Underjungle, p.10
Underjungle, page 10
Unity. This would be the first time our tribes had joined together since we’d wandered apart. Never mind the reasons.
“It will be something we can all look forward to,” Clova added. “But for now, have more fish.”
The Ecdda like to be around blood in the water—it keeps their stomachs full and senses alert. If the Dilidi are hedonists, they like hysteria, too. We say the Banjxa move too quickly to think things out fully. The Caavaju just like themselves. But these alliances were dissolution. They were violence and menace. It was like swimming through red tide: you could taste and smell the pungency at your lips and on your skin. But this wasn’t fear. We saw what our tribes were becoming, what all of us were, and it made us sick.
If you combine the ocean chemicals in ways they haven’t mixed before, you’ll end up with something new. You just need a catalyst. Something to sink or fall.
And then to spread.
I remember you, and us, and the family we were going to have. I could see them inside of you when you became translucent. They darted in every direction. I wonder how far they would have traveled. As they grow, they swim faster. But that was a different ocean.
This ocean feels empty. I can smell that difference now.
If there were any more of you left, I would eat it. Even after I lost you, you gave me strength.
With as few of the creatures as there must be on land, they must know what it’s like to be alone. I wonder if some of them want it.
47
We picture it on land. Hot air blowing past it as it crawls across the rocks and sand. It grips a shell in its clingers, and then uses it to dig for whatever it can digest. It can’t be the only creature, the only species. There must be fish flopping beside it, thrusting their gills into pools of water—maybe it eats the seals and whales it finds dead onshore, burrowing into their decomposing flesh like a cookiecutter shark. There are scuttling things alongside it. Lobsters, crabs, spiders. Twisting things. Slugs, eels, snakes. Flying things. Mobula rays, birds, flying fish. Somewhere there are plants that don’t mind living in the open air.
Some have wandered toward the cold to escape the heat. They live on ice. They bury themselves inside it, freezing themselves inside carved-out chunks so they will barely age, their muscles so atrophied by the time they reach adolescence that there’s no way out. They use the rocks and shells on land for that digging too, until their muscles are gone and they also are plants, just like the sea squirts that attach themselves to the corals and then start eating their own brains. Then the birds nip at them, if there’s a thaw. The creatures watch them coming, swooping toward them through the sky, until the birds finally snatch their eyes.
A few head into the mountains, the terrestrial counterparts of our ocean trenches. They go to escape. They do not like it too hot or cold, so this is another choice. But mostly they go there so they can see the water from afar and dream about it and watch it roll, and wonder if they can return to this place where they must have once belonged, before whatever cruel joke nature played on them occurred and they lost every faculty they’d need to survive.
Perhaps they have their own stories. If you lose your stories, you lose circulation and you go numb. So they must keep retelling them to anyone who will listen.
I don’t know if there are other minerals that exist outside of the water. But if there aren’t, then they’re made of the same stuff as us.
We still have the body, aside from the gonads and the detached limb that Brola took. We store it inside a cave on the edge of the canyon, not far from where I found it. It’s begun to decompose and rise. You can see the bubbles leaking from the lesions on its skin. If it were anything else, we’d already have consumed the body whole, and if we hadn’t, there’s an entire ocean around us of hungry life.
The roof of the cave keeps it from floating away. It bounces against it. When we first pushed it inside, eddies got behind it and they’d force the body out. It would twist and tear, even as its lower limbs and nostrils caught on a few overhangs. So we used the limbs to push some shells and rocks toward the entrance. Their flattened ends made them especially useful, although this exerted pressure on the rest of the body, especially at the sockets where the limbs join the lower half. But eventually we built a wall, with the body trapped inside. That’s where it is now. You can peer through holes in the formation and see it drifting back and forth, pressed up against the roof until a tiny current takes it and spins it around. We’ve had to make sure scavengers don’t get inside, or the rest of it would be gone in an instant. But, of course, they do. They are scavengers, and they are wily.
48
They were just bands that attacked. Mobs. They didn’t represent entire tribes. We kept telling ourselves this every time there was an incursion. We went back to Clova. This time he held on to his sardines and kelp. “Those gangs will still be needed at the end,” he told us. “Ours and the ones from other tribes. So I’m not going to say anything to them now. But you’re right, it’s shameful what they’re doing. And unnecessary. We’ll make sure they’re better disciplined after this unpleasantness turns into war and we rely on them for help, once we start leading you.”
Two of Clova’s captains had switched genders since our last visit, which had been only days before. It’s hard to know if they do this for themselves or to unnerve you. I could smell the change in hormones, the sweetness they spilled into the water, but there wasn’t time for their bodies to have shrunk. The new female soldiers sized us up. We did the same. They had the look of mothers who would go berserk protecting their fry and wanted us to know it. They brushed past us with their anal fins. They didn’t need to show their teeth, but both of them did.
