Читать книгу Humanity Prime - Bruce Mcallister - Страница 4

CHAPTER ONE

Waterjoyup is the name of my woman. Waterjoyup is the name of her soul.

When each child is born in the shadows of towering yau—high in their broad wrinkled leaves, near the surface where ocean meets dryness—the mother takes a deep first look into her child’s soul, reaches the strongest image of rhythm there—not at darkest depths, but at deepest rim of light. And that vision is the child’s name, the truest truth of naming.

Her mother found her soul a rushing, contented, rising current. So her name is waterjoyup, veined with light, and her name’s image drew me to her when I was young, needing currents to ride against slow dark dreams of death.

And above waterjoyup’s deepest light are delicate rivers of soft coral colors, which attracted me too at our first meeting.

And above her unspoken streams, precisely webbed thoughts find ordered dance, and those added to my pleasure, as they still do.

And embracing all of these in the solid world—her rushing rivering colors under tumbling feeling thoughts—lives her personal flesh, which is simple to love as the cupping hand of the deeper her.

(Do not hide in the past.)

...But this is not the moment of waterjoyup’s birth, nor our long first meeting.

She is dying.

Never alone in her desire, she has always wanted death. But her soul now gives neither the brightest blue of dancing joy, nor pale flow of a single comfort. Were I another man in this moment, her name would seem allpain, closedead, darkdowndim.

I look with my face’s eyes to the skin, flesh and bone of her face, which twitches now like a fish’s tail, twists and bobs among the wrinkled brown leaves waving and weaving around us. No healthy color remains now to any part of her trembling body.

She is pained by the white moss of sickness on her skin, and by the nearing birth of our child.

My soul opens itself to swallow hers, and in turn she swallows me.

My body twitches in our twisting bobbing, and my soul shakes in our sharing screaming.

The white moss began seven days ago. To our faces’ eyes it first appeared in the fine creases of webbing between her fingers. It went on to cover her arms, her shoulders, her back, the back of her legs, down to the ends of her tails, which slowly began to shrivel as the pale growth covered her.

To the ignorant eye alone, she might seem beautiful white coral in the shape of a woman—but the jagged moans of her darkened soul—

“I am sorryyy...,” she cries, and her coral rivers harden, black teeth now, crying, “Darksparklepains, sageragingdark, makingmetakeme...”

“The crawwwwling pain of skin,” she cries in her fading web of thoughts, “hides the good pain of the child’s coming. It is wrong not to feel its birth. It won’t be born tailless, will it?”

“No,” I say as I sink with her, “it will be all right.”

But our first child was born without tails.

Old poundgrayly took the child away.... We both hinted to our euyom friend—we could not do it ourselves. Poundgrayly took the infant far away from us and pressed his ancient scaly limbs over the tiny nose and mouth.

That is all I know about it, because poundgrayly was kind. He received it himself, but he never let the child’s moment of death slip from his memory to our two souls.

(The screaming again.)

“No, it will be all right,” I repeat, urging her.

“I am so sorrryyyy....”

Our leafy shelter of swaying yau is but a day’s swim from the territories of neighboring souls, but they seem so far away now—the truest truth of lonely loss, another’s dying...when mine would be the good one, long desired.

(Hide in some shallow truth.)

We worked together to weave the living yau stems, for a basket to hold our second child. Such stems are thick, slippery, but weaving and knotting them seemed easy for us together—even in her sickness, which is—

(No, hide!)

When the basket was finished, my body’s work was too. The work yet ahead for my soul would be simple. (“A father,” every father tells his son, “must guard his soul against involvement with the mother’s pain, to leave him free, to let him watch for any hungry jaws attracted by birth’s agony.”)

But it is difficult to keep my soul from touching hers. The pains of white sickness have been calling for a long time. I have shared them without will. To leave her alone now, to deny a bond of pain, is the dark of wrong.

“Is it my fault?” she cried. “I ate wrong things? I did not eat enough? Would finer sponges or fish or shell’s meat have ended this sickness, made me ready for the second child?”

“No fault,” I say. “Sickness is never one soul’s fault.”

(Whose fault?)

(Hide in blaming!)

I do blame! Her? The mother of us all...never letting us leave...never giving birth...one body of darkness, wetness hold....

(You cannot hide.)

