Meet Me at Infinity (18 page)

So do I, but not restfully. It has occurred to me that some Terran mammals, like rabbits, will give birth parthenogenetically if stimulated by saline water. What if, gods, what if she is right, and some monster is born?

” ’Om Jhared?”

“Yes?”

“Even if there are no babies, as you say, you will at least stay until I die?”

Oh, no—does she mean, spend my life with her? Gods, what have I done? “Oh my dear, do not talk of dying. Not now.”

“Yes,” she says musingly, “maybe you are right. But I think of it.”

And I can feel a dark shadow on her mind.

“But why think of it? Please don’t, my dear.”

“Why? Because it comes so soon. Do you not know? This is my last season in the world now.”

“Oh, Kamir. What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” I am bending over her, afraid of I know not what. “Tell me!”

“Why, because we love. Because I love with you. It is not so with you?”

“Kamir, I don’t know what you’re saying. What is wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong. When you love, you die. The woman dies. The man lives, to feed the babies. Is it not so?”

“No! No! In my race, the females live long, whether or not they love. Longer than the men, often. Do you mean you expect to die because we made love?”

“Why, yes. We all do. Only I feared I would live forever, alone.”

“Good gods… But I am sure you won’t have a baby, Kamir. We are too different. Like a—a crab and a fish, they can’t have young together.”

“And you are the crab?” She laughs playfully. “But no, perhaps you are right. We won’t think of it. This is our happy time.”

She snuggles down closer in the hammocky boat. “Sleep well, dear ‘Om Jhared. Sleep well.”

“Sleep well, my darling.”

I lie sleepless, incredulous.

What horrible wrong have I committed in my selfish lust? Even if I call it “love,” it led me terribly astray.

The little beach-life is tuning up its night song, but I am in no mood to appreciate it. A million unanswered questions are revolving in my head like rolls of barbed wire. What is this murderous process she believes will kill her? There must be a way to stop it. It can’t be biological, the species wouldn’t survive. Perhaps the people in the village make some lethal potion or charm they give the women. I could stop her taking it. Maybe they acquiesce in their deaths, by stopping eating, or something of that sort. I could stop that, too. There must be a way—I
must
stop it.

Eventually fatigue takes me and I lose consciousness, to dream of a terrifying great crab taking Kamir.

The morning is washed clean and clear, the barometer is high. Kamir gets up and announces she will go to the reef for fresh fish. I get out my scuba gear and prepare to go with her; I don’t want us to be parted.

She is still nude, and as she stands, stretching luxuriously in the morning sun, I make myself inspect her.

She is a radiant figure, palest of green-whites in the golden sun, with that mop of fiery “hair.” A faint flush suffuses her cheeks and lips and touches her body here and there. There is no other hairlike stuff on her; she is as smooth as a marble statue. Only, on her lower abdomen, there is this vertical thick welt I had glimpsed, like an old cicatrice. I see it is composed of two long lips, tightly appressed. Evidently their opening discloses the softness I had found. Closed, it is only a keloidlike ridge.

I find I, too, am being inspected. After a moment she comes close and touches me. Involuntarily I react, and she draws back, laughing and shaking her head.

“So different!” she says. Then, “Show me a picture of your women.”

But I find I can barely summon up an adequate image of a Human female, so much has this little mermaid obsessed me. When I do, it seems, well, messy and strange.

“Hmm,” she says. “So all are ugly, like me!”

“What is this ‘ugly’?” I am becoming exasperated. “What about you is supposed to be ugly?”

“Why, I am so thin and bony, all over.” She puffs out her cheeks and with her hands sketches over herself the outlines of a very fat woman. “I should be like this! Then you live long enough to help. Oh, but I see you don’t want me to say that. Let’s go to the sea.”

So we run down the dunes and splash out until I have to stop to put on my gear. It all amuses her vastly. When I submerge, she circles me, swift as a fish, with her flared-out gills. I have trouble making her take my needs seriously; she tries to slip my mask off for a kiss, and I have to surface and explain that if she wishes to keep her lover, she must allow him to breathe. She sobers quickly, catching my serious feeling-tone, and after that we have no more trouble.

It is enchanting, down below, watching her herd little reef fish into her net. And I, too, sorrow when we come out and have to kill them.

