Water Music

David J. Schow

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The pull of history is tidal. The pull of human history can be

countermanded; it occupies too scant a footing on the timeline to offer

resistance. Mere mammals to date have claimed precious little

additional length on that timeline. Imagine a yardstick. Human history

barely fills the final l/16th inch of the span. Mammals have yet to

stake an inch, let alone a foot... long after evolving opposable

thumbs.

Nonhuman, non-mammalian creatures fill much more of the Earth's

imaginary timeline. There, the weight of the past can exert an

irresistible pull — a dangerous undertow, a riptide that can enfold,

sometimes with toxic results. Death, even.

Abe Sapien is aware of this when he fugues. The fugue is a form of

self-meditation, an almost out-of-body state vital to maintenance of

mind and spirit, but as with medication, there is the hazard of

overdose. One can get lost in his own genetic past, as the price for

consultation with one's former selves.

Most humans lack the option, let alone the control that Abe Sapien has

cultivated through deft experience. Humans, he has found, remain

stranded in the backwaters of ghostly visitation, of demonic

possession, of poltergeists and so-called past-life regression —

superstitions they use to rationalize the preternatural.

The preternatural is already an accepted part of Abe Sapiens universe.

To augment the experience of the fugue, and permit more control, he has

climbed into his special isolation tank. Chemically enhanced pure water

at optimum temperature; utter silence; total darkness. This helps Abe

Sapien to concentrate on leveling his brainwaves to exclude the

here-and-now world. To an unschooled observer, Abe Sapien appears to

segue into a coma state, respirating less than one breath per minute

through the delicate lamellae of his gillwork. The "floating" sensation

of the buoyant solution in the tank gives way to the airborne,

"hovering" sensation that is the first stage of fugue.

Abe Sapien floats — transcending the concerns of the petty or material,

temporarily obviating the earthly need to indulge emotions. Like hate.

Like resentment. Abe Sapien has been suffering these feelings more,

lately, than he judges to be normal, even for a unique specimen such as

himself. Hate, mirroring the hatred of human beings for anything

different from their limited form and shape. Species hate, too often

against ichthyo Sapien. Resentment at the arrogance of the Bureau for

Paranormal Research and Defense. Lately Abe Sapien has been feeling

that the B.P.R.D. has been taking him for granted, as if he had no

other options in the world of humans. Yeah, throw the freak a bone,

gang him with the other mutants and misfits, and see if we can somehow

profit from their investigations into spooky stuff.

Never does Abe Sapien express these sentiments, but he cannot lie to

himself — he feels them, from time to time, always keeping the feeling

to himself. Human feelings, to his fancy, in conflict with his

non-human nature; it is not a choice between human-or-otherwise. He

occupies not a netherworld, but a neither-world. But he acknowledges

that to bottle up misgivings is never healthy. They fester in the dark;

they grow malignant and burst forth into black consequences. That is

one of the reasons he has come to the tank tonight, to meditate, to

fugue. To circumvent these confusing emotions and re-attack them

obliquely, from a refreshed perspective.

Abe Sapien does not appear to age, but he is aware he is somehow

outside his own skin, looking at himself, over a century earlier. He is

younger, smaller. He is standing knee-deep in some anguineous backwater

of New Orleans swampland, feeling the mystic transport of his fellow

creatures, the water witches and the Peremelfait, shrouded festively in

the ghost-shapes of drowned pirates, decorated with Spanish moss and

kudzu. He feels at one with the earth, the quickmud, the backwater

tidepools, all of it teeming with biology, with the reassurance of the

ocean always nearby ...

... and he jolts, subtly, in his tank, from synapse shock. The warm

feeling of homecoming is an illusion, a confection of his mind. The way

he would like his past to have been. He has heard humans do this, too —

idealize a childhood that never existed, editing out the objectionable

bits.

But the fantasy refuses to dissipate. Abe Sapien knows what history

claims. The theory goes that he was created in a laboratory as the

first human-fish hybrid, a homme amphibie, nearly a century before the

word "bioengineering" was coined.

For him to backtrack, via fugue, along that path is a dead end, and he

knows it. That path ends in 1895.

Several decades of isolation in a water cylinder, labeled as a marine

curiosity, had taught him a lot about leaving his body. About fugueing,

and finding ways to "think himself elsewhere." To Abe Sapien,

"Elsewhere" is a destination. When he achieves the proper mental state

to fugue, he has arrived at Elsewhere ... and Elsewhere has nothing to

do with being fabricated, mutated, or invented. Elsewhere pulls him

gently backward along a different path, an alternate life.