Her pains run deeper now. The muscles of soul, black hardened reef, chum shoals of deepest night.

My own muscles of back, arms and legs twitch in sharing pain, echo in quiver of tails’ ends.

(Now!)

“Comes the child!” she cries, I cry. Her body curls up, her soul curls down.

Sickness pains swallow screams between thighs, and soul’s voice screams to me, screaming me. Screaming.

Our child leaves her, slips out, floats away from her. The brown leaves wave around them both. The currents are calm, leave them alone.

He floats inside his glistening sac. It is thin, and my eyes touch him faintly, twisting, turning.

No blood flows from her. It is all inside the sac, which the child attacks with tiny fists, with nervous light of his simpler soul.

He breaks through.

Blood flows out, red, ocean’s gray flows in, and they blend, and he takes his first weak breath.

(Salt of blood, salt of sea.)

His fists rip the sac completely.

(Now!)

He breathes pure water.

(Now!)

Waterjoyup dies.

Ripping pains of death, over moss, over child, descend in the wave of sharing.

I die, glad to die, brown pounding with her down.

Praise the end of water’s embrace!

(But—)

A light jumps from the dying her. To me a light, one image, and then I lose it. Darkness only as she dies.

As we die, the ripping nearing end....

I am dead.

(But—)

I am—

It clears. Death’s dark colors brighten, and I live. Still screaming, blaming still.

Waterjoyup’s soul is still here, somewhere nearer than darkness. Screaming still, but distant. Body near, but dead.

Even if the screaming is hers, nothing can be done. The cupping hand is gone, the flesh is finished.

We are never certain about the screams that follow body’s end. Perhaps they are merely the face of our own deepest screams...from the loss of a soul once nearest.

(Move on.)

With face’s eyes I look to the second son. I look for a long time.

(His raw new soul, you must enter it. Find his name.)

No...I refuse.

The first son was born deformed—legs without tails, hands without webbing. The second son is no different. He has small normal tails moving before me, has webbed fingers fanning the water, but he is deformed, for his soul will be deformed.

His soul will have no mother. And a father broken by his woman’s death.

With face’s eyes again, I look at the child. Floats in water reddened by birth. His left hand is twisted in its bones, and always will be. No matter; he has greater deformity.

I look beneath his skin. He floats in shallow darkness, wanting touch of warming flesh and still warmer rivers of some mother’s soul.

(Look deeper.)

I cannot. Will not.

I am screamdeep, and my soul cries to me: “He does not know what his birth has done!”

I refuse to enter.

(Listen!)

Suddenly something rises, some light to the inner eye.

From a hidden crack in my soul, from pains shared in her death, springs again the last brief light she gave me.

In her sinking down, her rushing out, she found a truth as a mother finds. Found a moment to look deep in the soul of the son, and to throw her finding out and up, to another soul.

Her vision bobs up in sight, and remains for me to know and hold.

“I haaave found it!” she cries, as she secretly cried before she died. “In it, in it, in his soul, I seeeee a million fish dancing on the surface, on the sea, dancing in dangerous dryness—but they sing, glad singing!”

(Misunderstand?)

Is it not the same vision?

There is another vision, known to every man when given by man to woman, in the truest act before their child’s birth. The vision of a fish...pale scaleless flesh...crawling gasping from the sea to dangerous dryness....

No, that is another vision—lacks singing, dancing.

So I take him now, my hands larger than his head. To place him in the basket of living stems.

So I know that this living son’s name is fishsinger.

I—

I—

No, I—

I am—

I am fishsinger. The pink waking in the real now!

I am fishsinger, but I can be my father or mother or a thousand of my forefathers whenever I want—or whenever I am pulled, pushed, sucked into such memories. Such is the purple manner of soul and memory for us all, and the truth is one sparkling crag: the precision of sharing and talk between the souls makes past times, places and souls no less than now, as near as here.

Yes, of course, a brown truth: There are dangers in memories given to you by others...and they are dangers without promise of a real death, only dangers of madness.

Mother’s death through Father’s eyes happened to me many times—but the impressive time in memory’s eye was four hundred twenty-one days after Father’s—yes, Father’s—death.

So look to see it all:

In body, I am alone this day, in the territory given me by screamdeep’s death on the four hundred twenty-first day before. My flesh is alone, without the two other bodies familiar to my soul and eyes. The old poundgrayly, sensing the proper season, has gone to be with his gentle females. And the dumb ayom, whom I know as murmursome, is away for no reason other than the fickle bouncing of his dumb pale soul.