I have an idea.

“Kamir, have you ever looked at yourself?”

“Oh yes. Mavru keeps a polished shell. And sometimes in very still water.”

“Look.” And I root out my little mirror. “Now you will see beauty.”

She loves it, turning it to catch me, too. But she cannot resist trying to make a “fat” face.

I try to convince her, tracing my fingers over her delicate features. But she only hugs me.

“I may keep this? No one has seen anything like it.”

“Certainly.”

That reminds me. While she is tucking away the mirror, I try to ask her what her people call themselves. It’s the same old situation, they are only “the people,” or “us.” Her particular settlement is “the Souls of Ema,” after some legendary father, and a neighboring group is the “Souls of Aeyor,” for a woman who made an extraordinary trip.

“But we must have a name for you. You don’t want to let outsiders name you something like ‘Homo Wettensis’?” (Or, gods forbid, Homo Pforzheimerana.)

“Homo Wettensis?” she mimics, giggling. “Why?”

So I have to explain about her world being called “Wet.” That sends her off into paroxysms of laughter. But then she sobers. “Mnerrin.”

“What?”

“An old word that means ‘wet’, or ‘the wet ones.’ Would that not do?”

“Why yes, if your people agree.
Mnerrin
is quite fine.”

“Oh, they won’t mind. Very well; your Mnerrin asks, what shall we do today?”

“Well, would you like to explore inland? Or shall we look for some islands you haven’t visited? I thought we might go in my boat, it will just take two.”

She clasps her hands like a delighted child. “I’d love that! Yes, there are islands there”—she points north—“that haven’t been seen for lifetimes.”

“Let’s go see!”

So we launch and repack the boat, and set off. She is much pleased with our speed, only once or twice she puts her hands over her ears as if the motor’s hum bothers her.

“How fast does it go?”

I show her, but she soon covers her ears and cries, “Slow, slower, please—I can’t see anything!” I realize that she has been mostly peering down into the water, while my eyes are on the sea and sky.

“Look, there is a big fish.”

I see a moving shadow of enormous size, perhaps three meters. And before I can protest, Kamir throws a last morsel of fish overboard. The shadow surfaces—a big tan shape with round eyes. As it spots the fish, a long beaked bill breaks the water and clamps down. I get a glimpse of big, sharp cartilaginous ridges inside.

“That thing could take your arm off!”

“Well, if you let it, maybe. But look!”

To my horror, she rolls overboard. I see a flurry and a swirl and the thing hurriedly departs.

Kamir jumps and flips back in, laughing. “See? I just popped it on the nose, I told you.”

“Don’t ever do that again, my crazy little darling. It frightens me for you.”

She rolls over and cuddles between my legs, still laughing. “Well, your driving this boat frightens me for you! But there is our first island.”

The new island turns out spectacular, an old volcanic cone with strange tunnels running into the sea, from former lava tubes. So Kamir must be shown my instant camera, and exclaims over the tininess of the images. She wants to sleep there, but I detect enough signs of possible activity to make me discourage this, and toward evening we push on.

The next island proves to be full of the birdlike creatures. I pick one up—they are perfectly tame—and fancy I can trace signs of its evolutionary course from fish, too.

The next day there are two islands covered with a multitude of flowers, and the day after that, one whose river and bay teem with bright-colored, harmless sea snakes. And some days later comes a highlight; some river fish are clambering out of water and up in the undergrowth in pursuit of butterflies: And the next day an oddly barren island; and the next day, and the next…

I am guiltily aware that I should be making a record of all this. But when I get out my recorder and start, Kamir is so amused at my solemn tone of voice that we get little work done. My only concession to practicality is to keep a route map of our travel; so far it has been due north, so that my little base camp and the lander—about which I refuse to think—are still straight south.

We junket on and on over the turquoise sea, sometimes stopping to dive at barely-submerged coral reefs that would tear the bottom of a larger boat. And when the spirit moves us, we make love, sometimes in a fit of passion, sometimes gentle as children.

It is the happiest time of my life.

Only, one day I notice that where Kamir’s stomach had been elegantly flat, it now seems to have taken on a womanly curve. I put it down to the extraordinary number of little butterfish she eats, and forget it… or try to. The weather is halcyon beautiful. A few times we see storms in the distance, but they do not come near.

