“Very well,” I say with profound unwisdom. “Then if you want to help me, we will move my boat and the rest up into the dunes behind the beach.”
She smiles radiantly, and we go to it.
But it is a slow process; she exclaims with interest and curiosity over all my things, wet suit, waterproof recorder, pump, repair kit, camera, lights, charging device, scuba gear, first-aid kit, my lighter—I find she knows fire, which her people accomplish by twirling hardwood sticks—and all, down to the binoculars, which charm her, and the harpoons, which turn her very sober.
“You kill much.”
“Only for food, like you. Or to save my life.”
“But this is so big.”
“Well, I might be attacked by something big, like the crab. You killed it, you know. Without claws it will die of starvation.”
“Oh, no! It will eat algae. And the claws will grow again. We use them like that to pull building supplies.” Image of a big crab with a harness hooked on its carapace, hauling a laden travois. “When they get dangerous, we chase them back to sea.”
“Ah.”
Some perverse honesty compels me to show her my waterproof laser, which I carry in my swim trunks.
“This is for use if I am attacked on land.” I demonstrate on a nearby shell. She runs to examine the burn.
“It would do this to flesh?”
“Yes.”
“Why, when I came in your boat, you might have done this to me?”
Blue, blue eyes gaze at me, horrified.
“Not unless you attacked me so viciously that my life was in danger.”
“Oh, but could you not
feel
the warmth?” She flutters her hand from herself to me and back. I think. Yes—from the first moment, I could. Damn it.
“Well! You are strange.” Shaking her head, she resumes lugging a battery up the dune. She is very strong, I notice.
We have found a splendid hollow in the high dunes in which to ride out the storm. Somehow nothing more is said about her staying far, far away.
Finally, we stake my big tarpaulin over the heap of belongings and bring up the boat. I rope it upside down to three stout plant roots. The scrub “trees” growing here resemble giant beach gorse and have great hold-fast roots.
By now, the air is so humid and strange that our voices seem to reverberate on the still beach. And we can see a level line of white cloud rising up at us from the horizon, growing against the upper wind. Under it is a tinge of darkness, the first sight of the squall line. And in the far distance beyond towers pale cumulus. It looks like a whole frontal system coming on us. Will the weather change?
“You may grow cold here, Kamir.”
“Oh, I am used to that.”
“You could put on my wet suit.” (What, and leave me naked? I am mad.)
“No, when we cover our skins, we grow too thirsty.”
Aha, I was right about the osmotic protection in the skin. Perfect adaptation.
“Well, if it turns cold, we can always make a fire. Let’s gather some of these heavy stalks and stems.”
When all is ready, we sit on the dune top, swinging our legs and eating our respective provisions, watching the squall line rise until it divides the visible world. On our side all is still and sunny and hot; we are caught in an eerie stasis. A kind of water animal I haven’t seen before paddles about in the bay, followed by a line of small ones.
“Jurros,” Kamir observes. “They are very tame. Only the big fish bother them.”
I wonder about those “big fish.” Are they sharklike? But in response to my query Kamir only laughs.
“Oh, you pop them on the nose. They run away.”
Well, I have heard people say that about white sharks. I resolve to watch out for any “big fish.”
The storm is closer and closer, but still nothing stirs around us. Half the sky is shuttered with black roiling clouds, yet here it is impossibly bright and calm. The barometer must be falling through the deck, it is suddenly a little hard to breathe. I check it; yes, it’s at the lowest point I’ve seen it. This is going to be ferocious.
We watch quietly, gripped by the drama of the scene. The water animal has now disappeared.
Just as it seems that nothing will ever happen, a shudder runs through the world. Still in total calm, the sea wrinkles itself like the skin of a great beast. A tiny puff of cool wind lifts our hair. And a few big drops of rain, or perhaps hailstones, plop into the surface of the water and onto the beach.
And then, with a rush and a bellow, the storm hits.
In a moment the flat water has reared itself into a thousand billows two meters high, running unbroken from shore to shore. The breeze becomes a blast of wind against us. In the last rays of sunlight, a million specks of diamond flash from the waves into darkness. And then the sun is eclipsed by cloud, the world is twilight-dark.