And ancestry.

He glimpses his younger self — still in the fanciful swamp — but

momentarily, as though from a fast-moving hot-air balloon bobbing

overhead. Then he continues his journey, passing his own birth ...

Wait a minute. His birth?!

His sensitive dermis dances with galvanic new input. What he sees is

contraindicated, yet it moves him as profoundly as any single vision

could. Abe Sapien has never embraced any notion of having a real mother

or father. Yet there they are, and they love him. They are regal and

gracile, sophisticated masters of both land and sea.

Elsewhere blossoms for Abe Sapien, offering more, and he opts to

continue his journey back along this genetic timeline.

Now he sees his progenitors as a spare and noble race — overlords of

Atlantis; demigods of Amazonas; favored consorts of Triton and Poseidon

(as humans had later named them, erroneously). They had developed their

own culture and written language, no artifact of which survives today.

The paintings of the great human masters crumbled to dust in fewer than

a thousand years; the ancestral dynasty of Abe Sapien is millennia

older than that.

He visualizes an earlier configuration for himself. Primordial,

tougher, more brutal. Armor-plated scales, talons, an almost

microscopic alertness of the air around him and the signals it imparts.

With ancient, chromium eyes he can now see into the infrared.

Hyperdeveloped sensors in his taste buds now convey crucial hunting

data, like the smell of fear.

And it is in this form that Abe Sapien touches down on the virtual

ground of Elsewhere. The hot ozone of antediluvian lightning-strikes

charges the atmosphere. He stands on gray rock outcrops jutting from a

turbulent, iron-colored sea, and knows humid wind is buffeting him, but

cannot feel its temperature. His civilized self, back in the tank,

floating, fugueing, would be handicapped here. He looks down to see he

still wears his formfit tunic, because that is what his memory has

provisioned for this fugue. This might be the world as it was before

the aquatics crawled, gasping, onto land. The enormity of this place

dwarfs both his irritation and preoccupation — the foibles and

frailties he still biases as "human" in his mind.

If Abe Sapien owns a cellular history, he is the only extant repository

of that line. A possible past. It is easy to extrapolate others like

himself. Even his own ancestors. In this fugue, he might even be able

to console his misgivings by consultation with others of his kind.

Others of his kind — the revelation is deliriously gravid with

possibility. The dormant lobes of his thinking mind, back in the fugue

tank, know this is not real. But the illusion is deeply convincing.

Here — theoretically — he can be alone instead of lonely. At least,

that is what he thought until he saw the visitor. Intruder, perhaps.

Standing atop a rock in distant shadow, a humanoid silhouette, perched

on one leg like a warrior sentry. It seemed to have just noticed Abe

Sapien; both stood in regard of the other for several tense moments.

Abe Sapien felt himself being sized up.

Then the other being dove into the choppy water and swam to a closer

rock. It hauled itself up, sea foam sluicing from its smooth naked

body, which was a dark, mossy green, mottled with brown spots. Its legs

were backward-jointed, avian. Three fingers, three toes on each spindly

limb — long, super-attenuated digits designed for grasping. A little

pot belly like a pygmy, which did not conceal the protuberant stump of

penis.

Abe Sapien knew evolution. If this were some sort of protohuman reptile,

anthroposaurus Sapien, then the brain development required to advance a

species to the status of a thinking being would induce the upright,

bipedal stance of a human, and thus necessitate the ventro-ventral mode

of copulation, which was a more reliable method of mating than the way

birds or lizards did it.

It stood there with a definite attitude of challenge, then took to the

water and swam closer. Now it regarded Abe Sapien from a reef less than

thirty yards away.

This was not the "dinosauroid" posited by paleontologists, the

"primosaur" theorized as a possible conqueror during a time when vastly

outnumbered mammals kept to the trees to avoid predation by the

dinosaurs. This was different. This was a version that had crawled from

the water and learned to climb the trees.

It glared at Abe Sapien, waited exactly as long as it had before, then

swam nearer. It was now ten feet away. It rose erect and commenced its

stare-down. Its skin was scaly, probably armor-hard and elephant-tough.

It had large, oval eyes with vertically slit pupils, protected by bony,

slanting plates. Definitely a nocturnal hunter, and evidence that its

visual associations had shifted to its enlarged cerebrum. Lizards

processed most of their visual information in the retina, not the

brain.

It was not until the 1990s that scientists were able to use CT scans to

map the musculature of a dinosaur heart, which proved to have a single

systemic aorta, unlike the double-aorta found in cold-blooded

crocodilians. Extrapolated, this meant that anthroposaurus Sapien would

have warm blood, and a higher metabolic rate.

