Ecotones: Ecological Stories from the Border Between Fantasy and Science Fiction Read online

  Yuri sprang up in his boat, shouting with excitement and relief—then almost fell from it as the current swirled violently beneath him, threatening to flip it over until he crouched and leaned against the tilt.

  When he was able to look again, he saw the undines circling like sharks… but no sign of Nina. He howled in anguish and frustration as he reached the temple roof and leapt from the boat, rucksack in hand. He struggled with the buckles, desperate for the pistol, wishing he had loaded it, angry at his own caution.

  Looking up, he spotted Nina trying to climb the steeple, then the roof shook as two of the undines slithered out of the water in pursuit. One caught her leg and let out a triumphant cry as it pulled her off the wall, kicking and shouting. Her booted foot caught it in the face, but the other one had her. Together they dragged her into the water and carried her down into the deep.

  Shots rang out. A musket ball whistled past his face and he dropped to his knees. A skiff glided between the nearby houses, two musketeers riding in its prow. One of them shouted, “Avast there!” but his voice broke, no more convincing a mariner than the woman holding the other gun and desperately reloading.

  Yuri stood again and shouted incoherently, “The undines! My daughter! Nina!”

  Turning back to the water, he found himself confronted by another undine, larger than the others. Up on its fishlike tail, the creature screeched, raised its great webbed hands and thrust him to his knees. All thought of his weapons forgotten, Yuri gawped at its inhuman musculature, the whorled tattoos that covered its chest and the light catching the scales on its shoulders. It stank of musk and sweat and fish and the sea; his head reeled.

  “Please, no!” Yuri wailed, cowering as it raised its arm to deliver the killing blow.

  But the soldiers had managed to reload, and the skiff had closed the range so that their next shots hit the undine in the stomach. It yelled with a surprisingly human voice and collapsed in front of him, forcing Yuri to scrabble backwards across the roof to avoid the splash of bright red blood.

  It rose up again, its face filled with rage and pain, but no fear.

  “You’ll never see her again,” it hissed, “she is the King’s.” Then it slid into the water as if the wound was nothing, following its siblings down to wherever they had taken Nina.

  Yuri began to sob, head in hands, his whole body shaking. He was still crying when the marines pulled up next to the temple and shook him roughly. The woman eventually pulled his hands away and slapped him across the cheek.

  “My name is Sergeant Botkina,” she said. “Control yourself. Stop weeping.”

  Yuri wiped his sleeve across his eyes. Botkina looked more like a harbour alley rat than a soldier, her patchwork uniform pieced together from a dozen different companies. Her arms were covered in tattoos, optimistic attempts to disguise old gang affiliations with tokens of her service—the dates of battles she had survived, the Marine’s symbolic anchor, the emperor’s sigil. Even with all that, she looked less than half his age.

  She was patient with him and gave him water. He sensed the skills of an expert interrogator behind her sympathy and concern, but he told her about Nina and her foolish quest to find her lost mother, and how she was down there, if only he could get to her.

  Botkina nodded, then reached out and tousled his hair, as if their ages were reversed. “It’s a good thing you’re not one of those sympathisers. We shot an old girl an hour ago just for that.”

  Yuri was already asking whether they had any diving equipment on the skiff before he realised that Botkina meant they had shot Marissa. He realised that one of the markings obscured by the new ink looked very like the King’s trident, and he wondered how she could so coldly change sides. The inundation had forced everyone to pick their loyalties anew, he supposed. He paused, swallowed hard, but then pressed on. “I’ve got to go down there to rescue Nina.”

  The soldiers exchanged glances among themselves before one of them, a cold-faced northerner whose face was still red-raw with scratches said, “She’s gone, fella. Been down there too long. The King has her now.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” he replied. They had taken his rucksack, but he beckoned for it, and one of the soldiers eventually took pity on him and handed it back.

  “Keepsakes of my children,” he explained, in case they wondered, lifting out the clothes, carefully placing the weapons to one side so that the soldiers could see he meant no harm.

