Dragonfield: And Other Stories Page 13

  When the neighbors came the next day to assess the damage, they found no trace of the house or of Jan.

  “Gone,” said one.

  “A bad end,” said another.

  “Never change a river,” said a third.

  They spat through their fingers and made other signs against evil. Then they went home to their own fires and gave it no more thought.

  But a year later, in a pocket of the river, in a quiet place said to house a great fish with a translucent tail, an inquisitive boy found a jumble of white bones.

  His father and the other men guessed the bones to be Jan’s, and they left them to the river instead of burying them.

  When the boy asked why, his father said, “Huttah! Hush, boy, and listen.”

  The boy listened and heard the river playing merrily over the bones. It was a high, sweet, bubbling song. And anyone with half an ear could hear that the song, though wordless, or at least in a language unknown to men, was full of freedom and a conquering joy.

  Caliban

  I WAS NOT DEAF, do not think I was deaf

  To the music made by his imaging hand.

  Flesh unformed for dance can still hear the tune.

  I heard that ancient piping breath

  Witching the flowers and vines to the land,

  Charming the twisted rocks with its tones.

  But the twisted rock in my back alone

  Remained unmoved. It was grief,

  Not hate, that made me withstand

  The fairy tunes, the creation planned

  By a usurping God. I have mourned

  His leaving as a death,

  For this poor lump of earth,

  Untimely ripped from a witch’s womb,

  Had once the apprehensive soul of man.

  But now there is only the rock-ridden land,

  And with each silent falling leaf,

  Another winter comes.

  The Corridors of the Sea

  “HE’S AWFULLY SMALL FOR a hero,” said the green-smocked technician. He smirked as the door irised closed behind the object of his derision.

  “The better to sneak through the corridors of the sea,” answered his companion, a badge-two doctoral candidate. Her voice implied italics.

  “Well, Eddystone is a kind of hero,” said a third, coming up behind them suddenly and leaning uninvited into the conversation. “He invented the Breather. Why shouldn’t he be the one to try it out? There’s only one Breather, after all.”

  “And only one Eddystone,” the woman said, a shade too quickly. “And wouldn’t you know he’d make the Breather too small for anyone but himself.”

  “Still, he is the one who’s risking his life.”

  “Don’t cousteau us, Gabe Whitcomb.” The tech was furious. “There aren’t supposed to be any heroes on Hydrospace. We do this together or we don’t do it at all. It’s thinking like that that almost cost us our funding last year.”

  Whitcomb had no answer to the charge, parroted as it was from the very releases he wrote for the tele-reports and interlab memos, words he believed in.

  The three separated and Whitcomb headed through the door after Eddystone. The other two went down the lift to their own lab section. They were not involved with the Breather test, whose techs wore yellow smocks. Rather, they were working on developing the elusive fluid-damping skin.

  “Damned jealous Dampers,” Whitcomb whispered to himself as he stepped through the door. But at the moment of speaking, he knew his anger was useless and, in fact, wrong. The Dampers of the lab might indeed be jealous that the Breather project had developed faster and come to fruition first. But it should not matter in as compact a group as Hydrospace IV. What affected one, affected all. That was canon here. That was why hero-worship was anathema to them. All except Tom Eddystone, little Tommy Eddystone, who went his own inimitable way and answered his own siren song. He hadn’t changed, Gabe mused, in the thirty years they had been friends.

  Eddystone was ahead of him, in his bathing suit and tank top, moving slowly down the hall. It was easy for Gabe to catch up. Not only were Eddystone’s strides shorter than most, but the recent Breather operation gave him a gingerly gait, as if he had an advanced case of Parkinsons. He walked on the balls of his feet, leaning forward. He carried himself carefully now, compensating for the added weight of the Breather organs.

  “Tommy,” Gabe called out breathlessly, pretending he had to hurry and wanted Eddystone to wait. It was part of a built-in tact that made him such an excellent tele-flak. But Eddystone was not fooled. It was just a game they always played.

