III

  At midnight Ariel came out of the sea, climbed the rocks, and clicked her nails against my glass wall so the droplets ran, pearled by the gibbous moon.

  Earlier I had stretched in front of the fireplace on the sheepskin throw to read, then dozed off. The conscientious timer had asked me if there was anything I wanted, and getting no answer had turned off the Dvorak Cello Concerto that was on its second time around, extinguished the reading lamp, and stopped dropping logs onto the flame so that now, as I woke, the grate was carpeted with coals.

  She clicked again, and I raised my head from the cushion. The green uniform, her amber hair—all color was lost under the silver light outside. I lurched across the rug, touched the button, and the glass slid into the floor. The breeze came to my face, as the barrier fell.

  “What do you want?” I asked. “What time is it, anyway?”

  “Tork is on the beach, waiting for you.”

  The night was warm but windy. Below the rocks silver flakes chased each other in to shore. The tide lay full.

  I rubbed my face. “The new boss man? Why didn’t you bring him up to the house? What does he want to see me about?”

  She touched my arm. “Come. They are all down on the beach.”

  “Who all?”

  “Tork and the others.”

  She led me across the patio and to the path that wound to the sand. The sea roared in the moonlight. Down the beach people stood around a driftwood fire that whipped the night. Ariel walked beside me.

  Two of the fishermen from town were crowding each other on the bottom of an overturned washtub, playing guitars. The singing, raucous and rhythmic, jarred across the paled sand. Shark’s teeth shook on the necklace of an old woman dancing. Others were sitting on an overturned dinghy, eating.

  Over one part of the fire on a skillet two feet across, oil frothed through pink islands of shrimp. One woman ladled them in, another ladled them out.

  “Tio Cal!”

  “Look, Tio Cal is here!”

  “Hey, what are you two doing up?” I asked. “Shouldn’t you be home in bed?”

  “Poppa Juao said we could come. He’ll be here, too, soon.”

  I turned to Ariel. “Why are they all gathering?”

  “Because of the laying of the cable tomorrow at dawn.”

  Someone was running up the beach, waving a bottle in each hand. “They didn’t want to tell you about the party. They thought that it might hurt your pride.”

  “My what . . .?”

  “If you knew they were making so big a thing of the job you had failed at—”

  “But—”

  “—and that had hurt you so in failure. They did not want you to be sad. But Tork wants to see you. I said you would not be sad. So I went to bring you down from the rocks.”

  “Thanks, I guess.”

  “Tio Cal?”

  But the voice was bigger and deeper than a child’s.

  He sat on a log back from the fire, eating a sweet potato. The flame flickered on his dark cheekbones, in his hair, wet and black. He stood, came to me, held up his hand. I held up mine and we slapped palms. “Good.” He was smiling. “Ariel told me you would come. I will lay the power line down through the Slash tomorrow.” His uniform scales glittered down his arms. He was very strong. But standing still, he still moved. The light on the cloth told me that.

  “I. . .” He paused. I thought of a nervous, happy dancer. “I wanted to talk to you about the cable.” I thought of an eagle, I thought of a shark. “And about the . . . accident. If you would.”

  “Sure,” I said. “If there’s anything I could tell you that would help.” ‘

  “See, Tork,” Ariel said. “I told you he would talk to you about it.” I could hear his breathing change. “It really doesn’t bother you to talk about the accident?”

  I shook my head and realized something about that voice. It was a boy’s voice that could imitate a man’s. Tork was not over nineteen. “We’re going fishing soon,” Tork told me. “Will you come?”

  “If I’m not in the way.”

  A bottle went from the woman at the shrimp crate to one of the guitarists, down to Ariel, to me, then to Tork. (The liquor, made in a cave seven miles inland, was almost rum. The too tight skin across the left side of my mouth makes the manful swig a little difficult to bring off. I got “rum” down my chin.)

  He drank, wiped his mouth, passed the bottle on and put his hand on my shoulder. “Come down to the water.”

