<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <title>Samuel R. Delany - Driftglass</title> </head> <body> <br> <p></p> <center><b><a name="#Driftglass"></a> <font size="6">Driftglass<br> </font><font size="4"><i>by Samuel R. Delany<br> from Mermaids!<br> </i></font></b></center> <p> <i>It is not surprising that humans are fascinated by the sea we came</i> from <i>the sea, after all, as did all life, and our bodies, which are more than ninety percent water, respond to the moon's phases with the same rhythm as the tides. For thousands of years, people have lived near the sea, and on the sea, and taken their living from the sea . .. and dreamed of what it would be like to live</i> beneath <i>the sea as well. In the brilliant and evocative story that follows, we are taken to a future world where this age-old dream has been fulfilled by sophisticated medical technology, and surgically-created merfolk are renouncing the land for the mystery and danger and endless bountiful promise of the sea.... </i></p> <p><i>Samuel R. Delany was widely acknowledged during the sixties as one of the two most important and influential American SF writers of that decade (the other was Roger Zelazny). By 1969, critic Algis Budrys was calling Delany "the best science-fiction writer in the world," and he is still regarded by many critics as one of the genre's greatest living authors. He has won four Nebula Awards and a Hugo Award. His books include</i> The Einstein Intersection, Babel-17, Nova, The Fall of the Towers, Triton, <i>the controversial bestseller</i> Dhalgren, <i>and the landmark collection</i>Driftglass. <i>His most recent books are</i> Tales of Neveryon, <i>and the novel</i> Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. </p> <p>SOMETIMES I GO DOWN TO THE PORT, SPLASHING SAND WITH my stiff foot at the end of my stiff leg locked in my stiff hip, with the useless arm a-swinging, to get wet all over again, drink in the dives with old cronies ashore, feeling old, broken, sorry for myself, laughing louder and louder. The third of my face that was burned away in the accident was patched with skin grafts from my chest, so what's left of my mouth distorts all loud sounds; sloppy sartorial reconstruction. Also I have a hairy chest. Chest hair does not look like beard hair, and it grows all up under my right eye. And: my beard is red, my chest hair brown, while the thatch curling down over neck and ears is sun-streaked to white here, darkened to bronze there, 'midst general blondness. </p> <p>By reason of my being a walking (I suppose my gait could be called headlong limping) horror show, plus a general inclination to sulk, I spend most of the time up in the wood and glass and aluminum house on the surf-sloughed point that the Aquatic Corp gave me along with my pension. Rugs from Turkey there, copper pots, my tenor recorder which I can no longer play, and my books. </p> <p>But sometimes, when the gold fog blurs the morning, I go down to the beach and tromp barefoot in the wet edging of the sea, searching for driftglass. </p> <p>It was foggy that morning, and the sun across the water moiled the mists like a brass ladle. I lurched to the top of the rocks, looked down through the tall grasses into the frothing inlet where she lay, and blinked. </p> <p>She sat up, long gills closing down her neck and the secondary slits along her back just visible at their tips because of much hair, wet and curling copper, falling there. She saw me. "What are you doing here, huh?" She narrowed blue eyes. </p> <p>"Looking for driftglass." </p> <p>"What?" </p> <p>"There's a piece." I pointed near her and came down the rocks like a crab with one stiff leg. </p> <p>"Where?" She turned over, half in, half out of the water, the webs of her fingers cupping nodules of black stone. </p> <p>While the water made cold overtures between my toes, I picked up the milky fragment by her elbow where she wasn't looking. She jumped, because she obviously had thought it was somewhere else. </p> <p>"See?" </p> <p>"What... what is it?" She raised her cool hand to mine. For a moment the light through the milky gem and the pale film of my own webs pearled the screen of her palms. (Details like that. Yes, they are the important things, the points from which we suspend later pain.) A moment later wet fingers closed to the back of mine. </p> <p>"Driftglass," I said. "You know all the Coca-Cola bottles and cut crystal punch bowls and industrial silicon slag that goes into the sea?" </p> <p>"I know the Coca-Cola bottles." </p> <p>"They break, and the tide pulls the pieces back and forth over the sandy bottom, wearing the edges, changing their shape. Sometimes chemicals in the glass react with chemicals in the ocean to change the color. Sometimes veins work their way through a piece in patterns like snowflakes, regular and geometric; others, irregular and angled like coral. When the pieces dry they're milky. Put them in water and they become transparent again." </p> <p>"Ohhh!" She breathed as though the beauty of the