The good new stuff, p.3
The Good New Stuff, page 3
Just as he was leaning back in the sand, wondering if there were any more corners he could fill up—perhaps another bowl of that shrimp teriyaki?—Harra was back. She sat beside him.
“I talked to my mother about what you said. She said a tourist showed up today. It looks like you were right. It was a woman, and she was amphibious.”
“Piri felt a vague unease. One tourist was certainly not an invasion, but she could be a harbinger. And amphibious. So far, no one had gone to that expense except for those who planned to live here for a long time. Was his tropical hideout in danger of being discovered?”
“What—what’s she doing here?” He absently ate another spoonful of crab cocktail.
“She’s looking for you,” Harra laughed, and elbowed him in the ribs. Then she pounced on him, tickling his ribs until he was howling in helpless glee. He fought back, almost to the point of having the upper hand, but she was bigger and a little more determined. She got him pinned, showering flower petals on him as they struggled. One of the red flowers from her hair was in her eye, and she brushed it away, breathing hard.
“You want to go for a walk on the beach?” she asked.
Harra was fun, but the last few times he’d gone with her she had tried to kiss him. He wasn’t ready for that. He was only a kid. He thought she probably had something like that in mind now.
“I’m too full,” he said, and it was almost the literal truth. He had stuffed himself disgracefully, and only wanted to curl up in his shack and go to sleep.
Harra said nothing, just sat there getting her breathing under control. At last she nodded, a little jerkily, and got to her feet. Piri wished he could see her face to face. He knew something was wrong. She turned from him and walked away.
Robinson Crusoe was feeling depressed when he got back to his hut. The walk down the beach away from the laughter and singing had been a lonely one. Why had he rejected Harra’s offer of companionship? Was it really so bad that she wanted to play new kinds of games?
But no, damn it. She wouldn’t play his games, why should he play hers?
After a few minutes of sitting on the beach under the crescent moon, he got into character. Oh, the agony of being a lone castaway, far from the company of fellow creatures, with nothing but faith in God to sustain oneself. Tomorrow he would read from the scriptures, do some more exploring along the rocky north coast, tan some goat hides, maybe get in a little fishing.
With his plans for the morrow laid before him, Piri could go to sleep, wiping away a last tear for distant England.
The ghost woman came to him during the night. She knelt beside him in the sand. She brushed his sandy hair from his eyes and he stirred in his sleep. His feet thrashed.
He was churning through the abyssal deeps, heart hammering, blind to everything but internal terror. Behind him, jaws yawned, almost touching his toes. They closed with a snap.
He sat up woozily. He saw rows of serrated teeth in the line of breakers in front of him. And a tall, white shape in the moonlight dived into a curling breaker and was gone.
“Hello.”
Piri sat up with a start. The worst thing about being a child living alone on an island—which, when he thought about it, was the sort of thing every child dreamed of—was not having a warm mother’s breast to cry on when you had nightmares. It hadn’t affected him much, but when it did, it was pretty bad.
He squinted up into the brightness. She was standing with her head blocking out the sun. He winced, and looked away, down to her feet. They were webbed, with long toes. He looked a little higher. She was nude, and quite beautiful.
“Who … ?”
“Are you awake now?” She squatted down beside him. Why had he expected sharp, triangular teeth? His dreams blurred and ran like watercolors in the rain, and he felt much better. She had a nice face. She was smiling at him.
He yawned, and sat up. He was groggy, stiff, and his eyes were coated with sand that didn’t come from the beach. It had been an awful night.
“I think so.”
“Good. How about some breakfast?” She stood, and went to a basket on the sand.
“I usually—” but his mouth watered when he saw the guavas, melons, kippered herring, and the long brown loaf of bread. She had butter, and some orange marmalade. “Well, maybe just a—” and he had bitten into a succulent slice of melon. But before he could finish it, he was seized by an even stronger urge. He got to his feet and scuttled around the palm tree with the waist-high dark stain and urinated against it.
“Don’t tell anybody, huh?” he said, anxiously.
She looked up. “About the tree? Don’t worry.”
He sat back down and resumed eating the melon. “I could get in a lot of trouble. They gave me a thing and told me to use it.”
“It’s all right with me,” she said, buttering a slice of bread and handing it to him. “Robinson Crusoe never had a portable EcoSan, right?”
“Right,” he said, not showing his surprise. How did she know that?
Piri didn’t know quite what to say. Here she was, sharing his morning, as much a fact of life as the beach or the water.
“What’s your name?” It was as good a place to start as any.
“Leandra. You can call me Lee.”
“I’m—”
“Piri. I heard about you from the people at the party last night. I hope you don’t mind me barging in on you like this.”
He shrugged, and tried to indicate all the food with the gesture. “Anytime,” he said, and laughed. He felt good. It was nice to have someone friendly around after last night. He looked at her again, from a mellower viewpoint.
