6
A month later, Zomera
sat at the docks of Safeltsa, as far out as they
lead. The water was at its
The amplifier device and the modified translator that Angelous had rigged up for her both sat alongside her, along with a few tools, a lunch, and an old tattered book. Zomera had waited a long time for this day. After she had explained her intentions to Angelous, it had taken her a great deal of argument to convince him to tag along.
A weasel sat on one of the posts that held the dock above the water. It had its paws crossed in a very unbefitting manner and it was shaking its head, “I can’t believe I agreed to come,” it said.
“Oh cheer up, if this works just think of how amazing that would be!” Zomera said happily.
“Thrilling,” the weasel replied.
Zomera picked up the amplifier, setting its dial to the loudest possible setting. Then she picked up the translator and looked towards Angelous. “Here I go.”
The weasel rolled its eyes, “It won’t work.”
The girl ignored him and stuck her head into the water bringing the amplifier and new translator to her mouth. She yelled out and her mouth immediately filled with water despite the seal. She lifted her head and spit water out, gasping and coughing. “Maybe I should have thought this through a little more,” she sputtered.
“You think?” Angelous mocked.
Zomera picked up the small machines once more and put her head near the water, placing the devices to her mouth and then lowering them underwater. This time when she yelled there was no water for her to choke on.
“Hello! Anybody down there?” she called, “Hello, fish people!” She heard her voice echo through the watery depths.
Angelous frowned, “You will never get one of them to come up if you insult them.”
Zomera swatted at him as he jumped back to avoid the blow. “I’m just saying!” he defended.
They were there for hours. Zomera would try calling into the water every few minutes, making small adjustments to the machines each time. It was a long and fruitless day. Angelous left as the sun began to dip below the sea, its golden flames snuffed out by the water’s touch. Zomera stayed for a few more hours before returning to the ruins as well.
Several days passed in the same manner. Zomera would simply sit at the water side, calling into the depths every so often, making small adjustments as they were needed. She stopped going to the town for her trials everyday, too many people were there who might have been watching her. Besides, it was farther to walk. Instead she would go down to the beach and wade into the shallows. Sometimes when she was feeling like she needed a stroll in the town, or she needed to relieve some merchants of their wares, she would go down to the docks.
One day, as she was preparing to leave, Angelous stopped her.
“Zomera. I think this has gone too far. You have to give this up,” he told her solemnly.
Zomera nodded sadly in agreement, “Yeah I guess you are right,” she said slowly, “This will be the last day, I promise,” she told him, a glimmer of hope still in her eyes.
She said good bye to her friend and made her way down to Safeltsa. They were in need of a fresh supply of food, so she decided she would get some while she was out. She went down to the docks, to the most secluded part, where no boats were tied up. She set down her things and prepared for another long day.
She stuck the devices into the water.
“Hello down there. Please, oh please, oh please, oh please come up,” her voice echoed. She had grown tired of calling out her messages to the deep waters. Everything that she could say had already been said a thousand times.
“Come up, come up, come on….please,” she moaned. Already she could feel how useless this day was going to be.
“This is the last day I am coming. If you don’t come up today…well. I will have done all this for nothing.”
She lifted her head and looked around. She was making such an enormous amount of sound she doubted any of the fishermen out today would have very good hauls. She would have scared all the fish away by now, unless they could understand her, in which case they would still swim far away from the annoyance. She sighed.
Another long eventless day began to pass. The sun was centered in the sky and Zomera ate her mid-day meal. When she was finished she began her calls to the deep anew. Her hopes of success had dwindled, and she decided that if nothing happened that day she would wait until spring of the next year. Even as she had made the promise to Angelous, she had not meant what she said; she fully intended to try again some day. She was too stubborn to give up that easily. Spring was when the schools of fish were most often near the shore, and she assumed that even an intelligent race of fish-people might abide by this aquatic habit.
“I am leaving now,” she tried one final time, the day nearly spent and the sun half engulfed by the horizon’s waters, “I wont come again until next year, so if you want to come up, do it now.”
She paused, looking into the water’s clear depths, unable to view the bottom. After a few moments, still nothing happened. She was clearly disappointed. Of her few childhood fancies that had survived her seclusion in the ruins, this was one she had entirely put her hopes into. Now that she was finally to give up, she felt lost. Of course she promised herself she would return the next year, but she knew that by then the dream and the hope would have died.
Sluggishly she began to pack up her things, her face forlorn. Had she turned to look into the waters once more, she might have noticed a rather peculiar looking shadow crawling along the rippling surface. It weaved slowly between the small reefs, pausing in the concealing seaweed patches that it came across. The shadow made its way beneath the dock that Zomera sat on and waded there.
Zomera continued to pack and when she was finished she took one final, hopeful look into the ocean. Then she dropped her head and turned to walk away.
