Fish Tails (18 page)

“And you know this because . . .  ?”

“Because I was there. I saw the place destroyed.”

“Were the powerful ones good beings?” asked Bertram in a wondering voice.

Abasio frowned. He tried to keep his voice level as he said, “Bertram, that's a question! The old, powerful beings I'm talking about didn't hesitate to act, and bad ­people died for what seemed good reasons. Good ­people died for what we hoped were even better ones. Terrible destruction happened. And in the middle of dire happenings on all sides, I could not say whether it was for good or ill. I could only wait and see what it all led to. My . . . my dearest friend helped them, and she died doing it. I hope desperately that it was for good. So far it seems to have been.”

“Where was this Manland?” asked Bertram in a very gentle voice.

“East of here, well north of Artemisia.”

“Then Liny and Mother and I came may have come along the southern edge of it on my way here. We were told to avoid the cities, and we did so. Our ­people were originally a forest ­people, part of the Black and White Tribes from the east.”

“But you had heard of Artemisia?”

“Some good way south of here, and east. Let's see, settled originally, someone told me, by an association of LIFFs: Librarians, Injuns, Friends, and Feminists.”

“Librarians? Really? I didn't know that about the original settlers, but I should have guessed at it. There were places called ‘burns' still scattered around, but ­people there know enough to stay away from them. The walkers were beings that created burns every time they stood still. I'm surprised nobody told Villy's man.”

“Oh, Gurge or Garge had been told, but he thought they were using the threat to hide treasure. He was that kind of man. Never believed anything, always supposed that the other man had some ulterior motive for his warning. Gurge could talk the leg off a lamb without the creature knowing it was gone. You could follow Gurge's trail by the three-­legged sheep left limping around behind him, not one of them with any idea what had happened. Unfortunately, he usually talked himself into the same kind of situations. Poor Gurge never gave himself a chance, according to Ma, and of course he passed his death on to Villy.”

Abasio nodded to himself. “So, since then, anyone coming into Gravysuck is supposed to be bringing monsters or changing ­people into them, that right?”

“If they're strangers, that's more or less it.” Bertram placed a friendly hand on Abasio's, and Abasio surprised himself by gripping it strongly. Yes. They would be friends. He had not had a true male friend with only two legs for a very long time.

“Now, getting back to business,” said Bertram. “I can make you some trousers for the babies, wool linings and canvas outside, I can treat the canvas with beeswax. Make it pretty well waterproof. Then you can dump all that water and have less weight in the wagon, and—­”

“Abasio!” Xulai spoke from the door she had opened just a crack, her voice suspiciously sweet. “We have visitors.”

Abasio put on his meeting-­questionable-­strangers smile and went outside. There, shifting nervously from foot to foot, were three men and three women, with Willum behind them, dancing up and down in joyous expectancy. He cried, “They come to see the sea-­babies, Basio. My ma and pa, Aunty Enna and Unka Gum, Lorp and Aunty Liz.”

Abasio went to the wagon and brought out two sleepy babies. The three ­couples stood at a distance. One baby woke up and put a thumb in its mouth.

“Oooh,” said Ma. “It's a
tweety baby
.” She turned to Xulai. “May I feel its hair?”

“His hair,” said Xulai. “That's Bailai: a boy. The other is Gailai: a girl.”

“Ooh,” twittered Liz, “how can you? I mean they don't have . . . there's no . . . How do you know which is which?”

“They actually have two legs,” said Abasio. “The legs fit together closely when they're swimming. They'll learn to walk before long, and it will be more obvious. Also, Bailai seems to have a little red in his hair, as I did when I was younger. And when Gailai is older . . .”

“The girl will have . . . ?” Aunty made a curving gesture toward her chest.

“We believe so, yes,” said Xulai. “Except for the arrangement of the legs and the gills along their sides, everything else is completely human.” She did not mention the extensive rearrangement of internal organs discovered by the doctor in Tingawa. “Since these babies are the first ones, we're not completely sure how early they will mature. They're doing what completely human babies do at the same ages, so we're guessing about age fifteen or so.” She put on her own “let's be friendly” smile. “I was about to put on some tea. Would you like a cup?”

