Poseidon

Rebecca trailed her feet in the water, feeling like a school girl on her last day of summer vacation.  Cerberus floated along beside the raft, her enormous flippers occasionally touching Rebecca’s legs.

                Rebecca looked up at the sky, so like Earth but so different too.  The sky was a darker blue, almost indigo.  The sun was larger and darker, and it didn’t burn Rebecca’s eyes when she looked at it.  It hovered perpetually at the horizon of the infinite sea, giving the illusion of eternal sunset.  There was no sunset and no sunrise here; Poseidon always faced the same direction.  Rebecca took a deep breath, as though she could smell and taste the salty ocean air.  Sadly, all she could taste was the warm rubber of her breathing mask.  Rebecca sighed.  So close, and yet so far.

                She looked down at Cerberus with affection.  Erik Johansen had said that Cerberus had chosen the name herself; he’d wanted to call her “Siren.”  Cerberus looked nothing like a three-headed dog; she most closely resembled the love-child of a manatee and a dolphin.  She rolled sideways and raised one flipper into the air, and Rebecca touched it with a gloved hand.

                No skin-to-skin contact, doctor’s orders.  Each species was a living ecosystem for microbes that the other had no natural immunity to.  Part of Johansen’s work, back on the ship, involved developing safe vaccines so that people could visit in the future.  Their sponsor, that computer tycoon Jefferson Linares, saw this planet as the ultimate sea-quarium, where rich tourists could swim with the natives—for a price.  He tolerated the scientific aspect of their discovery the way a spoiled child tolerates a lecture about greed during the Christmas season.  In the meantime, Rebecca was encased in sterilized latex from head to toe, and she saw the world through clear goggles attached to her breathing mask.  At least the latex was thin; Rebecca often forgot that she was wearing her “body condom,” and it didn’t affect communication with the sea-people at all.

                Rebecca squeezed Cerberus’s flipper, and Cerberus tapped her knee twice.  Rebecca felt rather than heard the creature’s words in her mind.  “What’s wrong?  No games today?”

                Rebecca ran two fingers up and down Cerberus’s flipper and shook her head.  The sea-people communicated with a combination of sign language and low-grade telepathy.  Rebecca could not project her thoughts with any reliability, but she and Cerberus got on well with the hand signals and gestures they had taught each other over the six months they had spent together.

                “It’s time for me to go back,” Rebecca said aloud.  Cerberus would not understand her words, but she could sense the feeling behind them:  sadness and impending loneliness.

                “But that is good for you,” Cerberus ‘said,’ rolling in the water.  “You will be back with your own kind.  Your success here will bring you status, and you will seek a mate and offspring.”

                “I don’t get along that well with my own kind,” Rebecca said.  “I think I like it better here.  It’s so quiet and peaceful.”  She looked around again at planet Poseidon, the watery world that Johansen and his fellow eggheads had discovered.  Not a single foot of dry land to be found; all of Poseidon’s life had evolved underwater.  The planet appeared to have similar animal classifications, and like Earth, the greatest intelligence had developed in the mammalians.  It had been a marvelous six months, but for both Rebecca and Johansen, it had been too short.  Johansen was frustrated because there were still questions about the intelligent life here that he could not answer, something about their life-cycle.  Rebecca knew little of that; her job had been to use her expertise as a marine biologist to train and communicate with the creatures.  To her surprise and Johansen’s chagrin, most of the training had gone in the other direction. 

                “Not so peaceful deeper below,” Cerberus commented.  “The adults of my kind do not play games.  But don’t you want a mate?  All the males here with you are mated elsewhere.  You should seek a mate, while you are young and fertile.”  Cerberus was a young female, about to reach puberty, and her entire thought process was wrapped up in her impending search for a suitable male.  She was not unlike a human girl.

                Rebecca patted her own shoulders and pointed down at the water.  She preferred the company of the sea.  There were no words in the sea-people’s simple vocabulary to explain that Rebecca had a checkered past back home, and there seemed to be no escaping it while she lived on Earth.  She’d been a teenaged prostitute, pressured into the life by an abusive father and kept there by a boyfriend and drug addiction.  Getting arrested had saved her life; she had used the escape hatch of rehab to get away from the bad men and start over.  She’d gotten clean, gotten her act together, and with the help of an angel named Sarah who’d been her sponsor, she had eventually gone to college and gotten a degree in marine biology.  So it was a happy ending, on the surface.

