The Twice Lost

wondered if she was effectively blackmailing everyone into giving up killing. But she didn’t see what else she could do.

“Okay,” Luce breathed out. “Okay.” She couldn’t leave now. Nausicaa? Am I finally doing the right thing? Will you find me, since I can’t search for you? “Then we’re starting training tonight.”

11 Tadpole

“Good morning, tadpole.” Sudden light blazed through the tank and its anteroom, until the air appeared brass yellow and solid. As Secretary Moreland had expected, there was no answering flick of her blue tail, not yet at least. “Good morning.” He was bellowing into the speaker until feedback throbbed against the glass; she wouldn’t sleep through that.

Anais’s voice was among the voices on that recording he’d listened to on an afternoon he chose not to remember—except that he remembered it all the time. They’d piped the same music into her tank a few days ago, for the occasion switching off the mechanism set to shock her in response to those particular frequencies, and she’d casually identified all the singers later. Most of them were among those Anais had seen die, but the other possible survivors—Catarina and Dana were the names he recalled—would also be of tremendous personal interest to him if they could ever be captured alive.

This creature in the tank was a source of the musical infestation that persisted in his mind. The limpid trill of mermaid song reverberated through his thoughts as insistently as his own identity, as ineradicably as the word “I.” And even though Anais wasn’t about to risk singing, he could still feel the presence of her voice, her compressed song, whenever he visited her. Blocked and bottled in her throat, it still whined and jarred, fighting to get free. Moreland could practically see it, a kind of mouthy pulse chewing away at nothing just above her clavicle.

He could never allow himself to hear her song again. But he could watch the song juddering away inside that pearly neck, and better yet he could command its owner. “Now, tadpole. If too much TV is what’s bringing on this lethargy of yours, we can take it away. We can take away whatever is necessary to put some spring back into your step.” He leered to himself at his choice of words. “Get over here.”

As he expected, the sky blue tail reared up from behind her barricade of cushions and flung off a few sullen drops.

The blue of her scales, the blue of the water, interacted strangely with his eyes, scraping them with a distinct electric pain. “Yesterday, Anais.” Blue and gold swished lazily through the water, and he grinned. The tank wasn’t so big; in an instant she was almost at the glass.

“Why can’t you just let me sleep?” Anais spoke these words in a faintly musical whine; almost musical enough to trigger a shock, Moreland suspected. Certainly musical enough to be tantalizing. “If you need to bug me, why can’t you do it later?”

Even sulking and not outstandingly bright, Anais was still enchanting. For an instant he lost track of what he was planning to say. “One salient feature of owning you,” Moreland observed, “is that you talk at my convenience, my dear.” The mermaids’ voices continually prodding at his mind had been keeping him from sleeping. Even when he did drop off, the endless song seemed to scrape all the peace out of his body, leaving him hollow and exhausted. It was better to come here and stare through the glass at the root of the problem: his distasteful, transfixing little pet, his vile beauty.

Her fins were switching. He’d been around her enough to recognize that as a sign of acute irritation. He smiled. “Tell me something. Do you consider yourself—a person, Anais?”

She looked confused, and Moreland enjoyed that as well. “Sure.”

“‘Sure, Mr. Secretary’ or ‘Sure, sir’,” Moreland corrected. “Do you have any idea who you’re talking to? The barest inkling?”

She didn’t answer that, but her tail was flipping faster. They stared at each other. There was something searing and unnatural about the azure of her eyes, something that was more than just blue.

“So you’re not more than a person, or less than a person?” Moreland pursued after a moment. “Just an ordinary girl after all? Despite your many unseemly attributes?”

“I’m not ordinary!” Anais reared back in offense. “Duh.”

“More than a person, then?”

“I guess more.” Anais considered the question with uncharacteristic seriousness. “More. I mean, if I weren’t locked up in this stupid place and people could see me, I’d be a huge star! You said that even Luce . . .”

“Has become an Internet sensation? She has. Before that video of her got out, only idiots and fanatics could have bought into the idea of mermaids existing. And even now any self-respecting adult should be convinced that the video is a hoax, but”—Moreland gritted his teeth— “there aren’t enough adults out there who deserve that label.”

“But—isn’t it real? It looks just like her!”

Moreland ignored that. “The problem is the more. That little something extra you tails take on with your transformation. The more is what’s making people believe that the video is authentic. Even passive magic is worse, is more disgracefully violent, than a bomb. All the mental signals that make up a decent, regular, hard- working life are disrupted. You’re left with nothing but noise, buzzing and whining . . .”

Anais stared, too perplexed for the moment to attempt an answer.

He’d never talked to anyone this way before. He was glad no human being could hear him coming off so half-cocked, like some kind of poet . . . He couldn’t stop himself, though.

“The same more is what makes your kind subhuman, though. The same more that turns grown men into whimpering fools. Do you know what that video proves, Anais?”

For the first time, she looked genuinely frightened. Moreland found it delightful. He glared at her expectantly, his eyes demanding a reply.

“What?” Anais whispered at last. “I mean, what does it prove?’

“What, sir?” Moreland prompted.

“‘What, sir?’” Anais muttered. Her tail was thrashing and she’d backed away from the glass. But she didn’t quite have the nerve to swim back behind her cushions, much as he knew she wanted to.

“Ah.” Moreland grinned. “The video proves that even if, by some untoward miracle, your kind learned to resist their murderous urges tomorrow—even if the mermaids never sang to a human again—well.”

Anais’s eyes were wide. Another first. She was truly anxious to hear what he had to say. Her golden hair spread out in an enormous, shining web behind her shoulders.

Moreland waited another few seconds. “It’s not the singing that proves mermaids have to die, Anais,” he finally crooned. “It’s not the evil in all of you, or even the threat you pose to commerce. It’s the more. It’s what we see in that video, the quality that makes human minds collapse into imbecility. You little abominations don’t have to do anything to commit violence. You just have to be your charming selves. You do see my point, don’t you, tadpole?”

“Just because Luce was stupid enough to let some humans tape her, doesn’t—”

He cut her off. “It’s not just Luce, tadpole. It’s all of you. I’d rather,” Moreland lied, “have both my legs blown off than watch that video again. Do you understand me? It’s only my duty to my country that makes me endure, for one instant, the fact that you tails persist on the same planet.”

Every word he spoke, it seemed to him, followed the contours of the mermaids’ song in his thoughts. Even railing against the mermaids only served to provide their melodies with unexpected lyrics.

He wanted his mind back. That was all. His mind intact and determined, unfurrowed by their awful music. But maybe that was impossible.