  We walked away from the fire. Some of the fishermen stared after us. A few of the amphimen glanced, and glanced away.

  “Do all the young people of the village call you Tio Cal?”

  “No. Only my godchildren. Their father and I have been friends since I was your age.”

  “Oh, I thought perhaps it was a nickname. That’s why I called you that.”

  We reached wet sand where orange light cavorted at our feet. The broken shell of a lifeboat rocked in moonlight. Tork sat down on the shell’s rim. I sat beside him. The water splashed to our knees.

  “There’s no other place to lay the power cable?” I asked. “There is no other way to take it except through the Slash?”

  “I was going to ask you what you thought of the whole business. But I guess I don’t really have to.” He shrugged and clapped his hands together a few times. “All the projects this side of the bay have grown huge and cry for power. The new operations tax the old lines unmercifully. There was a power failure last July in Cayine down the shelf below the twilight level. The whole village was without light for two days, and twelve amphimen died of overexposure to the cold currents coming up from the depths. If we laid the cables farther up, we chance disrupting our own fishing operations as well as those of the fishermen on shore.”

  I nodded.

  “Cal, what happened to you in the Slash?”

  Eager, scared Tork. I was remembering now, not the accident, but the midnight before, pacing the beach, guts clamped with fists of fear and anticipation. Some of the Indians back where they make the liquor still send messages by tying knots in palm fibers. One could have spread my entrails then, or Tork’s tonight, to read our respective horospecs.

  Juao’s mother knew the knot language, but he and his sisters never bothered to learn because they wanted to be modem, and, as children, still confused with modernity the new ignorances, lacking modern knowledge.

  “When I was a boy,” Tork said, “we would dare each other to walk the boards along the edge of the ferry slip. The sun would be hot and the boards would rock in the water, and if the boats were in and you fell down between the boats and the piling, you could get killed.” He shook his head. “The crazy things kids will do. That was back when I was eight or nine, before I became a waterbaby.”

  “Where was it?”

  Tork looked up. “Oh. Manila. I’m Filipino.”

  The sea licked our knees, and the gunwale sagged under us.

  “What happened in the Slash?”

  “There’s a volcanic flaw near the base of the Slash.”

  “I know.”

  “And the sea is as sensitive down there as a fifty-year-old woman with a new hairdo. We had an avalanche. The cable broke. The sparks were so hot and bright they made gouts of foam fifty feet high on the surface, so they tell me.”

  “What caused the avalanche?”

  I shrugged. “It could have been just a God damned coincidence. There are rock falls down there all the time. It could have been the noise from the machines—though we masked them pretty well. It could have been something to do with the inductance from the smaller cables for the machines. Or maybe somebody just kicked out the wrong stone that was holding everything up.”

  One webbed hand became a fist, sank into the other, and hung.

  Calling, “Call”

  I looked up. Juao, pants rolled to his knees, shirt sailing in the sea wind, stood in the weave of white water. The wind lifted Tork’s hair from his neck: and the fire roared on the beach.

  Tork looked up too.

  “They’re getting ready to catch a big fish!” Juao called.

  Men were already pushing their boats out. Tork clapped my shoulder. “Come, Cal. We fish now.” We waded back to the shore.

  Juao caught me as I reached dry sand. “You ride in my boat, Cal!”

  Someone came with the acrid flares that hissed; the water slapped around the bottom of the boats as we wobbled into the swell.

  Juao vaulted in and took up the oars. Around us green amphimen walked into the sea, struck forward, and were gone.

  Juao pulled, leaned, pulled. The moonlight slid down his arms. The fire diminished on the beach.

  Then among the boats, there was a splash, an explosion, and the red flare bloomed in the sky: the amphimen had sighted a big fish.

  The flare hovered, pulsed once, twice, three times, four times (twenty, forty, sixty, eighty stone they estimated its weight to be), then fell.

