The Deep - Rivers Solomon Page 0,17
stranded, abandoned thing. In this big wide sea, we are far from the only strange fish.
We become queen of this place. One of the eldest among us, we know what most others do not. For that, they call us historian.
* * *
To protect ourselves from those who’d destroy this precious thing we’ve fashioned out of scraps and leavings, we build cities. The materials of our structures are mud, carnage, ship wreckage, and plants harvested from more shallow seawater. Our language flourishes until we’ve lost count of the words. We have words for every creature in the ocean. We have words for every region of the water.
We hone our natural skills and learn how to hear one another across distances that span days of travel time.
And yet we, the maker of all this, want more and more and more. We are collectors, and a collection is never complete. This vast city of ours must endure forever, which means it needs more reinforcements. Thicker walls. More huts to home and protect the growing families. And more zoti aleyu. Our population, roughly three hundred, is still too small to be considered robust. We remember the way our centuries-old pod was wiped out like a flash. When not properly fortified, a legacy is no more enduring than a wisp of plankton. It is our duty to ensure that the zoti aleyu survive, and that means we return to searching the ocean for any who are stranded.
We are away now so often that children swim after us calling, “Zoti! Zoti! Stay! Stay with us! Tell us the story of the surface dweller on the brink of death you saved! Stay! Please!”
“I am making it so no one of us will ever be without a home again,” we say, and shoo them off. We are in a hurry. We’ve planned for a several-week trip to the surface in hopes of learning the answer to our most pressing question: Where do the zoti aleyu come from?
One of the more precocious of the lot grabs us by our tail fin and pulls, then bites savagely. “Stay!” it says. “I despise you. If you go, I hope you never come back.”
Its mouth is full of our flesh.
Injured now, we should have no choice but to obey the little zoti aleyu’s request that we remain in the city we’ve made at the bottom of the ocean. We don’t have time to nurse wounds, however. Every moment wasted is a moment toward our people’s destruction.
Others come to gather the misbehaving pup, and we are off toward our lonely days of searching. It is a pleasant loneliness because in the end it will mean more togetherness. We are getting older and older, thinking more about what it is that makes a stable future when the world is so full of unpredictability.
Weeks are spent at the shallowest depths. Ships pass us by and at times we follow them, but to no end.
It’s been almost half a year when we find another of our kind, a seven-year-old feral thing recently taken in by a pod of fin whales. It’s blind and deaf, sensing only by its skin, which is heavily scarred and torn off in places. It recognizes, either by smell or feel, that we’re like it, and swims up to us curiously.
We try to draw it to us so we can take it back to the deep before we continue our search for more zoti aleyu, but it will not leave the whales.
“Come!” we say.
It will not come.
We reach out our fins to grab it but the whales intervene. They are easily four times our size. Not to be trifled with.
We use our words so it might feel them against its worn skin, but the zoti aleyu is not having it. The whales hum in unison and we’re stunned into paralysis by the vibrations of the sound waves. While we’re immobile, the pod swims from us, the zoti included.
We have known too much loss. Right now, the whale pod is all that pup knows, but in time, it will want for more, and will it be able to find us?
It could find us if we were massive, if our dwellings stretched so high, their tips were in the shallow part of the sea. We need more workers. More builders. More zoti aleyu.
* * *
How disorienting it is to go most of your life wondering about a thing, only to happen upon the answer, and it is a horror.
We knew we shared kinship with