I am floating, one leg and tail curled around a thick brown yau stem, not far from the surface of the sea. I am floating where the light from the twin lights shining in dryness far beyond sea’s surface softens all the darkness thrown up by the ocean floor. The water around me was as warm as blood, woven with fish-eye sparkle, bright with the murmuring souls of nearby fish, of plants flowing leafy brown around.

See further: ah, the distant bottom. Dark pores of crags. Endless coral souls in yellow mumblings. Red roaring souls of taloned ioe. Enormous oio, dangerous only in their bulky carelessness.

So I am floating where the quiet current comforts those souls of brighter colors, where no fish flees, since no teeth snap nor dark souls scream. I am the young body who wants to relax alongside the simpler games of fish.

My soul churns in the deep brown mounds of aloneness. Though unaware that a common wish for death is the arm of my deepest churning, still I feel it, and try to flee through my face’s eyes alone.

My eyes move; I look. I ignore my deepest soul.

But the scales of nearby fish flash in a way that reminds me of Father’s eyes, and this brings more churning.

So I close my face’s eyes, try another fleeing, try thoughts of common truths.

(See it: Your own skin is not shiny scaly. Its color is a yellowed gray, and it feels like the raspy hide of a muyom.)

I open my eyes.

The cracks of the gills of nearby fish remind me of Father’s scars, shiny marks on a muscular back, and I close my eyes again.

(See it: You do not have slits on your neck for breathing. Instead the waters pass through your nose—or sometimes through your mouth—into your chest, and then back out again, warmer than when they entered.)

I open my eyes once more. But the image of scars persists, so I hide in the light of a wider truth.

(But you are not so alone in differences. The bodies of fish are not wholly unlike yours. Your legs end in darker tails that ripple like yau leaves when you want to move—not unlike the smaller tails of the smaller bodies darting around you. Their tails take them where they wish to go—just as yours do, though your destinations are different than theirs. See it: You swim the familiarity of your territory, or venture farther when you choose to attend one of the congregations of your kind of “fish” every two hundred days....)

But on this day I have no desire to move, to travel anywhere. My right hand clenches and unclenches, and my twisted left hand trembles, both of them following the nervous motion that is deeper than my body.

All the raging travel I need is within my soul, and I try to deny it.

(See it: On the outer edge of your soul runs the babble of fish swimming near you, some within eyes’ touch, but most beyond it. And among their yellow babble flow the pale murmurs of those tiny souls that inhabit every point in the sea, though the eye never manages to touch them. “Those millions of tiny souls,” your father told you often, “make possible the talk and touch between our souls, and all larger souls. Without will, they capture our colors and thoughts; without will, they pass on the talk of our souls, through their own endless hordes until our feeling thoughts reach other souls of our kind, or the friendly soul of another kind, or the dark raging soul of a toothed jaw.)

But the churning traveling in me rushes deeper than these thoughtful lights.

At other times I would be able to touch the mumblings of dumb murmursome—a simple friend—or the wisdom of poundgrayly, the old euyom befriended by screamdeep in his own youth. But today no such touches can be made, and I do not even pause to question murmursome’s rare absence, or the unusual length of poundgrayly’s visit to his females and their islands.

Because Mother is with me, as is Father. Though screaming dying, she is still alive in screamdeep’s memory of her day of death, and I pried this memory from Father long ago.

I become Father watching and sharing Mother’s dying....

“A soul may give his experience to another soul,” Father once said. “The soul who receives is able to remember the gift of event as if it were his own, from the beginning and in the now. But the dark truth is: such gifts can be dangerous. The truth is: a child who receives too many gifts from others’ memories may lose his own personal soul, may forget who he is and fall into splitting darkness. And if too many of the gifts are moments of death...

I become Mother dying.

And Father’s soul, in Father’s memory, will not let go of me.

I struggle to leave, and in the end, when the memory is spent, I win.

But I lose in other ways.

Once again I return from waterjoyup’s death, screamdeep’s agony, and my own raw birth with the bleeding sore of a truest truth: I am a terrible child named fishsinger, killer of mothers.

I always wanted—as any soul would—the memory of my own birth. But when I finally received it, it became death itself; and still I want it—as any soul would.