Eerily, the papyrus plants all bend over with a whipping sound before we feel the wind that bent them. And then it hits, and the boat bangs up and down as if it will tear from the earth.
We scramble back from the dune-top and get under cover of the boat, holding it down over our heads. Then the sky opens, and tons of water dump on us, drumming intolerably on the boat. I am sure it is hail that will tear the boat, but when I stick out a hand, it is not. The world is in uproar around us.
Kamir is going excitedly “Whoo! Whee!” I can barely hear her over the storm, but I can see her eyes flashing blue fire and her little back fin standing straight up.
“This is not boring?” I yell.
“No!” Laughing, grinning with excitement.
“But—” I begin and am drowned out by a
crack!
of lightning, and thunder like a gigantic bolt of tearing silk. Then the cracks and flashes and roars and rumbles are all about us. The strikes seem to be hitting the beach and the dunes. I see Kamir’s fin suddenly clamp itself into her back, and her laughter changes to a squeal. I realize she hasn’t seen, or has forgotten, the lightning part of a storm. She hangs on to my arm, quaking as each bolt hits. And then, somehow, she is in my arm, her face pressed against my chest, while I hang on to the boat for dear life with the other arm.
“It won’t hit us, the boat will stop it,” I howl at her.
Water is coursing down the sides of the hollow we are in. Down below, the beach has disappeared under a wilderness of sinister yellow-gray breakers that are striking and tearing against the dunes, and throwing spray to mingle with the rain on us.
But by degrees, the wind changes from a wild whirl to a steady blow, driving the rain across us, and I am able to release my aching arm and rope the boat more securely.
That was, I think, my last chance to escape.
But I do not take it. That arm joins the other around the slender quivering Kamir, and she clamps her whole body against me. For warmth.
Her back is cold. I rub it to warm her, cannot resist fingering the pretty little fin, which makes her giggle. I rub, stroke, but the coolness seems to be in her skin. It feels thick, a pale green velour over soft curves. I try to concentrate on its interest, its prevention of dehydration. Yes, I see there are tiny pores, but how they function is beyond me. I am stroking rhythmically now, unable to keep from enjoying the exquisite forms of her back and flanks.
And oh! Warmth comes, but not the warmth I wanted. Her shivers have turned into unmistakable, sinuous wiggles under my hand. She is whispering something, her free hand feeling for my swim trunks. And, gods! Her silken loincloth seems to have come undone.… Tom Jared, what are you doing? Stop now, you fool. This is no girl, but a grown alien—a god-lost
fish!
There is no stopping. I have only time to glimpse what seems to be an organ on the front of her lower belly, a solid mounded track running up to her navel, like a newly healed scar. My body has taken me over, relieved me of the cold swim trunks, and is longing to press into her.
Only, where? Her crotch is as smooth as an armpit. I can only lay myself alongside the “scar” and squeeze our bodies together. “Yes,” she says, “Oh yes.” There is a feeling of clasping.
From there on I don’t know exactly what happens. It isn’t Human, but exciting beyond words, and finally, somehow, fulfilling. And at its height, a tremendous lightning bolt hits the beach…
Much later, I come back to consciousness. The rain is still drumming on our shelter, but the wind has abated somewhat, and the waves aren’t quite so fierce. More water has drained into our hollow; we are lying in a puddle.
Kamir is asprawl, half under me and wholly wet. For a moment I fear I have hurt her. But she is only deeply asleep.
And I—I have broken Rule One, and the sky will fall on me. And I do not care.
“Kamir? Kamir?”
Answering smile, long, slow, and beautiful. Lazily the big eyes open their sea-blue pools.
“Are you all right, my dear?”
“Umm…” Sleepy, obviously as fulfilled as I. Her lips move.
“What?”
“Never…”
“Never what?”
“I thought—never would I know—Oh, you have been sent from the skies to rescue me.”
Wild bells of warning—new ones—ring in my head. Does she assume I will stay here with her? Oh gods—I bitterly reproach my offending body, my weakness. But looking at her lying there, the mere thought of leaving gives me a pang. Can it be that I truly love this little alien? Oh gods! How wise are the Federation regs!
“Let me get you out of this water.”
