The Little Homo Sapiens Scientist Read online

  None of it matters now.

  Now we’re in a stolen submarine headed for deep ocean.

  And when I get back up, I’m probably going to be wanted for treason for doing this. Dr. Hansen, too, and it will be my fault—I’m the one who told hir what happened, looped hir in on this mad plan to steal a military asset, to free a kidnapped person.

  Hansen would tell me it was hir own decision, I’m sure. Ze was just as mad as I was.

  It’s possible they won’t catch hir. Ze’s still up surface-side, after cutting the power to the security grid for us and helping me with the manual overrides, soaked in the dark as we heaved at the airlocks… then ze went to try to erase our presence tonight while I stole the sub.

  We didn’t make a plan for when I get back to the surface. From the look on hir face, I think Dr. Hansen expects to have been arrested by then.

  Ze has a family. I forgot about that when I asked for help.

  Hello. Hi. I don’t know if this thing still works. I grabbed it from the sub.

  Somehow I’ve gotten used to talking things out in these subvocals. I don’t know when that happened.

  So.

  I’m not in jail. I surfaced and went off the grid as fast as possible. They haven’t found me. There’s been no big publicity splash, no news articles—I don’t think they want people to know this all happened. A cover-up.

  Dr. Hansen was okay. Ze was too smart—managed to make our tracks vanish. They know I did it, because I disappeared, but they don’t know how, or that I involved anyone else.

  Small favors.

  And Hansen—Jace, ze keeps telling me to call hir Jace—ze’s been keeping me in the loop. The Institute is locked up tighter than a bank vault, ze says. Sudden new policies, tight-lipped whispers, military from several different countries lurking in hallways and conference rooms.

  Jace thinks they’re afraid Aíoëe is going to bring back word of what happened, and it’ll start a war. But I don’t think that’s likely. The atargati know we can’t reach the deep ocean in any meaningful way. The abysses are safe from us, and I suspect most of the atargati are happy to ignore the fact that we exist.

  Jace hasn’t been able to get back down to talk to Òiôaaa. But ze said our instruments have shown the outpost deserted. In fact, all the contact points we’ve had with the atargati have simultaneously been abandoned. They tried first contact, and now it’s failed.

  My heart hurts. How could we have been so stupid?

  How could I have been so naïve, to think it wouldn’t happen sooner or later?

  Jace got me cash and a forged passport. I had no idea ze had this level of street savvy.

  I don’t know where to go. I don’t know what to do with my life now. I might as well hurl myself into the ocean after the atargati—I have nothing left without them.

  It’s the middle of the night. I’m in a narrow bunk on a cargo ship. It’s pitch black.

  I was just dreaming.

  Dreaming of Aíoëe, the atargati I broke out of our custody.

  God, she was so beautiful.

  I met someone in the hutong today who claimed to be psychically connected to the atargati. Ridiculous, of course.

  It seems like everywhere I go, dusty alleyways or remote rural villages, there’s some fascination with the atargati. Nobody knows they’ve left us, not yet. And the people I’ve been meeting aren’t science-based. Not at all. Folk storytellers and psychics and cultists. I don’t know why I keep seeking them out—I’ve been hard put to keep my mouth shut and let them go on.

  But I’m drawn to them. The atargati were my life.

  I’m still dreaming about Aíoëe. I can’t get her face out of my head. Am I so guilt-ridden about what my race did to her? Or am I just latching on to the last atargati I spoke to before I lost everything? Lost them?

  Where do I go next?

  I like Mandarin. It’s not as pitched as the atargati language, but singing my speech again is at least a wistful comfort.

  Today I heard a tale about a man in Indonesia who can transform humans into atargati.

  I couldn’t help it. I laughed.

  The man telling the tale took great umbrage. “There are more things in this world than you can dream of in philosophy,” he said. “You are stupid if you do not believe that.”

  His bastardization of Shakespeare notwithstanding, he might have had a point if he hadn’t been unknowingly talking to one of the world’s leading experts on the atargati.

  I wonder if Òiôaaa misses me.

  I wonder if Aíoëe misses me.

  Why would she? I probably remind her of the worst experience she’s ever had. I was the one human who barely had a conscience, that’s all. She doesn’t owe me anything.

  Sakhalin is cold. Maybe I shall go to Indonesia.

  I had a disturbing dream last night.

  It’s making me feel… odd.

  I thought I was going to talk about it, but I’m not.

  “Oh, yes, he makes the human into the mermaid,” an old Indonesian woman said to me today. “He is… you know, dukun.” She laughed and said something else in Indonesian.

  “Magic doctor,” a grinning man on a nearby stool translated.

  “Witch,” corrected the girl who put my drink down on the counter. “She said a witch. But they also say he’s a man of medicine, one who studies the sea.” I must have looked skeptical, because she shrugged and said, “So they say.”

  “Witch doctor,” wheezed the grinning man. He seemed to be getting a kick out of my inquiries. “Sea witch doctor.”

  “Thank you,” I said, trying to maintain my dignity.

  “I take you to him,” said the man. “Five million rupiah.”

