Oshenerth (26 page)

Clearly very popular, the place was as crowded as any she had encountered. She moved freely within, staring wide-eyed at the lavishly decorated interior. Never had she seen so many colorful deep-sea colors. Hanging from the ceiling, the skeletons of black, red, and pink coral had been polished to a high sheen. Decked out in such natural jewels, the ceiling glistened like a magician’s cave.

Along with piped-in warm water, mersons and manyarms circulated through the large artificial cavern. Many were chatting animatedly, others were eating, a few were dancing. What drinking took place involved downing sealed thin-skinned tubes of edible material that had been filled with various dark, flavored liquids. Here one did not have to look hard to discern someone who had imbibed too much of the wrong fluid. Since their mouths tended to open before they had finished swallowing, a visible haze hung around the heads and in front of their faces of the heaviest drinkers.

The establishment was home in equal numbers to mersons and manyarms, with a number of less intelligent but still interested fish finning cautiously among them. Seated atop a raised dais off to one side was the band whose music had first drawn her inside. Percussion was provided by (perhaps unsurprisingly) a large blue-ringed octopus each of whose eight arms held a stone hammer. Striking large shells of different sizes produced not only varying tones but also generated a different-colored pulse of light from the small bioluminescent lifeforms that inhabited each shell. When a shell cracked after receiving one too many blows, the octopod’s assistant replaced it with another of the same size, much as guitar player might replace a snapped string. Nary a beat was missed.

A trio of yellow trumpetfish needed no extraneous instruments to supply a jazzy counterpoint, while an oversized pufferfish attended to what looked like some finely tuned cast-off plumbing. A cuttlefish smaller than Glint clutched several armfuls of empty bivalves whose halves she adeptly clicked like castanets. Among all the tootling and clacking and banging there was not a single stringed instrument. That one could be fashioned she had no doubt, but it was evident that any sound generated by such a device would not carry well underwater.

Drifting off to one side, she watched as a pair of squid dominated the area reserved for dancing. Their incredible ballet could not have been replicated by the most agile of mersons. Locking arms, propelled by their siphons, they shifted and swung in all directions while their bodies simultaneously changed colors in complimentary patterns. Other waltzing manyarms and tangoing mersons admiringly made space for them.

“Like to join them?”

The three mersons who had come up behind her were large, young, and manifestly male. Their attention was clearly fixated on her and not the action elsewhere in the establishment. Another time, another place, another world, she might have been flattered. Not here. Besides, in close proximity even to the friends she had made she still found the regular in-and-out pulsing of gill flaps anything but attractive. She eased away from them.

With a single powerful scissor kick, one swam around in front of her to block her way. Another hovered overhead. Gazing fixedly at her while floating upside-down with his face level with hers, he reached out and began to finger multiple strands of her drifting blonde tresses.

“Never seen hair this color. What kind of merson are you? Not from the city, that’s plain. Are there others like you?”

“If possible two more of you,” echoed one of his companions.

Twisting away, she flipped her hair out of the fondling fingers, her quick spin winding it around her head like a golden band. It would not stay like that for long, but at least for now it was out of reach.

“There’s just one of me,” she snapped, “and the one of me isn’t interested in either of the three of you. Leave me alone.”

“Cannot do that.” Reaching out, the first speaker put a hand on her shoulder and drew it slowly downward. “I personally am too obsessed with the new. You are a very new,
silash
.”

The last word was merson slang, uncivil and borderline vile. She looked around. No one had been attracted to the conversion, no one was interested in the confrontation. Apparently in a place like this you were on your own, be you merson, manyarm, or changeling. She realized now it had been foolish to go off by herself. This was not simple, rustic Sandrift or even its larger cousin Siriswirll. Merson culture was neither homogeneous nor inherently idyllic. Threats existed in this world that had nothing to do with sharks or spralakers.

She’d found herself caught in similar situations once or twice before. But both times the surroundings had been familiar, the testosterone-fueled tropes typical, and the means for extricating herself practiced and polished. Here everything was different, for all that certain aspects of life seemed universal even in another world and even under the water.

