(2019)
(Part of A Matter of Time)
100 million years hence
Obsidian-plated pagodas towered in the mist, beaded with condensation. Knots of vegetation fountained up into the silver sky, dotted with dark flowers like open wounds. Carefully delimited ponds of brackish water formed perfect geometric designs on the lowest level of the city, shaded by mangrove-like buildings dripping with moss. Several breeds of burden beasts flapped their moist wings, some slow and majestic, some minute and darting, all laden with parcels and tablets.
Many of those tablets bore messages of grief. The warriors of the city had been away for many months, shedding their blood in a distant plain, leaving poor bones to rot far away from their natal pond. Some had come back in flesh, with their backs cruelly scarred and their tongue-hand maimed or missing altogether. Pious archivists would puncture the names of the fallen on squares of wood and hang them on high strings to clatter in the wind.
In these days, so loud and constant was the clattering that Huura went out every day to fish in the upstream waters where few ever went. His wife had been taken by the recruiters and sent out beyond the northern hills many months before, and no message had come from her since. In the night before leaving she had left behind a clutch of eggs, all of which had failed to hatch, even when bathed in the purest water and attached to the most auspicious reeds; thus often occurred with eggs laid in anguish.
The woven boat slid out slowly on the green water, abuzz with microbats and dragonflies. Driftwood floated lazily downstream, dragging mats of algal froth. Huura breathed in air sweet with vegetal decay, balancing his weight on the muddy floor, caulked with gum-resin, and idly poking at the ballast stones with his tongue-hand. Life swarmed just beneath the mirror surface; not as abundant as in the ancient times, when people were few and things were many, and there was no reason to quarrel.
It felt empty, that tottering vessel, that soulless pile of stones a poor substitute for a distant love. Still, he paddled westward in the vital waters.
Here the forest was open. Even in the steaming air, direct sunlight stole from him vital moisture. He withdrew his tongue-hand in its gular sac, except to steer the boat when necessary. He longed to wash his parched skin in the river's green water, but he feared to catch some dreadful fungal rot. A few tadpoles swam fearlessly in the river, doubtlessly war orphans to whom nobody had taught to stay in safe waters. Many indeed showed worrying white patches on their young backs. How many of them would live to sprout limbs, and how many of those would retain them all?
Once in a while Huura plunged a grass basket in the upper water. Good enough to gather the floating nuts and snails, decent food to sustain oneself during the serious fishing.
For many hours Huura followed the river against the current, and came to a region where life flowered more densely. The branches of the rice-trees wove high above the river, their sheath-leaves splintering the sunlight into a myriad amoebic patches, brightly colored slugs gliding with broad fins from one to another. Silvery spiders laid vast sparkling nets across the water, attempting to catch the slimy flyers. From green bundles of leaves or leaf-like flesh, thin tongues darted out at the passing insects.
The people of this age of Earth had ambiguous feelings about the deeper swamp-forest. A part of them, presumably, recognized in their bones the steaming cradle of their ancestors, where industrious tongue-hands and unclouding minds had lifted each other out of brutedom; the receptacle to which their body had molded like water in a pot. At the same time, people half-remembered their flight from this receptacle into the wide bright spaces of civilization. They now felt a numinous terror at the countless things creeping and swarming about, at the endless cycle of consumption and regrowth. They had given them the names of fair and terrible spirits, none of whom was quite kind or cruel, but all dryly indifferent to the concerns and preferences of people, just like the clockwork of nature and fathomless time.
Now Huura could hear the secret piping and whistling of the forest folks, see their blurry shadows leaping from bough to bough. A strange midway point between worlds, all the indifference of natural processes tempered by the corruptibility of people. It was possible, after all, to gain favor among them if one could guess and satisfy their desires, or showing mercy to a spirit in the rare occasion it fell under one's power. Sometimes they made demands, heavy or light or simply strange: they were equally likely to ask for the heart of a child or for a pinch of dirt. And what were the polities of the world – the power that had dragged Huura's love from their home and sent her to the fields of death – other than mad spirits that had grown larger and mightier, and now spoke through richly-dressed people?