  I don’t why I’m still recording these. Maybe because it stops me from thinking too much. When I’m subvocalizing to myself, my thoughts have no chance to crawl into dark corners or remind me how my life ended weeks ago. That now I’m only existing.

  What am I even doing here? I’m in a cheap motel room. Tomorrow I see the “sea witch doctor.” I was expecting some sort of purported medicine man in a village, but this particular crackpot has offices in downtown Jakarta. No wonder everyone knows about him.

  I had the dream again tonight.

  Maybe I’m going mad.

  I’m in a daze.

  God. Shell-shocked. I don’t know what to think.

  The “sea witch doctor”—how ridiculous, his name is Tanu, I’ll call him that, though he does style it Dr. Tanu but I don’t know whether he deserves the title—he said it as soon as I walked in.

  “So, you’re in love with a mermaid, are you?” he said, in smooth American English.

  I stopped. I couldn’t think what to say. My mouth flopped open and shut like I was an idiot.

  “It’s the only reason people ever come to me,” he explained. “Well, that or they’re looking for immortality straight-up, but for most people immortality in crushing darkness is equivalent to hell. Anyway, you’ve got that lovelorn woe-is-me angst leaking off you so messy I can smell it.”

  “I’m not in love with a—they’re not mermaids,” I snapped at him. My skin was all hot and prickly, but fortunately I’m dark enough to hide that sort of thing.

  Tanu waved a hand. “Mermaids, atargati—that’s not what they call themselves anyway, so what’s the difference?”

  “‘Mermaids’ is a ridiculous romanticization that encourages preconceived stereotypes,” I shot back.

  I could tell from the expression on his face that he was thinking, Oh no, you’re one of those. The heat under my skin started to turn to rage.

  “And your precious word ‘atargati’ comes from the name of a Syrian fish goddess,” he said, getting up to pull out a chair for me. “Do you call them ‘she?’ Have you ‘romanticized’ one of them enough to want her to rub her curves against you until you scream from an orgasm? I think we can live with the word ‘mermaid.’”

  Fuck him. Fuck him and his vulgar, dismissive, wrong—

  I’m not in love with Aíoëe.

  There are so many, many problems with saying that. The first of which is, she’s not a woman. I know that.

  I came out twenty years ago. It nearly broke me. I lost my relationship with my father. I lost two of my sisters for nearly a decade… and we never quite made it back before I committed treason and disappeared.

  I lost my religion. I lost my whole identity. I had to rebuild myself brick by brick and seal a shield around myself with the label “lesbian.”

  I’m attracted to women. I was born that way. I’ve always been that way. If that’s not true, then my whole life, every relationship, every broken tie—it was all a lie.

  Aíoëe is not a woman.

  She fools the eye into thinking so, sure. Insipid hetero men who don’t know any better have been falling into lust with mermaids—atargati—for centuries. But I know better.

  I’m not going to redefine myself. I’m too old for that. I’ve already lost everything else—my career, my life… my sisters may have never understood me but we still saw each other at Christmas, and that’s gone now. A few stupid dreams are not going to take away the remainder of my identity.

  Not to mention that I talked to Aíoëe for a bare handful of hours, and she hardly said anything back. I don’t know her.

  I’m not in love with her. It’s the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard.

  I hate Dr. Tanu.

  He’s a gold-digging, insensitive, possibly evil fool.

  And he’s also a genius.

  I don’t know how he’s learned the things he has, or how he’s flown under the radar from the greater scientific community. He claims his was a family business, that his parents taught him everything he knows about the atargati and all he did was give it a storefront.

  Me, I wonder if Aíoëe wasn’t the first atargati kidnapped by humanity—rather only the first one to be kidnapped by a government and then make it back and tell them so.

  But I keep coming back. I sit in Tanu’s office chair that smells of leather and cigar smoke and I listen to him talk with a squirming in my guts warning me that his knowledge might very well be built on the backs of murdered atargati.

  “You know they don’t fuck like we fuck,” he said to me. “Not for pleasure, and not for popping out little mermaids. Some people walk out the door when I say that, but I gotta be up front.”

  He still thinks I’m in love. I haven’t told him otherwise. No matter how perverse his science is, I have to know what he knows—I’m cut off from everything else.

  I sicken myself.

  “It’ll be painful, too,” he continued. “Every bone in your body, you won’t be able to stand it. Like your body’s trying to crush itself from the inside. We’re not able to take you all the way mermaid, just enough, and the human part won’t like it one bit. But you gotta understand, it’s permanent. It’s all DNA manipulation. You know what DNA is?”

  “Yes,” I said. Inanely.

  “Well, once I do it, there’s no going back. You’ll have a fin, for starters, but more importantly, your internal pressure gets jacked, your metabolic processes all slow down, your cell membranes morph over to withstand the pressure. That might not mean much to you, but this will: you’ll have gills. You won’t be able to breathe up here anymore.”

  “What about speaking?” I couldn’t help asking. Not that I was considering this… lunacy.

  “Nope,” he said. “No breath.”