blunted triangular fragment in my palm assailed her like perfume. Then she looked at my face, blinking the third, aqueous-filled lid that we use as a correction lens for underwater vision. </p> <p>She watched the ruin calmly. </p> <p>Then her hand went to my foot where the webs had been torn back in the accident. She began to take in who I was. I looked for horror, but saw only a little sadness. </p> <p>The insignia on her buckle her stomach was making little jerks the way you always do during the first few minutes when you go from breathing water to air told me she was a Biological Technician. (Back up at the house there was a similar uniform of simulated scales folded in the bottom drawer of the dresser and the belt insignia said Depth Gauger.) I was wearing some very frayed jeans and a red cotton shirt with no buttons. </p> <p>She reached up to my neck, pushed my collar back from my shoulders and touched the tender slits of my gills, outlining them with cool fingers. "Who are you?" Finally. </p> <p>"Cal Svenson." </p> <p>She slid back down in the water. "You're the one who had the terrible but that was years ago. They still talk about it, down " She stopped. </p> <p>As the sea softens the surface of a piece of glass, so it blurs the souls and sensibilities of the people who toil beneath her. And according to the last report of the Marine Reclamation Division there are to date seven hundred and fifty thousand who have been given gills and webs and sent under the foam where there are no storms, up and down the American coast. </p> <p>"You live on shore? I mean around here? But so long ago..." </p> <p>"How old are you?" </p> <p>"Sixteen." </p> <p>"I was two years older than you when the accident happened." </p> <p>"You were eighteen?" </p> <p>"I'm twice that now. Which means it happened almost twenty years ago. It is a long time." </p> <p>"They still talk about it." </p> <p>"I've almost forgotten," I said. "I really have. Say, do you play the recorder?" </p> <p>"I used to." </p> <p>"Good! Come up to my place and look at my tenor recorder. And I'll make some tea. Perhaps you can stay for lunch " </p> <p>"I have to report back to Marine Headquarters by three. Tork is going over the briefing to lay the cable for the big dive, with Jonni and the crew." She paused, smiled. "But I can catch the undertow and be there in half an hour if I leave by two-thirty." </p> <p>On the walk up I learned her name was Ariel. She thought the patio was charming, and the mosaic evoked, "Oh, look!" and "Did you do this yourself?" a half-dozen times. (I had done it, in the first lonely years.) She picked out the squid and the whale in battle, the wounded shark and the diver. She told me she didn't get time to read much, but she was impressed by all the books. She listened to me reminisce. She talked a lot to me about her work, husbanding the deep-down creatures they were scaring up. Then she sat on the kitchen stool, playing a Lukas Foss serenade on my recorder, while I put rock salt in the bottom of the broiler tray for two dozen oysters Rockefeller, and the tea water whistled. I'm a comparatively lonely guy. I like being followed by beautiful young girls. </p> <p><b><font size="4"><i>II</i></font></b> </p> <p>"HEY, JOAO!" I BAWLED ACROSS THE JETTY. </p> <p>He nodded to me from the center of his nets, sun glistening on polished shoulders, sun lost in rough hair. I walked across to where he sat, sewing like a spider. He pulled another section up over his horny toes, then grinned at me with his mosaic smile: gold, white, black gap below, crooked yellow; white, gold, white. Shoving my bad leg in front, I squatted. </p> <p>"I fished out over the coral where you told me." He filled his cheek with his tongue and nodded. "You come up to the house for a drink, eh?" </p> <p>"Fine." </p> <p>"Now- a moment more." </p> <p>There's a certain sort of Brazilian you find along the shore in the fishing villages, old, yet ageless. See one of their men and you think he could be fifty, he could be sixty will probably look the same when he's eighty-five. Such was Joâo. We once figured it out. He's seven hours older than I am. </p> <p>We became friends sometime before the accident when I got tangled in his nets working high lines in the Vorea Current. A lot of guys would have taken their knife and hacked their way out of the situation, ruining fifty-five, sixty dollars' worth of nets. That's an average fisherman's monthly income down here. But I surfaced and sat around in his boat while we untied me. Then we came in and got plastered. Since I cost him a day's fishing, I've been giving him hints on where to fish ever since. He buys me drinks when I come up with something. </p> <p>This has been going on for twenty years. During that time my life has been smashed up and land-bound. In the same time Joâo has married off his five sisters, got married himself and has two children. (Oh, those <i>bolinhos</i> and <i>carne assada</i> that Amalia of the oiled braid and laughing breasts would make for Sunday dinner/supper/Monday