Humanity Prime. Bruce Mcallister
with the bubbleless water pulled through the stem.
Only a few hands’ lengths ahead of me, the scaly head of the euyom suddenly breaks through the surface into dryness.
In the next moment my own head snaps from water, is washed by a wave, and then is completely in dryness. And in the jaws of shock.
(My soul screams yellow and black, and the surprise of the rise of two opposite feelings makes me scream again.
(The bright yellow of joy, the depths of fear’s darkness—this moment becomes one long day, and the stomach of my soul throws up shimmering faces of darkened seas, brilliant lights, funneling greens of a strange sweet green flesh, and reds of bitterest bones.
(So now all of my people scream within me. My prayer comes alive, gains flesh, and I am its own prayer, living. I feel, I see, I know myself leaving the water, and a million unblinking eyes watch me, praying, living.)
The dryness strokes me, but not unpleasantly.
And the bodies of tiny invisible souls begin to die on my drying skin; and they scream—but not unpleasantly.
And the last unpleasant quiver of my flesh is rushed into joy when the strongest image I have ever known begins to rise from bottoms beyond bottom in my soul.
The image begins formless—whites and blues and whites—but in a moment is a form whose clarity is greater than my own fishsinger name. It grabs my body, tells it to shiver in bright yellow of the widest white, and I obey it without question.
And then the rising image faces me:
A pale fish...crawling from the sea...into dryness.
(I scream, and oddly my scream is one calm “Yes.”)
The stem slips from my mouth—
A pale fish! crawling from the sea! into dryness!
(My soul gathers its thousand fingers and throws the image out, higher than dryness, faster than speech, to the ends of water.
(And I dimly recognize the image. Screamdeep knew it twice. All men know it, and scream their pleasant “Yes,” and give it to the women who will bear their children.
(And the image is like my name. It is like me, leaving the sea on an euyom’s back, touching her, making two bodies one—
(Touching? I can remember Father’s advice against touching anything....Why?)
But in the end the image of the crawling fish is greater than my name, greater than my act, and my soul knows this truth without being told.
The image has been expelled and my body is suddenly weak, soul babbling. The lavender soul under me is babbling too, rigid from the screaming glory of an image she has never touched before.
I slip off her shell, back into deeper water, and lie there panting, too weak to hold the stem with limp jaws or the yau leaves on my back with my trembling left hand.
The soul finds rest more easily than the flesh, and in a moment my thousand fingers are again reaching out, seeking other fingers, and finding the same two other distant souls.
Murmursome far away, bouncing in excitement, but not approaching....
The soul of girl, different now....Though the distance is great, it seems as if she has received the screaming image, swallowed it.
(And it seems that she too is trembling in a similar image—another crawling fish brought to life inside her by mine—but I fail to understand this, so I make no effort to believe it.)
I try again. Move the yau leaves onto my back. Place the end of the hollow stem in my mouth. But now I hesitate.
(My skin is cool now—and memory of my brief moments in the hot dryness frightens me.)
“You must go,” lavender says. “Your second time will disturb you less. I do now, as I have been there a hundred times....”
For a moment the euyom—whose name continues to be lavender whether or not it really is—offers rhythms that are certainly those of a mother, and I say without will: “You are alive. I did not kill you after all.”
Lavender understands enough. She says, “You are falling into other times. Do come back. We must go now.”
My thousand fingers reach out one last time, find neither murmursome nor the strange soul of girl, and—
(—For a moment I am afraid. Have I injured, killed a soul, many souls—with the force of the crawling fish? Have I hurt murmursome? or the soul of girl? No, the crawling fish doesn’t do such things.)
“Go, then!” I say, pulling myself back onto the shell.
Lavender moves.
The dryness strikes.
My soul stirs, but the crawling fish dies in the bones of fatigue, and refuses to return.
I am completely in dryness now, and I suck frantically on the hollow yau stem.
(Fear! Will my chest be strong enough to pull the water through the stem for a longer time?)
At first the water resists, but then rushes into my mouth. I breathe deeply.
The dryness invades my nose. My head begins to ache.
(Will the yau leaves slip from my back—leaving my flesh to crack in dryness?)
The yau leaves grow heavy on my back and do not slip. I pull my left arm up to my side and hold it between my body and the euyom’s shell.
After a few moments of sucking, I become aware of stranger murmurings everywhere.
But in their strangeness they are also familiar. They are yellow, soft, come from everywhere, but lack the solid forms of ioe, ayom or euyom souls. They respond in waves of pale colors to my own thoughts, and in a moment I understand their presence.
These murmuring souls in the dry world are the brothers of the tiny invisible souls, the hordes of invisible bodies who make talk possible in the sea.
(So I realize now that talk will be possible in the dry world too—and proof of this truth lies in the unnoticed fact that I can still hear the rhythms, the rippling colors of lavender under me, under her own shell.)
“I thank you for all of this,” I say. “A hundred ways, a thousand corners—”
“I am poundgrayly’s,” she says, and the dryness seems not to distort her soul’s message at all. “He is yours, you are his, so you are always welcome to this body and soul.”
Slowly but perfectly the euyom continues crawling, her limbs weding into the sands of dryness, and her beak opening and closing as if she were breathing the dryness itself.
“You breathe dryness?” I ask, the pale blue of astonishment.
“I do—as does poundgrayly, all of our kind.”
(I should have realized it long ago. Although they seemed infrequent, poundgrayly’s visits to the surface have always occurred according to the larger rhythms of his euyom soul, and have always been born of a reddening need for something I never bothered to understand....)
My left arm has slipped down from my side, down the euyom’s shell, nearly touching the sands of dryness, so I try to lift it back up—and find the motion very difficult. And the strength of my face’s eyes is dimming too, so I close them quickly.
(I am weak....)
(Or is it that my arm is somehow heavier?)
(Or both?)
“In dryness,” lavender answers, “we are all weak. Wetness embraces, holds us lightly, and we move with ease.”
“Then I will never be able to move by myself here!” I say, brown rising.
“Why the brownness? You will not find me throwing you from my back.”
My