  He located the precious box, lifted it from the rucksack, and unlocked the clasp. He looked at its contents again, tears flowing freely. The soldiers drifted to the other side of the temple to consider their next move, discussing whether to make camp on the roof of the taller building.

  “That was where my daughter thought she’d find her mother,” he blubbered and, embarrassed, they turned away to give the broken man a semblance of privacy. Then, seizing his chance, with the box clasped tightly to him, he moved to the edge of the roof, lay down and pushed his head under the water.

  He opened his eyes but could see nothing. He wondered how far sound might carry under the waves as he screamed for his wife, screamed for Ana.

  It was an admission of defeat, of failure, and of love.

  The Marines pulled him out of the water with a cheeriness that suggested they had expected him to attempt to take his own life. They must have seen so many fractured families, he thought, as they picked him up and helped him change into some of the dry clothes in his rucksack. They even helped him pack it back up, weapons and all. If they looked inside the jewellery box, they said nothing.

  They led him back to the skiff and rowed him over to the tall building. They climbed in via one of the upper windows, and made their way through each room until they found the stairwell. The building had been looted on the dry levels, the floor strewn with papers and detritus. The local cat population had also moved in, rather than learn to swim.

  The soldiers gathered papers and other flammable materials as they made their way to the roof, then set about making a fire. Sergeant Botkina made a show of looking after Yuri but the others weren’t interested, and he could tell that he had become a burden they didn’t need. He suspected it was much easier to shoot those who had stayed behind to await the King’s welcome.

  From up high they could see the sea creatures gathering around the King’s great maelstrom, and the naval flotilla moving towards it. The soldiers pointed out where they had seen artillery positions set up in the distant meadows, forcing the refugees out, and they all cheered when the shelling to support the fleet began.

  Yuri wondered about the efficacy of explosives and shells, but a gruff and sly-looking soldier told him that they were using a special kind of bomb, called a depth charge.

  “How can they take on the god of the sea?” he asked, genuinely shocked by their hubris.

  “The top brass tell us that he’s not a god,” Botkina replied, “just another old sea creature, like a giant squid, or a great blue whale. We’ve all seen their carcasses washed up on the shore, so if they can die, so can he…”

  “You were raised by the water, weren’t you, Sergeant? I can tell from your tatts.” He showed her the similar markings on his upper arm, the gull and the vortex. “Does that sound right to you?”

  She just shrugged and turned away, afraid to appear parochial in front of her men.

  The battle played out over the next hour. They were powerless to intervene, but the men kept up a running commentary about the commanders of each sloop and frigate. Most of it was probably half-remembered gossip, but it allowed them to distance themselves from what they were seeing as, one by one, their comrades died. When some vast unseen beast reached from the deep and pulled down the first cruiser, it astonished them all, but they could blame the disaster on a poor helmsman. And when the undines swarmed and holed a frigate, well, it was surely because the captain didn’t treat his marines right.

  Gradually, they said less and less, simply bearing witness as the fiasco became a rout.
The end came when a huge and terrible leviathan rose out of the water, grasped the mid-section of the flagship and dragged it straight into the King’s vortex.

  The soldiers took off their hats and helmets. The sergeant declared, “Well, that’s that, then,” and the cynical and aggressive soldiers hugged as they wept.

  The hour after the battle was fraught, as undines and other sea creatures hunted and killed any surviving mariners. The weather started to change. Yuri noticed that the water levels had begun to rise again, and wished that he had taken the children and gone to spend his final few months fleeing to the mountains.

  “What is the King Under the Sea?” asked Botkina. She’d been stripping her uniform of its badges and insignia and throwing them into the fire.

  “That is,” Yuri said, and pointed towards the place where the sea met the sky. It was darker now, topped by foam. A great wave was forming, dominating the skyline. It met the clouds and obliterated everything else, still far distant, but inexorably coming to claim the land again.