  Suddenly I shrugged out of my shirt, pulled at my belt buckle. “I’m going over the side, Juao!”

  He leaned, he pulled, he leaned. “Take the rope.”

  “Yeah. Sure.” It was tied to the back of the boat. I made a loop in the other end, slipped it around my shoulder. I swung my bad leg over the side, flung myself on the black water—

  —mother-of-pearl shattered over me. That was the moon, blocked by the shadow of Juao’s boat ten feet overhead. I turned below the rippling wounds Juao’s oars made stroking the sea.

  One hand and one foot with tom webs, I rolled over and looked down. The rope snaked to its end, and I felt Juao’s strokes pulling me through the water.

  They fanned below with underwater flares. Light undulated on their backs and heels. They circled, they closed, like those deep-sea fish who carry their own illumination. I saw the prey, glistening as it neared a flare.

  You chase a fish with one spear among you. And that spear would be Tork’s tonight. The rest have ropes to bind him that go up to the fishermen’s boats.

  There was a sudden confusion of lights below. The spear had been shot!

  The fish, long as a tall and short man together, rose through the ropes. He turned out to sea, trailing his pursuers. But others waited there, tried to loop him. Once I had flung those ropes, treated with tar and lime to dissolve the slime of the fish’s body and hold to the beast. The looped ropes caught, and by the movement of the flares, I saw them jerked from their paths. The fish turned, rose again, this time toward me.

  He pulled around when one line ran out (and somewhere on the surface the prow of a boat doffed deep) but turned back and came on.

  Of a sudden, amphimen were flicking about me as the fray’s center drifted by. Tork, his spear dug deep, forward and left of the marlin’s dorsal, had hauled himself astride the beast.

  The fish tried to shake him, then dropped his tail and rose straight. Everybody started pulling toward the surface. I broke foam and grabbed Juao’s gunwale.

  Tork and the fish exploded up among the boats. They twisted in the air, in moonlight, in froth. The fish danced across the water on its tail, fell.

  Juao stood up in the boat and shouted. The other fishermen shouted too, and somebody perched on the prow of a boat flung a rope and someone in the water caught it.

  Then fish and Tork and me and a dozen amphimen all went underwater at once.

  They dropped in a corona of bubbles. The fish struck the end of another line, and shook himself. Tork was thrown free, but he doubled back.

  Then the lines began to haul the beast up again, quivering, whipping, quivering again.

  Six lines from six boats had him. For one moment he was still in the submarine moonlight. I could see his wound tossing scarves of blood.

  When he (and we) broke surface, he was thrashing again, near Juao’s boat. I was holding onto the side when suddenly Tork, glistening, came out of the water beside me and went over into the dinghy.

  “Here you go,” he said, turning to kneel at the bobbing rim, and pulled me up while Juao leaned against the far side to keep balance.

  Wet rope slopped on the prow. “Hey, Cal!” Tork laughed, grabbed it up, and began to haul.

  The fish prised wave from white wave in the white water.

  The boats came together. The amphimen had all climbed up. Ariel was across from us, holding a flare that drooled smoke down her arm. She peered by the hip of the fisherman who was standing in front of her.

  Juao and Tork were hauling the rope. Behind them I was coiling it with one hand as it came back to me.

  The fish came up and was flopped into Ariel’s boat, tail out, head up, chewing air.

  I had just finished pulling on my trousers when Tork fell down on the seat behind me and grabbed me around the shoulders with his wet arms. “Look at our fish, Tio Cal! Look!” He gasped air, laughing, his dark face diamonded beside the flares. “Look at our fish there, Cal!”

  Juao, grinning white and gold, pulled us back in to shore. The fire, the singing, hands beating hands—and my godson had put pebbles in the empty rum bottles and was shaking them to the music— the guitars spiraled around us as we carried the fish up the sand and the men brought the spit.

  “Watch it!” Tork said, grasping the pointed end of the great stick that was thicker than his wrist.