“Why? It’s comfortable… ” As if daring greatly, she puts her hands up to my cheeks, the dainty wrist frills quivering.
“Tell me, ‘Om Jhared: Do I still seem beautiful to you?”
“Yes… oh,
yes!
But why do you ask? Don’t you know you
are
beautiful?”
“But I am ugly, everybody knows that. My people say I am so ugly it is good when I leave!”
“No!” I protest. “But to me, and to the eyes of all my people, you would be considered wonderfully lovely.”
“Ahhh …” She gives me an adoring look and a smile and the next moment is fast asleep again, like a child. My mermaid.
There seems nothing better to do. I follow suit.
We wake in darkness. The wind has died, and the three little moons are rising, showing a sky of racing cloud fragments.
“Hungry!” exclaims Kamir, grinning.
“I too.”
And we rise from our puddle and go up to sit on the dune top, now scoured almost flat by the gale. Below us the beach is emerging from the waves. It is chilly; a fire seems good, so I bring up the dry stuff we had collected and soon have a comfortable little blaze.
She is fascinated by my lighter. Soon she has satisfied herself that it uses the principle of friction, too, like her people—but what is it
made
of? What is this stuff, “metal”? Rock, coral, and shell are the hardest substances she knows.
So the evening starts, unexpectedly, with a lecture on metallurgy. Oh, if I could only find deposits of something, iron, copper, silver, tin! I rack my memory, can only remember something about manganese globules on the seafloor—or is it magnesium? There must be some metal available to these people, if only I could tell them what to look for. I dream of precipitating them into an Iron Age before—before I go. I wince.
As to my plastic gear, I can only describe to her a gross oversimplification of petrochemicals and polymers. She shakes her head worriedly.
“So much! You have so much… But do you have music?”
I fish in my recorder pack and come up with a lovely piece by Borgnini.
“Listen. This reminds me of you.” Which it does, especially the flute solos.
She cocks her head at the first notes. Then, seeing me lie back, she flops down with her head on my stomach to listen. I am diverted by the shining red silk of her pseudohair.
“Oh!” she exclaims once or twice. “Ah!” I think she likes it.
When the piece has drawn to its ravishing finale, she turns to me with glowing eyes. “Oh, you have beautiful music! I never—we never heard such sounds. But no voices?”
“Not in this one. They are what we call musical instruments.”
“We must make some,” she says determinedly. “You will show us how. Now, more!” She leans back again.
“I haven’t much in this little box. But here is another from my homeland.” I give her Brahms’s
Quintet for Clarinet in E.
And so the evening passes…. I am impossibly happy.
Before retiring, we drag the boat up to the top to sleep on, and spread out her loincloth to dry. It’s more complex than it looks, with four small pockets. The fishnet goes in one. I concentrate on this to avoid looking at her body.
“You shall wear this now,” she says shyly, patting the cloth.
“Me? Oh no.”
“Yes. It is right.”
“Why, what does the loincloth mean?”
“Well, first they mean that we are ripe. All my age-group are wearing cloths now. When all are ready, they go out to sea, to explore and to meet each other. When”—I think she says—“when a couple forms, they exchange clothes and return so, to let everybody know they are together. Of course I went out alone, this way where nobody will come, because I knew nobody would want me. I expected nothing. And I found you! Oh—”
In an exuberance of love, she pounces on me, and before I can protest, rolls me off the boat and around in the sand, nuzzling and kissing me. Strong little mermaid!
I catch her and roll her back and we play like puppies.
When we are both gasping with laughter, naked and sandy, we fall into each other’s arms and let nature have her will. Blissfully, there are no insects here. We fall asleep once more, enmeshed in love.
Only, just as I am drifting off, I catch her whisper.
” ‘Om Jhared?”
“Yes?”
“You will, won’t you?”
“Will what?”
“Care for them. You will?”
“Them? What?” I force myself awake.
“Our babies.”
Oh, gods.
“Kamir,” I say gently, “I hope this will not make you sad, but there won’t be any babies. Our physical beings, our bodies are too different.”
She frowns. “You don’t think there will be babies?”
“No. I’m sorry.”
“Well,” she says, with a return of her old mischief, “I think differently!” And she lays one hand on her abdomen, smiling, and lies back.