Piers Anthony - Mer-Cycle

This time he was able to perform. “You know, Gaspar and I are both only-survivors in our families. We think that’s because our employer selected for singleness. Maybe they don’t want people wondering where we are. In case—you know. Uh, you said you’re single, but otherwise—is it the same with you?” He had even asked her a direct personal question!

“Almost,” she said. “My father died ten years ago. He married late. My mother was thirty five when I was born. I haven’t seen her for a couple of years. So it’s the same, I guess. I’m uncommitted. But I’d be uncommitted even if I had a massive crowd of relatives.”

“You keep saying that,” Don protested. “But you’re such a lovely young woman—”

She looked at him. “I guess I’d better take the plunge and show you. Get it over with at the outset. That’s maybe better than having it happen by chance, as it surely will otherwise.”

“Show me what?”

“Look at me, Don.” She sat up.

He sat up too, uncertain what she had in mind. He tried to keep his eyes from the firm inner thighs that her crossed legs showed under the skirt, but that meant he was focusing on her evocative bosom. He finally had to fix on her lovely face.

Melanie put her hands to her head and slid her fingers in under her perfect hair. She tugged—and her hair came off in a mass. It was a wig—and beneath it she was completely bald.

Don simply stared.

“I’m hairless,” she said. “All over my body. My eyebrows are glued on, and my eyelashes are fake. It’s a genetic defect, they think. No hair follicles.” She lifted one arm and pulled her blouse to the side to show her armpit. “I don’t shave there. No need to. No hair grows.” She glanced down. “Anywhere.”

Don was stunned. She had abruptly converted from a beautiful young woman to a bald mannequin. She now looked like an alien creature from a science fiction movie. Her green eyes shone out from the face on the billiard ball head, as if this were a doll in the process of manufacture.

“So now you know,” the mouth in the face said.

Don tried to say something positive, but could not speak at all. Her beauty had been destroyed, and she had been made ludicrous. It might as well have been a robot talking to him.

Gaspar righted his bicycle. “Ready to go,” he said. “We shouldn’t use up the batteries unnecessarily.” Then, after a pause: “Oh.”

“Oh,” Melanie echoed tonelessly.

“I wasn’t paying much attention when it counted, it seems,” Gaspar said. “Disease? Radiation therapy?”

“Genetic, from birth,” she said.

“Why show us?”

“Because Don was starting to like me.”

He nodded. “Hair is superficial. We know it. Now all we have to do is believe it.”

Melanie put her wig back on, and pressed it carefully into place. It was evident that it had some kind of adhesive, and would not come loose unless subject to fair stress. She resumed her former appearance. But now, to Don’s eyes, she looked like a bald doll with a hairpiece. She had set out to disabuse him of his notions of her attractiveness, and had succeeded. Evidently she didn’t want to be liked ignorantly.

They resumed travel without further comment. The coordinates were 24°20’–82°30’. Forty minutes west of their rendezvous, ten south. Depth was one hundred fathoms. They must have been traveling well, indeed, downhill, before starting the laborious climb. Don was amazed to realize that they were now beyond their target, and he had never been aware of their passing it. They had time, plenty of time, thank the god of the sea.

They had climbed six hundred feet in the past two miles, and it didn’t look steep, but it was grueling on a bicycle. Now he was glad for the continued struggle, because it gave him something other to think about than Melanie’s hair. She had figured him exactly: he was getting to like her, because she was pretty and she talked to him. And now his building illusion had been shattered. He should have known that there would be something like this.

Twenty miles and seventy fathoms east and up, with a break for another bicycle malfunction—this time Don’s, whose seat had come loose and twisted sideways—the way abruptly became steep. Gaspar, in the lead, dismounted and walked his bike up the slope. Don and Melanie were glad to do the same; it was a relief to change the motion.

Suddenly Don saw a rough wall, almost overhanging. Jagged white outcroppings and brown recesses made this a formidable barrier, and it extended almost up to the surface of the sea.

“This is it,” Gaspar said with satisfaction as they drew beside him.

“But how can we pass?” Don asked. “What is it, anyway?”

Gaspar smiled. “Coral reef. Isn’t she a beauty!”

Don, not wanting to admit that he had never seen a coral reef before, and had had a mental picture of a rather pretty plastered wall with brightly colored fish hovering near, merely nodded. It looked ugly to him, because he couldn’t see how they were going to get across it. There might be a hundred feet of climbing to do, scaling that treacherous cliff—and how were they going to haul up the bicycles?

He glanced at Melanie, who had not spoken since her revelation. Could she be likened to a coral reef? His mental image suddenly disabused by the reality? Unfortunately, it was the reality that counted.

They did not have to scale the reef. Gaspar merely showed the way east, coasting down the bumpy slope to deeper water. This was why they had come this way: to go around the reef instead of across it. Don was now increasingly thankful for Gaspar’s knowledge of the geography of the sea. When they struck reasonably level sand they picked up speed. They went another ten miles before he called a halt.

“We’re within a dozen miles,” Gaspar said, breaking out the rations. “I guess we’d better get inside the reefs, next chance. Rendezvous is only a couple miles out of Key West.”

“Get inside the reefs?” Don asked, dismayed. “I thought we already went around them.”

“No, only part way. But this is a better place to cross them, I think.”

“Why is the rendezvous so close to civilization?” Don mused. “Can this next person know even less about the ocean than I do?”

Melanie remained silent, and Gaspar discreetly avoided the implication. “The reefs are rough—literally. The edges can cut like knives, and the wounds are slow to heal. It’s no place to learn to swim, or ride. So we’ll have to guide him through with kid gloves. He probably does know less than you—now.”

A left-footed compliment! “So how do we get through?”

“Oh, the reefs are discontinuous. We’ll use a channel and get into shallow water. Have to watch out for boats, though; we’ll be plainly visible in twenty foot depth.” He considered briefly. “In fact, as I recall, there’s a lot of two fathom water in the area. Twelve feet from wave to shell in mean low water, which means barely six feet over our heads. That’s too much visibility.”

Don agreed. He would now feel naked with that thin a covering of water. He was tired, and wanted neither to admit it nor to hold up progress, but here was a valid pretext to wait. On the other hand, he was increasingly curious about this close-to-land member of the expedition. If the man were not knowledgeable about the marine world, why was he needed at all?

But Melanie wasn’t knowledgeable either. What was her purpose here? Unless this really was a testing situation, a maze for average white rats. How would those rats find their way through? How well would they cooperate with each other? He remembered reading about a test in which a rat could get a pellet of food by striking a button. Then the button was placed on the opposite side of the chamber from the pellet dispenser. Then two rats were put in the same chamber. When one punched the button, the other got the pellet. That was testing something other than wit or mechanical dexterity. Could this be that sort of test?