We went to Brola. His troops turned us away, swam around us in tightening circles until we had to retreat, and then kept swimming around us as we did. We went to Doloca* of the Dilidi, the only one among them who passes for a chief, mostly because he never tells any of the others what to do. “Come back when you’re wounded, because that will be entertaining for us,” he snorted. There was no one to try among the Ecdda. They’re a shifting mass. Chaos. I won’t call them a school.
So we attacked. The Ecdda are fierce but given to rage where strategy would be more useful. They’re weaker without their sharks. We’d back them into caves and then come at them until they were trapped inside, just like our creature, with additional Gjala swarming behind us in defense. We didn’t wall the Ecdda up, but we’d wound them and then let the scavengers in, the ones drawn to the taste of blood. We picked them off, one by one. Then the barracuda and trevally picked at their wounds, in throngs.
And we went to the Akla. The ones we knew the least and who seemed the most methodical and enigmatic of us all.
* * *
*Do’lō’ca’kl’ēza.
49
If you go back far enough, before there was Ooo or any other octopus, before we existed even as a glimmering speck, before there were fish or corals, eternity was an open ocean. Then life began. Single-celled organisms. Protozoa. Ciliates. Flagellates. Amoebas oozing through the water like specks of jelly. They drifted, fed, turned from one to two to four to nine or ten, and then to the larger numbers that are too chaotic and amorphous to calculate.
They organized themselves. They built. They built themselves. Until they had fins and snouts and gills and livers and hearts and blood. They acquired mouths and teeth and bones. They built themselves up into bodies. And then they built themselves into schools.
They turned themselves into many creatures. They became the coelacanths and the rays, the sharks and jacks and nudibranchs and mackerel and gobies and tuna and parrotfish and pufferfish and razorfish and viperfish and dolphins, and also us. Until the ocean was more than a shifting microbial mat, and everywhere it was alive. The corals weren’t the only ones to build. We all had to do that to be here.
Whatever you think about numbers, there will always be ones that are too swollen and shapeless to fit inside your head, or that bounce around from one side of it to the other. The brain isn’t infinite. Neither is the skull. Not even in the blue whales, where you sometimes have to swim around them, and then purposely ram theirs with your own to get their attention.
The single cells started conglomerating. At first, they must have drifted off from one another, swept by the currents into the enormity of the world around them. There’s power in having endless space to roam—but even more in having a brawny tail and fins and a snapping jaw, and, practically speaking, you could roam through the same space that way, too. So they built themselves into everything around us. Everything living. It’s hard to know if that was luck, determination, continued effort, or some godly design. But whichever it was, most of those advances were made without a brain. The fin and tail appeared over time. You didn’t will them. But once they were there, you knew how to use them.
It’s easier moving rocks. You can sweep them with your tail or nudge them into place with your fin or snout. It’s not precise, but it doesn’t require a lot of time or evolution. Basically, you just get behind and push. But the discovery of the creature’s limbs changed our thinking and the process. It showed us you could build a frame to protect a design (for a while), or a wall to trap an Ecdda (until it died). Just as creatures grew from an agglomeration of cells, structures could be made from an agglomeration of shells and rocks. You just needed to put the pieces together and jumble them around until you had what you wanted. The cliffs and ridges were the result of slow geological forces, but you didn’t have to wait for those. There were ways to speed things up. We don’t have grasping forelimbs like the creature, capable of so much precision, but imagine what you could do if you had many. You could have eight like an octopus. Or you could gather together four land creatures and more or less achieve the same results. But if you amassed an army, the number of limbs would grow with each one you added, until they operated like a fearsome creature. Then who wouldn’t want to enslave them? They’d just have to be obedient enough to learn to school.
50
That was how the Akla put it.
The fighting continued in our waters. It was inevitable that we’d come to them next—there was no place left for us to go. If our tribes have diverged from one another over time, nowhere do you see and feel it more than among the Akla. The scarification of their males when they come of age is only the start. Of course they look different. But they smell just like us.
We could see they’d recently completed the rite. Several male youths were covered in scalloped or striated scabs, while others flaunted their half-healed marks, swimming around us with their chests bulging like puffers just to show them off. Females of the same age ululated and clicked from a short distance away, but weren’t as practiced as the older ones you usually hear. They all smelled young.
The older ones flittered in a camp, a depression on the ocean floor that allowed them to sweep herds of sea cucumbers up against its sides. Every so often an Akla would swoop down from above and grab one of them for a snack. As they bit, viscid fluid would gush out, which they’d slurp from the water before it began to dissipate.
We approached. The scabby youths weren’t far from our tails, with their cheerleaders just behind them. Everyone needs a purpose. You go out and find one, if your world doesn’t press one upon you first.