breakfast.) I rode with them in the ambulance ' copter all the way into Brasilia and in the hospital hall João and I stood together, both still barefoot, he tattered with fish scales in his hair, me just tattered, and I held him while he cried and I tried to explain to him how a world that could take a prepubescent child and with a week of operations make an amphibious creature that can exist for a month on either side of the sea's-foam-fraught surface could still be helpless before certain general endocrine cancers coupled with massive renal deterioration. Joâo and I returned to the village alone, by bus, three days before our birthday back when I was twenty-three and João was twenty-three and seven hours old. </p> <p>"This morning," João said. (The shuttle danced in the wet at the end of the orange line.) "I got a letter for you to read me. It's about the children. Come on, we go up and drink. The shuttle paused, back-tracked twice, and he yanked the knot tight. We walked along the port toward the square. "Do you think the letter says that the children are accepted?" </p> <p>"It's from the Aquatic Corp. And they just send postcards when they reject someone. The question is, how do you feel about it?" </p> <p>"You are a good man. If they grow up like you, then it will be fine." </p> <p>"But you're still worried." I'd been prodding Joâo to get the kids into the International Aquatic Corp nigh on since I became their godfather. The operations had to be performed near puberty. It would mean much time away from the village during their training period and they might eventually be stationed in any ocean in the world. But two motherless children had not been easy on Joâo or his sisters. The Corp would mean education, travel, interesting work, the things that make up one kind of good life. They wouldn't look twice their age when they were thirty-five; and not too many amphimen look like me. </p> <p>"Worry is part of life. But the work is dangerous. Did you know there is an amphiman going to try and lay cable down in the Slash?" </p> <p>I frowned. "Again?" </p> <p>"Yes. And that is what you tried to do when the sea broke you to pieces and burned the parts, eh?" </p> <p>"Must you be so damned picturesque?" I asked. "Who's going to beard the lion this time?" </p> <p>"A young amphiman named Tork. They speak of him down at the docks as a brave man." </p> <p>"Why the hell are they still trying to lay the cable there? They've gotten by this long without a line through the Slash." </p> <p>"Because of the fish." Joao said. "You told me why twenty years ago. The fish are still there, and we fishermen who cannot go below are still here. If the children go for the operations, then there will be less fishermen. But today..." He shrugged. "They must either lay the line across the fish paths or down in the Slash." Joâo shook his head. </p> <p>Funny things, the great power cables the Aquatic Corp has been strewing across the ocean floor to bring power to their undersea mines and farms, to run their oil wells and how many flaming wells have I capped down there for their herds of whale, and chemical distillation plants. They carry two hundred sixty cycle current. Over certain sections of the ocean floor, or in sections of the water with certain mineral contents, this sets up inductance in the water itself which sometimes and you will probably get a Nobel prize if you can detail exactly why it isn't always drives the fish away over areas up to twenty-five and thirty miles, unless the lines are laid in the bottom of those canyons that delve into the ocean floor. </p> <p>"This Tork thinks of the fishermen. He is a good man, too." </p> <p>I raised my eyebrow the one that's left, anyway and tried to remember what my little Undine had said about him that morning. And remembered not much. </p> <p>"I wish him luck," I said. </p> <p>"What do you feel about this young man going down into the coral-rimmed jaws to the Slash?" </p> <p>I thought for a moment. "I think I hate him." </p> <p>Joâo looked up. </p> <p>"He is an image in a mirror where I look and am forced to regard what I was," I went on. "I envy him the chance to succeed where I failed, and I can come on just as quaint as you can. I hope he makes it." </p> <p>Joâo twisted his shoulders in a complicated shrug (once I could do that) which is coastal Brazilian for "I didn't know things had progressed to that point, but seeing that they have, there is little to be done." </p> <p>"The sea is that sort of mirror," I said. </p> <p>"Yes." Joâo nodded. </p> <p>Behind us I heard the slapping of sandals on concrete. I turned in time to catch my goddaughter in my good arm. My godson had grabbed hold of the bad one and was swinging on it. </p> <p>"Tio Cal " </p> <p>"Hey, Tio Cal, what did you bring us?" </p> <p>"You will pull him over," Joao reprimanded them. "Let go." </p> <p>And, bless them, they ignored their father. </p> <p>"What did you bring us?" </p> <p>"What did you bring us, Tio Cal?" </p> <p>"If you let me, I'll show you." So they