  We turned the fish over.

  “Here, Cal?”

  He prodded two fingers into the white flesh six inches back from the bony lip.

  “Fine.”

  Tork jammed the spit in.

  We worked it through the body. By the time we carried it to the fire, they had brought more rum.

  “Hey, Tork. Are you going to get some sleep before you go down in the morning?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Slept all afternoon.” He pointed toward the roasting fish with his elbow. “That’s my breakfast.”

  But when the dancing grew violent a few hours later, just before the fish was to come off the fire, and the kids were pushing the last of the sweet potatoes from the ashes with sticks, I walked back to the lifeboat shell we had sat on earlier. It was three quarters flooded.

  Curled below still water, Tork slept, fist loose before his mouth, the gills at the back of his neck pulsing rhythmically. Only his shoulder and hip made islands in the floated boat.

  “Where’s Tork?” Ariel asked me at the fire. They were swinging up the sizzling fish.

  “Taking a nap.”

  “Oh, he wanted to cut the fish!”

  “He’s got a lot of work coming up. Sure you want to wake him?”

  “No, I’ll let him sleep.”

  But Tork was coming up from the water, brushing his dripping hair back from his forehead.

  He grinned at us, then went to carve. I remember him standing on the table, astraddle the meat, arm going up and down with the big knife (details, yes, those are the things you remember), stopping to hand down the portions, then hauling his arm back to cut again.

  That night, with music and stomping on the sand and shouting back and forth over the fire, we made more noise than the sea.

  IV

  The eight-thirty bus was more or less on time.

  “I don’t think they want to go,” Juao’s sister said. She was accompanying the children to the Aquatic Corp Headquarters in Brasilia.

  “They are just tired,” Juao said. “They should not have stayed up so late last night. Get on the bus now. Say good-bye to Tio Cal.”

  “Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye.”

  Kids are never their most creative in that sort of situation. And I suspect that my godchildren may just have been suffering their first (or one of their first) hangovers. They had been very quiet all morning.

  I bent down and gave them a clumsy hug. “When you come back on your first weekend off, I’ll take you exploring down below at the point. You’ll be able to gather your own coral now.”

  Juao’s sister got teary, cuddled the children, cuddled me, Juao, then got on the bus.

  Someone was shouting out the bus window for someone at the bus stop not to forget something. They trundled around the square and then toward the highway. We walked back across the street where the café owners were putting out canvas chairs.

  “I will miss them,” he said, like a long-considered admission.

  “You and me both.” At the docks near the hydrofoil wharf where the submarine launches went out to the undersea cities, we saw a crowd. “I wonder if they had any trouble laying the—”

  A woman screamed in the crowd. She pushed from the others, dropping eggs and onions. She began to pull her hair and shriek. (Remember the skillet of shrimp? She had been the woman ladling them out.) A few people moved to help her.

  A clutch of men broke off and ran into a side street. I grabbed a running amphiman, who whirled to face me.

  “What in hell is going on?”

  For a moment his mouth worked on his words for all the trite world like a beached fish.

  “From the explosion . . .” he began. “They just brought them back from the explosion at the Slash!”

  I grabbed his other shoulder. “What happened!”

  “About two hours ago. They were just a quarter of the way through, when the whole fault gave way. They had a goddamn underwater volcano for half an hour. They’re still getting seismic disturbances.”

  Juao was running toward the launch. I pushed the guy away and limped after him, struck the crowd and jostled through calico, canvas, and green scales.

  They were carrying the corpses out of the hatch of the submarine and laying them on a tarplin spread across the dock. They still return bodies to the countries of birth for the family to decide the method of burial. When the fault had given, the hot slag that had belched into the steaming sea was mostly molten silicon.

  Three of the bodies were only slightly burned here and there; from their bloated faces (one still bled from the ear) I guessed they had died from sonic concussion. But several of the bodies were almost totally encased in dull, black glass.