Abasio left Xulai serving tea and cookies to Ma, Aunty, and Liz—­their stock of cookies was running very low. As Bernard later informed him, a sibling of a parent was a named person, as were Aunty Liz and Unka Gum. Liz and Gum were siblings of Pa or Ma, Gum's wife was Aunty, or Aunty Enna, but Lorp had not been accorded the “uncle” because, so Abasio gathered, the others, including Aunty Liz, did not consider him family. What was immediately more important was that Ma was cuddling Gailai and Aunty was rocking Bailai, and Liz was passing cookies. Both the babies had gone back to sleep. Pa, Gum, and Lorp stood apart, Lorp muttering and waving his hands about.

Willum had worked his way around to Abasio and now tapped him on the arm, whispering, “Uncle Lorp thinks they're monsers. He said so. That's why my ma made him come along. He just told Pa they'd die, like that other one did that got borned before.”

“I heard about that, but I don't think that's going to happen,” Abasio said. “The babies are almost a year old; they're very healthy, they're almost weaned, and they're growing fast. When we get to the ocean, down below Artemisia, they'll probably start eating seafood, that is, fish and seaweed, things right out of the ocean.”

“Give 'em back the damn horse,” shouted Pa suddenly, yelling it into Lorp's face. “You are all the time getting us into trouble, Lorp. You and your prophecies and your shapist sillyness! Tryin' t'kill that traveling lady just because she had earrings on! Now this nonsense! None a' us care 'f yer a Lorpian or a crawdad! We're going to give them back their horse, and you're going to be shut about it, and if I hear any more about it out of your mouth, it'll be the last thing you say!”

“Wow,” whispered Willum. “Pa don't let go very often, but when he does, look out!”

Pa stood at the top of the hill, waving his arm. In a moment someone came out of the town, leading Kim's horse.

“Meet him halfway,” said Abasio to Kim, and Kim started down the hill. When they met, the reins were handed over, and Kim brought white-­footed, mostly black Socky to rejoin Blue and Rags. The ladies from Gravysuck had finished the obligatory cup and were preparing to leave. Xulai waved them farewell, with smiles, but Ma looked around, searching. “Where's Willum?”

Everyone looked. No Willum. “Did he go back to the town?” Abasio asked.

“Must've,” said Ma. “That boy's gone more than he's anywhere. He'll show up for supper. Seldom if ever he misses supper.”

T
HAT NIGHT, WITH
K
IM, THE
babies, and the horses asleep, Xulai and Abasio met with Bertram in his cavern, entered from the shop basement through a narrow slot in the mountain. Air moved freely through the space, making the candle in the lantern flicker. The first space they came to was empty and uninteresting, a cave, merely a vacancy in the stone, but a narrow and twisting crevasse led them to a second, very different cavern. It was huge, high, echoing, and filled with transparent cases of books. One of the cases had been unsealed, the others were misted inside with gray vapor. Bertram confessed to having opened the one.

“That case held the inventory, and also it had the book about the wet suit,” he said, pointing. “When I opened the case, the gas inside came out. I wouldn't have opened it except that I had more gas canisters, so I knew I could refill it when I put the books back. Strictly speaking, I shouldn't have opened the case even so. But, since I knew I could reseal it, I decided I could at least take a look at the case that had the inventory in it.”

“Are there more of these places?”

“Book repositories? Oh, yes, wherever there are Volumetarians.”

“They're books about the oceans,” said Xulai, who had been looking more closely at the books in the open case. “They're scientific books, full of graphs and charts and mathematics. Gracious. I wonder if my ­people know about all this.”

“Would they understand them?” asked Bertram eagerly. “I've wanted someone to come who could understand them. Or someone who would take them to someone who would understand them.”

“Oh, yes. That's exactly what my ­people in Tingawa do,” said Xulai. “Bertram, keep your secret just a few months more while I arrange for ­people to come. They have arranged for all the information to be kept in a form that will still be accessible when the waters have risen. Would all the Volumetarians want their books to be copied?”

“Copied? You mean, written down?”

“It's easier than that,” said Abasio. “They have machines with eyes. The eyes look at each page and store all the information that's on it. It goes as fast as the machine can turn the pages.”