stepped back, green-eyed and quivering. I watched Joao watching: brown pupils on ivory balls, and in the left eye a vein had broken in a jagged smear. He was loving his children, who would soon be as alien to him as the fish he netted. He was also looking at the terrible thing that was me and wondering what would come to his own spawn. And he was watching the world turn and grow older, clocked by the waves, reflected in that mirror. </p> <p>It's impossible for me to see what the population explosion and the budding colonies on Luna and Mars and the flowering beneath the ocean really look like from the disrupted cultural mélange of a coastal fishing town. But I come closer than many others, and I know what I don't understand. </p> <p>I pushed around in my pocket and fetched out the milky fragment I had brought from the beach. "Here. Do you like this one?" And they bent above my webbed and alien fingers. </p> <p>In the supermarket, which is the biggest building in the village, Joâo bought a lot of cake mixes. "That moist, delicate texture," whispered the box when you lifted it from the shelf, "with that deep flavor, deeper than chocolate." </p> <p>I'd just read an article about the new vocal packaging in a U.S. magazine that had gotten down last week, so I was prepared and stayed in the fresh-vegetable section to avoid temptation. Then we went up to Joäo's house. The letter proved to be what I'd expected. The kids had to take the bus into Brasilia tomorrow. My godchildren were on their way to becoming fish. </p> <p>We sat on the front steps and drank and watched the donkeys and the motorbikes, the men in baggy trousers, the women in yellow scarfs and brighter skirts with wreaths of garlic and sacks of onions. As well, a few people glittered by in the green scales of amphimen uniforms. </p> <p>Finally Joâo got tired and went in to take a nap. Most of my life has been spent on the coast of countries accustomed to siestas, but those first formative ten were passed on a Danish collective farm and the idea never really took. So I stepped over my goddaughter, who had fallen asleep on her fists on the bottom step, and walked back through the town toward the beach. </p> <p><b><font size="4"> <i>III</i> </font></b></p> <p>AT MIDNIGHT ARIEL CAME OUT OF THE SEA, CLIMBED THE rocks and clicked her nails against my glass wall so that droplets ran down, pearled by the gibbous moon. </p> <p>Earlier I had stretched in front of the fireplace on the sheep-skin throw to read, then dozed off. The conscientious timer had asked me if there was anything I wanted, and getting no answer had turned off the Dvorak Cello Concerto that was on its second time around, extinguished the reading lamp and stopped dropping logs onto the flame so that now, as I woke, the grate was carpeted with coals. </p> <p>She clicked on the glass again, and I raised my head from the cushion. The green uniform, her amber hair all color was lost under the silver light outside. I lurched across the rug to the glass wall, touched the button and the glass slid down into the floor. The breeze came to my face as the barrier fell. </p> <p>"What do you want?" I asked. "What time is it, anyway?" </p> <p>"Tork is on the beach, waiting for you." </p> <p>The night was warm but windy. Below the rocks silver flakes chased each other in to shore. The tide lay full. </p> <p>I rubbed my face. "The new boss man? Why didn't you bring him up to the house? What does he want to see me about?" </p> <p>She touched my arm. "Come. They are all down on the beach." </p> <p>"Who all?" </p> <p>"Tork and the others." </p> <p>She led me across the patio and to the path that wound to the sand. The sea roared in the moonlight. Down the beach people stood around a driftwood fire that whipped into the night. Ariel walked beside me. </p> <p>Two of the fishermen from town were crowding each other on the bottom of an overturned washtub, playing guitars. The singing, raucous and rhythmic, jarred across the paled sand. Sharks' teeth shook on the necklace of an old woman dancing. Others were sitting on an overturned dinghy, eating. </p> <p>Over one part of the fire on a skillet two feet across, oil frothed through pink islands of shrimp. One woman ladled them in, another ladled them out. </p> <p>"Tio Cal!" </p> <p>"Look, Tio Cal is here!" </p> <p>"Hey, what are you two doing up?" I asked. "Shouldn't you be home in bed?" </p> <p>"Papa Joäo said we could come. He'll be here, too, soon." </p> <p>I turned to Ariel. "Why are they all gathering?" </p> <p>"Because of the laying of the cable tomorrow at dawn." </p> <p>Someone was running up the beach, waving a bottle in each hand. </p> <p>"They didn't want to tell you about the party. They thought that it might hurt your pride." </p> <p>"My what?" </p> <p>"If you knew they were making so big a thing of the job you had failed at " </p> <p>"But " </p> <p>" and that had hurt you so in failure. They did not want you to be sad. But Tork wants to see you. I said you would not be sad. So I went to bring you down from