  Eddystone stopped and turned slowly, moving as if he were going through water. Or mud. Gabe wondered at the strain that showed in his eyes. Probably the result of worry, since the doctors all agreed that the time for pain from the operation itself should be past.

  “Are you ready for the press conference?” Gabe’s question was pro forma. Eddystone was always ready to promote his ideas. He was man who lived comfortably in his head and always invited others to come in for a visit.

  A scowl was Eddystone’s answer.

  For a moment Gabe wondered if the operation had affected Eddystone’s personality as well. Then he shrugged and cuffed the little man lightly on the shoulder. “Come on, Tom-the-giant-killer,” he said, a name he had invented for Eddystone when they had been in grade school together and Tommy’s tongue had more than once gotten them both out of scrapes.

  Eddystone smiled a bit and the triple striations under his collarbones, the most visible reminders of the operation, reddened. Then he opened and shut his mouth several times like a fish out of water, gasping for breath.

  “Tommy, are you all right?” Gabe’s concern was evident in every word.

  “I’ve just been Down Under is all,” Eddystone in his high, reedy voice.

  “And …” Gabe prompted.

  Eddystone’s mouth got thin. “And … it’s easier Down Under.” He suddenly looked right up into Gabe’s eyes and reached for his friend’s arms. His grip was stronger than those fine bones would suggest. Eddystone worked out secretly with weights. Only Gabe knew about it. “And it’s becoming harder and harder each time to come back to shore.”

  “Harder?” The question hung between them, but Eddystone did not elaborate. He turned away slowly and once more moved gingerly down the hall toward the press room. He did not speak again and Gabe walked equally silent beside him.

  Once in the room, Eddystone went right to the front and slumped into the armchair that sat before the charts and screen. He paid no attention to the reporters and Hydrospace aides who clustered around him.

  Gabe stopped to shake hands with reporters and camera persons he recognized, and he recognized most of them. That was his job, after all, and he was damned good at it. For the moment he managed to take their attention away from Eddystone, who was breathing heavily. But by the time Gabe had organized everyone into chairs, Eddystone had recovered and was sitting, quietly composed and waiting.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Gabe began, then gave a big smile. “Or rather I should say friends, since we have all been through a lot together at Hydrospace IV.” He waited for the return smiles, got them, and continued. “Most of you already know about our attempts here at the labs.” He gestured to include the aides in his remarks.

  “And I know that some of you have made some pretty shrewd guesses as to Dr. Eddystone’s recent disappearance. In fact, one of you …” and he turned to speak directly to Janney Hyatt, the dark-haired science editor of the ERA channels, “… even ferreted out his hospital stay. But none of you came close to the real news. So we are going to give it to you straight. Today.”

  The reporters buzzed and the camera operators jockeyed for position.

  “As you can see, Dr. Eddystone is not in his usual three-piece suit.” Gabe turned and nodded at the chair. It drew an appreciative chuckle because Eddystone rarely dressed up, jeans and a dirty sweatshirt being his usual costume. He never tried to impress anyone
with his physical appearance since he knew it was so unprepossessing. He was less than five feet tall, large nosed, popeyed. But his quick mind, his brilliant yet romantic scientific insights, his ability to make even the dullest listener understand the beauty he perceived in science, made his sweatshirt a uniform, the dirt stains badges.

  “In fact, Dr. Eddystone is wearing his swim suit plus a tank top so as not to offend the sensibilities of any watchers out there in newsland.”

  Some of the reporters applauded at this, but Janney Hyatt scowled. Even the suggestion of sensibilities filled her with righteous indignation, as if Gabe had suggested it was women’s sensibilities he was referring to.

  “Dr. Eddystone has been Down-Under, our designation for the water world around Hydrospace IV. It is his third trip this week and he wore just what you see him in now, minus the tank top, of course. He was under for twenty minutes the first time. The second time he stayed under forty minutes. And this last time—Dr. Eddystone?”

  Eddystone held his reply until every eye was on him. Then he spoke, his light voice carrying to the back of the room. “I was under sixty minutes. I breathe harder on land now than I do in the sea.”