As she did, she felt a faint tapping under her feet. At first she thought it was simply the waves knocking some debris around under the wooden planks of the docks, but the sound persisted, becoming more of a gentle knock. She paused and looked down. The knocking continued, rhythmically. She watched the water for a moment, noticing that the knocking did not match the pattern of the waves. She set her things down and knelt on the wooden planks of the dock. The knocking stopped. She was still too far out to see the sea floor.
She leaned her head out over the water; looking down under the platform of the wood to see what was making the sound. She saw that could have been the source. She was about to stand up again when she glimpsed a dark figure moving around far below. Her eyes widened. Her fingers fumbled to open the bag in her excitement. She pulled out the translator; it was too shallow here to have need of the amplifier. She ducked her head closer to the water and spoke.
“Hello?” she said tentatively.
At first she believed she was imagining things, but when she had spoken the dark shadow had stopped. It now began to crawl closer, and she could see the shadow getting larger. The outline was growing too quickly for it to be a fish. Zomera watched it wide eyed, unable to move. For the first time since seeing it she wondered if it were a shark of some sort, but they didn’t usually come this close to shore.
As soon as she was able to clearly see the figure beneath the water, she was staring into a scaly dripping face. Zomera was dumbfounded, she grasped for words, for gestures, but her mind was blank. Before she had a chance to even accurately discern whether what she was looking at was simply a hopeful mirage or true solid reality, two webbed hands shot out of the water, taking either side of her face and pulling harshly downward.
Zomera did not stand a chance. She fell awkwardly into the water, her limbs flailing about for futile balance. She dropped the translator, hit the water, and sank down. The creature took hold of Zomera’s arm and began to pull her down. Zomera struggled against it, but the creature was far more agile and water efficient than the girl, and she continued to sink down. When they hit the bottom Zomera was still struggling fiercely and she could already feel the need for oxygen. The dense salt in the waters caused her to wrench her eyes shut to subdue the stinging. A few more tense seconds passed as Zomera’s lungs began to ache. She thrashed around, knowing that her entire endeavor had been a terrible mistake.
She thought of Angelous. How lonely she knew he would be. All alone once more in those vast endless ruins with no purpose in life but to patiently rebuild, slowly, meticulously, and alone. She had been so lucky to meet him, to have him take her away from her horrible existence. He had shown her a life that she had never thought possible, free from the torment of her brothers, free to learn as they were free to learn, and free from her society’s restrictions. Few of the women of her town could read, let alone write. Already, Zomera had surpassed them, surpassed tradition. She could read in almost two languages, and write articulately. She understood the basic principles of machinery, of science. But all her knowledge would now come to nothing, and she would be lost in the water’s depths.
She stopped moving, knowing that it would preserve her oxygen just a little longer, keep her alive for a few more precious seconds. Suddenly the water around her seemed to peel away from her face. She felt air around her. Instinctly, she took a deep breath. The air was stale, and it did not last long. In a moment her face was once again engulfed in water and at the end of her breath she inhaled water. She coughed and sputtered, panic taking over her again. She tried to struggle again, but she was held firmly down. Once more she felt the water melt away from her face, she felt the dampness of her hair around her neck. She held her breath a little longer before taking a breath. This time she made sure it was smaller, slower. As she inhaled she felt the water rise swiftly to her chin. She stopped. She exhaled slowly, cautiously. She did not want to give up all her precious air. As she exhaled she felt the water sink slowly down to her neck.
Puzzled, she opened her eyes, but was careful not to inhale. Around her head was a small flattened bubble of air. It was not round like the bubbles she knew, but more dome shaped, the bottom of it flat. She wrenched her head to look above her, the back of her head descending below the bubble and back into the water. The bubble was covered by what looked like a huge dark turquoise hand, the fingers webbed together with a thin lighter membrane, laced with pink winding veins. This hand held the bubble in place, as if keeping the air from escaping to the surface, like and inverted cup of water.
Zomera could see nothing beyond the hand, though below her she could see her own body wavering in the moving water, half sitting, half standing on the bottom, in a frozen movement of trying to thrust herself up to the surface. She relaxed partially. She felt her arm still held and knew that whatever was holding the air in place was also keeping her down. Zomera took another measured breath, watching as the bubble decreased in size. The air was still stale, and it failed to entirely absolve the need of her lungs. She exhaled and then took another breath. She did this a few times, the bubble growing slowly smaller as tiny air droplets escaped below the fingers and up to the surface. The air began to satisfy her need to breathe less and less until she began to feel like she was drowning once more, unable to breathe at all.
She calmly shook her arm, trying to let her captor know her plight. She assumed that the fish creature did not want her dead, or it would not have provided her with air. She felt it release its grip and she pulled her arm nervously away. She closed her eyes and pushed the hand above her aside, letting the air beneath it escape in one large effervescence. She felt the sharp scaled surface of the creatures hand as she brushed passed and began to swim upwards.