One very clear night we are camped on a beach like the one on which we met, with a small estuary and its group of papyrus-cenya in the center. Kamir finishes the handsome wristband she has been making for me from the tail of her loincloth, using a splinter sliced from a cenya stem for a needle. (Regretfully, she has had to admit that we couldn’t comfortably exchange clothes.) In lieu of my trunks I give her my identity bracelet; it won’t do on her wrist because of the fin, but it goes nicely on her slim ankle.

When she sees the lettering, and I spell out my name, she frowns.

“I think this is something for Maoul,” she says.

“Who is Maoul?”

“An old man, very wise. He made some of those land pictures you call ‘maps’. These are something like that.”

“Yes,” I say, surprised. Bright little mermaid!

“And now”—she stretches out with her head on my lap, and hands me the binoculars—“you will tell me more, please, about those stars.”

It is a topic we have just broached. I lament my star charts, left back in the lander; it is a perfect night for viewing, the moons are down for the hour, and the heavens are a riotous sight. I do the best I can; she is very keen and remembers well. Later we drift off to sleep, entangled in the binocular strap, with images of dark nebulae floating in our heads….

—And then I am suddenly awake. What’s happening? All is still; too still, that’s what waked me. All the night creatures are silent.

Something is on the beach.

I listen hard and catch a faint splashing. Correction, something is coming out of the sea, over by the river outlet where papyrus-cenya hide the view. The moons are just rising. I sense Kamir is awake and listening, too.

Can it be a giant crab?

But as I form the thought, the last thing I expected in this world happens—a light shines out.

It’s not a torch, but a bright greenish glow. Then it begins to blink, rhythmically. Signals?

“Ahhh,” says Kamir. “Wait one moment, my love. I go.”

“Kamir, wait—”

But she is up and racing down the beach, toward the cenyas.

I wait tensely, straining my ears. Aha—a faint colloquy; of course, I remember, I’ll hear little, these people are telepaths. Anger rises; who or what dares to intrude on us? Who can it be? I realize I know so little about Kamir; could this be a father? A lover? A pang of raw jealousy grips me, the thought that it might be another woman never enters my besotted mind. And I’ve forgotten, or never believed, Kamir’s story of being unmarriageable. Can this be a
husband,
hunting her?

And then abruptly, without my hearing footsteps, they are beside me, two forms blocking out the moonrise. The stranger is taller and much stouter than Kamir.

” ‘Om fhared? This is Agna, my egg-mate.”

What is she telling me? I get the image of a large object, which crumbles or splits to reveal—no, not objects: babies. An image of a woman holding two of them.

“Your
brother?”

“Yes, yes!”

Vast relief for me. I remember my manners.

“Greetings, Agna.” But wait—has he come to charge me with violating his sister? Gods! No, he returns my greeting cordially, adding, “For three days I track Kamir. Now I find her here with you.”

“Yes,” says Kamir. “Agna, great happiness has come to me. ‘Om Jhared is my mate.”

“No!” says Agna, looking at me in astonishment. “But Kamir is so—so—”

I get an image of the unsaid word and push it away. So Kamir was being truthful about her “ugliness.”

“In my eyes,” I say firmly, “and in the eyes of my people if they could see her, Kamir is a very beautiful woman. Her appearance is so lovely that I was attracted to her at once. I only hope that I am not too ugly, as you call it, in your eyes.”

“Never!” exclaims Kamir loyally, and adds with more realism, “He is so strange altogether that ‘ugly’ has no meaning. Oh, Agna, couldn’t you tell? You followed a trail of happiness.”

“Yes.” Agna nods. “I was puzzled. Well, little sister, the sun of the seas seems to have smiled on you. Just when we gave up hope that you would develop, a mate comes from the skies!” He chuckles. “But I have come to bring you home. And ‘Om Jhared, too, of course, if he will. The season of storms seems to have come unusually early this year. We should make the Long Swim now. And one has come from the Souls of Aeyor with very bad news.”

“What news? What has happened? Aeyor is the campment near us,” she reminds me.

“Later, later. You will have many questions, and I was not there when he came. Right now I need a bit of rest, and tomorrow early we will start.”