  There was bedlam in the room as the reporters jumped up, trying to ask questions. Finally one question shouted above the others spoke for them all. “You mean you were under sixty minutes without scuba gear?”

  “Without anything,” said Eddystone, standing up for effect. “As you see me.”

  The silence that followed was palpable and Gabe walked into it with his prepared speech. “You know that living under water has always been the goal of this particular Hydrospace lab: living under water without mechanical apparatus or bubble cities.” It was a slight dig at the Hydrospace labs I, II, and III, and he hoped he would be forgiven it in the flush of their success. “That is what all our experiments, as secret as they have had to be, are all about. Dr. Eddystone headed the project on what we have called the Breather. Dr. Lemar’s group has been working on a fluid-damping skin.”

  Everyone was listening. A few were taking notes. The cameras rolled. Gabe could feel the attention, and continued.

  “When we first decided to prepare the bionics to allow a person to breathe water as easily as air, we took a lot of ribbing. Conservative marine biologists dubbed our lab Eddystone’s Folly and our group the Cousteau Corporation. But we knew that the science was there. We had two possible approaches we were considering.

  “The first was to implant a mechanical system which would extract the dissolved oxygen from the water and present it directly to the lungs. From there on, normal physiology would take over. The other choice was to implant a biological system, such as gills, from some chosen fish, which would load the blood directly with oxygen, thus bypassing the lungs.”

  Eddystone sat quietly, nodding at each point Gabe ticked off. Gabe looked around the room for questions. There were none.

  “Of course you realize,” he continued, “that both systems required the normal functioning of the musculature of breathing: one to pull the oxygen from the apparatus, the other to pass water over the implanted gills.”

  Janney Hyatt raised her hand and, to soothe her earlier anger at his “sensibilities” remark, Gabe called on her at once.

  “What was the mechanical system to be made of?” she asked.

  “Good question,” said Gabe. “The earlier bionics experts felt more comfortable with metal, plastics, and electronics. So they opted for a dioxygenation module, Doxymod, which was basically an add-on option for the underwater human. We were going to try it on some dogs first, water dogs, possibly Labradors or a springer spaniel. Trouble surfaced immediately.”

  Laughter stopped Gabe until he realized his unintentional pun. He smiled and shrugged winningly and went on. “Making a Doxymod small enough and light enough was the first problem, of course. And once we had produced it—Dr. Eddystone and his staff produced it—we could think of no good reason to implant it. It needed batteries and that meant it had a built-in time limit. Just what we had been trying to avoid. All we had, after all that work, was tankless scuba gear. We were simply replacing the oxygen tanks with batteries. More mobile, perhaps, but …”

  “In other words,” added one of Eddystone’s aides brightly, “not a fail-safe system. Batteries run down and need recharging.”

  The reporters whispered together. One tentatively raised his hand, but Gabe ignored him. He felt things building and, like any good performer, he knew it was time to continue.

  “So we turned to the gill system. Modern medicine had already solved the rejection syndrome, as you know, at least within phylum. Using pigs for heart valves and the like. But we knew nothing about cross-phyla work. We expected a lot of trouble—and were surprised when we encountered very little. Men and fish, it turns out, go well together. Something seafood lovers have long been aware of! In fact, it occurred to one of our bright-eyed tech threes on a dissertation project that we could even produce a classically composed mermaid with a small woman and a large grouper tail. Could—if anyone could think of good reason why, that is.”

  It drew the laugh Gabe expected. Even Janney Hyatt smiled quickly before reverting to her customary scowl.

  Gabe nodded once to his assistant sitting in the far back next to the projector. She caught his signal and dimmed the lights, flicking on the projector at the same time. The first slide focused automatically above Eddystone’s head. It was of a large tuna on a white background, with five smaller fish below it. Gabe took up the pointer which had been resting against the table and placed the tip on the big fish.