I took the lead, passing above the cucumber herds until we reached the center of their camp, where the Akla could approach from all sides and surround us. Gjila and I would have no swift way out, and we knew they’d know we knew it. That was the point. It was a display of deference. The ululations and clicking increased. We waited for them to die out, but they didn’t. They wouldn’t. They wanted us to know we’d need to talk above them. No niceties would be granted. The Caavaju had offered sardines and kelp, and look where that got us. But touch one of their cucumbers, and all teeth would be bared. That much was clear. Perhaps that was a start.
“I don’t have to tell you about the fighting,” I said into the water.
“You don’t eat the octopuses after you kill them,” one of them answered. “You could begin by telling us about that.”
Amid the clicking and ululating, it was impossible to tell where the speaker’s voice was coming from.
I finned forward without knowing if it was in the right direction. I wanted to exert myself. Perhaps how we presented ourselves would matter to them most. “Those were only a few occurrences,” I began. “Committed by our young. They were angry. Helpless. Which is new for any of us to feel. That’s not an excuse, but it’s not why we’re here.”
“Octopuses aren’t good to herd. They’re much too smart. You can herd them once their arms are removed, as long as you eat them before they grow back. But you’d need to be a monster to do that. Is that what the Gjala are?”
“We came to talk about an alliance. Between our tribes.”
“You didn’t answer.”
“You know the answer. We’ve come to discuss joining together.”
“Why?”
“Because, like I said, you know about the fighting.” I finned forward again, trying a new direction.
“We know that no one is fighting with us.”
“The fighting will grow worse. It will spread. Everything spreads in the ocean.”
“You talk like this is our first time in these waters. And yet here you are, in our camp.”
The clicking kept growing louder, until it was a single indivisible thrum, a drone that came from all directions, one that no one in our own tribe made. Each new click filled the gap between the others. The Akla youth were equally adept, because it was all of the Akla who were making the noise together.
I raised my voice. “I mean you no disrespect. Nor does Gjila.” But it was clear I’d underestimated them. The female adolescents had demonstrated that with their determination and cohesion. And maybe Gjila had too, because he’d let me go on uninterrupted, when both of us saw I wasn’t getting through. Nevertheless, I continued: “The waters are different now. They’re changing. If we could detect this in any of our usual ways, we’d all agree. We can observe the ocean—the shifts in temperature, the currents, storms, the minerals, schools, and the health of the herds. Like your delicious one of cucumbers. We can even sense emotion, what that does to you inside your body, and how you might react. But we can’t detect words until they occur. Or attacks.”
I tried to listen, to see if they were listening. The thrumming continued.
“We all remember when the seas were cooler,” I continued, too. “When the corals were healthier. We thought we knew everything about this world, but maybe that isn’t true. Some say that’s the surface sadness. And its poison. We’ve always preferred the deep, where we thought nothing on land would affect us. But there are chasms here. Trenches that plunge the length of a thousand whales into the planet. And widening ones, where we can also disappear. So I’ll be honest. We’ve never liked one another. Our tribes have kept apart. We haven’t mixed. We haven’t needed to. That’s our sadness, too.”
The thrumming abated just enough for a single response to come through: “If a Gjala mates with an Akla, we’ll kill you all.” There was a pause. “But if a Gjala courts an Akla, we will only kill him or her.”
Now Gjila pushed forward. “Would you kill that Akla, too?”
“Don’t be silly,” the voice responded. “No Akla would ever want to mate with one of you.”
“Then you have nothing to worry about,” Gjila answered.
“The Gjala kill octopuses. Everyone knows that across the ocean. That worries us very much. That depravity. That monstrosity. But you’ve come to talk about fighting, and that’s supposed to worry us less?”
“No,” I answered, “it should worry you more, because the fighting will become a wave and you will see it, and it will kill Akla, Gjala, Banjxa, Caavaju, Dilidi, Ecdda, and Fantaskla, too.”
“And also some octopuses, we suppose. So you’d like us to join you in starting that killing now. To team with you? And not just to tell ancient stories and sing. Although you can tell we’re quite good at singing.” By now, the thrumming had picked up volume, surging against my fins and skin, and pressing relentlessly into our heads. Had the walls of the circle the Akla made around us grown closer, too?
51
They had. The circle had slowly been constricting around us as our talk, or whatever it was, progressed. The droning had masked the Akla movements, and the speaker hadn’t used any of our language’s positional inflections to indicate they were approaching. Now the Akla were nearly upon us on all sides, and hovering above us, too.
“Show them you’re unbothered,” Gjila whispered to me, as we felt tails flicking above our heads. “Let them know you’re pleased they’ve come closer.”
I looked back at him quickly. “Give me more minerals than that.”
“Lead.”
The droning was louder now, but I knew that meant I wouldn’t need to raise my own voice as much. Because of their proximity, the Akla wouldn’t be able to hide where the speaker’s voice was coming from. I watched her emerge from a wall of bodies, approaching me until we were nearly touching. The last time I’d been this close to another female was with you.