                But there was still that nagging trace of dirt on her soul, that feeling that she was an outsider, an imposter.  She didn’t belong among good people, people who had never been beaten or raped, never sold ass for a snort to make the pain go away.  Rebecca didn’t think she would ever belong, not while she lived among humans.  It was just hard to be around people.  Even people who knew nothing about her, who saw her as just that friendly blonde woman who trained dolphins for a living, made her uncomfortable, and that made them treat her differently.

                Here it was better.  Quieter.  And the sea-people accepted her without question.

                Cerberus’s face broke the surface.  Grey, soft, and round like a manatee, except she had no whiskers, and her eyes had the eerie bright roundness of a dolphin.  The rest of her body was thick and solidly muscled, with an exceptionally long tailfin.  Cerberus’s mouth opened, and she chattered like a squirrel.  Her long, limber flippers gestured and curled.

                “You have many fine genetic properties.  Your body is healthy.  Your eyesight is excellent, and you are a strong swimmer.  You must mate.  You owe it to your species to produce superior offspring.”

                Rebecca dropped off the raft and into the water.  This ocean was saltier than the one back on Earth, and she seemed to bounce in the water.  She felt that if she paddled upward she could clear the surface entirely and walk on water like Jesus. 

                Rebecca took off swimming through the gentle waves, and Cerberus gave cheerful chase.  There was no point in spoiling their last hours together in moping.

                The others of Cerberus’s pod were spread about, napping near the surface or simply drifting with the current.  It still felt odd to Rebecca to look up and see no sea birds drifting overhead.  The other sea-people—Rebecca could not think of them by Johansen’s name, “sea bison,”—rolled and waved in lazy greeting.  Their manner and personality were like the manatee, though Rebecca had seen them swim faster than her naked eye could catch, and they fought like cornered rats when threatened.  But now the water was warm and their bellies were full, and they floated about like little pigs.  Rebecca rolled over in the water and blew them all a kiss.

                Back in the ship, Johansen was using the tiny cameras mounted on Rebecca’s rubber suit to watch and analyze the sea bison.  “There’s something we’re missing,” he said to his partner, a young man named Jacobs.  “Their DNA is unlike anything we’ve got swimming in the oceans on Earth.  But I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

                “Well duh they’re different,” said Jacobs, who missed his wife and daughter and wanted badly to walk on dry land again.  “They’re aliens.”

                “Actually we’re the aliens,” Johansen said, “but that’s not the point.  I’ll tell you what they remind me of, if you promise not to laugh.”

                “I promise nothing,” Jacobs said.  “Tell me.”

                “They’re not like manatees at all.  They’re more like caterpillars.  Sea-dwelling caterpillars.  I wonder what they change into.”

                Faster and faster Rebecca swam, as though she could leave her unhappiness behind on the raft.  Speaking of which—Rebecca paused in the water and looked around.  It was unwise to go out of sight of the raft.  On this featureless plain of water, it would be easy to lose her bearings and lose her way.  Cerberus could probably lead her back to it, but why take the chance?

                There was the raft; Rebecca relaxed.  It was just a yellow blob, moored to the anchor point that the ship had dropped from orbit.  Cerberus drifted by, and Rebecca snagged her dorsal fin with both hands.  Take me away, she thought wildly.  I want to forget that Earth even exists.

                Cerberus sensed what Rebecca wanted, and she took off across the water at top speed.  Rebecca held on for dear life and whooped her joy to the indigo sky.  Wave after wave smashed and broke apart on her mask.  Cerberus leaped into the air, and Rebecca clamped her legs around the sea-child’s streamlined body.  She felt the pulsing muscle moving beneath her thighs and almost wept with the perfect beauty of this world and these marvelous people.

                They want me to go back to Earth?  To that hot, crowded, smelly planet, filled with sneering men and judgmental women?  Really?

