Гарднер Дозуа - Mermaids!

He recalled the Mexican aphorism that "one must feed the body in order that the soul may live in it"; and, hence, food—and its preparation and consumption—always seemed to him to partake of a spiritual as well as a physical and social quality. An intelligent and appreciative interest in victuahry made, in Wilson's view, all the difference between dining and mere feeding. The more a woman showed a genuine interest in the food he chose for the two of them, the more genuine was his own interest in her; an extra dimension was supplied their friendship. Alas! for the ugly advance of ready-mixed, frozen, tinned, and pre-cooked rations: Jack Wilson had rarely met a woman who was his equal in the kitchen, and few who were not infinitely his inferior.

Wilson's peregrinations were usually aboard his own vessels—for, as a lover of the dolphin-torn sea itself, he possessed a diesel-powered yacht fully capable of braving a stormy Atlantic—and it can be realized that many a weekend, and sometimes many a week, was passed with pleasure and profit on the bosom of the deep. And the one thing he never disclosed to any one of the fine selection of prime cuties which he had squired over seven or eight seas was that he was looking for something more than perfection in a woman.

As a matter of plain fact, he was looking for a mermaid.

Wilson was quite certain that the mermaid legend was no legend at all, but simple truth. There had been too many sightings, too many reports from widely scattered spots over the earth's seas, over too many centuries of human history, to doubt that such beings had once swum the seas of the planet. And, as far as Jack Wilson was concerned, they were still swimming them. (For that matter, he had an equally unshakable faith in the actual existence of the sea serpent—but, then, he had no desire to find a sea serpent.)

It is not to be thought that Jack actually thought of marrying a mermaid; that would perhaps have been carrying things a bit too far, especially for a man of his fastidious tastes. He did not even particularly desire to make love to a mermaid, although the sheer physical mechanics of the process interested him in a semi-scientific sort of way. What Wilson was actually pursuing was a dream of beauty. A beatific vision.

The vision was compounded partly from the stuff that dreams are made of, but it included, as well, some of the more memorable features of some of the more memorable women whom Wilson had known intimately. And it happened that each of these hauntingly lovely items in his mind had likened in some way to the treasures of the sea itself, recasting poetry to do so:

Full fathom five my true love glides...

His true-love had, to begin, long sun-blonde hair the color of the golden sands of Trincomalec (Merrilyn Madison, whose tresses remained in his mind long after the grace-notes of her body had blended pleasantly with the symphony of a score of others.) His true-love had teeth like a perfectly matched set of the finest Bahrein pearls (The Contessa Delia Gama; he chose to forget that those teeth had a particularly nasty bite). His true-love's eyes were as blue as the Bay of Naples on a summer's day (Marya Amirovna, whose eyes, like the sea, shifted to gray when a storm was gathering). Her skin was as milky white as the waters which lave the beach at Saipan (Kirsten Jonsdotter, tall, majestic, and passionate). Her bosom was magnificently bifurcate and tipped with coral (Amy, Duchess of Norchester; she of the cool manner and the hot blood). Her...

But enough.

Now, each of these women had been, in her own way, as nearly perfect as anything merely human can be. Yet each had failed to satisfy him for long, not because of the presence of any particular flaw, but by the absence of some indefinable quality. And so, in Wilson's mind, over a period of years, his vision of the mermaiden had come to assimilate all the perfections of the women he had known, plus that definition-defying something .

He did not, on an intellectual level, consider that every mermaid would resemble his vision. He reasoned that such creatures must vary, one from the other, much as non-pinniped females do. But in his secret imagining—deep, deep, down, full fathom five—he knew that his mermaid would be the perfect one.

Alex MacNair, captain of the Lorelei , Jack Wilson's yacht, neither believed nor disbelieved in mermaids. He was perfectly willing to believe—if he saw one—but, left to himself, would not have walked to the side to look. Mermaids, he felt, were, like lurlies and kelpies, out of his province. His task was to captain a seagoing vessel. The uses to which that vessel was put were the province of the owner, and Captain MacNair was quite happy with such a division of labor and responsibility. And as for any picturesque devotion to Old Scotland, he limited that to a deep fondness for Ballantine's Twelve Year Old.

He had only once made the mistake of slighting his employer's dream-hobby. It was in Portau-Prince, early in Jack's enthusiasm. "Captain MacNair! Look! A trawler off New Zealand sighted a mermaid, according to the paper!"

The captain had politely taken the proffered journal and read the item slowly, decoding the almost 18th Century elaborateness of the French prose with deliberation while Jack fidgeted at his side.

"Ah!" MacNair said finally, looking up. "Interesting. Very interesting. I tell you what it probably was, Mr. Wilson. Very likely they spotted a dugong. Or a manatee. That's what it was." And he held out the paper as the patronizing smile slowly withered on his face.

"Captain," said Jack, his tone the only chill thing that Haitian noon, "have you ever seen a dugong?"

"I have, sir."

"And your eyesight is good?"

'Twenty-twenty, Mr. Wilson."

"Then tell me: Would you ever mistake a dugong for a mermaid? Does a dugong look like a beautiful woman to you?"

MacNair considered his recollection of the dugong. It was somewhat larger than a grown man, and much more visibly mammalian than—say—a porpoise or a whale. From the waist down, the ichthyoid tail, with its horizontal flukes, might have some likeness to the tail of a mermaid, but—from the waist up?

The flippers could never be mistaken for arms, certainly. And that bald, bulging head, with its swollen face and deep-seated eyes and its bristly, lumpy, divided upper lip certainly did not resemble anything human at all.

"Now that I think on it, Mr. Wilson," MacNair conceded, "I do not believe that any sober person could mistake a dugong for a pretty woman."

"Exactly! Not even the most depraved sailor would, or could, make such a mistake."

MacNair was privately of the opinion that his employer had obviously not known as many depraved sailors as he, MacNair, had, but he kept his own counsel, and never again deprecated Wilson's hobby. Ahab had chased whales; Mr. Wilson, mermaids. Mermaids, on the whole, were certainly preferable, being much safer. So was seafood. "A fare day's work for a fair day's pay," was MacNair's motto.

Wilson had long employed a clipping service in New York, another in London, a third in Paris, and, after the war, a fourth in Tokyo, to supply him with mermaid data culled from the periodicals of the world. These clippings were arranged methodically in his leather-bound scrapbooks. Over a period of years, they had expanded into several volumes.

What made Jack Wilson unhappy was that he was always too late. No matter how quickly he got to an area where a mermaid had been sighted—and he had flown on several occasions—the shy creature had always decamped by the time he arrived.

There seemed to be no help for it. The big international news services do not consider mermaid sightings to be real news. Unlike, for example, axe murders and sex circle exposés, they are relegated to the Silliness Files, and are usually a week or two old before they are ever printed. Even then, the reports are used only as fillers, and the details of fact are meager, since most of the space is given over to what Jack considered the dubious wit of the reporter or rewrite man.