I started young to pry, coax, plead for Father to give it to me, soul to soul, in the vivid now of given events.

Father refused, denied, protected me from it with the pretended pink of a lie: “Waterjoyup...? She died when you were young. That is all. The simplest of truest truths.”

But dark colors of mood, strange rivers of feeling flowed often from screamdeep’s soul when the momentary thought of waterjoyup came to either of us. So I continued to pry, to peer, to question, or to probe at more dishonest levels.

Sixty days before screamdeep’s death, I found him asleep in the yau, and pierced his memory for the truer truth—

—that fishsinger’s life had brought waterjoyup’s death.

It did not matter that Father no longer saw it that way. He had once, and once would always be now.

Curiosity brought me pains that cannot be dimmed by time. And still my blue curiosity learned nothing from the experience.

The next time—after Father’s death—brings equal pains, in a probe of poundgrayly’s soul.

The face of wrinkled scales, the tiny eyes, the ancient depths, witnessed screamdeep’s death. Without will, the man offered his death’s moment, and such an offering can never be refused, with or without will.

To my own eyes and eye of soul the day of Father’s death occurred too simply—incomplete:

I was sick, not from white moss on skin, but from the smallest invisible souls who had chosen my stomach as their territory. Screamdeep left me with a man and woman in the nearest territory and went with poundgrayly to find a scarce food called “eye shells” whose meat was believed good for sicknesses of the stomach and chest.

I waited, and was surprised when the pains of stomach began to leave on their own, as the thousands of tiny souls within began dying and dimming in the victory of my body.

Poundgrayly came back.

The return of one soul—when two had left—should have been enough to bring understanding, but I could not touch the truth so easily.

Eyes always have less range than souls. It was one lone soul, indistinguishable in the distance, who called softly to me from gray waters:

“I am called poundgrayly, who is alone and sorry.”

Poundgrayly approached and offered only: “Your screamdeep father has died. One accident, without will, his or mine, at the talons of ioe.”

My muscles hardened, and I probed for more.

Poundgrayly refused. Small eyes blinking. Heavy soul pounding brown, like a shelter of leaves, reprimanding: “I cannot give it. Your screamdeep father would not have me give it.”

“So you do have it!” I shouted, green rivers browning. “He did give you his death!”

“He did not choose to—I did not choose to receive it. Gift without will. But now poundgrayly will not give it to you. Why do you desire his moment so?”

“He was my father! Two souls share from birth to death. He would want it so! I have the right...”

“You do not.”

I prodded, probed and bothered the old soul. Poundgrayly defended with: “I find you stupid. You desired your mother’s death moment, and you got it, and agony with it, and crags of guilt you do not deserve. But perhaps you deserve something for your stupid unlearning way.”

I gave no answer. I began waiting.

After many days the moment comes. Poundgrayly eases the shelter of his soul for a single moment, and I ride the moment into memory, find screamdeep’s darkest day, and it takes me completely, without will. Once again I become screamdeep, and ride a quiet wave toward the violence of death.

Fishsinger—

I—

Screamdeep—

I am here. Swimming.

Poundgrayly is with me, following above and behind. A bright wide shell of friendship’s constancy arches from his euyom soul, arches out with a wish to cover my own—just as his body’s hard green shell protects wrinkled flesh and would cover mine if souls could have their way with flesh, skin and rigid bone.

Our destination nears, and we share waking dreams of “eye shells” in the rumored bed at a sandy place.

“Nothing is simple,” I say with the formal fringe of my soul.

“Explain,” poundgrayly answers, the fringe too abrupt for understanding.

“The bed is near an island, one place where reefs or rocks assure ioe presence, or some other dark jaws of our choice.”

“Perhaps. It is said the bed lies in an inlet.”

“Certainly between two masses of rock or coral crags—the perfect opportunity for jaws. Certainly we will find ourselves digging in sand surrounded by caves.”

I am joking, offering the bright fins of a smiling soul. Nothing is ever certain, and poundgrayly in his wisdom would be the first to announce it.

“Do ready your soul, though,” I say. “Get your ioe lies in shape.”

All ioe are darkly stupid. Their souls feel only large shadows or the brightest of lights, so the lies we throw at them never fail to protect us. And though most euyom are clumsy with lies—finding learned images too hazy for perfect molding, too slippery for easy handling—poundgrayly is an experienced soul, and perhaps he is somewhat talented. We have managed to learn from each other since the day our depths first touched.

