This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2021 Nisi Shawl

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

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eISBN: 9781542032711

Cover illustration by Natasha Cunningham

Cover design by Alex Merto

Published in coordination with Plympton Literary Studio

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Their last time on shore, they made sweet and salty love. Then they entered their nannie machines. Coming out, the most noticeable change Darden saw in Catherina was a faint, pearly sheen to her skin. Like sweat. He must look the same, he thought. Absently he rubbed his upper lip, where his mustache used to grow. Permanent hair removal had been recommended by FortyAcres, though not required. The krewe’s costumers Drake and Florenzo had insisted on it, and on everyone eating the fattening food the modders recommended, too. Fat was fuel for the nannies, and insulation against the water’s chill. It needed to protect him in the air first, though; February in South Carolina didn’t feel that mild to him standing out naked in the sea breeze.

Catherina smiled and reached behind her for the swimsuit hung over her machine’s door. This whole move had been her idea at first, before she sold the rest of the krewe on it. He wasn’t going to let her back off from that “New Frontier” feeling she claimed most of their band’s fans wanted from them. “Come on now,” he teased her. “You can leave that old thing behind. No need to wear clothes now the machines loaded us up on nannies controllin our body temps—and you look damn good without em.”

“I guess you proved that.” She grinned but put the suit on anyway. “Ima want some kinda protection for sittin on that Mule.”

He took her hand and shook his head. “You know I decided our krewe couldn’t afford to upgrade to models with seats.” As manager of the Pretzles’ krewe finances, Darden kept a close eye on expenditures. Like other show bands, they had to pay licensing fees for the music they played, guarantee audience shares, copyright any original performance material created to tie songs together, and cover a myriad more costs of doing business.

Income from this new venture might justify splurging later. For now, “I ordered us all the same kind of DPVs, all right? Motor jet with a steering bar. You just gotta hang on to your handles. Here we go.” Trudging toward the lower beach’s packed sand, they left behind the row of empty modding machines, and the tents and awnings of the others in the krewe, all gone ahead.

Darden would have gone with them, but Catherina had wanted to tweak their streaming setup a few more times before handing it off. She was the expert, and according to her, some adjustments needed krewe onstage to test things out. And he’d wanted the two of them to share the transition to mer life as a couple, since she was the main reason he’d agreed to it. Plus, in the unlikely event the new nautical militia, the ones calling themselves “coast guards” showed up, he wanted to be there.

Storm erosion had shortened the path from dunes to surf. Out past the current waterline, the remains of a pier jutted up, half-rotted pilings poking out of the water. The last two of the krewe’s fleet of Mule model Dive Propulsion Vehicles were moored to a pair of pilings at the foot of the ghost pier, bobbing in the sea’s shallow waves.

He looked back over his shoulder at the nannie machines, small beige and turquoise huts like public outhouses. At the line of deserted summer homes behind them.

“Race you in!” Catherina shouted as she passed him, already running into the water. White foam splashed and swirled around Darden’s calves and thighs as he wallowed in after her. Sand sank under his feet, sucking at him, slowing him down. Best get it over. He dove forward. Six breaststrokes and he made it to the closest of the two Mules. Smooth neon-green prastic moved like life under his broad palms.

“Tie!” called Catherina from the far side of the farthest DPV. “Mind if I take this one?”

“No.” Yellow was a little girl’s color. Daffodils were yellow, and baby chicks.

“Come on. You wanna be late for the show?”

“No,” he repeated. This was going to be the Pretzles’ first underwater concert in the wild. Figures from their dress rehearsal in a hotel pool looked promising. He unclipped the Mule, grabbed one end of its steering bar, and pushed the lever to the left to let out some of the air in its ballast tank.

“You ain’t scared?”

“No I am not,” Darden lied. He was. Even though the entire rest of the krewe, all fourteen of them, had turned mer without a hitch. This morning he’d seen their single-use red-and-white signal buoys scattered along the edge of the rented right-of-way, floating like bottles carrying messages of success. Soon he’d be in range of the krewe’s live transmissions on the permanent communications system. He’d hear their reports firsthand. Soon he’d have his own headset to hear them on.

The Mule began to drag at him. He had set it for neutral at ten meters, way lower than the bottom this near shore. “Ready?” he asked. Thumbing the throttle to cruise and facing outward, away from the land, he blinked three times, paused, three more times, paused, three again. That was the post-trance signal he’d settled on. Drilled into his unconscious. No more blinking. For a while, no more breathing.

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF “THE SPLENDID TRUTH” PODCAST DECEMBER 10, 2041

Host: Marcy Wallace

Guest: Representative Alan Stott, D Georgia

Stott: “It’s win-win-win-win. Everyone’s a hero. The Blacks get their reparations they’ve been clamoring for. Property owners in flood-affected areas get compensated for their losses when their land becomes part of a temporary right-of-way. Business gets a big order, which means jobs, which means private-sector growth. And government, well, we get to play the good guys. We bring it all together, make the connections, create the legal framework.”

Wallace: “But only a few businesses will benefit. One, really—Muleteers Unlimited. And—okay, okay—I’ll grant you the trucking companies, but still—isn’t that a little unfair? Isn’t it—”

Stott: “Look, Marsha—”

Wallace: “Marcy.”

Stott: “Right. What happens is the money we spend on these DPVs—that’s the technical name for the underwater scooters we’re subsidizing—anyway, that money winds up in general circulation pretty darn fast. It’s what we call ‘ripple-out economics.’”

Wallace: “Any relation to ‘trickle-down’—”

Stott: “Well—it’s better, newer. Less about hierarchy. But anyway, you follow the dollars one direction, you’ve got people manufacturing the feedstock—the ‘prastic,’ they call it—for the printers turning them out, and the ingredients for the feedstock, you know, growing and mining those. Go in the other direction, you’ve got the print and assembly workers paying more for more childcare, going to restaurants, and that sort of thing, and it just leads to increased prosperity everywhere. Everywhere!

“Plus the Blacks will probably be able to farm fish or something.”