the rocks." </p> <p>"Thanks, I guess." </p> <p>'Tio Cal?" </p> <p>But the voice was bigger and deeper than a child's. </p> <p>He sat on a log back from the fire, eating a sweet potato. The flame flickered on his dark cheekbones, in his hair, wet and black. He stood, came to me, held up his hand. I held up mine and we slapped palms. "Good." He was smiling. "Ariel told me you would come. I will lay the power line down through the Slash tomorrow." His uniform scales glittered down his arms. He was very strong. But standing still, he still moved. The light on the cloth told me that. "I..." He paused. I thought of a nervous, happy dancer. "I wanted to talk to you about the cable." I thought of an eagle, I thought of a shark. "And about the... accident. If you would." </p> <p>"Sure," I said. "If there's anything I could tell you that would help." </p> <p>"See, Tork," Ariel said. "I told you he would talk to you about it." </p> <p>I could hear his breathing change. "It really doesn't bother you to talk about the accident?" </p> <p>I shook my head and realized something about that voice. It was a boy's voice that could imitate a man's. Tork was not over nineteen. </p> <p>"We're going fishing soon," Tork told me. "Will you come?" </p> <p>"If I'm not in the way." </p> <p>A bottle went from the woman at the shrimp crate to one of the guitarists, down to Ariel, to me, then to Tork. (The liquor, made in a cave seven miles inland, was almost rum. The too tight skin across the left side of my mouth makes the manful swig a little difficult to bring off. I got "rum" down my chin.) </p> <p>He drank, wiped his mouth, passed the bottle on and put his hand on my shoulder. "Come down to the water." </p> <p>We walked away from the fire. Some of the fishermen stared after us. A few of the amphimen glanced, and glanced away. </p> <p>"Do all the young people of the village call you Tio Cal?" </p> <p>"No. Only my godchildren. Their father and I have been friends since I was your age." </p> <p>"Oh, I thought perhaps it was a nickname. That's why I called you that." </p> <p>We reached wet sand where orange light cavorted at our feet. The broken shell of a lifeboat rocked in moonlight. Tork sat down on the shell's rim. I sat beside him. The water splashed to our knees. </p> <p>"There's no other place to lay the power cable?" I asked. "There is no other way to take it except through the Slash?" </p> <p>"I was going to ask you what you thought of the whole business. But I guess I don't really have to." He shrugged and clapped his hands together a few times. "All the projects this side of the bay have grown huge and cry for power. The new operations tax the old lines unmercifully. There was a power failure last July in Cayine down the shelf below the twilight level. The whole village was without light for two days, and twelve amphimen died of overexposure to the cold currents coming up from the depths. If we laid the cables farther up, we would chance disrupting our own fishing operations as well as those of the fishermen on shore." </p> <p>I nodded. </p> <p>"Cal, what happened to you in the Slash?" </p> <p>Eager, scared Tork. I was remembering now, not the accident, but the midnight before, pacing the beach, guts clamped with fists of fear and anticipation. Some of the Indians back where they made the liquor still send messages by tying knots in palm fibers. One could have spread my entrails then, or Tork's tonight, to read our respective horospecs. </p> <p>Joäo's mother knew the knot language, but he and his sisters never bothered to learn because they wanted to be modern, and, as children, still confused with modernity the new ignorances, lacking modern knowledge. </p> <p>"When I was a boy," Tork said, "we would dare each other to walk the boards along the edge of the ferry slip. The sun would be hot and the boards would rock in the water, and if the boats were in and you fell down between the boats and the piling, you could get killed." He shook his head. "The crazy things kids will do. That was back when I was eight or nine, before I became a waterbaby." </p> <p>"Where was it?" </p> <p>Tork looked up. "Oh. Manila. I'm Filipino." </p> <p>The sea licked our knees, and the gunwale sagged under us. </p> <p>"What happened in the Slash?" </p> <p>"There's a volcanic flaw near the base of the Slash." </p> <p>"I know." </p> <p>"And the sea is as sensitive down there as a fifty-year-old woman with a new hairdo. We had an avalanche. The cable broke. And the sparks were so hot and bright they made gouts of foam fifty feet high on the surface, so they tell me." </p> <p>"What caused the avalanche?" </p> <p>I shrugged. "It could have been just a goddamned coincidence. There are rock falls down there all the time. It could have been the noise from the machines though we masked them pretty well. It could have been something to do with the inductance from the smaller cables for the machines. Or maybe somebody just kicked out the wrong stone that was holding everything up." </p> <p>One webbed hand became a