                Splash!  They both went under, and Rebecca involuntarily held her breath.  When they broke surface, Rebecca breathed deep and laughed at herself.  The face mask that filtered the air around her worked underwater, albeit less efficiently.  It was no replacement for good scuba gear, but if Rebecca ever needed to stay underwater for five minutes or so, it would do the job.

                Cerberus flew over the waves, and Rebecca raised her hands into the air like a religious supplicant.  She only wished that she could take off her mask and headpiece and feel the cool spray in her face, the wind in her hair.

                I could die right now and be all right with it, Rebecca thought.  I wish I could die here, and never go back.

                Cerberus twitched in midair, seeming to flinch.  Then she collected herself.

                “Hold on tight,” Cerberus instructed Rebecca.  The woman obeyed, gripping her marine steed’s sturdy dorsal fin with both hands.

                Then Cerberus dove down.  Straight down, into the deep inky sea.  Rebecca clutched her friend’s powerful body as they left the sunlight behind them and forged down into the depths of the alien ocean.

                Rebecca forced herself to breathe.  Her mask worked sluggishly in the dense water.  It felt like she was breathing through a heavy, wet blanket.

                “Where are we going?” Rebecca asked with her hands and her mind.

                “I want to show you something,” Cerberus said.  “It will make you happy, and it will make your Doctor Johansen happy.  He’ll understand us now.”

                Rebecca was touched.  Cerberus wanted to give her a gift before she left forever.  She resolved to endure the heavy ocean air for as long as it took to see.

                The water’s density was increasing, and Rebecca had to take very deep breaths.  “Be brave,” Cerberus told her.  “You will be amazed.”

                The sea around them was darkening now, the twilight of early evening.  Glowing jellyfish drifted around them.  Red, blue, green…  Rebecca smiled at the loveliness.  I really could die here, she thought.  There’s so much beauty, I don’t think I could ever see all of it.

                Johansen stared at the darkening screen before him.  “What’s going on?” he asked.  “She shouldn’t be going that deep; her oxygen will run out.”

                “Chick’s lost her damn mind, that’s what’s going on,” Jacob said.  “Use the radio, call her back.”

                Johansen shook his head.  “She’s out of range.  She’s never gone so far from the raft before.  What’s gotten into her?”

                “I don’t know, but we better send someone down there if we want our marine biologist back.  I don’t think she knows what she’s doing.”

                A dark eel slithered past.  It was thick as a python and black as an adder, and Rebecca flinched away from it.  The eel took no notice of her, focused on a cluster of glowing shrimplike creatures that drifted with the current.

                And still Cerberus forged downward, leaving twilight behind and coming into full dark.

                Rebecca couldn’t breathe.  The water was too dense, flattening her fragile body.  She tried to take a deep breath, but her lungs were locked, pressed down by the sea.  She tapped Cerberus frantically with both hands.  Blood-flowers bloomed before her eyes.  She couldn’t breathe.

                “Be brave,” Cerberus said again.  “You won’t have to go back to Earth, if you really don’t want to.”

                Then Rebecca understood.  This was Cerberus’s gift, the gift of death.  She let go of the sea-child, meaning to fly upwards and back to air and life.

                Something seized her ankle in a cold grasp, hard as rubber and strong as a manacle.

                Rebecca screamed, losing what was left of her precious oxygen.

                Jacobs had his suit on and was making the pod-drop down to the surface, but Johansen was sick in his stomach and almost crying.  It would take ten minutes or more to reach Rebecca’s raft.  Rebecca didn’t have ten minutes.

                Cerberus stroked her with a flipper, reassuring and gentle as ever, but Rebecca kicked and flailed, thrashed and choked in the grip of the undersea monster.

                She looked down, straight into Hell.

                A glowing volcanic crevice, and dwelling in the crevice a creature with a raw, red maw, ringed with shining teeth.  Two enormous eyes perched above, round and bright and—oh God—intelligent.

                The eyes flicked at her, then at Cerberus, and Rebecca saw the family resemblance.  She could almost hear Johansen’s scream.

                As she drew closer to the teeth, struggling uselessly against the thick, rubbery limb that held her tight, Rebecca had one last thought.

                The dog at the gate…