The nannies didn’t really hurt. More like they itched, the way his lips felt waking up from a dental injection. Towed along behind his Mule, flying low over sand and weed and rock, Darden split his attention between the pulsing dot on his aftermarket GPS and Catherina’s twin light cones on his right. Keep his love beside him and his fear wouldn’t matter. He’d be brave for her sake. Brave enough for both of them. Keep the dot centered and they’d be headed straight for the undersea community they’d picked: Bahari, five miles off the new South Carolina coast. An hour away.

Meanwhile, the machine-bred nannies put the finishing touch on his adaptations. They were pretty much done; he felt—or imagined?—the increased weight and thickness of his new lenses of pressure-easing gels, the tickle of fresh-planted phosphorescing reflectors crowding the backs of his retinas, the swift efficiency of his light receptors, their number now significantly higher. His ears—Catherina’s too—had also received upgrades. Their nostrils already had lids, which they’d shut tight.

The biggest changes still going on, though, were happening within Darden’s chest. Unlike Catherina, he’d had no breast tissue to replace, and his slightly larger lungs were no match for her nannie-increased oxygen storage capacity, built by modifying her milk-producing lobules. Two krewe members—one of them female—had opted into breast-mimicking oxy depot add-ons. Drawings Darden had seen of mers taking the “belly” option looked pregnant. Not for him. Leave that to Brenda or Aaliyah or one of the krewe’s show-off performers. He was already sacrificing enough.

The solution offered for those preferring a traditionally male-bodied appearance involved major structural revisions. Long term, semiautonomous self-sealing chambers of hyperefficient alveolar sacs would even Darden and Catherina out. Short term, though, the conversion had cut into the length of time he could hold his breath.

Too bad gills weren’t a better match for mammalian metabolisms. Not enough oxygen in the water, they said, to fuel the dream of deserting the air. Not forever . . .

Feeling the detachment and jamais vu he’d been warned about, Darden signaled Catherina and headed for the surface. Silver broke around his head like a false ceiling and he was floating openmouthed under a dimming, overcast sky. Incoming rain erased the horizon. Slick as driftwood, Catherina’s brown skull parted the shallow waves where she rose nearby.

“Two miles,” she announced. “Almost half the way there.”

He nodded, suddenly too busy breathing to talk.

“Look!” She was pointing back over his shoulder at the land. “Lights. Think it’s them white supremacists already?”

He turned. “Yeah.”

“How many more times you need to stop?”

That word “need” made him out to be weak. “Stupid modders told me every twenty minutes.” Blame it on them. “Don’t worry. We’ll reach Bahari before the deadline.” Bahari’s right-of-way between shore and city would expire in five hours. Lots of leeway.

“Those lights over there look like they gettin closer, don’t they?”

“Where?”

A red-and-white cluster among the lights of the flatbeds loading the modding machines brightened as he watched, then detached itself, flying upward. Through the thin air came the whir of metal blades. Helicopter blades.

Legally those jerks couldn’t do anything except harass them. The right-of-way was paid for till ten. But he was replenished, and Catherina was impatient. “Dive!” she commanded.

APPLICATION FOR COMPLIMENTARY MODIFICATION IMMERSION SESSION:

PRELIMINARY QUESTIONNAIRE

How did you hear about us?

Are you currently receiving any form of nanotechnology-assisted (“nannie”) medical therapy?

Date: _________  Medication: _________  Physician: ___________

Date: _________  Medication: _________  Physician: ___________

Date: _________  Medication: _________  Physician: ___________

(make additional attachments as necessary)

Have you ever undergone a nanotechnology-assisted (“nannie”) surgical procedure?

Date: _________  Medication: _________  Physician: ___________

Date: _________  Medication: _________  Physician: ___________

Date: _________  Medication: _________  Physician: ___________

(make additional attachments as necessary)

Do you identify as one or more of the following (mark all that apply):

African American

Black

Neo Negro

Hispanic American

Latinx American

Native American

Amerindian

First Nation

Indigenous

AZN American

SEAZN

Other (explain: _________________________)

Have you received and accepted an invitation to visit or live in a settlement run by a member of the Cetaceous Living Independent Trade Issues Association (CLITIA)?

A white glare shattered the underwater visibility, throwing shadows that blocked their way. It swung back and forth, slicing this way and that across the deep. A search beam. Darden said a silent “Fuck.” The krewe’s 640-acre parcel, like the entire settlement of Bahari, was surrounded by private property. Once their rental period passed, he and Catherina would technically be trespassing—and certain parties would do their utmost to speed up the clock. The best way to go to escape the probing, disorienting light, the noise, and whatever other quasi-just tricks the pricks in the helicopter meant to play on them was toward the seafloor. Down. Ugh.

The blinking GPS could still guide them at their new depth of sixteen meters. A spray of darts passed between his Mule and Catherina’s—uncomfortably close. As Ronna and the krewe’s other lights/sound workers had suspected, CLITIA personnel weren’t alone in accessing the Mules’ federally mandated RFIDs. Grimly, Darden ignored the hateful sensation of being hunted. Another barrage of darts descended. Nearer. They looked too small to do anyone serious injury. Drugged?

A wrecked train car loomed up from the silt-covered ridge of dumped trash he was following. Darden swerved to avoid it. But then a figure glided out of one of its broken windows and into his way. By turns a dull, unreflective grey and a shimmering mercury, the figure was man-shaped, but with exaggeratedly long feet and wide, webbed hands. These propelled it in quick, graceful arcs, a figure eight looping around the two of them, separating them and tying them together. It spun to a stop before him.

It smiled, lips unparted. It held out one umbrella-like hand, unfurling and spreading its fingers to reveal a green prastic headset identical to those Darden had seen in CLITIA promos. Then he realized it—he?—wore one of his own, though colored to blend in with his—skin? Scales?

Catherina reached tentatively for the headset but he grabbed it first. She sagged and drooped—he thought from disappointment before he saw the darts showering around them. She was hit! He took hold of her by one pink-strapped shoulder and her head flopped back loosely, eyes a horrible boiled-egg white, mouth slack, nostril lids fluttering. Not dead but not okay. Not okay.

