They took the marvels with them.
I’M A PERSON who doesn’t like aftermaths, as I may have mentioned earlier—in general they’re depressing. But this one wasn’t like that, at least not for me. I could tell some of us were let down, some people felt kind of robbed—Ellis, for instance, who’d been nursing a possibly broken arm and hadn’t seen much of anything—but I didn’t feel that way at all. From the time we headed back to the cutter (we’d finally righted the rubber boat, but its motor wouldn’t start so Sam, Thompson, Miyoko, and Gina paddled us in) I felt euphoric.
I was shivering in my wet clothes, even under the tropical sun, but a curious sense of peace kept me sitting quietly, contented. Blood ran down my leg from the barnacle scrapes: it welled up in thousands of microscopic pinpoints from one place where the outer layers of skin had been sheered off, plus there were thin, deep lines scored into my thigh and calf that drooled blood all the way down to my ankle and heel.
I barely noticed it. I mean, I did notice—sitting on the wet bench-seat of the Zodiac I stretched out the leg and peered down at the red lines and ribbons of blood—but it was less out of urgent concern than with a sense of friendly interest.
I knew I shouldn’t feel peaceful, necessarily, because those mermaids wouldn’t be safe now anyway, no matter where they went. Still, for today they were safe, and somehow the knowledge that the blue whales had taken them far away comforted me.
What if the whales, I thought dreamily (happily resting my dripping leg on the side of the boat and letting the others handle the paddling), what if the whales were in charge of the whole shebang? Those behemoths had obscure ways of knowledge, obviously. Somehow they’d heard a mermaid distress call: that alone was astonishing.
I let myself daydream that the whales had great, all-encompassing wisdom, far greater than any commanded by the race of men. The whales weren’t going to fall prey to our mischief this time (although they often had, in centuries past and even more recently). Their songs carried hundreds of miles; we hadn’t even known about those songs until the 1960s. Sam and Thompson had both trotted that out.
So we knew little of them, and for eons they’d wandered the quiet deep, masters of that dark and liquid kingdom.
They might be anyone. They might know anything.
WE MADE IT back to the cutter just as Gina was becoming annoyed by having to paddle; we toweled off and sat in the sunlight with towels wrapped around us, tamping the moisture from our soaking clothes.
In due time the rest of our party returned from the Narcissus. Though our Zodiac was out of service now, the yacht had her own inflatables; so over they chugged, finally, aboard one of those (larger, newer, and cleaner than the one we’d capsized in). When Chip came back aboard the Coast Guard boat again I saw he was elated too, just like me. Behind him was Nancy, satisfaction shining from her like a beacon. She went up to her father right away, for he and the doctor had stayed on the cutter this whole time, and they shared a heartfelt, emotional greeting: each grasped the upper arms of the other, briefly yet firmly.
Gone were her hopes of a sanctuary, I assumed, and yet—and yet I could tell she was pleased.
We’d been far closer to the spectacle than they had, but aboard that yacht, with its lofty decks, the diplomatic party had had the boon of height, a panoramic view. Chip had made a phone video; on the small screen the whales weren’t anything, you couldn’t see the mermaids at all, but it was HD, he said, it would look better on his laptop screen.
As the cutter headed back to shore, he knelt down beside me and tended my hurt leg, smearing on some antibiotic ointment and then wrapping my calf lightly in bandages from the cutter’s well-stocked first-aid cabinet. The thigh would be harder to bandage, he thought; we’d get the doctor to handle that.
Chip took a lot of care over the cleaning and bandaging, talking to keep my attention off the pain; he said he’d practically had a heart attack when he saw the rubber boat flip. He’d watched the whale’s head rise beside it, the great whale-chin ridged with curving lines, and he’d been thunderstruck. He realized I could swim perfectly well, but who knew, he said—I might have been knocked unconscious by a hard blow to the head, I could have sunk beneath the waves, drowning.
It was the worst minute of his life, he said, waiting for me to come up again, waiting to make sure it was me heaving myself onto that bobbing orange oval.
Negotiations hadn’t been going that well anyway, he added, when the whales came. He looked around then, not wanting to hurt anybody’s feelings. The civil servants had been very polite, said Chip—well, too polite, honestly. They’d been so polite it was hard to tell what they wanted, if anything. Their words, as they spoke to the representatives of the parent company, were so matter-of-fact, so bureaucratic (Chip said these words included stakeholders, as well as win-win and orientated toward the long term), that even to Chip it wasn’t clear they had a compelling interest in progress. So yes, they’d spoken to the GM, Chip said, the guy from the beach who really was a ten-gallon ass hat.
But on the other hand it was as though they hadn’t spoken, pretty much.
There’d been no forward motion at all until Nancy, out of sheer frustration, had broken in, and just as she was taking the conversational