fist, sank into the other and hung. </p> <p>Calling: "Cal!" </p> <p>I looked up. Joâo, pants rolled to his knees, shirt sailing in the sea wind, stood in the weave of white water. The wind lifted Tork's hair from his neck; and the fire roared on the beach. </p> <p>Tork looked up too. </p> <p>"They're getting ready to catch a big fish!" Joâo called. </p> <p>Men were already pushing their boats out. Tork clapped my shoulder. "Come, Cal. We fish now." We stood and went back to the shore. </p> <p>Joâo caught me as I reached dry sand. "You ride in my boat, Cal!" </p> <p>Someone came with the acrid flares that hissed. The water slapped around the bottom of the boats as we wobbled into the swell. </p> <p>Joâo vaulted in and took up the oars. Around us green amphimen walked into the sea, struck forward and were gone. </p> <p>Joâo pulled, leaned, pulled. The moonlight slid down his arms. The fire diminished on the beach. </p> <p>Then among the boats, there was a splash, an explosion, and the red flare bloomed in the sky: the amphimen had sighted a big fish. </p> <p>The flare hovered, pulsed once, twice, three times, four times (twenty, forty, sixty, eighty stone they estimated its weight to be), then fell. </p> <p>Suddenly I shrugged out of my shirt, pulled at my belt buckle. "I'm going over the side, Joao!" </p> <p>He leaned, he pulled, he leaned. "Take the rope." </p> <p>"Yeah. Sure." It was tied to the back of the boat. I made a loop in the other end, slipped it around my shoulder. I swung my bad leg over the side, flung myself on the black water </p> <p>Mother-of-pearl shattered over me. That was the moon, blocked by the shadow of Joâo's boat ten feet overhead. I turned below the rippling wounds Joâo's oars made stroking the sea. </p> <p>One hand and one foot with torn webs, I rolled over and looked down. The rope snaked to its end, and I felt Joâo's strokes pulling me through the water. </p> <p>They fanned below with underwater flares. Light undulated on their backs and heels. They circled, they closed, like those deep-sea fish who carry their own illumination. I saw the prey, glistening as it neared a flare. </p> <p>You chase a fish with one spear among you. And that spear would be Tork's tonight. The rest have ropes to bind him that go up to the fishermen's boats. </p> <p>There was a sudden confusion of lights below. The spear had been shot! </p> <p>The fish, long as a tall and a short man together, rose through the ropes. He turned out to sea, trailing his pursuers. But others waited there, tried to loop him. Once I had flung those ropes, treated with tar and lime to dissolve the slime of the fish's body and hold to the beast. The looped ropes caught, and by the movement of the flares I saw them jerked from their paths. The fish turned, rose again, this time toward me. </p> <p>He pulled around when one line ran out (and somewhere on the surface the prow of a boat doffed deep) but turned back and came on. </p> <p>Of a sudden, amphimen were flicking about me as the fray's center drifted by. Tork, his spear dug deep, forward and left of the martin's dorsal, had hauled himself astride the beast. </p> <p>The fish tried to shake him, then dropped his tail and rose straight. Everybody started pulling toward the surface. I broke foam and grabbed Joäo's gunwale. </p> <p>Tork and the fish exploded up among the boats. They twisted in the air, in moonlight, in froth. The fish danced across the water on its tail, fell. </p> <p>Joäo stood up in the boat and shouted. The other fishermen shouted too, and somebody perched on the prow of a boat flung a rope and someone in the water caught it. </p> <p>Then fish and Tork and me and a dozen amphimen all went underwater at once. </p> <p>They dropped in a corona of bubbles. The fish struck the end of another line, and shook himself. Tork was thrown free, but he doubled back. </p> <p>Then the lines began to haul the beast up again, quivering, whipping, quivering again. </p> <p>Six lines from six boats had him. For one moment he was still in the submarine moonlight. I could see his wound tossing scarves of blood. </p> <p>When he (and we) broke surface, he was thrashing again, near Joäo's boat. I was holding onto the side when suddenly Tork, glistening, came out of the water beside me and went over into the dinghy. </p> <p>"Here you go," he said, turning to kneel at the bobbing rim, and pulled me up while Joäo leaned against the far side to keep balance. </p> <p>Wet rope slopped on the prow. "Hey, Cal!" Tork laughed, grabbed it up and began to haul. </p> <p>The fish prized wave from white wave in the white water. </p> <p>The boats came together. The amphimen had all climbed up. Ariel was across from us, holding a flare that drooled smoke down her arm. She peered by the hip of the fisherman who was standing in front of her. </p> <p>Joäo and Tork were hauling the rope. Behind them I was coiling it with one hand as it came back to me. </p> <p>The fish came up and was flopped into Ariel's boat, tail out, head up, chewing air. </p> <p>I had