It was his fault. It was because they’d stopped moving, made the Mules easier to home in on. They had to get going again. He had to—

The stranger shot between Darden and his drifting Mule, tugging its safety line free with a sharp jerk, then spinning to intercept Catherina’s and yanking that away too. Then dropping both lines and circling his long arms to beckon Darden to follow as he swam back toward the train car.

The Mules descended to land in dark puffs of silt. Darden glimpsed them as he paused to grip Catherina closer under his belly. The train window loomed up and swallowed him just as he was realizing going in might not be the best idea.

Inside, the stranger glowed like pale ashes coating burning charcoal. Cracks along his outline showed lava red through the car’s dark, slanting interior. But it was the shining white covering his hands and the bulk of his belly that revealed the car’s surprising cleanliness: no sand on the floor or in the corners, no rusted remains of passenger seats, no corroded finishing panels or wire conduits dangling from above.

Instead, nets padded the walls, stretched between colored pegs and holding a jumble of what looked at first glance like paper books—but how could that be?—and pistols and ammunition belts. The stranger pointed at an empty net slung from the car’s roof. Darden stared, confused. He started to lower Catherina onto the rubber matted floor. The stranger wrestled her away and bundled her into the net.

Okay. The net was a hammock. For now, let her stay there. Darden stroked Catherina’s cheek. Her nose remained shut now, her eyes disconcertingly open and pupilless. He withdrew his hand and a spasm lifted her chest, arched the trunk of her body like an orgasm. The spasm relaxed suddenly, replaced by desperate thrashing. Darden struggled helplessly to contain her, tangling his fingers in the holes of the net.

“SHE’S TRYING TO BREATHE!” boomed a loud, directionless voice. “IT’S THE SEDATIVE!” Was it coming from the headset? Darden had automatically wrapped it around his throat when Catherina collapsed. He looked away from her. The stranger was nodding and moving his mouth.

“YES! THAT’S ME TALKING! PUT THE BUDS IN SO I CAN CUT THE VOLUME.”

“Catherina—”

“DO IT!”

The thrashing had subsided to sad little shudders. Carefully pulling back his arms, Darden adjusted the headset so its speaker buds fitted inside his ears and its mics rested along his jaw. “What’s your name?” he asked. “What—what are you?”

“You’re Darden and that’s Catherina, right? She’ll be okay—the darts don’t last.” The shining figure came nearer. “I’m Joa. A Bahari Outlier. Been expecting you—Welcome Committee sent me to track your RFIDs.”

Darden put one palm on Catherina’s stomach, feeling barely a flutter. Her face looked better, less screwed up in pain. “How do you know about the darts?” he asked. “What’s an ‘outlier’? How do you know our names?”

“You sure ask a lot of questions.” Joa came suddenly too near, but then continued past Catherina and the hammock to the window. “I know your names from meeting your krewe. It’s my job to welcome new citizens to Bahari—part of being an Outlier, the only part you need to understand right now. Because we’re about to head off.”

“What? Why?”

Turning from the window, Joa rose to the car’s ceiling. “They have you pinned in place—they think. Till the right-of-way expires—they think. Then someone’s gonna be sent to haul you in.” He was coiling a rope around the crook of his arm—one end of it connected to the foot of the hammock, Darden saw. “Go on and grab the other end.” A flash of gemlike lights crowned the Outlier’s head. They blinked out and he was gone.

Shocked, Darden forgot and opened his nose. Salt water rushed down the back of his throat and over his tongue. He gagged and spat and recovered to find a rope lying in his hand. No sign to show where Joa had gotten to but a taut line vanishing out the window. And Catherina’s hammock was about to follow—the rope he held was sliding fast between his fingers.

“Quick!” The headset startled him. He kept his nose shut but failed to hold on to the hammock. He pushed off after it, out of the car’s sudden murk and into the open water’s relative brightness. “Go low,” the headset told him. “I planted a forest of plastic trees along the right-of-way. We’ll use that for cover till we reach my corral.”

He wasn’t sure he’d heard right. “You mean coral?” And what were “plastic trees”?

He found out soon enough: their thick brown stems towered over Darden and Joa as they wound between them. Far above his head layers of translucent film waved in the current, like leaves in the wind, sometimes from the ends of short, curving stalks and sometimes wrapped around the trees’ main trunks. Memory clicked into place: CLITIA had gotten permits from the landowners; they claimed these kelp-based organisms could trap and hold free-floating plastics for easy harvest and conversion to prastic. Kicking forward in Joa’s wake, Darden tried to see more of how they worked, but all the luminescence the Outlier shed was directed downward. That made sense if there actually was pursuit. So did his silence.

The silt-coated ridge of junk the plastic trees grew on fell gradually lower. Darden was starting to worry about his oxygen reserves when Joa turned at a right angle to swim slowly along the steep slope they’d been descending. “Swollen!” the headphones proclaimed. “No one bothered a thing! Come on in.”

Joa disappeared into the ridge, towing Catherina. Darden followed. In Joa’s suddenly intense light, the space he entered looked like a long tube. Another train car? Too big. Too many weird protuberances.

Like the one Joa was tying the hammock to. “Here.” He put out a webbed hand for Darden’s end. The skin between his fingers sparkled as if painted with jewels. Darden offered Joa part of the rope but kept what he hoped was a casual-looking hold on the rest. That earned him a puzzled grunt. No comment, though.

The pupils of Catherina’s eyes were back. They tracked him as he leaned over her. “You okay?” he asked stupidly. Of course she couldn’t hear his broadcast or answer it without a headset. The ones they’d paid for were with the krewe. But then another spare appeared, in Joa’s furled-up fist shoved between them. He helped Catherina put it on, lifting and turning her head to make insertion easier.

“You okay?” he repeated.

“I feel like warmed-over vomit.” Her cheeks stretched upward in a rueful smile. “We still gonna get to Bahari on time?” She fought the hammock and managed to tilt it to spill her free. “Where we at?”