  “That is the King,” he said. “The one who cannot be defied.”

  And then out of the becalmed waters before them rose Ana: imperious, beautiful and terrible. Yuri had only seen her transformed like this on a few occasions, but he still felt joy and love despite the scales and fins and seaweed, despite her leaving him. The soldiers reached for their guns, though she was twice the size of the undines they had fought off earlier.

  Ana opened her arms to reveal Nina, cradled in a giant Crassatella shell, and his heart surged with hope.

  Ana laughed, and it was the barking of a seal, and the clicking of a dolphin, and the song of a siren. He began to smile, then to laugh with her. He danced and capered, and pushed the soldiers’ rifles down, crying, “It’s my wife! She’s my wife!”

  At that, they pointed the rifles at him, but he ignored them and rummaged for the box in the rucksack. He broke the lid as he scrambled to undo the fastening, but it didn’t matter. There was no future on land for his daughter.

  He lifted from the box a garment that was, at first glance, a beautifully sequinned dress that glistened in the noonday sun.

  He had kept it hidden in the house since the day she’d been born, along with those of her brothers. He had watched the three garments grow as the children grew. He’d moved them to new secret places every time the children explored and played near the latest hidey-hole.

  On their sixteenth birthdays ,he had explained to Vitaly and Piotr the significance of their heritage, and Ana had then taken them down to the water and showed them exactly what it entailed. Both of the boys had made their choice.

  There was no name for what Ana was. Some days she was a sinuous grey seal, others the queen of the undines. Some days she was the mother of their children, others the daughter of a king. Most of the time she was just Ana—the girl he had met on his skiff in the middle of nowhere, then found again living in the gutters of the land, and then married.

  When she spoke, it was the sound of the tide on pebbles, the waves breaking on the shore. “It’s too late, my love, too late.”

  The marines ran for their boat. The sergeant called out to him, begging him to grab the girl and climb aboard, but Yuri knew now that it was futile for he could see what Ana had promised.

  He went to her, and she was suddenly herself, and he folded her lithe human form in a long-sought embrace, nuzzling her neck, telling her that he had missed her.

  “It’s no good, old man,” she said. “When they took Nina, I had to come out of hiding and go to my father. He’ll let our child live, but there’s no hope for anyone else.”

  “No hope for the boys?” He replied.

  “No respite from the King.” Then she pulled him close and said, “Help me dress her.”

  They slowly clothed their unconscious daughter in the gown of scales and shells. As they did so, her countenance began to shift and blur, as it had for her brothers. Yuri stroked her cheek and kissed her forehead. “She’ll be fine in the world to come, now she has her skin. And maybe Piotr and Vitaly will wear theirs once more.”

  Ana nodded, but didn’t smile. Yuri fervently hoped that the boys had kept their heritage close.

  The tsunami dominated the skyline now. He had no idea when it would hit, but it would be soon, and he could not imagine the King would ever let the waters roll back.

  If it were to break, and subside, what would be left of all that they had built on the land if the Gods were angry?

  He slowly lowered himself to the high roof, cradling his daughter. Nina woke, just then, and he smiled at her.

  “Your mother’s back,” he said.

  The Green

  Lauren Beukes

  Lauren Beukes is among the most celebrated contemporary writers of speculative fiction. Her novels Moxyland, Zoo City, The Shining Girls and Broken Monsters mix near-future sci-fi, fantasy and horror with tech thrillers, serial killers and hardboiled crime, and have earned her an Arthur C. Clarke Award as well as numerous others.

  Humanity, and its bastard offspring Business, has long seen the environment as a resource ripe for exploitation—that’s what life does, after all. In The Green, the corporate animal sees an aggressive ecosystem ripe for the plunder, if those sent to reap its rewards can keep to the right side of the profit/loss barrier. But even a catastrophe can be turned into advantage, under the right conditions…

  The Pinocchios are starting to rot. Really, this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. They’re just doing what corpses do best. Even artificially-preserved and florally-animated ones. Even the ones you know.