“I’m asking you nicely.” She found herself swatting away hands in all directions. “To leave me alone. Or I’ll yell for the police.”

“Police?” Two of the self-confident nuisances exchanged a glance. “What are ‘police’?”

“I think she means the civil guard,” suggested the third member of the disagreeable trio. He moved a little closer. They were hemming her in now; from front, back, and above, reducing her room to maneuver, to get away. Blasting out so much percussion, the band made it difficult for her to make herself heard.

Could
she make herself heard? How far would her cry for assistance travel underwater, swamped as it was likely to be by the wail of the band? Would anyone respond if they did hear her, and did anyone care? For all she knew of local culture, in Benthicalia this increasingly unpleasant confrontation was a common and accepted method through which representatives of one gender initiated contact with another. Certainly it was no less intrusive than the courtship rituals employed by certain species of dolphin in her own world.

She was no dolphin, and she wanted out.

In frustration as much as anger, she struck out at the nearest merson. Slowed by the intervening water, her slap barely grazed him. Worse, he appeared to take it as some kind of perverse invitation. Moving toward instead of away from her, he reached out to tickle the outer edge of her left gill flap. If it was supposed to send some kind of intimate sensual signal it failed miserably with Irina, reminding her as it did only of newfound opportunities for suffocation.

The merson behind her was intent on committing a gesture considerably more familiar though no less unwelcome when a horizontal blur slammed into him and knocked him prone in the water. Now some in the crowd did pause in their partying to turn and look, though no one seemed inclined to summon the aforementioned civil guard. Blinking at the abruptness of the intervention, Irina was too shaken to thank her rescuer.

Pivoting sharply in the water, having knocked insensible one of the trio who were vexing Irina, Poylee cocked both arms in front of her.

“I think I heard the changeling ask you nicely,” she hissed.

The unconscious merson’s cohorts barely glanced at the confrontational new arrival. They were too busy gaping at Irina. “A changeling!” echoed one. “That explains the strange hair.”

“Yes.” His companion nodded in the direction of their free-floating friend. “Welenhu has gone to sleep and left this intriguing creature for us to examine. We would be lax in our duty as friends if we were to retire without learning more.” Putting his own hands out in front of him, he advanced on Poylee while his associate closed a new circle around the uncertain Irina.

Suddenly he was arching backwards. Having slid an arm around each side of the advancing merson’s neck, his assailant clutched his own forearms with opposing hands. The result was a firm hold that forced tightly shut the gill flaps of Irina’s tormentor. The merson thus restrained began to kick frantically. Locked together, the pair spun around and around in a series of increasingly desperate somersaults. Other patrons of the establishment backed up to give the fighters more room as the thoroughly blasé band segued smoothly into another, somewhat faster, selection.

As he slowly suffocated, the wild flailing and kicking of the merson who had been surprised from behind began to moderate. After he passed out but before he died, Chachel released the double-arm choke hold and swam to pull the last remaining assailant off an increasingly hard-pressed Poylee. Swimming to the first and still unconscious merson, Irina stood watch over him to make sure he didn’t revive in time to rejoin the fray. Out of the corner of an eye she saw a nest of arms come into view: Glint had arrived.

Gesturing to where Chachel now had his hands full with the third and largest of the troublemakers, she snapped at the splendidly hued cephalopod. “Why don’t you go help Chachel? Isn’t he still your friend?”

The cuttlefish replied with considerable dignity. “I don’t interfere in the mating rituals of mersons.”

The male beside her was starting to revive. Extending a leg, she shoved a webbed foot against his left gill flap. His eyelids fluttered and he promptly passed out again.

“This isn’t a mating ritual, you ghost of a calamari dinner! It’s a fight! A brutal, kicking, scratching, head-butting fight!”

Unperturbed, the cuttlefish cocked one eye at her. “Where mersons are concerned, it is often impossible to tell where one begins and the other lets off.” Extending themselves, several tentacles gestured. “Chachel fights sharks single-handedly and with only two arms. I am not concerned as to the eventual outcome of this encounter, nor should you be.”