Joa answered. “This is my secret lair. It’s where I keep most of my welcoming supplies, and extra equipment like the headsets I’m loaning yall—and like this.” He raised a section of the curving metal wall to display a three-seater Project Triton–class Mule. “Yeah. You’ll make it to Bahari before the right-of-way ends. I guarantee.”

EXCERPTS FROM Our White Rights:

How to Defend America in the Coming Race War

Many people think that by siphoning off uppity Blacks into underwater reservations the government has assured our safety. Sadly, in reality that’s just not enough. Volunteer efforts are needed to supplement the official actions. That’s where You come in.

EURO and Identity Arya are wrong! No right-thinking White can support what’s happening of our coasts. Far from being crippled by their mer-durous modifications, Blacks gain from them enormously. They can go without breathing for hours! Rendering them practically immune to essential crowd-control measures like teargas. Simple sunglasses and earplugs remove any disadvantage to being overly sensitive to light and sound. Your protests and other public profile events are very likely to already be compromised!

. . . her screams for help ignored! This Monster From The Black Lagoon dragged her through the slime to his swampy cave dwelling and had his way with her, over and over and over. Nothing but a made-up story, according to legacy media. But even if they’re right it’s based on a sickening and all-to-universal truth. Because no one, NO ONE would dare to trespass upon this Black’s private property!

And that’s the same problem we face regarding these underwater townships once these criminals and delinquents reach there boundaries. Once they cross the legal line their beyond our reach. That’s what we have to prevent. Because property’s sacred, sure. But it does not trump the purity and innocence of White Womanhood’s rights. It does not rule out our duty to champion them and act in her protection. For as long as we can.

So on the strength of such lying and scurrilous reports they have actually extended the offer of reparations to cover not only Blacks descendants of slaves, not only ALL African immigrants, but those of “indeterminate origin.” That’s right, Coloreds of ANY stock, no pedigree required, can apply for and receive their 40 acres and a working Mule.

The seafloor’s descent had leveled out. Seated behind Joa on the deluxe DPV’s smooth prastic bench, Darden tried to stay calm. Weddell seals could last ninety minutes without oxygen. So far he’d only done thirty—only ten more than recommended.

Beside him Catherina leaned forward against the strap at her hips and the momentum of the Triton’s top speed: six knots. She seemed fully recovered. “How do you know for sure the coast guards don’t monitor this channel?” she asked, the latest in a long stream of inquiries.

“Because we give em what they spect to find on another one,” Joa answered. “Anyway, they don’t like comin out this deep, and we’ll be there pretty soon. Only fifteen more minutes. Beat the cutoff time by plenty.”

“Shouldn’t Bahari be visible by now?”

“Depends, but yeah. The lights at least.” Joa pulled back on the thrusters and they dribbled to a stop. He switched off the already dim headlamps. They hung in the dark water motionless as a sleeping shark.

“There!” Catherina’s excited hand shook Darden’s shoulder. She pointed ahead and slightly leftward—eleven o’clock, if an analog dial had been laid on the bottom’s rough plane.

It took him a moment. Then a faintly shining mist seemed to form where he looked—a wispy cloud, like a blurred and distant galaxy.

“Yup, that’s it. Guess they must be testing out the new perimeter alarms.”

“Why? How can you tell?”

“Usually things are more multichromatic. They probably shut the old ones down. New ones change, turn color if they get tripped.” Joa reengaged the thrusters and eased on the headlamps, keeping them aimed downward. The headlamps showed the bottom’s stone-strewn sands and the furtive scuttling of things too quickly gone to name.

They went on. Darden hunched forward. Ahead, Bahari snuggled into the rising rocks and soared above them. On its lowest level stood mound-shaped domes of titanium-white seacrete. From them rose a structure like a fairy-tale palace: impossibly tall trees of gold and silver arching together to form balconied windows, gargoyled rooflines, the corners of invisible walls, enchanted stairs spiraling up to the faraway surface. Pointy turrets and crenellated battlements appeared and disappeared, mirages whose reality depended on the direction Darden saw them from. Shadowy torsos, heads, legs, and arms formed fleeting silhouettes against the palace’s soft light: his fellow refugees from the land.

“How soon will we come to the alarm?” asked Catherina.

“Soon. Now. I’ll take you in.”

Between their Mule and Bahari hung a sheer curtain, suddenly visible as they slowed to a stop where it swept the floor. It rippled and revealed itself as thousands of translucent snakes fringed with millions of clear tentacles.

“Siphonophores!” Catherina had downloaded a few articles about sea creatures in preparation for the transition—though her reading wasn’t as in depth as some of the krewe’s performers’—while Darden had focused more on investment strategies.

“Drop the plural, but basically you right. Just the one colony.” Joa shot off of his seat on the Triton Mule and swam forward. The siphonophore wrapped him in a see-through embrace. “She knows all over not to sting me. It’ll take a moment for her to reach a consensus on what’s next, though.”

They waited several heartbeats. “Did you do this for our whole krewe?” Catherina asked.

“Escort and intro? Ain’t no thing. This all part of the service. I’ll be happy when I can head home again, though. Too much turbulence up here near the surface.”

Darden frowned. “Where do you live?” If not in Bahari, he would have thought the train car where they’d met—or the buried submarine where Joa had taken them to pick up the Triton?

“I’m a benthos. Like most Outliers.”

“A what?”

The curtain parted. Joa came back to the Triton’s pilot seat. “Benthos. Bottom-feeder. It’s a beta modstyle; ain’t available to everybody. I live on the ocean’s bed—well, not right on it. Close enough.”

They rode past the curtain’s edges, which silently flowed over them and came together in their wake.

“Will there be time for us to visit our eighty acres before the show?” asked Catherina.

“Not really.” Darden’s mods had included a recommended upgrade to his wrist display to show elapsed dive time—even though double-lunging kept the bends at bay. The Pretzles were set to hit at eleven, which was in an hour. He had to find the others, get the stats on their audience. And didn’t Catherina have to finish setting up her feed? And he’d need to breathe at least twice before then . . .