Bertram's face lit up and he heaved an enormous sigh. “How wonderful. I've thought of it over and over. If I can be sure there are ­people coming, I'll seal up the little slot we came in through—­make it look like a natural fall, you know. Then, when the ­people get here, they can go in and copy them all. I'll give them the list of my kindred and friends, each of them will give others, and so on until all of them are reached. None of us have the complete list. There were times when that just wasn't wise. But when that's done, all of us Volumetarians can quit living like hermits!”

“There's someone you're interested in?” asked Xulai.

He blushed. “There is a girl in Asparagoose . . .” He sighed. “We're sworn not to reveal to anyone outside the fold, as it were, that we are Volumetarians.”

Abasio asked, “Do you have any idea what the rest of the books are about?”

“There are sections on everything. Astronomy through zoology. Everything.”

They slipped back the way they had come. “Would you like our help in sealing it up?” Abasio asked. “The fact that you seemed friendly with us may stir up some talk; it could lead to troublemakers hanging about.”

Bertram lifted his lantern, pointing to the pile of stone next to the crevasse entry. “The ones on top are the ones that go on the bottom,” he said. “I thought it'd make it quicker, putting them back. It shouldn't take us any time at all.”

While Xulai held the lantern, they stacked the stones, mostly a matter of tumbling the large stones down and tossing the small bottom ones on the top. Repiling was obviously easier than unpiling had been. When they were finished, the pile looked like several others around the walls of the cavern. As they were about to leave, Xulai stopped. “Footprints,” she said. In the lantern light, their footprints led straight to the pile of stone.

“I'll get a broom,” said Bertram, leaving them momentarily.

“Strange,” said Abasio to Xulai. “Bertram, I mean. So . . . unlike the other inhabitants of Gravysuck. It's almost as though he belongs somewhere else.”

“Place I was before, it wasn't that different from here,” said Bertram, returning. “But a long time ago, I opened one of the cases there and started reading the books in it. I read almost every book in it, and it was a big, big case. Fiction, the books were called. Stories. It's like I'd lived the lives of hundreds of other ­people, you know. I believe it would be hard to be just a Gravysucker or a Saltgoshian or a Burned-­Hatter once you've done that.”

Abasio, thinking of the wonders of the library helmet that he had hidden in the wagon, knew exactly what he meant, and so did Xulai. Olly had given him her helmet before she left. She had been given it by one of Artemisia's librarians. They had received the helmets originally, so they said, from helpful creatures who had come from some other place or time or universe. In any event, Abasio had taken his helmet all the way to Tingawa, where the babies were born. There a scientist named Savanker Kyn Dool had found not only that the Tingawan labs could duplicate it, but also that new, empty helmets made exactly like the sample one were able to access the same information source as the original helmets. In addition, they were waterproof. When humanity was at last consigned only to the sea, their books could go with them. Savanker Kyn Dool was the same man who had given them the key to making humans and other creatures “seaworthy.”

Bertram was very busy for the next several days. Willum came and went and came again, often bringing others with him, children and adults, to watch the babies swimming in the nearby pond among the trees, to play with them under Xulai's watchful eyes. Willum was uniformly gentle and playful with the babies—­he said they were pretty much like baby goats and sheep, except for being wet—­and they soon adored him. Lorp (who, it turned out, had taken his name from the Lorpist sect) was still trying to convince the village that Abasio and Xulai and their children were “monsers,” but he made very little headway against the babies' chortles, grins, and happy splashes.

Xulai, using the Tingawan far-­talker that had been installed in their wagon, spent most of one night reaching her friend Precious Wind, who was traveling toward them and was now somewhere southeast of Artemisia. Precious Wind had far more practice in using the device—­which, like most devices, ancient or modern, had its quirks—­and she in turn reached the appropriate ­people in Tingawa and reported back that they were sending a mission from the University to record all the books in Bertram's hoard and getting his list of Volumetarians so they could record everything that existed in print. On hearing this, Bertram burst into tears and hugged both Abasio and Xulai repeatedly, confessing brokenly that he could not forgive himself for having been rude to the lovely children. Xulai patted him into a semblance of poise and forgave him yet again.