The water burst open here and there, as struck by a blow from beneath; rotting vegetation sunk in the thick mud of the river bottom, and sometimes gas escaped in bubbling eruptions. The rice tree branches swaying in the wind, rigid tubes connected by flexible joints, caressed each other like tangles of living fingers. Ancient shells of giant turtles, bleached by a hundred generations of sun and rain, lay half-buried in the river banks, swarming with minute water bats. Yes. Here was the heart of the swamp-forest, the palace of its invisible masters.
Here Huura cast his traps with many prayers and oaths. Sticky ropes, coated with a kind of vegetal tar, hung under bobbing buoys of cork, like the stinging filaments of a vast jellyfish, to ensnare all that was drawn by the bait at the bottom. Furious yanks on a buoy revealed the struggle of a trapped prey, which was swiftly drawn out of the river, thrown twitching and wheezing on the woven floor, and mercifully cut in twain with a flint axe. Iridescent scales and branching legs piled quickly among the ballast stones, and good meat into Huura's bag.
When the afternoon light was dwindling and the city appeared as a distant glow downstream, a struggle begun more violent than the others, to the point that the boat itself started to quake.
Huura withdrew the offending rope, and there fell in the boat the writhing form of a hand-fish. Its body was covered in fine brown pelt, flattened to flex up and down rather than sideways as scaly fish did; it ended with a cleft horizontal tail fin, five bony rays in either half. Its rounded head swiveled around, gaping and staring at the woven walls with front-facing eyes, though not suffocating, for this water creature breathed air like people. Just below the head, thin but well-formed arms flailed at the sides, looking for something to grasp with tiny five-fingered hands, made to hold onto reeds and stones as it waited for preys.
A stupendous catch, certainly, for not only this hand-fish was larger than any Huura had ever seen or heard about, but it was found in the river in the season in which all its kind should have been out in the sea. So much that he wondered if this was not a test, or a trap. What merit had he, poor illiterate fisherman, to deserve such a bounty?
The creature flopped on its back, turned its eyes – round, bulging, glistening, red piercing eyes – on Huura and fixed them on him, two pieces of burning coal. It opened its lips on a row of fish-hook teeth, as if to say, Why am I here? Why have you called me? What right do you have to hold me captive? There was something grand in that lowly mud-dweller, like a vast and fearsome mind dethroned and imprisoned in a packet of squirming flesh, still threatening to burst out and remake creation in its image as it may have been in ancient times.
Huura felt his gular sac constrict, and turned up the palm of his tongue-hand in a gesture of submission. In his brief flight from the world of people he had truly ventured too far. It seemed an embodied spirit had found its way on his boat, the earthly being and the unearthly at each other's mercy.
It was not a difficult choice, one between being the object of revenge or gratitude. He picked up the hand-fish as delicately as he would his own tadpoles, and whispered to it his name and prayers – remember this fisherman, prince of the deep – that he might feel again the touch of that beloved tongue-hand and hear her nectar-sweet croaks. Then he wiped the traces of tar from its warm side, and flung it back into water.
It broke through the surface, and swam down. Through shimmering circles it briefly turned to look at Huura with those eyes like dying embers, and then disappeared as if it never had been. This occurred as the Sun did the same in the marshes upstream. This must have been a powerful spirit indeed.
So Huura took back all the ropes and the buoys, fearful of less benign encounters in the vanishing light, and let the current bring back his solid vessel toward the glow of the town. A warm breath was blowing from the uplands, smelling of sun-baked vegetation and sharp metal; and even tremulous stars shone through gaps in the dome of steam. A pleasant farewell from the wild land after all, perhaps a good sign about his wish.
The pagodas now glistened in the light of the lamps, and the ponds had become black patches of sky. The wooden squares still clattered in the wind, the croaks of people suffering and waiting far away.