“Your stage is near the top. Better head up there now.”

“Are you gonna take us?” asked Catherina.

“If you like. Ride or climb? Riding’s faster.”

Darden didn’t want to look needy. “Climb.”

Joa parked the Triton and they went up, first along the brown rocks, then around and over the city’s mounds of seacrete—some freshly formed, many more sporting gardens of hydroids and anemones. New voices spoke on his headset. Mostly Darden was able to match these to people waving hello out of the buildings. As they began their ascent, he recognized the voices’ connections to others twining around the mineral-encrusted scaffolding that had been sculpted to mimic a fantastically spindly tower.

And they apparently recognized him and Catherina, even though neither of them were performers. “Hey, you with the Pretzles?” asked a woman clinging to a lacy balcony fifteen meters up.

“Sure are,” Catherina replied. “You plannin on comin to see us?”

“Not this time. Heard you’re good, though.”

Darden grabbed on to a column jutting from the balcony’s roof and stopped his kicking rise. “Why not?”

“Why should I?” The woman managed to sound hurt and puzzled. So, talking on headsets obviously got better with practice. “Why go anywhere when I can listen to you fine right here?”

“Because you crave an experience that’s unmediated. We all do.” He turned to face Joa. “Am I right?”

“You want unmediated? Lose the headset. Lose the dive computer. Lose the fat and the alarm and the Mules and all the other interventions CLITIA sets up. Mediation c’est moi.”

“Preach, brother!”

Darden couldn’t tell who’d said that. He gazed in the direction of the distant surface, seeing nothing but a vague, dark-grey twilight.

“You want preachin?” Now there was a familiar voice. “You want church? Yeah, cause you want community.” From high above, a diver sped nearer, nearer with each word. “And if you want community you best come see our show in person.”

“Dwavonda!” Catherina’s eagerness sent her rocketing upward. “How’d you know to come meet us?”

“Listenin in. Glad you already got a way to talk before we could bring you yours we been keepin for you. Whole krewe been so busy settin up for the show. But while we done that we were tuned in to all sixteen of Bahari’s channels—yeah, even the propaganda one created for benefit of the coast guards.”

Darden continued his steady progress. “Are you okay with handing us off to our krewe now, Joa?”

“Maybe. I need to check in with Bahari’s Welcome Committee. Have to change channels. Go on. I’ll catch up with you if that’s what they want.”

Dwavonda and Catherina hovered overhead, holding on one-handed to a long spire, wavering like flags in the current. “It’s a kush setup!” Dwavonda declared. “They had the stage already made for us—salvage pipes taken out of drowned beach developments, put together spaced out wide but with perches built in, and platforms for speakers and instruments—”

“Lights? Scenery? Costumes?”

“On it from the get.” Facing downward, she kept up her enthusing. “Florenzo printed the cloth before we went in the machines, and Drake and I whipped things together soon as we arrived here. Teeny, Ina, and that new girl Ronna met with Bahari Energy to schedule electric service for tonight and the rest of the run.”

Catherina jumped into the pause. “And I’m thinkin we don’t need a lot of scenery. Specially if not a whole bunch of people plan on attending.”

“But they will,” Dwavonda insisted. She released the spire. “Come on. Lemme show you how it looks so far.” She held down a beckoning hand. “Come on.”

The stage was a wide, open-construction deck blossoming from the top of a tall, jointed turret. The rods forming the turret walls finished in brackets holding blue and yellow LEDs. Multiple daises rose at the stage’s center, small stands in graduated tiers, and four ramps radiated outward from them, the arms of a Celtic cross. Beyond the stage’s edges they curved upward and sprouted six increasingly higher rows of rings marked in meter-long sections: white, red, white, red, white—

“Seats, right?” Darden asked. “How do you expect to fill them?” An hour before a show on land there would have been a line outside the venue’s door. There’d have been scalpers. No sign of anything like that on their way here. Teeny had better be able to tell him something good about presales and reservations.

“We’ve got plenty of time.”

Darden glanced up. Smooth power cables slanted past them to a nearby wind turbine. How far away from here was it? The surface looked near enough to touch: aluminum tarnished by night, polished by moonlight. “I’ll go catch my breath, then.” According to his wrist display, he swam another seven meters before breaking through.

Just visible in the night’s gloom, the glinting turbine blades wheeled slowly in the constant offshore wind. This was the closest to South Carolina’s coast of Bahari’s three electricity-generating turbines—the other two floated much farther out, beyond the boundary for territorial waters. They had to be producing a surplus. Was Bahari selling it? Via CLITIA? He would have to find out more, dig deeper than his earlier research. First thing tomorrow. Once the krewe had settled in.

He lay back, face and belly turned toward the sky, and let the waves rock him. Rise and sink. Crest and trough. Inhale and exhale. Thin clouds whipped past the stars, blunting but not completely blocking their shine, dappling the moon. They thickened landward, then dissolved suddenly to reveal a helicopter’s silhouette.

The silhouette got larger as Darden watched. And lower. It was the same one as before. It burst into brilliance: that must be the searchlight he and Catherina had dodged coming here.

Bahari’s official boundaries were extensive—they began well outside the siphonophore’s curtain. And legally those boundary lines were like walls stretching from the seafloor into the air. He should be safe, even on the surface.

Should be.

Again, he dove.

The searchlight died. The noise—what he could hear of it below the surface—faded out.

Probably a disappointed patrol, looking for laggers along the expiring right-of-way. Eighteen more minutes.

Rudie, krewe security and keyboard for the Pretzles, always laughed at the coast guards. He said they never did more than brush up against breaking the law. Silence, darkness, and remembered mockery combined with time’s passage to bring Darden up once more to breathe a good, long while. Then, with a final check of his wrist, he sank below.

The rings surrounding the stage had begun filling with audience members, but only sparsely. Equipment dotted the daises, and a circle of screens enclosed the crossed ramps’ junction. No sign of Catherina or Dwavonda, or any krewe. What were they using as a green room? Who had the soundboard?