just finished pulling on my trousers when Tork fell down on the seat behind me and grabbed me around the shoulders with his wet arms. "Look at our fish, Tio Cal! Look!" He gasped air, laughing, his dark face diamonded beside the flares. "Look at our fish there, Cal!" </p> <p>Joäo, grinning white and gold, pulled us back in to shore. The fire, the singing, hands beating hands and my godson had put pebbles in the empty rum bottle and was shaking them to the music. The guitars spiraled around us as we carried the fish up the sand and the men brought the spit. </p> <p>"Watch it!" Tork said, grasping the pointed end of the great stick that was thicker than his wrist. </p> <p>We turned the fish over. </p> <p>"Here, Cal?" </p> <p>He prodded two fingers into the white flesh six inches back from the bony lip. </p> <p>"Fine." </p> <p>Tork jammed the spit in. </p> <p>We worked it through the body. By the time we carried it to the fire, they had brought more rum. </p> <p>"Hey, Tork. Are you going to get some sleep before you go down in the morning?" I asked. </p> <p>He shook his head. "Slept all afternoon." He pointed toward the roasting fish with his elbow. "That's my breakfast." </p> <p>But when the dancing grew-violent a few hours later, just before the fish was to come off the fire, and the kids were pushing the last of the sweet potatoes from the ashes with sticks, I walked back to the lifeboat shell we had sat on earlier. It was three-quarters flooded. </p> <p>Curled below still water, Tork slept, fist loose before his mouth, the gills at the back of his neck pulsing rhythmically. Only his shoulder and hip made islands in the floating boat. </p> <p>"Where's Tork?" Ariel asked me at the fire. They were swinging up the sizzling fish. </p> <p>"Taking a nap." </p> <p>"Oh, he wanted to cut the fish!" </p> <p>"He's got a lot of work coming up. Sure you want to wake him up?" </p> <p>"No, I'll let him sleep." </p> <p>But Tork was coming up from the water, brushing his dripping hair back from his forehead. </p> <p>He grinned at us, then went to carve. I remember him standing on the table, astraddle the meat, arm going up and down with the big knife (details yes, those are the things you remember), stopping to hand down the portions, then hauling his arm back to cut again. </p> <p>That night, with music and stomping on the sand and shouting back and forth over the fire, we made more noise than the sea </p> <p><b><font size="4"><i> IV </i></font></b></p> <p>THE EIGHT-THIRTY BUS WAS MORE OR LESS ON TIME. </p> <p>"I don't think they want to go," Joâo's sister said. She was accompanying the children to the Aquatic Corp Headquarters in Brasilia. </p> <p>"They are just tired," Joâo said. "They should not have stayed up so late last night. Get on the bus now. Say good-bye to Tio Cal." </p> <p>"Good-bye." </p> <p>"Good-bye." </p> <p>Kids are never their most creative in that sort of situation. And I suspect that my godchildren may just have been suffering their first (or one of their first) hangovers. They had been very quiet all morning. </p> <p>I bent down and gave them a clumsy hug. "When you come back on your first weekend off, I'll take you exploring down below at the point. You'll be able to gather your own coral now." </p> <p>Joâo's sister got teary, cuddled the children, cuddled me, Joâo, then got on the bus. </p> <p>Someone was shouting out the window for someone else at the bus stop not to forget something. They trundled around the square and then toward the highway. We walked back across the street where the café owners were putting out canvas chairs. </p> <p>"I will miss them," he said, like a long-considered admission. </p> <p>"You and me both." At the docks near the hydrofoil wharf where the submarine launches went out to the undersea cities, we saw a crowd. "I wonder if they had any trouble laying the " </p> <p>A woman screamed in the crowd. She pushed from the others, dropping eggs and onions. She began to pull her hair and shriek. (Remember the skillet of shrimp? She had been the woman ladling them out.) A few people moved to help her. </p> <p>A clutch of men broke off and ran into the streets of the town. I grabbed a running amphiman, who whirled to face me. </p> <p>"What in hell is going on?" </p> <p>For a moment his mouth worked on his words for all the trite world like a beached fish. </p> <p>"From the explosion " he began. "They just brought them back from the explosion at the Slash!" </p> <p>I grabbed his other shoulder. "What happened?" </p> <p>"About two hours ago. They were just a quarter of the way through, when the whole fault gave way. They had a goddamn underwater volcano for half an hour. They're still getting seismic disturbances." </p> <p>Joâo was running toward the launch. I pushed the guy away and limped after him, struck the crowd and jostled through calico, canvas and green scales. </p> <p>They were carrying the corpses out of the hatch of the submarine and laying them on a canvas spread across the dock. They still return bodies to the countries of