  They shuffle around the corridors of our homelab in their hermetically-sealed hazmat suits, using whatever’s left of their fine motor functioning. Mainly they get in the way. We’ve learned to walk around them when they get stuck. You can get used to anything. But I avoid looking at their faces behind the glass. I don’t want to recognize Rousseau.

  They’re supposed to be confined to one of the specimen storage units. But a month ago, a Pinocchio pulled down a cabinet of freeze-dried specimens. So now Inatec management lets them wander around. They seem happier being free-range. If you can say that about a corpse jerked around by alien slime mould like a zombie puppet.

  They’ve become part of the scenery. Less than ghosts. They’re as banal a part of life on this dog-forsaken planet as the nutritionally-fortified lab-grown oats they serve up in the cafeteria three times a day.

  We’re supposed to keep out of their way. No harvester should touch, obstruct or otherwise interfere with the OPPs, the notice from Inatec management read, finished off with a smiley face and posted on the bulletin board in the cafeteria. On paper, because we’re not allowed personal communications technology in homelab. Too much of a security risk.

  Organically Preserved Personnel. It’s an experimental technique to use the indigenous flora to maintain soldiers’ bodies in wartime to get them back to their loved ones intact. The irony is that we’re so busy doing experiments on the corpses of our deceased crew that we don’t send them back at all. And if we did, it would have to be in a flask. Because after they rot—average “life-span” is 29 days—they liquefy. And the slime mould has to be reintegrated into the colony they’ve been growing in Lab Three.

  It’s not really slime mould, of course. Nothing on this damn planet is anything you’d recognize, which is exactly why Inatec have us working the jungle in armored suits along with four thousand other corporates planet-side, all scrambling to find new alien flora with commercial applications so they can patent the shit out of all of it.

  Slime mould is the closest equivalent the labtechs have come up with. Self-organizing cellular amoebites that ooze around on their own until one of them finds a very recently dead thing to grow on. Then it lays down signals, chemical or hormonal or some other system we don’t understand yet, and all the other amoebites congeal together to form a colony that sets down deep roots like a wart into whatever’s left of the nervous system of the animal… and t
hen take it over.

  We’ve had several military contractors express major interest in seeing the results. Inatec has promised us all big bonuses if we manage to land a military deal—and not just the labtechs either. After all, it’s us lowly harvesters who go out there in our GMP suits to find the stuff.

  Inatec’s got mining rights to six territories in four quadrants on this world. Two sub-tropical, one arid/mountainous, and three tropical, which is where the big bucks are. Officially, we’re working RCZ-8 Tropical 14: 27° 32' S / 49° 38' W. We call it The Green.

  We were green ourselves when we arrived on planet. The worst kind of naïve, know-nothing city hicks. It was all anyone could talk about as we crammed round the windows—how fucking amazing it all looked as the dropship descended over our quadrant. We weren’t used to nature. We didn’t know how hungry it was.

  The sky was rippled in oranges and golds from the pollen in the air, turning the spike slate pinnacles of the mountains a powder pink. The jungle was a million shades of green. Greens like you couldn’t imagine. Greens to make you mad. Or kill you dead.

  Homelab squats in the middle of all that green like a fat concrete spider with too many legs radiating outwards. Uglier even than the Caxton Projects apartment blocks back home. Most of us are from what you’d call underprivileged backgrounds. The Caxton stats when I left were 89% adult unemployment, 73% adult illiteracy, 65% chance of dying before the age of 40 due to communicable disease or an act of violence. Who wouldn’t want a ticket out of there? Even if it was one-way.

  Besides, our work is a privilege. We’re getting to work at the forefront of xenoflora biotech. At least that’s what it says on the “Welcome To Inatec” pack all employees are handed when they’ve dotted the Is and crossed the Ts on the contract. Or maybe just made an X where you’re supposed to sign. You don’t need to be literate to pick flowers. Even in a GMP.