  Of course. The atargati don’t produce sound the way we do—no lungs, no vocal chords. We’d always assumed they vocalized in some way similar to fish, sonic muscles drumming against a swim bladder, or stridulations of skeletal body parts, or some combination. It’s no wonder the song they make is so hard for most humans to replicate.

  Except that I can. I can. I’m the only one. I can sing to them, communicate with them.

  If I were to take my lungs away and replace them with gills… that would all be snatched away.

  “Now, the other thing you have to know is that your puny human body can’t stand up to all this,” Tanu went on to me. “It’s impossible. The changes and the deep sea pressure—they kill you. You’ll have a matter of months to find your mermaid and meld.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. “Meld?” I asked.

  And that’s when he looked at me like I didn’t know the first thing about the atargati. Me. A fool.

  “Wait. Why did you come to me?” he said.

  I have to pause here in retelling this. Stop and breathe.

  I’d thought I’d lost everything. It turns out I still had something left—the conviction of my own knowledge, that I was one of the only people in the world who knew the atargati. That I knew them as well as any human could, that I was a foremost expert, like all the magazine profiles said, like the ghostwriter of my book probably would have said if Dr. Zanga weren’t in all likelihood deleting every mention of me from the log books and records. I still had that, until Tanu wrenched it from me.

  How did we not know all this? How do so many laypeople know, folks who listen to stories about mermaids retold on the street, enough that Dr. Tanu thinks the people who come to him are all seeking this one thing? How did they know and I didn’t?

  Maybe he’s lying. Maybe he’s making it up. Maybe it’s only urban legend, something “everybody knows” that isn’t actually true if we were able to study it.

  But he showed me his lab, once he realized I knew a little more than what DNA was. He explained everything he does, and his science—he’s probably evil, maybe one of the most evil men alive depending on how he knows what he does—but his science is good.

  I understand what he meant by “immortality” now.

  The atargati have genetic memory.

  And once you join with that genetic memory, your memory, your consciousness—he called it “soul,” but I am still a scientist—it becomes melded in and passed on to all the offspring. Your awareness exists as long as you have descendants, through all those other selves.

  It sounds—unbelievable. Incredible. And yet, to be a human who might experience that—I’ve spent my whole life studying the atargati. The chance to be a part of them, so intimately, forever—to live among their minds and learn everything about them, be one of them—

  This is idiocy. How does Dr. Tanu know any of this?

  How would I even find Aíoëe again, if I tried? And why would she or any other atargati choose to take a mute, deformed stranger on as a genetic mate?

  I took a risk and contacted Jace. I need some buttress here, some check. I’m so far outside the bounds of my own sanity that I don’t know which way is up anymore.

  I started out by telling hir what Tanu had said about atargati reproduction. Meld, he’d said, and he hadn’t been using the word in a figurative way. According to him, when mating begins the atargati literally burrow into each other, their bodies melting together—like anglerfish, only lacking the sexual dimorphism.

  It’s the third stage of a complex life cycle. They melt into each other and become a… a blob of genetic material, he called it, and for the life of me I cannot think of a better term. Polyps begin budding off it, then, the first stage of the new generation, the parents slowly dying as they give the children life—and living on through them.

  “‘Polyps’ would be the wrong term,” said Jace. “That’s specific to cnidaria—”

  “I tried to tell him that,” I said.

  “But as a description of a developmental phase, I suppose it works,” ze continued. “Fascinating. A stationary developmental phase, the adult atargati we’re familiar with, and then the reproductive phase—if it’s true, it’s a fascinating life cycle.”

  I had to admit I agreed. “But it doesn’t sound—absurd to you?”

  “No more absurd than other deep-sea lifecycles we know about. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio.”

  Hamlet again.

  I thought about the anglerfish, burrowing into each other, eight males becoming mindless tiny parasites on a single female, melted into her flesh until she needed them for reproduction.

  I thought of Turritopsis dohrnii, the immortal jellyfish, reverting to polyp form over and over and reliving its existence indefinitely.

  Even immortality was already not unheard of in the deep sea.

  It’s time.

  There’s nothing left for me here. I might die, but if I don’t—

  I’ve spent my life learning about the atargati. If this fails, at least it will be a fitting end.

  Even with all the money I have left, and everything Jace gave me, I could only come up with half Tanu’s fee. He narrowed his little avaricious eyes at me and said, “Well then. You’re the woman who talks to mermaids. Before you lose your voice, give it to me.”

  Until that moment, I hadn’t realized he knew who I was. But of course—the magazine articles, and Tanu would have paid attention… I don’t know when he made the connection.

  I’m lucky he didn’t call someone, turn me in, notice I was using a fake name and nose around to see why. But he’s only out for himself—if they’d offered a reward for me maybe it would be different.

  So. He wants a dictionary. Words, phrases, grammatical examples. He wants as much of my voice as I can give him. He wants the tapes I was painstakingly recording for the Institute, all of them, every note of meaning and nuance, and more—whatever I can bring him, whatever more I can record.

  But it’s a deal with the devil. How do I know what he’s going to use this for? How do I know he doesn’t have atargati trapped right now in a pressurized tank below his labs, his own personal lab animals awaiting dissection?

  Language is powerful. What if I’m giving a mad scientist a weapon?