She was large; quite a bit taller than he was. Her physical age was around thirty, unusually old for a woman. He thought she might be closer to sixty or seventy, but he had nothing to base it on. Piri himself was in his nineties, and who could have known that? She had the slanting eyes that were caused by the addition of transparent eyelids beneath the natural ones. Her hair grew in a narrow band, cropped short, starting between her eyebrows and going over her head to the nape of her neck. Her ears were pinned efficiently against her head, giving her a lean, streamlined look.
“What brings you to Pacifica?” Piri asked.
She reclined on the sand with her hands behind her head, looking very relaxed.
“Claustrophobia.” She winked at him. “Not really. I wouldn’t survive long in Pluto with that.” Piri wasn’t even sure what it was, but he smiled as if he knew. “Tired of the crowds. I heard that people couldn’t enjoy themselves here, what with the sky, but I didn’t have any trouble when I visited. So I bought flippers and gills and decided to spend a few weeks skin-diving by myself.”
Piri looked at the sky. It was a staggering sight. He’d grown used to it, but knew that it helped not to look up more than he had to.
It was an incomplete illusion, all the more appalling because the half of the sky that had been painted was so very convincing. It looked like it really was the sheer blue of infinity, so when the eye slid over to the unpainted overhanging canopy of rock, scarred from blasting, painted with gigantic numbers that were barely visible from twenty kilometers below—one could almost imagine God looking down through the blue opening. It loomed, suspended by nothing, gigatons of rock hanging up there.
Visitors to Pacifica often complained of headaches, usually right on the crown of the head. They were cringing, waiting to get conked.
“Sometimes I wonder how I live with it,” Piri said.
She laughed. “It’s nothing for me. I was a space pilot once.”
“Really?” This was catnip to Piri. There’s nothing more romantic than a space pilot. He had to hear stories.
The morning hours dwindled as she captured his imagination with a series of tall tales he was sure were mostly fabrication. But who cared? Had he come to the South Seas to hear of the mundane? He felt he had met a kindred spirit, and gradually, fearful of being laughed at, he began to tell her stories of the Reef Pirates, first as wishful wouldn’t-it-be-fun-if’s, then more and more seriously as she listened intently. He forgot her age as he began to spin the best of the yarns he and Harra had concocted.
It was a tacit conspiracy between them to be serious about the stories, but that was the whole point. That was the only way it would work, as it had worked with Harra. Somehow, this adult woman was interested in playing the same games he was.
Lying in his bed that night, Piri felt better than he had for months, since before Harra had become so distant. Now that he had a companion, he realized that maintaining a satisfying fantasy world by yourself is hard work. Eventually you need someone to tell the stories to, and to share in the making of them.
They spent the day out on the reef. He showed her his crab farm, and introduced her to Ocho the Octopus, who was his usual shy self. Piri suspected the damn thing only loved him for the treats he brought.
She entered into his games easily and with no trace of adult condescension. He wondered why, and got up the courage to ask her. He was afraid he’d ruin the whole thing, but he had to know. It just wasn’t normal.
They were perched on a coral outcropping above the high tide level, catching the last rays of the sun.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “I guess you think I’m silly, huh?”
“No, not exactly that. It’s just that most adults seem to, well, have more ‘important’ things on their minds.” He put all the contempt he could into the word.
“Maybe I feel the same way you do about it. I’m here to have fun. I sort of feel like I’ve been reborn into a new element. It’s terrific down there, you know that. I just didn’t feel like I wanted to go into that world alone. I was out there yesterday …”
“I thought I saw you.”
“Maybe you did. Anyway, I needed a companion, and I heard about you. It seemed like the polite thing to, well, not to ask you to be my guide, but sort of fit myself into your world. As it were.” She frowned, as if she felt she had said too much. “Let’s not push it, all right?”
“Oh, sure. It’s none of my business.”
“I like you, Piri.”
“And I like you. I haven’t had a friend for … too long.”
That night at the luau, Lee disappeared. Piri looked for her briefly, but was not really worried. What she did with her nights was her business. He wanted her during the days.
As he was leaving for his home, Harra came up behind him and took his hand. She walked with him for a moment, then could no longer hold it in.
“A word to the wise, old pal,” she said. “You’d better stay away from her. She’s not going to do you any good.”
“What are you talking about? You don’t even know her.”
“Maybe I do.”
“Well, do you or don’t you?”
She didn’t say anything, then sighed deeply.
“Piri, if you do the smart thing you’ll get on that raft of yours and sail to Bikini. Haven’t you had any … feelings about her? Any premonitions or anything?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, thinking of sharp teeth and white death.
“I think you do. You have to, but you won’t face it. That’s all I’m saying. It’s not my business to meddle in your affairs.”
“I’ll say it’s not. So why did you come out here and put this stuff in my ear?” He stopped, and something tickled at his mind from his past life, some earlier bit of knowledge, carefully suppressed. He was used to it. He knew he was not really a child, and that he had a long life and many experiences stretching out behind him. But he didn’t think about it. He hated it when part of his old self started to intrude on him.
“I think you’re jealous of her,” he said, and knew it was his old, cynical self talking. “She’s an adult, Harra. She’s no threat to you. And, hell, I know what you’ve been hinting at these last months. I’m not ready for it, so leave me alone. I’m just a kid.”