But in the end, quickness and precision of the soul are the only certain way for protection.

The yau are beginning to thin out.

“One pause,” I say and stop swimming. I uproot a long yau stem from its lone rock base at the sandy bottom.

Poundgrayly knows what I wish to do. The idea came from him, as do many ideas for hands—even though they are not for his kind of limbs: flat, scaly, useful only for swimming.

We swim on and I strip the stem of its leaves, then tie it in close knots to form a basket for any shells we find.

The sandy place we seek appears now to our souls: the murmuring of the large shells buried there. And now to face’s eyes: the shallow bright water warm in its nearness to a beach’s hot dryness.

I reach the place first and begin digging in its softness. Poundgrayly will wait to see what my hands are able to find.

The first shells I find set my soul to yellow chattering, serve only to make me want the discovery of more. Fishsinger must have enough shell meat that his stomach’s cure is sure.

Here: four shells next to each other!

I place them in the basket, and decide to choose eye’s way: I wait for the murk of disturbed sand to clear. The soul by itself could see well enough, but imprecision of direction is always frustrating—face’s eyes are precise.

Three more here.

Even two there—

What? Where?

My soul is struck by sudden formless tumble of darkest red.

(Lift your face’s eyes!)

My eyes touch nothing.

But my soul finds the familiar red forms of ioe.

I clench the basket tightly, as my soul clenches the proper lie, the perfect form, the raging colors of the deceit—ready to throw it at the ioe.

Poundgrayly nods quietly with a pale softness, and together we throw out our lies, which blend as one, and the ioe are fooled.

The image for the pack of six ioe charging: Two wounded female ioe here—do not approach!

It is the most common lie, one that brings roaring fear to simpler souls: the female of the ioe kind, twice the size of any ioe male, five times as fierce when wounded, fearing.... So a pack of ioe will attack a pair of giant oio in mating before it would dare approach two raging females of its own dark taloned kind.

So my eyes touch the inevitable: the ioe slow their rush, their own black webbed talons pawing frantically to stop them, their skin-taut heads thrown back on sinewy necks in simple assurance that their bodies will follow.

We keep our lies steady in their form, their jagged rhythm—which would have been tiring in my body’s youth, would have darkened my soul in those days...and to most euyom it would be impossible. But the two of us manage it easily, and find its familiarity even amusing.

Keeping up my half of the lie, I begin swimming back toward the shelter of yau in deeper water. The basket full of shells hangs from my arm, and poundgrayly swims in front of me.

What?

More dark red—

Where? (There!) Others here!

The second pack is nearly upon me. Poundgrayly throws out a quick new lie. Image to the second pack’s souls: a giant thrashing oio with plated flesh, dangerous tail.

The new lie strikes the second pack. They try to slow, but their bodies tumble on toward me.

(Throw out your own!)

I tighten, surround myself with one precise ioe lie. The second pack tries harder to slow. But the image to the first pack’s souls has changed: Confusing things, unclear threats—one wounded female disappears, appears a thrashing giant, remains one female—where the threat? Fear is dim—

The first pack rushes on, almost to me.

(Escape in body!)

No, death will be good.

(Body! Escape!)

I turn to swim, catch one leg and tail in the basket I dropped, flail out with arms.

My body thrashes, the basket entangled. My lie is dropped, dissolves.

(No!)

Two packs of ioe in one small area? Improbable....

(No, throw out a lie!)

And their timing of attack? Improbable too....

(Throw a lie!)

Both packs together did sense our presence, forgot their hatred of each other—

(Yes, you desire death.)

Talons reach me, flesh of arm, bones of pain, reddening waters, souls roaring redder.

(At last.)

Talons on face, one eye dark, pain deeper darker—

“Poundgrayly! Get away!”

Pains are darkness. Yellow never was—

I di—

I—

I—

I—

“Fishsinger, fool!”

Who where what here?

“Always the stupid boy.”

Poundgrayly? Poundgrayly....

So I stir without will from the memory. Many, many times since I snatched Father’s experience from poundgrayly’s moment of relaxed guarding have I relived it this way, and each time I fail to reach Father’s death moment—but only because it does not exist for me. Poundgrayly managed to keep it from me, so I hold only the moments leading up to it to sink myself in.