The fact remained that despite the manyarm’s reassurances, she was concerned. Her anxiety level dropped when she saw Chachel spin his opponent into a wall. Coral was notoriously unyielding. Her apprehension eased still more as Chachel, holding onto the dazed merson with one hand, began pummeling him with the other. Blood from the unlucky merson’s face began to flow into the surrounding water in tight little trickles, like threads of cuttlefish ink. At this depth and in the bioluminescent light, it appeared dark green instead of red.

Poylee finally managed to pull Chachel off the now comatose nuisance. The excitement over, those patrons who had stopped to watch now returned to their momentarily interrupted pursuits of eating, dancing, conversing, and listening to the music of the band, which had never paused in its playing. There was no sign of any representatives of the civil guard.

Benthicalia might be beautiful, and sophisticated, and the most advanced metropolis in this part of Oshenerth, Irina reflected, but it was not without blemishes of its own.

She swam over to where Poylee, irritated and stressed, was working to catch her breath. The merson appeared unharmed.

“Poylee, I don’t know how to ….

“Oh, shut up, changeling!” The female growled through clenched teeth. “Can’t you do anything right? After all this time among us? You don’t have the sense of a spasmed oyster!” Before Irina could say a word, the first of her two saviors was kicking hard for the exit.

Duly unsettled, she approached Chachel more cautiously. At least he let her talk long enough to express her gratitude before he initiated his own verbal pummeling. This was at once less irate and more forceful than Poylee’s.

“From now on I suggest you don’t go anywhere without the company of a
real
merson, or one of the manyarms in our group.”

Did he ever blink, she wondered? Come to think of it, while the reflex gesture was common enough here, it was not necessary. A merson’s eyes were always moist.

“You are a lot of trouble, changeling,” he finished.

“I don’t mean to be.” She was not going to cry, she told herself. How could she, when her rising anger threatened to overcome her relief at having been rescued from an increasingly unpleasant set of circumstances. “I’ve been trying to see and learn as much about your world as possible. That’s what I was doing out on my own. That’s what I was doing here.”

“Learning a thing is not much good if it’s the last thing you learn. Watch where you stick your head, changeling, lest you shove it into a hole occupied by a drunken moray and end up withdrawing without it.” He nodded to where the bodies of two of the unconscious mersons had drifted up against each other. “Or worse.”

She was struck by a sudden thought. “How did you know where to find me? I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. I couldn’t have, since I didn’t know myself.”

Instead of replying, he just stared at her. The longer he held the gaze the more his expression seemed to soften. Or maybe, she thought inconclusively, it was just the effect of the shifting luminescence in the enclosed space and the distortions caused by the constant movement of water within the busy establishment.

In any case, he didn’t answer. After a pause that seemed even longer than it was, he turned and swam away, picking a path through the churning crowd as easily and effortlessly as he would have through a school of skipjack. Unsurprisingly, Poylee was right behind him. Watching her trail close behind the hunter as he left the establishment, it struck Irina suddenly what kind of fish the young female reminded her of.

A remora.

“What are you smiling at? You were in an uncomfortable situation. You should not be smiling.”

Her accuser was Glint. Responding to the stimulus of his present dynamic surroundings, he had strained his chromatophores to saturate his skin with intense orange color infused with sequencing purple bands, all lit by his own internally generated pale blue and red bioluminescence. It was a sight to supersede any human—or merson—make-up. Among cephalopods, cosmetics were not only intrinsic, they were a biological imperative.

She turned to face the leisurely writhing mass of colorful tentacles and the body to which they were attached. “Smiling? Was I smiling?”

“I think that you were.” The cuttlefish drifted closer. “Though I suppose with changelings, as with mersons, a sensible person can never be sure. I heard your question.” An arm gestured in the direction of the way out. “When Chachel found out that you had left to explore the city on your own, he became uneasy.”