Her chin came up, and the moonlight flashed in her eyes.
“You idiot. Have you looked at yourself lately? You’re not Peter Pan, you know. You’re growing up. You’re damn near a man.”
“That’s not true.” There was panic in Piri’s voice. “I’m only … well, I haven’t exactly been counting, but I can’t be more than nine, ten years—”
“Shit. You’re as old as I am, and I’ve had breasts for two years. But I’m not out to cop you. I can cop with any of seven boys in the village younger than you are, but not you.” She threw her hands up in exasperation and stepped back from him. Then, in a sudden fury, she hit him on the chest with the heel of her fist. He fell back, stunned at her violence.
“She is an adult,” Harra whispered through her teeth. “That’s what I came here to warn you against. I’m your friend, but you don’t know it. Ah, what’s the use? I’m fighting against that scared old man in your head, and he won’t listen to me. Go ahead, go with her. But she’s got some surprises for you.”
“What? What surprises?” Piri was shaking, not wanting to listen to her. It was a relief when she spat at his feet, whirled, and ran down the beach.
“Find out for yourself,” she yelled back over her shoulder. It sounded like she was crying.
That night, Piri dreamed of white teeth, inches behind him, snapping.
But morning brought Lee, and another fine breakfast in her bulging bag. After a lazy interlude drinking coconut milk, they went to the reef again. The pirates gave them a rough time of it, but they managed to come back alive in time for the nightly gathering.
Harra was there. She was dressed as he had never seen her, in the blue tunic and shorts of the reef maintenance crew. He knew she had taken a job with the disneyland and had been working days with her mother at Bikini, but had not seen her dressed up before. He had just begun to get used to the grass skirt. Not long ago, she had been always nude like him and the other children.
She looked older somehow, and bigger. Maybe it was just the uniform. She still looked like a girl next to Lee. Piri was confused by it, and his thoughts veered protectively away.
Harra did not avoid him, but she was remote in a more important way. It was like she had put on a mask, or possibly taken one off. She carried herself with a dignity that Piri thought was beyond her years.
Lee disappeared just before he was ready to leave. He walked home alone, half hoping Harra would show up so he could apologize for the way he’d talked to her the night before. But she didn’t.
He felt the bow-shock of a pressure wave behind him, sensed by some mechanism he was unfamiliar with, like the lateral line of a fish, sensitive to slight changes in the water around him. He knew there was something behind him, closing the gap a little with every wild kick of his flippers.
It was dark. It was always dark when the thing chased him. It was not the wispy, insubstantial thing that darkness was when it settled on the night air, but the primal, eternal night of the depths. He tried to scream with his mouth full of water, but it was a dying gurgle before it passed his lips. The water around him was warm with his blood.
He turned to face it before it was upon him, and saw Harra’s face corpsepale and glowing sickly in the night. But no, it wasn’t Harra, it was Lee, and her mouth was far down her body, rimmed with razors, a gaping crescent hole in her chest. He screamed again—
And sat up.
“What? Where are you?”
“I’m right here, it’s going to be all right.” She held his head as he brought his sobbing under control. She was whispering something but he couldn’t understand it, and perhaps wasn’t meant to. It was enough. He calmed down quickly, as he always did when he woke from nightmares. If they hung around to haunt him, he never would have stayed by himself for so long.
There was just the moonlit paleness of her breast before his eyes and the smell of skin and sea water. Her nipple was wet. Was it from his tears? No, his lips were tingling and the nipple was hard when it brushed against him. He realized what he had been doing in his sleep.
“You were calling for your mother,” she whispered, as though she’d read his mind. “I’ve heard you shouldn’t wake someone from a nightmare. It seemed to calm you down.”
“Thanks,” he said quietly. “Thanks for being here, I mean.”
She took his cheek in her hand, turned his head slightly, and kissed him. It was not a motherly kiss, and he realized they were not playing the same game. She had changed the rules on him.
“Lee …”
“Hush. It’s time you learned.”
She eased him onto his back, and he was overpowered with deja vu. Her mouth worked downward on his body and it set off chains of associations from his past life. He was familiar with the sensation. It had happened to him often in his second childhood. Something would happen that had happened to him in much the same way before and he would remember a bit of it. He had been seduced by an older woman the first time he was young. She had taught him well, and he remembered it all but didn’t want to remember. He was an experienced lover and a child at the same time.
“I’m not old enough,” he protested, but she was holding in her hand the evidence that he was old enough, had been old enough for several years. I’m fourteen years old, he thought. How could he have kidded himself into thinking he was ten?
“You’re a strong young man,” she whispered in his ear. “And I’m going to be very disappointed if you keep saying that. You’re not a child anymore, Piri. Face it.”
“I … I guess I’m not.”
“Do you know what to do?”
“I think so.”
She reclined beside him, drew her legs up. Her body was huge and ghostly and full of limber strength. She would swallow him up, like a shark. The gill slits under her arms opened and shut quickly with her breathing, smelling of salt, iodine, and sweat.
He got on his hands and knees and moved over her.