“Darden!” That was Aaliyah, a performer, the Pretzles’ lead singer, on his headset. “Switch to the frequency four up. Ina rented us some dedicated time.”

He flexed his jaw and found the channel. “How come Ina thinks we can afford this? How come she didn’t check with me?” he asked.

“Seen the spreadsheet for streaming sales?” That was Ina. “We’re in the millions.”

“No. That can’t be right.” He should have looked earlier. “Teeny, mail me an update.” Darden raised his wrist display to his eyes just as the lamps on the pole fixtures blinked twice in unison and went out.

Showtime. He found a perch on the mostly vacant last ring.

EXCERPT AND FINALE FROM PRETZLES’ “CAVES OF ALTAMIRA” SCRIPT

SANDRA crosses stage looking lost.

GLENN (off): Be back by daylight! I’m the one who has to make everything right . . . talk it out, keep it from a fight . . . Don’t you care anymore?

BAND REPRISES “BLACK COW.”

SCENE V

Lights off except foots as dim frieze. SANDRA enters from audience, still looking lost. Band begins “Caves” as instrumental ballad while she “searches” stage by flickering handheld light, then accompanies her singing for both verses and joins in chorus. End song on SANDRA vanishing behind scrim.

Scrim rises (or sinks?) to reveal cave interior: SANDRA seated at fire between ERCILLA and HENRY.

SANDRA: It was women did this?

HENRY: All this art is by women.

SANDRA: How? How do you know?

ERCILLA: We’re not just guessin.

HENRY: Touch it.

SANDRA: What?

ERCILLA: Look at the paint strokes, the handprints, how small they are.

HENRY (more urgently): Touch it!

SANDRA: Why? (Standing) What’s wrong with you? What do you want?

ERCILLA: No! Nothing! We’re only sayin—if you want to understand—

HENRY: Here—touch it with your own hand.

BAND STARTS “CHAIN LIGHTNING” INTRO.

ERCILLA: Don’t trouble to ask a man—

HENRY: Not east of the Rio Grande—

ERCILLA: Not west either, that’s no good.

(SANDRA rises slowly, palms out)

HENRY: We’re standin just where she stood, and it’s—

SANDRA: (Palms flat against invisible barrier) CHAIN LIGHTNING! OUR OTHERHOOD!

BAND PERFORMS “CHAIN LIGHTNING.”

The attack came in the middle of the third act. Darden felt it before he saw it: Turbulence shoving him off his seat, sucking him first toward the stage, then away. Then bright bubbles rushing down, cloaked around something tearing away the tops of lamps, screens, speakers, Rudie’s keytar—Rudie’s head! Blood spilled out of a stump that could not be Rudie’s neck— No! Billowing black clouds of it hid whatever else was happening, whoever else was dying. Sirens like humping serpents screamed into his head.

Audience members flailed by him—he was flailing, too—back came the bubbles and in their midst he glimpsed metal jaws gaping wider—wider—and then they shut tight on a ring of seats and ripped it apart and rose trailing wreckage. Up was that way. Up was danger.

A shower of darts chased him downward. Bigger objects rained past as he fled deeper—would Catherina escape? Dwavonda, Aaliyah, any of the krewe? He slowed. He should stop, turn around, see who he could save. He should be brave. For Catherina.

He tried the channel Ina had rented. “Ago, ile!” he called—their Yoruba-language code for emergency contact. All the answer he got was static. Desperate, he whirled 360. No one he knew—wait—that shape, like a negative silhouette in the chaos of debris and casualties—

The shape filled in, became a shade fast solidifying into the now-familiar grey-and-white form of Joa. The Outlier reached for Darden’s shoulder with one webbed hand and signaled with the other: closed it in a fist and opened it twice. Two flashes—of course! Bahari’s disaster communication system used their second lowest frequency. Darden changed his headset over and heard what sounded like a drug-calmed child reciting instructions: “—always to unconfirmed hostilities by retreating to your severe weather domes. Those not yet assigned a weather dome and visitors from other CLITIA settlements can check in with a benthos guide. Look for their distinctive chromatophore markings and follow all their directions.” At the edge of Darden’s vision lava-red lights twinkled—he turned to find that they blinked in sequence along Joa’s outstretched arm, as if it was a runway.

Darden remembered that the Outlier had called himself a benthos. He put his arm on Joa’s shoulder, mirroring his gesture. Joa nodded and urged Darden downward. “—respond as always to unconfirmed hostilities by retreating to your severe—” repeated the disaster system announcer as the slowly falling destruction above dwindled behind them. Toy battlements. Mock crenellations. Real bodies, victims, stunned with shock. Or drugged. Or . . . as he watched, another chromatophore-bedecked figure dove below the nearest drifting mer, reached up to tug him behind her, foot-first, and swam to intercept one a little farther off. He recognized Teeny’s bulky outline and his stubbornly maintained silver locks trailing in his rescuer’s wake. And the flaming pink of Catherina’s suit clung to the tumbling figure they headed toward. He struggled to go to her. In vain. Joa kept them on their course. He was stronger than he looked.

Darden feigned surrender. He couldn’t beat Joa up, couldn’t break the Outlier’s hold on him. So what could he do? There had to be something. He could plan. He could count. He could figure things out.

With Rudie gone, that left a krewe of fifteen, including himself and Catherina. He’d seen her, and he’d seen Teeny. Were either of them injured? He looked up, but Catherina’s bathing suit was out of sight. That faint, pearl-like glimmering might be coming from the benthos he’d seen going after her. Maybe.

And where were the other twelve krewe—what about them? What about Florenzo? Drake? Darden tried their channel again. The staticky silence infuriated him. He finally managed to drag Joa’s outspread hand off and kicked furiously in a semi-successful attempt to resist his pull. But the benthos caught Darden by his calves and either hauled him down or climbed up his torso till they were face-to-face. “Hold still!” Joa’s mouthing released no air. Only from the exaggerated movements of his lips and teeth and tongue—and was that something else inside there, something weird?—only with his eyes could Darden read Joa’s meaning. “Let me—”

With the tips of his webbed hands extended, the benthos reached for the external controls of Darden’s headset. A moment later his voice came through the buds, sharp and crisp: “Your krewe spects to rendezvous below. At my sister Minnie’s—that’s where they’re assigned. She’s bringing them if they can’t get there themselves. Come on.” He reached around to hug Darden even tighter and flipped them heels over head.

