Xulai had only mentioned it, so while they swam, the Sea King told Abasio all the details, between stopping here and there for more sightseeing. When they arrived back at the beach, Abasio heaved himself out of the water and lay on the sand, feeling rather achy.
“I’ll leave you now,” said the Sea King. “Oh, by the way, Abasio, for the past few hours, I’ve been carrying the face mask you borrowed. Would you mind putting it over behind the rocks when you’ve put your clothes on?”
Abasio felt for the mask, felt of his face. Abasio looked at what he was feeling his face with. Abasio yelled, not quite a scream, and began to choke.
The Sea King swarmed up the sand and shook him. “Breathe!” he commanded. “Change! You know you can. You have! Now change back!” He grabbed two of Abasio’s adjacent tentacles and pushed them together.
Somewhere inside Abasio a bell rang, or a switch clicked, or a survival trait came screaming out of a cave, and the two tentacles joined. Arms and legs squirmed and thrashed. Bones clashed together like cymbals. Sounds fell on him like rocks, like metal, clanging like gongs. Sight, two of everything, jiggled, tumbled, coalesced. He felt as though he were being mangled, drowned, crushed, smothered, squashed, and then he gulped air.
Blue, who had galloped as far back on the beach as was possible when he saw the two creatures coming out of the sea, tiptoed back and sniffed at Abasio, who screamed again.
“Well,” Blue huffed. “You’re making made a great deal of fuss over nothing.”
“I shall be happy to see how well you do when it comes your turn,” said Abasio in an acid tone as, carrying the mask, he went to reclaim his clothing.
Xulai and Precious Wind went to interview Blue before choosing to believe Abasio’s version of affairs.
Blue confirmed the episode. “Yes, he did. Yes, he did it without knowing it. Yes, the Sea King tricked him into it by making him think about something else. That’s it. And he made entirely too much fuss about it.”
“So it took the sea egg,” Xulai said to Precious Wind with an enormous sigh. “And it did work.”
Precious Wind repeated it, like a mantra. “Yes, it took the sea egg, and now we know for a fact that it works. Thanks be.”
Sea eggs began to accumulate, some from the new sea-fertile females, some from Xulai. Everyone was waiting for the emissary to arrive. They needed the information the emissary had before they could complete their plans. While waiting, Xulai and Abasio took their first sea change together, exploring the Sea King’s castle and spending some time playing with the Sea King’s children. Infant octopi were not, strictly speaking, compensation for Xulai’s fisher, but they had a charm and attraction of their own. Blue came to the waterside to meet several of them but refused to repeat the adventure after one octo-child clamped itself firmly upon his nose and refused to let go, even after it started to dry out and Abasio and Xulai had to regrow frantic fingers so they could remove it safely.
“It’s a boy,” said the Sea King apologetically. “My sons are curious and exploratory, like all males. I’m thinking of setting up a school.”
“Schools are only for fish,” muttered Blue as they left the shore. “That octo-brat needs a reformatory.”
“What’s a reformatory?” Xulai whispered to Abasio.
“It was a mythical solution from the Before Time,” he answered. “The people in Artemisia say the people who lived in the Before Time preferred easy myths to rigorous analysis. Belief instead of reality. That’s why things so often went wrong.”
“Couldn’t they tell the difference?”
“People can’t tell the difference if they start with an ‘if’ statement. Myths always have an ‘if’ in them. ‘If people believed in Whifflepop, then we wouldn’t have Gloop.’ So then, instead of working on Gloop, which is the problem, they try to make people believe in Whifflepop.”
“I don’t understand . . .”
“A lot of young people didn’t have schools that interested them. They got into trouble instead of going to school. So instead of fixing the schools, people said, ‘If all young people knew they would be locked up and punished for being bad, we wouldn’t have any more Gloop.’ ”
“Getting into trouble was Gloop, and locking them up was Whifflepop?”
“That’s right. So they did Whifflepop, and while they were being Whifflepopped the very worst young people soon taught all the others how to do more and worse Gloop when they got out.”
“And the schools stayed the way they were.”
“People preferred to believe in Whifflepop because it was easier to build prisons than to create good schools. No one expected prisons to do any good, but a good school makes demands on students and teachers and parents and communities. Prisons were easier and cheaper. A very large part of the problem was that no one tried to limit the number of children people had, so prudent parents had one or two and stupid, self-indulgent, egocentric, careless ones had however many happened. They always excused themselves by saying their god sent them, ignoring the sex that went on before their god presumably got interested. The prudent people resented trying to create schools to educate other people’s huge families. Belief that their god sends unlimited children is Whifflepop, and as long as you believe in unlimited Whifflepop, you’ll have unlimited Gloop.”
“So they built prisons instead.”
“Yes.”
“In the Before Time.”
“That’s right.”
“I used to really feel bad about what happened to all the people in the Before Time. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe it was best most of them weren’t saved.”
“As the Sea King pointed out, that opinion is widely shared today,” Abasio said angrily.
“No.” She shook her head, unable to understand his anger. “No, Abasio. In his speech, he said historically