What would have happened? Intelligent dinosaurs might have dominated

what are called the Cretaceous terminal extinctions — the so-called

"Kimmeridgian turnover" of 145 million years ago, the "Aptian turnover"

28 million years later, and the "Cenomanian turnover" 22 million years

after that — possibly even steam-rolling over the apes that were in

power by the end of the Tertiary geological era.

In short, they might have resembled this guy.

Abe Sapien thought that the being's expression classified as smug. It

gave a dismissive snort and jerked its head sidewise ... then leaped

from his rock to the one Abe Sapien was standing upon. Abe Sapien

willed himself not to recoil as the creature landed in perfect balance.

The pads on its spatulate fingers and toes gripped the porous stone. It

appeared to weigh about a hundred pounds, and its stubby tail (more a

tailbone, with vertebrae) was probably vestigial.

Its snout was akin to a blunted beak, but still had nasty teeth, or

perhaps ridged gums. Either way, they looked pointy and pain-capable.

Abe Sapien wondered who and what this vision was supposed to represent.

I am the thing you have always feared most, the being said. But it

stood there, transfixing Abe Sapien with the combat stare. It had not

moved its mouth, nor spoken. Abe Sapien heard the thoughts of this

being in his mind. Perhaps his brain was fabricating that detail, while

putting a face to some enemy who laid traps deep in his subconscious,

those unmapped eddies accessed by the fugue state.

But Abe Sapien retained his share of instinct, too, and that primordial

fight-or-flight coding engaged on an autonomic level. His left hand

flew up to protect his face, while his right struck with ballistic,

deadly force. Crush the throat and one usually brings down the

antagonist.

Abe Sapien's martial-arts jab passed through the being; it was like

punching cigarette smoke. It was not corporeal.

In response came an organ-dislocating hammerblow of pain that sank Abe

Sapien to his knees, as palpably as being mashed by a falling safe.

Purple coronas of concussion nimbused Abe Sapien's view.

And again. Abe Sapien grimaced and tried to shove himself up from the

abrasive surface of the rock, which was similar to pumice; volcanic.

Pressure vised his neck and impeded his wind.

Choking, Abe Sapien felt the density of the battering waves of hatred

that assailed him. The Anthroposaur was knocking him down with sheer

hate — megatons of it, eons of it, all backed up on the yardstick of

time until it became a lethal physical threat.

You persist thinking according to real-world terms.

All Abe Sapien could summon by way of response was, "Bite me, Doggie

Legs."

You forget that we are beyond the realm of the corporeal.

"Not so far beyond that I can't feel this! And if you're a phantom — "

Not even that. We are not memory. Because we never existed.

In his mind, Abe Sapien began to block and patty. He could feel the

killing energy invading him and fought to deflect and defuse it. He

managed to rise to one knee, then stand, flinching as if pummeled from

within.

"Why?" was all he said.

Abe Sapien felt the salvo ebb, just slightly. The Anthroposaur had

tilted its head, as it had before, peering at him.

Your race eliminated the possibility of our existence. And now you are

the last of your race.

The massed energy of an entire race, denied by history, was focused

toward making Abe Sapien history, too.

As a civilized being, Abe Sapien was supposed to have an advantage over

this ... this Joke, this dawn-of-time mockery of evolution. At least

the damned thing couldn't club him with a bone axe. In a human fight,

Abe Sapien would have favored the Neanderthal by default, for savagery

and efficiency in extermination. He needed to become his own version of

a primal man, someone unencumbered by modern tactics or remorse.

All he had by way of return fire was his own capacity to hate.

But defending himself was also a risk. He had to expend thought toward

this battle, here, now, thereby increasing the risk that he would never

be able to meditate upward from the fugue state. His travels, before,

had never divided his attention this way, and it wasn't as simple as

clicking his heels and saying there's no place like home. He needed a

reserve to avoid being sucked down by the undertow of this past, yet he

had to summon all his will, now, to engage this unexpected foe. The

fallout could be worse than death, as the atoms of his very

consciousness were spread thin over the return centuries, in a

dustcloud of miniscule microns. Even his own considerable mind, body,

and spirit would be scattered so widely that he would run out of

particles before he could make it back, whole.

Your kind exterminated my race before we could flower.

