Кейт Форсит - Relics, Wrecks and Ruins - Anthology of Speculative Fiction Short Works

A mile up, Aracai met schools of fish—silver perch that darted in front of him like a moving screen. Huge red-tailed catfish plied the muddy bottom, using whiskers to taste for food. A parrot bass, half as long as him, hid in the shadows of a pool, the yellows and greens around its gills muted as it emitted a sonorous snoring sound.

Here, Aracai watched freshwater crabs of deep mossy green march among some stones, then he gathered water lettuce and taro roots. Dulce offered a blessing on the meal.

As they ate, Aracai tried to speak delicately. “This will be a long journey, and hard.”

Dulce peered at him with exhaustion in her dark eyes. “And you wonder if there is honor in killing humans?”

“No,” he said. “I know there is no honor in it.”

She bit her lip, and a lightning flash made her eyes glow startlingly green.

“It is not about honor,” he said. “I just wonder if it even makes sense. I do not want to hurt anyone. What good can come of it? Our species… is doomed.” Dulce remained pensive. Aracai continued, “We could leave the bomb, hide it in the mud.”

Anger flared in Dulce’s eyes. “Don’t even think of it.” Her tone brooked no argument. She held his gaze, her dainty nose beguiling him. She drew close and kissed his lips, pressing hard and long. “Promise me. Promise you won’t turn back.”

“If we do this, the humans will hunt us down.”

“Everyone dies,” she said.

So they ate and for a while they slept in the forest shadows, cradled in one another’s arms.

The journey stretched long after that. After their nap, Aracai felt a sharp pain in his urethra. He recognized from the rhythmic motions that it was a fish. It had swum up an inch or more into him, and so he tried to pee it out.

But the tiny fish had barbs and could not be extricated, so he suffered the pain.

For four days they continued swimming along the shore of the Amazon, sometimes stopping to rest in an estuary. He saw the promised anacondas overhead and fell afoul of an electric eel. He saw colorful birds flashing over languid pools and swam unharmed through schools of piranha. There were giant arapaima longer than he and his wife, and alligator longer than any mer. The trees overhead, dripping with bright blossoms, were a marvel.

As they swam, he grew sicker. On the third day, he could no longer pee, nor could his wife. It was not the fish that had done it. Their kidneys were failing.

His body began to ache as uric acid built inside, so that every muscle felt beaten and bruised. His scales took on a milky coating. With each passing hour, he felt more certain that this journey would kill them. Freshwater was deadly. On the fifth day, he could no longer eat. His gut had given up digesting, and it felt better to starve than to take nourishment.

As sick as he felt, Dulce was worse. She wept as she fought her way upstream, and each day she grew slower and slower. She held to his back often as they swam, and he pushed for both, so that sometimes he blanked out and swam blind from fatigue.

He judged that they had come a thousand kilometers when they reached the junction to Rio Negro, full of its poisons.

Wearily, they stopped and tried to get a breath in a small lagoon upstream from the Rio Negro. The place was magical, pristine, the water far cleaner than any that they had encountered. It was as if they were entering a lost world, the great green jungles rising above the water, vast trees streaming epiphytes. A pair of dolphins swam along the river briskly, laughing as dolphins will, their coral-colored hides a delight.

He felt as if he had found some primal place that man had never touched and marveled that such jungles still existed.

They swam into a flooded creek. Blue crayfish scuttled among tree roots and clung to floating duckweed. The day was windy, and Aracai could hear roots groaning as the trees swayed and stretched. The waters in the lagoon were golden, and huge red-bellied pacu as long as his arm swam about.

As the trees stirred, dark, round nuts fell, and the pacu would bite the nuts, crunching them with powerful teeth, so that though the fish looked like enormous piranhas, they seemed like gentle giants.

Here, Aracai gazed into Dulce’s eyes and said goodbye. “I want you to go back downstream,” he begged. “You won’t have to fight the current, and you can swim swiftly. Once you hit the saltwater, you will begin to heal.” He did not know if it were true, but hoped that it was.

To his astonishment, she did not fight him. She peered deep into his eyes, reached out and stroked his beard, and apologized. “I don’t have the strength to go on.”

He nodded, knowing she was right.

He glanced up at the surface of the water, which rippled with waves, and listened to the plop of falling nuts, the groan of straining roots, the crunching of pacu.

Aracai considered swimming home to the sea, giving up this sad quest. He could leave the bomb in the mud. He looked up. Swarms of dragonflies were hovering above the lagoon—electric blue, fiery red, leafy green.

Dulce grabbed his bicep and peered into his face. “Promise you will go on,” she said. “Do it for your daughter, for all the mer yet to be born.”

Aracai imagined their child again, that sad thing thrashing about after birth as she drowned. He imagined her growing cold and stiff, her blue eyes turning to white. She’d died without a name.

He nodded.

He did not want to kill. He had argued for and against it in his mind time and time again, until nothing made sense anymore. His wife wanted him to fight, as had Escalas. That was all that mattered.

Aracai kissed Dulce goodbye, hugged her tightly, and she swam back, as if the idea of swimming downstream invigorated her.

She rose near the surface so that the sun caught her hair. But there was a flash from the surface, a violent disturbance.

Dulce gave a blood-curdling shriek and jerked hard, swimming first to the left in a wide arc, then diving, but there was a metal rod stuck in her back, with a heavy cord tied to it. No matter how hard she swam, the cord pulled her upward.

Terror and grief coursed through Aracai. Time slowed. He realized that his wife had been struck by a spear fisherman, and the harpoon had taken her in the back. She burst up toward the surface, becoming airborne, and he heard a man shout in delight, “Ela é uma grande!” She’s a big one!

He dropped the bomb and swam toward her fast. The harpoon had hit near her right lung. He doubted she could survive long.

Blood stained the water. Aracai could taste it. The giant pacu suddenly seemed to spasm, instantly turning their interest from nuts to flesh. They sped up and swam toward Dulce, who spun onto her back and grabbed the line that held the harpoon. Desperately, she jerked. “Help!” she sang.

Aracai raced to her, realizing that this must be some mistake. He’d seen monster fish in other lagoons, and though no humans had been fishing near the poison water, up here where things were more pristine, someone must have mistaken his wife for a meal.

The spear fisherman was pulling the line, trying to drag Dulce to shore. Aracai raced up and grabbed the line, tugged violently, and felt the human go off balance. A man cried out in fear.

Aracai rose to the surface, whistled a shrill warning. He could not speak the human tongue, but he could make his anger known.

He peered up into a sandbox palm, where three young men hunted from a tree fort. One held the fishing line. Another held a spear gun. A third bore an ancient rifle.

“Há outro!” the spearman called. He raised his spear gun and fired hastily. The bolt tore past Aracai’s head.

“You’ve made a mistake,” Aracai sang in his own tongue.

But the gunman peered at him with deadly intent, an eager smile playing over his face. He raised his rifle and fired. Heat tore through Aracai’s shoulder and he dove for cover, down into the inky darkness beneath the tree roots.