  “A lot of time and thought went into the question of whether to use the gills of a human-sized fish like this tuna or an array of smaller gills taken from several fish, perhaps even from different species.” He pointed in turn to the other fish on the screen, naming them. “But as often happens in science, the simple solution proved best. Two large gills were inserted in the skin, just under the collar bones. …” The next slide, a detailed sketch of a human figure, appeared. “And ducts leading from the branchial passages through triune openings completed the alterations.”

  The next slides, in rapid succession, were of the actual operation.

  “Valves were implanted, special plastic valves, that allowed either the lungs or the gills to be used. These went into the throat.”

  “So you made an amphibian,” called out a gray-haired science writer from the Times.

  “That was our intention,” said Eddystone, standing up slowly. The final slide, of fish in the ocean, had snicked into place and was now projected onto his body. He threw an enormous shadow onto the screen.

  Sensing an Eddystone speech, Gabe signaled his assistant with his hand, but she was already ahead of him, flicking off the projector and raising the lights.

  “But something more happened. Think of it,” said Eddystone. “We can walk on the moon, but not live there. We cannot even attempt a landing on Venus or breathe the Martian air. But the waters of our own world are waiting for us. They cradled us when we took our first hesitant steps into higher phyla. Why, even now, in the womb, the fetus floats in la mer, the mother sea. Our blood is liquid, our bodies mostly water. We speak of humankind’s exodus from the sea as an improvement on the race. But I tell you now that our return to it will be even more momentous. I am not an explorer … not an explorer taking one giant step for mankind. I am a child going home some million years after leaving.”

  The speech seemed to have exhausted him. Eddystone slumped back into his chair. Gabe stood over him protectively. But his own thoughts warred with his emotions. Even for Eddystone it was a romantic, emotional outburst. A regular cousteau. Gabe knew that he had always been the more conservative of the two of them, but he worried anew that the Breather mechanism might be affecting Eddystone in ways that had not been calculated. He put a hand on his friend’s shoulder and was appalled to find it slippery with sweat. Perhaps a fever had set in.

  “That’s all now, ladies an
d gentlemen,” Gabe said smoothly to the audience, not letting his alarm show. “Tomorrow, tide and time willing, at 0900 hours, we will give you a demonstration of the Breather. Right now Dr. Eddystone has to be run through some last-minute lab tests. However, my assistants will see to it that you receive the information you need for the technical end of your reports. Each pack has scientific and historical details, charts, and a bio sheet on Dr. Eddystone, plus photos from the operation. Thank you for coming.”

  The reporters dutifully collected their material from the aides and tried to bully further answers from the staff while Gabe shepherded Eddystone out the door marked NO ENTRY/TECH ONLY. It locked behind him and would only respond to a code that Hydrospace workers knew.

  In the deserted back hall, Eddystone turned. “What last-minute tests?” he asked.

  “No tests,” Gabe said. “Questions. And I want to do the asking. You are going to give me some straight answers, Tommy. No romances. No cousteaus. What’s going on? I felt your shoulder in there. It’s all sweaty. Are you running a fever? Is there rejection starting?”

  Eddystone looked up at him and smiled. “Not rejection,” he said, chuckling a bit at a projected joke. “Rather call it an acceptance.”

  “Make sense, Tommy. I’m a friend, remember. Your oldest friend.” Gabe put out his hand as a gesture of goodwill and was surprised when Eddystone grabbed his hand, for his palm was slick.

  Eddystone took Gabe’s hand and ran it up and down his arm, across his chest where it was exposed. The gill slits were closed but the tissue was ridged and slightly puckered. Gabe wanted to flinch, controlled it.

  “Feel this so-called sweat,” Eddystone said. “You can’t really see it, but it’s there. I thought at first I was imagining it, but now I know. You feel it, too, Gabe. It’s not sweat at all.”

  Gabe drew his hand away gently. “Then what the hell is it?”

  “It’s the body’s way of accepting its new life—under water. It’s the fluid-damping skin that Lemar and her kids have been trying for all these months. Seems you can’t build it in, Gabe. But once the body has been readapted for life in the sea, it just comes.”