Her head broke the surface and she took in one long satisfying gulp of air. After the staleness of her recycled air below the water, the fresh sea blown breeze seemed heavenly. She pulled herself up onto the dock, laying herself flat against its surface and deeply breathing the heavenly sweet open air.
She heard a small disturbance of water, the sound of something breaking the surface. She rolled herself over and looked over the side of the dock, her youthful curiosity getting the best of her once more. The fish creature was wading a few feet from the dock, looking quizzically at the human girl, clearly intrigued.
It was as the books had said, one of the races of old, clearly humanoid, though years off the same evolutionary tract had rendered it very different. Its smooth finely scaled body was sleek and thin with dark, but shimmering hues of blue and green. This specimen was female as near as Zomera could tell, and the curvature of its body was far less exaggerated than that of humans, leaving the creature with a smooth streamlined body. Its limbs were long and sinewy, the muscle bulges also less embellished, but there were clearly four limbs.
Zomera had heard sailors speak of the merpeople who possessed arms but a fish’s tail. This creature could clearly have walked on land in the human fashion with a little practice.
Its hands were out of proportion, the fingers going down passed its knees. They were webbed, as Zomera had seen, with a thin membrane like that of the fins of fish. Its toes too were abnormally long and spread widely apart in a manner that would break a human’s toes off. They were webbed as well. Off the fronts of her shoulders, the creature sported short webbed appendages, supported by small spines that could be pressed down against the creature’s body when these fins were not needed.
Beginning at the back of the skull, a row of webbed spines descended down her back, growing larger until they reached just below the shoulder blades and then gradually getting smaller until they stopped at her tail bone. Though, her spinal column continued beyond her tail bone, growing out into an actual tail. It was short, just long enough to reach her toes when they were outstretched, and sported two spinned fins that ran down its sides until coming to similar ends as the fin on her back.
The most human feature about the thing was its face, though that was considerably altered as well. It had no hair, giving it a bare, alien look to it at first. Its face was shallow, barely indented for eye sockets, devoid of ears except for small holes on either side of its head, and with a long flattened nose. Its face was kind, and soft in its features, though sharp and pointed in its demeanor. It had small pursed, blue lips with inklings of long pointed teeth that poked out from behind them. Its eyes were very bright, almost entirely white except for a dark center pupil and a barely purple ring surrounding it.
Its eyes darted, examining Zomera from above the water, blinking often to keep its eyes moist. The creature seemed as bewildered as she. It swam closer to the dock, smoothly gliding through the water.
When she spoke, the creature’s voice sounded like the calls of the whales that Zomera heard when herds of them would travel by, except the creature’s voice was much higher, quicker, and far more elaborate, though it reverberated and trembled the ears in much the same, mysterious way.
It took Zomera a moment to recognize that the creature was trying to speak to her. She realized with disappointment that she had left the unaltered translator behind, only bringing along the one that would allow the fish-person to understand her, and not the other way around.
Zomera fumbled for the device in her bag, indifferently getting water on the other things inside. She pulled it out and held it to her mouth.
She saw the creature draw back, lifting its hands to where its ears would be. Zomera paused and realized that the creature was expecting the device to be give out a loud sound, as it had with the amplifier. The girl smirked faintly, and then spoke.
“Hi there. My name is Zomera,” she stopped and looked at the creature to see if it understood. It made to speak once more but Zomera cut her off.
“I can’t understand what you are saying. This thing,” she held the translator forward and then put it back to her mouth, “only works one way, so that you can understand me.”
The fish-girl nodded in understanding. Zomera smiled and continued.
“I have a device that will allow me to understand you, but I have to retrieve it. Will you meet me tomorrow?” she asked.
A faint flicker of a smirk floated across the creature’s lips and it nodded once more.
“Thank you.” Zomera thought a moment. She did not want to walk all the way back to town the next day. “At dawn I will meet you on the beach north of here, the one that has a small bay and is flanked by dark rocks,” Zomera said, “Do you know where that is?”
The creature frowned and nodded, but then it shook its head. A look of confusion crossed the girl’s face and the fish-girl saw this. She proceeded to mime swimming and then pointed a hand towards land and then prominently shook her head.
Zomera thought a moment and then raised the translator to her mouth, “You don’t want to swim up to the beach?” she asked.
She creature hesitated and then nodded.
“Well, I will meet you in the bay. I will have a boat,” Zomera offered.
This seemed to be more to the creature’s liking, and it nodded.
Zomera smiled and stood, making one final message, “I will see you tomorrow then, friend.”
The fish-girl grinned, revealing rows of small, widely spaced sharpened teeth, then slipped into the water, becoming a shadow in the depths. Zomera stashed the translator in her bag and then walked down the dock towards land.
She skipped half of the way back to the ruins, basking in the achievement she had made, and commending her long days and work that she had spend at the dock. And indeed she also held Angelous in high esteem for his creation of the modified translator, and reminded him so several times when she got back to the ruins.