birth for the family to decide the method of burial. When the fault had given, the hot slag that had belched into the steaming sea was mostly molten silicon. </p> <p>Three of the bodies were only slightly burned here and there; from their bloated faces (one still bled from the ear) I guessed they had died from sonic concussion. But several of the bodies were almost totally encased in dull, black glass. </p> <p>"Tork " I kept asking. "Is one of them Tork?" </p> <p>It took me forty-five minutes, asking first the guys who were carrying the bodies, then going into the launch and asking some guy with a clipboard, and then going back on the dock and into the office to find out that one of the more unrecognizable bodies, yes, was Tork. </p> <p>Joäo brought me a glass of buttermilk in a café on the square. He sat still a long time, then finally rubbed away his white mustache, released the chair rung with his toes, put his hands on his knees. </p> <p>"What are you thinking about?" </p> <p>"That it's time to go fix the nets. Tomorrow morning I will fish." He regarded me a moment. "Where should I fish tomorrow, Cal?" </p> <p>"Are you wondering about well sending the kids off today?" </p> <p>He shrugged. "Fishermen from this village have drowned. Still it is a village of fishermen. Where should I fish?" </p> <p>I finished my buttermilk. "The mineral content over the Slash should be high as the devil. Lots of algae will gather tonight. Lots of small fish down deep. Big fish hovering over." </p> <p>He nodded. "Good. I will take the boat out there tomorrow." </p> <p>We got up. </p> <p>"See you, Joâo." </p> <p>I limped back to the beach. </p> <p><b><font size="4"> <i>V</i> </font></b></p> <p>THE FOG HAD UNSHEATHED THE SAND BY TEN. I WALKED around, poking in clumps of weeds with a stick, banging the same stick on my numb leg. When I lurched up to the top of the rocks, I stopped in the still grass. "Ariel?" </p> <p>She was kneeling in the water, head down, red hair breaking over sealed gills. Her shoulders shook, stopped, shook again. </p> <p>"Ariel?" I came down over the blistered stones. </p> <p>She turned away to look at the ocean. </p> <p>The attachments of children are so important and so brittle. </p> <p>"How long have you been sitting here?" </p> <p>She looked at me now, the varied waters of her face stilled on drawn cheeks. And her face was exhausted. She shook her head. </p> <p>Sixteen? Who was the psychologist a hundred years back, in the seventies, who decided that "adolescents" were just physical and mental adults with no useful work? "You want to come up to the house?" </p> <p>The head-shaking got faster, then stopped. </p> <p>After a while I said, "I guess they'll be sending Tork's body back to Manila." </p> <p>"He didn't have a family," she explained. "He'll be buried here, at sea." </p> <p>"Oh," I said. </p> <p>And the rough volcanic glass pulled across the ocean's sands, changing shape, dulling... </p> <p>"You were you liked Tork a lot, didn't you? You kids looked like you were pretty fond of each other." </p> <p>"Yes. He was an awfully nice " Then she caught my meaning and blinked. "No," she said. "Oh, no. I was I was engaged to Jonni... the brown-haired boy from California? Did you meet him at the party last night? We're both from Los Angeles, but we only met down here. And now... they're sending his body back this evening." Her eyes got very wide, then closed </p> <p>"I'm sorry." </p> <p>That's it, you clumsy cripple, step all over everybody's emotions. You look in that mirror and you're too busy looking at what might have been to see what is. </p> <p>"I'm sorry, Ariel." </p> <p>She opened her eyes and began to look around her. </p> <p>"Come on up to the house and have an avocado. I mean, they have avocados in now, not at the supermarket. But at the old town market on the other side. And they're better than any they grow in California." </p> <p>She kept looking around. </p> <p>"None of the amphimen get over there. It's a shame, because soon the market will probably close, and some of their fresh foods are really great. Oil and vinegar is all you need on them." I leaned back on the rocks. "Or a cup of tea?" </p> <p>"Okay." She remembered to smile. I know the poor kid didn't feel like it. "Thank you. I won't be able to stay long, though." </p> <p>We walked back up the rocks toward the house, the sea on our left. Just as we reached the patio, she turned and looked back. "Cal?" </p> <p>"Yes? What is it?" </p> <p>"Those clouds over there, across the water. Those are the only ones in the sky. Are they from the eruption in the Slash?" </p> <p>I squinted. "I think so. Come on inside." </p> <p></p> <center><b><a name="#Pigafetta"></a>&nbsp;<font size="6"></font></b></center> <div style="text-align: right;">"Driftglass" by Samuel R. Delany. Copyright © 1967 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. <br> First published in <i>Worlds of IF</i>, June 1967. <br> Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent, Henry Morrison, Inc.</div> </body> </html>