The End's Beginning

the men's sound-maker will not form a sensitive enough picture to show them to me.

How strange to think that men will prevent me from carrying out the task given me by other men...

I can smell and taste the cold metal hull and the hot-metal hot-oil of the propellers and engines. And now I can even hear the murky curtain of fish-nets, spread like great wings, sweeping the sea as they approach. I have avoided them so many times before .

In a few moments my life will end. My people may be safe for a short time after I die-- yet I want to live. I must give up my life, but I will not do it happily, nor even bravely. The nets will close around me and panic with them, and I will thrash and struggle and silently cry out as the ropes and wires cut into me.

The nets are just before me. I touch them, and the hard mesh scrapes my skin.

Suddenly my body wrenches away, turning too swiftly, convulsed by the signal. Unwillingly I dive and turn, circle the ship and fishing nets, and flee.

How can the men know so much about what is going on this far out in the ocean? Can they know where every ship is, and where each creature swims?

I move onward with powerful involuntary strokes of my tail, frightened to realize how close a control the men have over me, yet relieved to have even a few more minutes.

But there is no joy left in me. The men have given me a terrible gift that will be paid for in the lives of people. Even if the men do not begin to kill each other and the world because of my actions, if I finish this task all the air- breathers in the sea will be under more suspicion. Already the undersea machines kill us if we come too close. We have learned to avoid them, but we cannot avoid every human machine. There are too many of them, and our foolish young ones court pleasure and death riding their bow-waves.

The taste of land grows stronger now, and the water is much shallower. The metal sounds that guide me echo loudly, quickly. The water is thick with the waste of humans and their creatures. People never visit this bay anymore.

Driven onward, my whole body quivers with weariness and fear. I am only a presence within it, able to guide myself around the worst islands of trash and poison, but little more. If I could shut off my hearing as I can close my eyes I would, and know nothing more until the end.

I am the only living creature in a desert world.

As I round a point of land the cry and groan of machinery washes over me, a wave of sound opposing the waves of the sea. I am swimming into a harbor full of ships and other things important to men. I surface, breathe the heavy air, listen to the air-borne sounds. The lights are bright before me.

I dive again. That is another compulsion the men have put into me, to stay beneath the surface as much as possible. They would have given me gills if they could.

This maze of shapes and echoes is not a place people would come of their own free will, though with my own voice I would not be so confused. Each note would tell me something new about my surroundings.

A shape is coming toward me.

These men have discovered me. They realize I am a creature of the other men, and they are sending a weapon to kill me. I surge forward, seeking to outrun it.

Of a sudden I cease fleeing. This is what I have sought: death by some other means than the plan of the men who captured me.

The shape comes closer and I swim as slowly as I am able. I do not want to die.

The shape does not move like a machine.

And now I can see it, through the darkness and the murk. This is no man-weapon.

If I were free I could never swim so calmly onward, waiting for the shark. Its ancestors slaughtered

mine when people decided to return to the sea. We in turn learned how to kill the only creatures we ever hated.

Better the killer whale, the nets, the weapons of men. I can smell the cold beast now. It will writhe in a frenzy at the first taste of my blood. It will kill me with whatever its tiny brain grasps as joy, for it knows my people are its only challenge in the sea. Except the men. And there is no defense for people or for sharks against the men.

The shark will stop me, but I cannot stop the men from killing themselves. When they have suicided, when their poisons have murdered all the people, the shark will remain, as it has remained for millions of years, as it will remain until the end of the world.

This is the end's beginning.

Published by Alexandria Digital Literature. (http://www.alexlit.com/)

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