And this time! Poundgrayly himself has arrived to interrupt my reveries, to pull me from the edge of memory’s incompleteness.

I throw at him brown teeth of instant hatred.

I sink back down, try to be the dying man again.

I—

I—

“Fishsinger!”

Again I try. I—

“Listen to this old soul. Young hardened reef, shallow love of self, listen. Foolish and fooled, your soul is an ioe’s stomach. Shall I shed the dark used food of my body and feed you with it?”

This is the way poundgrayly always pulls me out: a wave of insults demanding soul’s defense in the presence of now.

I begin my own wave of insults, but then stop.

A thing is different this time. There are always reprimands from poundgrayly, but this time his soul is unusually disturbed, sharp purple feelings, nervous edging.

“A secret problem?” I ask, green paling in sarcasm.

“Secret only to your blindness: a personal world swallowing you. Indulge yourself, selfishsinger, and miss the brightest day your kind has ever wanted.”

Such talk is meaningless to me. Brightest day? Of course he is trying to fool me, pull me completely from my waking dream of dying.

So I play with the old soul. “I understand. You have finally decided to give me Father’s moment.”

“Stop this! Listen: A bigshinegray has come.”

I ignore him. “You still refuse to—”

And then my soul rises up in understanding. Bigshinegray?

“You are trying to fool me!” I shout

“No. No.”

“One has come?”

“Yes.”

“One has come! Has come!”

“So you do remember the waiting dream inside your kind’s souls. If you had bothered to hold memory of it all along—in all times since screamdeep’s death—feelings of aloneness would not have taken you so strongly. The waiting dream has always held your kind together—”

“Yes, yes, but such advice is unimportant now! A bigshinegray has finally come—to where?”

“An island, as the dream expected. Two females of mine witnessed its coming. You see, I prepared their souls well for this day—gave them clear formed visions of what the big, tall, pointed, upright, shiny, round, gray dream of your kind would look like to face’s eyes—”

“Yes, yes, I will certainly thank your two females—all of them too—but—”

“It is without a single doubt,” poundgrayly continues, interrupting with the babble of his own excitement, “a bigshinegray, no misreceived light to face’s eyes, nor nervous dream forced into the present. It surely came from endless dryness above us, slowed with bright hot light as it neared the island falling down, and came to rest upright—”

“I believe you! Where is the island? A territory near?”

Poundgrayly arrives now within eyes’ range. I stare at the two small eyes that blink over his beak, and grow impatient.

“Which territory?”

“I told you a moment ago, but you were not listening. Yours.”

“No....”

“No? You fear the responsibility?”

“Of course not! It is no because I cannot understand how.”

My territory? How? There are thousands of my kind, and their thousands of large territories. That mine is the one the bigshinegray has come to is impossible!

“More foolish thoughts—when this is one day no foolish soul should have awakened. Listen: every soul of your kind thought as you, believed the dream would eventually come—but not that the coming would be to his or her territory. ‘The world is large, and I am small,’ each soul thought as you. But when the bigshinegray came, it could only touch one territory, and chance does not apply to places or souls chosen by certainty’s ways. Cease your pink chattering, begin your swim.”

Perhaps I do fear the responsibility, deeper than the fringe of my self’s pale knowledge:

Suddenly the wish for Father’s death moment rushes to me again, offering strange escape from another moment—this one that my people have wanted since the beginning of our times.

“I go, but before I go,” I say, “give me the death moment.”

“Dumbest soul, starved yourself today? Your hunger for death so fierce. You are truly one of your dark-dreaming kind in their—”

“Give! Please....”

“I say no. Perhaps you will get it soon, perhaps never. If it is given, it will not be before you have greeted the souls inside the bigshinegray. If your kind could see you now, view your craving of a moment deeply trivial in this moment’s light, they would make pieces of your flesh. Go! A day’s swim lies before you.”

The hunger dims. I begin to remember images of who I am, who my people are, why our world is divided into wide territories of lone waitings, why we have been waiting, watching, living at all for so long.

I begin to move my tails, one up, one down, knees not touching. I tuck my head against my chest, arch my shoulders properly, kick harder, and the bright water begins to slip by.