As the sea’s depths darkened around them, the soft glow emanating from Joa’s hands and belly seemed to brighten. “Any idea what happened? Who that was?” he asked.

“Probably it was coast guards. Jammin our comms is typical for them; this the first time in a year they done more than talk about attackin, though. Likely no serious primary casualties.”

“What’s that mean?”

“What’s what mean? ‘Primary’?”

Darden felt his inner lungs ache with the speed of their descent. “Yeah.”

“No spearguns. Yeah, I saw they used an underwater excavator rig to tear things up, but as far as weapons, far as I can tell, it was just the usual sleep darts. If you’re unconscious, though, it’s a little harder to regulate your breath sometimes. Like you saw with Catherina. And depth compensation can be a bitch.” With a casual-looking swat he warded off a looming “gable.” “Bends wake em up fast enough so they don’t die, usually.”

“But they could die?” Darden clawed at the Outlier’s hands.

“Stop that! It don’t—it hardly ever happens. She pulled out okay, didn’t she? Here we go. You’ll see.”

They had come to a cleft in Bahari’s bottom, near the city’s edge. The rolling, mound-strewn ground rising around them was studded with cultivated corals and the glittering white wires of new seacrete projects. Joa guided them to a dome standing on a ledge overlooking a surprisingly opaque abyss. A brilliant green spilled from the dome’s round entrance, casting shadows that deepened its mystery.

Darden half lowered his outer eyelids. Joa towed him to and through the entrance. Inside he saw other mers huddled in the currentless brightness, among them several krewe. “Ronna!” She had on a headset but didn’t respond. Neither did the others: Cassius, Blimpy, Terri, and Brenda. Maybe the coast guards’ jamming had had a permanent effect?

Joa let loose of his shoulder. Darden looked past him and found the way out blocked by a large-meshed net. Was there room enough to slip between its strands? He’d have to abandon Ronna and them if he went searching for the missing krewe—who were on their way here, if Joa was to be trusted. And Ronna had spotted him. She beckoned to him to join her. He kicked over, tapping his headset with both hands.

Ronna tilted her head, waited—she must have said something he should have answered—then shook it “No.” She pulled at his headset, got it free, and flipped through the settings. As she handed it back he heard her speaking. “Good to see you. That’s most of us accounted for—everyone except Teeny, Rudie, Catherina, and Milton.”

“Teeny and Catherina are coming. Rudie—” Darden didn’t know how to say it. “Rudie’s not.” He worried about Ronna, who’d been one of Rudie’s most attentive lovers.

“Yeah. We heard there’d been a couple casualties.” Headset phrasing could be pretty flat. This was flatter.

From either side of her, Cassius and Terri clasped arms and hugged Ronna. Blimpy and Brenda reached up from slightly lower to comfort him, too. He eased away. He didn’t need hugging. He didn’t deserve it. He hadn’t done anything.

“How did you hear?” he asked. “How’d you know about—everyone?”

“Hunh?” said Blimpy. He and Brenda looked at each other and seemed to check each other’s thoughts. “Headsets, a course. After the coast guards stopped jammin the frequencies, we most of us were able to get back in touch.”

“But mine didn’t—” Darden’s headset hadn’t started working again till Ronna messed with it. Why? He’d gotten it from Joa— “How’d you fix it?” he asked her.

“Fix it? All I did was turn it back on.”

A commotion in the water above their heads prevented him from denying he’d ever turned it off.

Joa and another mer were unfastening the net across the dome’s entrance. In swam the Outlier who’d been chasing Catherina, Teeny still in tow. Catherina floated in behind her, arms propelling her gently forward, languid as the leaves of a plastic tree.

Catherina was fully conscious. She wasn’t breathing.

He rose to greet her, waving and calling ahead to catch her attention. “I love you!” He plowed into her from below and behind and she jerked away in fright—she hadn’t heard him! Recognition cleared her face and they embraced. He got her to remove her headset. It was turned off.

Joa. Joa had given her hers and him his.

Quira.com User: What keeps us from developing genetically engineered gills for human beings?

James Benjamin, Chaired Professor of Marine Biology, University of Georgia–Athens, answered October 2, 2043: The oxygen levels found in water are much lower than in air, and gills are an inefficient means of extracting oxygen. Gills couldn’t provide it fast enough to support the high metabolic rate we and other mammals have.

Possibly modifying human energy consumption patterns to fit lower oxygen availability is the path forward.

Aaliyah, Ina, Florenzo, and Drake were the next to arrive, rescued from a tourist trap—a fake shipwreck—fluttering with newfound romantic intimacy. Dwavonda came in last, right before the all-clear was announced, right before dawn. She and Gina had spent the night dressing debris wounds and triaging dart poisonings. She said Gina had wanted to stay late into the morning at Bahari’s infirmary, help a little more and learn a lot, a claim that made sense. Gina was the krewe’s trainer and health manager. Joa promised he’d find her and show her the way to the parcel before going home. Then he led the rest of the krewe there.

Outside the southern boundary of the krewe’s combined acreage, the siphonophore draped her diaphanous tentacles, forming a long, sensitive curtain vanishing into the sea’s sudden depths. Inside that boundary, the abyss into which the siphonophore dangled continued a good ten or more meters. Even once the bottom rose high enough to become visible again, steep inclines and irregular rocks broke it into clashing geometries, planes intersecting at all angles. And the whole parcel was like that. Nowhere could Darden see an area wide enough and flat enough to build a stage.

