Kim Robinson - A Short, Sharp Shock

“Yes,” she muttered sleepily. “And I still am.” But this, he supposed, was another of their misunderstandings. Thel had first noticed this phenomenon when he had seen a windhover, hunting over the meadows inland. “Look,” he had said, “a kestrel.” But the swimmer had thought him crazy for pointing into the sky, for that to her was the name of a kind of fish. And later he found that when he said loyalty she understood it to mean stubbornness, and when she said arbitrary she meant beautiful, and that when she said melancholy she did not mean that sadness we enjoy feeling, but rather mendacity; and when she said actually she meant currently; and when he said I love you, she thought he Was saying I will leave you. They had slowly worked up quite a list of these false cognates, Thel could recite scores and scores of them, and he had come to understand that they did not share a language so much as the illusion of a language; they spoke strong idiolects, and lived in worlds of meaning distinct and isolated from the other. So that she no doubt understood queen of an ancient kingdom to mean something like a swimmer in the deep sea; and the mystery of the ancient alloy coin was never explained, and, he realized, never would be. It gave him a shiver of fear, thinking about it—it seemed to him that nothing would ever be explained, and that all of a sudden each day was slipping away, that time was flying by and they were getting old and nothing would ever come clear. He sat on the beach watching the clouds tumble overhead and letting handfuls of sand run through his fingers, the little clear grains of quartz, flecks of black mica, pieces of coral, shell fragments like small bits of hard ceramic, and he saw that a substantial portion of the sand was made of shells, that living things had labored all their lives to create ceramic shelters, homes, the most permanent parts of themselves; which had then been pummeled into shards just big enough to see, millions upon millions of lives ground up and strewn under him, the beach made out of the wreckage of generations. And before long he and the swimmer too would become no more than sand on a beach, and they would never really have understood anything.

One evening in early spring, after a long day on the hot tawny beach, Thel and the swimmer walked homeward, between great logs of driftwood that had washed ashore in the winter. In the blue twilight the logs looked like the bodies of fallen giants after a titanic battle, and above them in the sky a black star was fluttering, a bird high in the air. The swimmer clasped Thel’s arm: “Look,” she said, and pointed down the beach. “We have visitors.” Torchlight glimmered around their shell home, a dozen points of yellow weaving in the dusk.

It was a group of the shellfolk, drinking liquor from curved shells and laughing as they danced in a circle around their home.

“Is it New Year’s already?” the swimmer asked.

“Something else,” Thel said.

They walked into the circle of light, and the shellfolk greeted them and explained it was Paros’s birthday, and, as had happened once or twice before, they had decided to celebrate out at Thel and the swimmer’s home, because they had not been able to agree whether brown or purple should host. So Thel and the swimmer joined the party, and ate and danced around the bonfire, and drank the liquor until everything was bright with the colors of fire and night, and the faces of the shellfolk were like crude masks of their daytime selves. Thel stumbled as he swung his feet out in dance, and a face the brown nearest black appeared before him, harsh with laughter and some shouted curse he didn’t understand. Then someone the purple nearest black darted from the side, trying to trip him; Thel looked up and it seemed that people were not quite themselves, so that when Psara came out of their house holding the mirror overhead, Thel saw immediately that it was not Psara but Tinou. Tinou’s black skin was now purplish in tint, and his face was twisted into Psara’s visage, but with Tinou’s big grin on it, and Tinou’s shouting laugh.

As the transformed shellfolk seized Thel and the swimmer by the arms and dragged them to Tinou, a part of Thel was distracted, wondering if Psara had been Tinou all along, waiting all these years for whatever unimaginable reason to reveal himself—or if he had recently arrived in the village, and for reasons equally beyond comprehension had taken over Psara’s form. In any case the voice was the same, and as Tinou placed the mirror in the wooden frame familiar from Oia, he laughed and said, “All life is a case of deja vu, don’t you think? And here we are again. Let us put the woman through first, so Thel can see what it looks like.”

Thel struggled against the hands holding him down, but there were too many of them; all his neighbors, faces gleaming yellow and their eyes big and hungry as they watched the other group lift the struggling swimmer and force her feet into the bright liquid surface of the mirror.

Tinou laughed and began his litany of questions, face inches from hers, spittle flying over her as he shouted in a gross parody of solicitousness, “Pinching? pressing? gnawing? cramping? crushing? wrenching? scalding? searing?” Thel was proud of her, the way she could hold her face rigid in a mask of stoic disgust, staring Tinou in the eye; but his stomach was flip-flopping inside him as he saw the flesh of her legs and torso jerk at the contact with the mirror. Her body remained visible on the other side, flesh pale and inert yet still there among them. But remembering his own voyage on the other side, Thel feared they would be separated again, separated for good, and as her head popped through and she tumbled unconscious to the ground behind the mirror, Thel ripped convulsively away from the hands holding him and leaped forward to dive head first through the mirror and after her. The last thing he saw was Tinou’s face, bright with torchlight and astonishment, as big around as the mirror itself.

It was early morning, sun bright in his eyes. The swimmer lay next to him, sleeping or unconscious, and the world smelled as fresh as the shadows under trees. It hurt to move—to raise his head, to sit up—each joint a stab of pain when he moved it. Nevertheless he was happy to be with her still.

And yet it hurt, it hurt to move. This was an aspect of pain he noticed at once: it was hard to see through it to anything else. It took a discipline that would have to be learned.

Groaning, he rolled to her side and shook her awake. She woke with a gasp and held her left arm to her side. They sat up, looked around at a cold windy hillside—the spine, in fact, near the crest, on a prominence overlooking the sea. There was no sign of the shellfolk’s bay. “The sun,” the swimmer said. “It’s moving east. It will set in the east.”

Thel ignored the conundrum of how she could orient herself by something other than the sun in the sky, and merely nodded. “It’s the mirror world,” he said. “Everything’s backwards.”

They would need clothes, having been thrust into this world nearly naked. Even something like the leaf capes that the treefolk had worn would help shelter them from the wind.

Then the swimmer pointed. “Look, it’s him. The thing that took over our Psara.” Far to the east, on the crest of the spine, a figure was walking away from them. It had a lump on its back. “He’s carrying the mirror,” the swimmer said. She had a hand shading her eyes, and was squinting. “It’sTinou, isn’t it.”

“Yes.” Thel peered after the tiny figure speculatively. “If we could get the mirror from him, and push through it again…”