The energy of hatred pulsed from the Anthroposaur in wave after wave,

relentless as the ocean, like magnetism that could rend Abe Sapien

asunder; the hot, devastating microwave power of cosmic rays. Abe

reeled as he absorbed each attack, struggling to envision himself

inside a shielding cocoon of healing water. He imagined the motes of

aquatic life, the quintillions of living forms in every ounce of fluid,

bonding together to work with a purpose and protect him in unison. He

thought the image clearly and felt another barrage soar into his guts —

but this strike felt deflected, as if magically sapped of aim.

To prevail, Abe Sapien would have to enact a genocide unprecedented in

the annals of civilized history. But at this moment, he was not

occupying civilized history, and turned his thoughts to hatred.

Abe Sapien thought of being stranded in time, alone, the only one of

his kind, seeking community in the company of ghosts. Of humanity's

dismissal of him as a sideshow freak. Of the prejudices of little

people, against him, and against what he represented. He hated humanity

— and every other phylum that could despise him so much with no cause.

He confronted black, primeval emotions that his modern self had learned

to tamp down, restrain, and muzzle. He gave his loathing full rein

against the scientists who had bottled him up for years, uncaring. His

ire for the condescension of the B.P.R.D. was allowed to bloom into a

scalding fireball of hatred that was both irrational and unwarranted —

but he could not permit the luxury of mercy or compassion or

understanding, not now. The whirling fireball took on the chartreuse

cast of poison, decanted, as Abe Sapien expanded his hatred to include

all air breathers, all mutants and mockeries, anything that was not Abe

Sapien.

And he found he could stand, at last, to face his opponent.

Deep down, past the veneer of manners and feel-good drivel spoken, but

not meant, Abe Sapien acknowledged that he was unilaterally hated and

feared, on some level, by every living thing he had ever encountered

... and he was able to focus that hatred, that fireball, and swing it

like a scythe. He brutally reduced his thinking mind to the elements:

Water, from which he sprang. Earth, on which he stood. Air, which could

serve as a hot conduit for Fire, which was the summation of his

capacity for rage.

Coming to hate every living thing still did not include the

Anthroposaur, who was not a living thing.

So Abe Sapien stretched the parameters of his hatred to include the

dead and the never-born, all of whom had committed the sin of forcing

Abe Sapien to consider his own demise someday, and his place in a world

that did not want him. Even his ancestors — the ones he had never had —

had stranded him. If they had existed, he wanted them to suffer. If

they were figments of a dream, he wanted them to live so he could

murder them, and kill anything else that had denied him a different

world from the one he knew.

Now Abe Sapien could see the force being deployed against him, as an

icy blue aura enveloping the Anthroposaur, and flowing from it to him.

They both held steady, like arm wrestlers locked in tension, as the

blue collided with the chartreuse. Much of the energy was canceled out

by its mirror, its opposite.

And when matter and anti-matter meet ...

Abe Sapiens eyes could not see fast enough to record all that happened.

But he got fragmented images: A molten sunspot in the center of the

Anthroposaur. The ocean behind it, visible through the hole only for an

instant as the hole flared, supernova bright, and consumed the world in

white-out. It was like opening a porthole and seeing a star, close-up.

It was too much for any mind to bear, in its vastness. It was the

blinding opposite of a black hole, shredding time, ripping a gouge in

the fabric of the universe.

Abe Sapien felt himself displaced.

He drifted in a gray limbo with no reference points, no up or down,

gravity-less. He could see through parts of himself, not wounds, but

portions of his wholeness that had ceased to be. Lacking all except the

most basic urges, Abe Sapien swam — swam as his ancestors might have,

without thought to time, which existed only as an ordering conceit of

more rational beings. He swam as they would have, before evolution,

before social groupings or sequential cognizance. Before right or

wrong. And when he could no longer swim, he floated, unmoored ...

... until a mighty hand of stone grasped his arm, and hefted him bodily

out of the isolation tank.

"We thought we'd lost you," said a voice. "Your readouts had all gone

flat."

Abe Sapien could not see anything until he remembered to retract the

protective membranes that had automatically snapped upward to guard his

delicate eyes. He was very thirsty.

"Just what do you think you were doing in there?"

"Relaxing," said Abe Sapien.

He took in the concerned expression on the devilish visage of his

friend. Horns, hooves, crimson skin. Yes, most humans would have

collapsed into gibbering insanity upon waking up to see such a sight.

"Yeah, well, you almost relaxed yourself to death."

With help, Abe Sapien was able to debark the tank and stand upright — a

biped, as intended. Nausea washed over him. He had returned to the

world of humans, and demons, and pain without measure. But not without

the assistance of a friend.

It felt good to be home.