Nor could he see Ronna, Teeny, or Ina—sound and lights—on the roughly trapezoidal parcel’s other end. But he could talk to them. Using his own headset now. “You may as well save us the money and have CLITIA’s power feed stop over on that side, closest to the turbine,” he told them. “Doesn’t get any better out here.” He kicked a few meters onward to hang over the seemingly bottomless abyss cutting into their home. No better. Pretty clearly worse.

Far down in the void, lights glimmered: burning crimson and frosty white. Joa’s chromatophores. Coming closer. Catherina’s teeth glinted as she flashed the benthos an open-lipped grin. Her pink suit glowed softly in the fluorescing patterns modded into the Outlier’s skin. They were near enough now that Darden should be picking up any conversation. He hunted across his headset’s channels. Nothing.

No reason to be jealous; Milton, Florenzo, Terri, and Aaliyah had joined them, too, swimming into view around a bare rock. The Pretzles’ krewe was well represented. But instead of interrupting whatever special connection Joa and Catherina had formed between the two of them, these four seemed somehow to become part of it. Leaving him out.

That was going to change. There were times krewe got together in smaller groups within the group. A job might make it necessary, or members might share memories of a hometown, or hatred for a particular venue—it was always temporary, and always open to others.

Darden flipped head downward and stroked toward Catherina, still scanning for the frequency where she was talking. He reached her and smiled, and she smiled again. Not as wide. Still, she seemed genuinely glad to touch him, running her fingertips along his shoulders and leaning forward to brush her lips against his ear.

But she wore the headset from Joa, not one of the ones the krewe had bought. And she seemed—distracted? With a glance back at the benthos she hand-signaled “five,” the same channel they’d been using since leaving Minnie’s, waited to make sure Darden and everybody in sight had tuned in, and spoke:

“We need to think differently about this place. Challenges is opportunities and brand-new ways to make money. Concert last night was proof: our audience interested in how strange life gettin for us down here, how weird it gonna be—interested in more than we can just show em in a few songs.”

INTERCEPTED COMMUNICATION BETWEEN UNIDENTIFIED PARTIES ON 12/04/2043 FROM 21:05 TO 21:07

X: It’s like when the ancestors used to save up to buy they freedom. Practicin a trade that makes em worth more when they finally get away.

Y: If you say so.

X: Only mers don’t know it’s freedom we goin after. They don’t like it down so deep so they thinkin we won’t neither. “Hazard pay” they callin it. Pay’s good; freedom from them’s even better.

Z: Get paid while you can. Buy all the extra depth mods you think of. Only a matter a time till they figure out how we rigged our headsets to carry our secret frequency when we got em seemin they shut off. Then they gonna wanna know what we got to talk about they can’t hear.

Y: Ain’t my fault.

X: It ain’t mine neither. I ain’t the one turned two—two of them special-hacked headsets over to mers we don’t know for sure gonna be joinin us.

Y: How was I spozed to realize my chance to take em back was gonna get spoiled? What was I spozed to do?

Z: Coulda just not risked givin em headsets in the first place. Did they look like they needed to talk before pickin up their own?

Y: Just cause they not the same as us, that don’t hafta make em our enemies. I think they gonna take us up on our invitation to combine forces. If you let me make it a little more explicit.

“I don’t understand.”

“Nothing too complex. We’ll build a fifty-story hotel, pressurize and seal every other floor—”

Darden twisted on his bar, pointing out of the dome’s porthole. “—starting with the foundation, which we want to put down on the far side of our parcel.” Where Catherina had convinced him to see a unique development possibility.

The sleek-bodied CLITIA liaison shook her elegant head. “I’ve got all that. But what I need to know—well, two things. How long do you expect this structure to last into storm season, and who’s paying for it?”

He shrugged. “How long does anything last outside the domes?”

The liaison—her name was Claudia—sighed, an extravagant trail of air bubbles streaming from her flared-open nostrils. “You talkin about the sculptures? The castle and all them fancies? That’s different. That’s art.” She nodded at the console between them where his krewe’s plan was displayed. “Yall are sayin this is business.”

“Art’s business. Business is an art. Coming up with new building plans after storm season passes is part of what we sell.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Claudia waved a dismissive hand. “I seen enough failures—the fish farms, the scrap salvagers— You still ain’t told me nothin about who’s your backers. Cause I have seen your figures, and the Pretzles don’t have the kind of shred it’s gonna take for even this project’s first iteration.”

If that. Seat sales had stayed flat. On the internet, though . . . the surprises revealed when he researched those demographics were behind his current scheme. “White people.”

“What? As investors? We okayed them to be guests but are you serious? Where does it say—”

Darden gripped the bar he sat on as if he could hold it tight enough to save himself. “Appendix B. Supporting organizations.”

“Okay. Some of these are mixed—SPLC, sure, kind of weird, but you slung a wide net, didn’t— Nunh-unh. No. Does RAM stand for what I think it stands for?”

“Race America Movement.”

“THEM?” Darden tardily turned down his headset’s volume.

“They were interested.”

“How did you even get an appointment? They hate us.”

“No they don’t. They only think they do. And only some of em. And we can change their minds.” Like Joa and the other benthos had changed Catherina’s. And Catherina had changed his.

The sea was no scarier than the land, and the depths no more horrible than the heights. It was all going to be theirs. Catherina had decided to accept the latest benthos betas and persuaded some of the krewe to do likewise. He and the rest would work with them, be with them as much and as often as they could. Sleep with them. Sex with them.

The hotel would help. Catherina and the krewe’s other benthos would be able to work on its lower stories, keeping closer to Bahari than the generators’ anchors, staying in better touch than if they’d signed up to work the mines. Instead they’d be guiding and training a trending wave of tourists, and scheduling visits, and booking tickets to the Pretzles’ resort-exclusive shows. Which online traffic warranted.

“Just because they’re our enemies doesn’t mean we don’t want some of the same things.”

About the Author

Photo © 2019 Caren Ann Corley

Nisi Shawl is the award-winning author of Everfair and numerous short stories, which have appeared in such publications as Strange Horizons and Asimov’s Science Fiction, among many others. Nisi was short-listed for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and the World Fantasy Award and was nominated for the Nebula Award.