Behind me poundgrayly offers: “I shall move on to tell your kind this day’s event. In the moment you reach the bigshinegray’s island, perhaps all your people will know, to the ends of water....”

The old soul dims in the distance, and I hear only faintly, “One female of mine awaits you at the chosen island. Do not keep her soft soul waiting.”

I swim on alone.

I would fall again into living memories with screamdeep and waterjoyup, but a larger pink memory holds me. For the first moment in my soul’s life I carry fully and endlessly the vision of all the waiting souls that are like my own.

A bigshinegray....

Though it belongs to the start of time, I remember well the first bigshinegray.

See it: The ancient memories among my people are accurately formed, properly hued, passed down from father to son, soul to younger soul, precision of shared impression in a gift to each new age of children.

As I swim on, I speak with myself, and the bottomless mouth within me opens. “See it: Many details were lost in time’s passing. The soul selects what bits of now it sees, and remembers even fewer bits to be given to other souls, younger, other. But the important parts of our beginning here have not been forgotten.”

I remember easily the forefathering times of now as if I myself had been alive then to touch them:

He— I— I am—

I am one of the breathers of dryness, the touchers of dry ground, asleep in the first bigshinegray. I awake. I look around me with good eyes in the dryness I breathe, and remember that the great shiny gray cave which holds me has been traveling quickly for the longest time through an endless darkness drier than the dryness I breathe.

“Wake up!” I say to another man—speaking with pounding rhythms from my dry moving mouth.

Yes, and I remember now that soon the travel will end, that my bigshinegray will fall from the darkness to a fine dry land, which I will touch with the ends of my limbs, and then bear children to touch it too, and always be glad that the long sleep of travel (yes, we have been fleeing from a dark hurting thing or things) has ended. (But we will not forget: if the infinite is good to us, one dry day a bigshinegray will come to find us...one dry day sooner or later....)

I...

I am another man, the son of the son of the man of the bigshinegray. We have worked to make shelters on the dry land, and we are contented—

—Until the moment we look up to the bright twin lights high above us, and find those lights beginning to change.

We scream, we are sad, are angry, we try to hide.

Our pale flesh bubbles, our bones run soft, our children die—inside their mothers and on the heated land.

We die.

But some of us live. We have changed, are different, we live.

We change, we live, we die. Others are different too—a million differences in a million bodies. Some manage to live, but then they die. Deaths, more differences, living.

I—

We—

We are different. (Live!) We live, though the land often pains. We live where land (dry hot) meets water (comfort cool) and our children live (bear children!) though many die in their differences. We are different (flee to water) but we remember something (different body then) that was our beginning.

We die (terrible dryness!), we live (to water, go!).

We—

We are different, now, here, the water around. There are many of us. We dream of a large gray thing (it will come: remember). We swim, we live—we die (children without tails).

I—

I am one of the first souls with bodies of change—legs with tails, not with stumps so worthless for swimming. (“Remember,” tell your children, “the shiny gray thing of dreams, night and waking, brought the yester-us from darkness to here, to these waters. Another one will come—tomorrow or tomorrow’s tomorrow—to discover us....”)

I—

I am my father’s son. (“Remember,” he always told us, brothers and me, “it will come.”) I look up at the light which falls from dryness into our waters. I am waiting. All of us are. We dream of hot, of rotting flesh, of large dark caves, of brilliant round lights, of strange infants, of stranger old men, all things we fail to understand. We understand waiting, but this is not enough, and our depths scream black moans, and many of us seek to kill ourselves for the deaths we all seem to want—son after son after son’s son.

I wait.

I wait, and we all say, “Remember.”

I—

I am—

I am fishsinger, in the pink of now—

—the boy who swims toward the bigshinegray now finally come; the single soul who will greet the breathers of dryness, the touchers of dry land, the speakers with mouth’s rhythms, the sons of our shared forefathers—who have come to us from endless darkness dryness.

I will tell them about the changes that have come to us, the rise of soul’s strength, the lengthening of legs, the life of water’s embrace.

We have remembered.

But as I swim toward the island, purple eyes lift in my soul to stare at me. I begin to tremble.

“See it,” they say, the purple stares. “Ahead of you lies an act no other soul of your kind, since the beginning of dreams, has ever had before him. You must greet the breathers of dryness....”

I shudder, stop swimming, close my eyes.

“You will have to leave us. You must leave the water.”