Weird Fishes

By Rae Mariz

AN UNDERWATER TALE OF FRIENDSHIP AGAINST MONSTROUS ODDS

When Ceph, a squid-like scientist, discovers proof of the ocean's slowing currents, she makes the dangerous ascent from her deep-sea civilization to the uncharted surface above. Out of her depths and helpless in her symbiotic mech suit, Ceph relies on Iliokai, a seal-folk storyteller,

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stelliform Press
• Release date: Aug 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781777682354

Rae Mariz

Rae Mariz is a speculative fiction storyteller and cultural critic. Her writing inhabits the ecotone between science fiction and fantasy, and features characters finding family with others who live in the gaps between. She's the author of The Unidentified and co-founder of Toxoplasma Press. Find her work at raemariz.com and on Twitter @raemariz.

Book preview

Fathom

The deep-sea coral cities were a cacophony of sound and movement. The humming and mumbling and purrs of laughter. The faint tingle of so much life, packed so close together. Electric pulses. We feel you, we feel you, the throb­bing told Ceph while she drifted and weaved through the coral structures, the always arrhythmic dance of the architecture.

She barely acknowledged the teeming of her neighbors and their busy activities. Her nine minds were occupied with calculating the results of her findings. No matter how she organized the data, these results meant trouble. She stared blankly at the activity around her — a swish, a flutter, a sway — not seeing any of it.

There was nothing wrong with her visual acuity. The eyes of her kind were like those of a peacock mantis shrimp. Sixteen color receptors could detect six types of polarized light. She often prided herself on her keen perception, and this sensitiv­ity was essential for her to communicate with her siblings or consorts, to detect the subtle shifts in chromatophore pigments and polarization patterns on their skin.

Still, there was an urgency plaguing her that even she couldn’t express with her intricate visual language. Maybe it was because, she glanced now at the showy mating ritual of firework jellies, no one felt the currents of time in the cities. So much of life was just eat, mate, laugh.

She heard a mournful hoot — a predator warning — but paid it no mind. Ceph could afford to be oblivious to the cares and concerns of those around her; no creature of the depths would dare hunt her kind.

Fins flashed. Silt settling.

Ceph spread all her arms wide, allowing the cool atmos­phere to fill her webbing, then snapped her body shut to lift herself above the fray. She let the giggles of schoolfish bubbling their exhilaration buoy her briefly, and tasted their thrill of escape. Below her, polyps bloomed in time with their own desires, stretching and yawning, each an open mouth singing feeeeeed.

This was life in the city. Constant as the currents.

Until the currents change, the chaotic patterns on her skin expressed while she billowed majestically out into the open sea.

Crab divider

Ceph found her sisters watching an argument of lights overhead, following the luminescent display of lanternfish with vague disinterest. She gently brushed an arm along each of them one by one to signal her presence.

Hi, Ceph. Hi. Ane and Ceria pulsed distractedly at the place where Ceph touched their skin. They were tending to Mone, who was at a difficult stage in their transformation from sister to male. The natural hormonal process was making Mone’s forehead bulge in a way most women found attractive. Their arms were changing shape as well. Instead of the perfect symmetry of eight, two were growing larger and stronger as the other six receded. It was painful, as all changes are, but Mone was excited for their new role; the hormones wouldn’t have begun to flood their body if they hadn’t felt their purpose so intensely.

Hey, sis. Mone communicated, along with a taste of their aches.

Ceph settled between her sisters Cnida and Zoa. The argu­ment overhead culminated in one lanternfish belching luminescent ink and swimming off. Zoa giggled.

The fuck happened to your arm? Cnida’s skin flared in greeting.

Urchin spine. Ceph replied, filtering the nutrients from the clouds of organic debris drifting down from above, ignor­ing her unresponsive arm. Had research to do in the seafloor flats, must’ve fallen asleep …

And you let a filthy urchin nuzzle up to you out there? Cnida scoffed. Why are you even spending all that time rolling around in that wasteland?

Ceph hid her numbed limb, but her coloring couldn’t con­ceal her vague irritation. You know why —

Cnida unfurled all eight arms to cut her off, then prickled her skin to mock her. Oh right. Your science.

Ceph puffed herself full of indignation in a threat display.

The snow is rich today, the pulsing patterns of Ane’s skin announced, casually changing the subject.

Maybe a hint of whale corpse perfectly brined, Ceria agreed.

Although Ceph and her sisters were genetically clones, she sometimes wondered how they were even related. She had most in common with Zoa — at least they were both propelled by a kind of curiosity. The others were satisfied to sit there and let nourishment snow down on them.

Ceph! Zoa blushed and twined her arms around and around Ceph’s, blithely unaware of her sister’s billowing mood. Listen!

Ceph deflated some and listened. There! She heard it. The faint echoes of a whale rider screaming their stories.

Zoa and Ceph often discussed how it was possible for the whale riders to know about all the stories they sang. They must lead wild, exciting lives traveling all parts of the seas. Ceph received the stories like reporting: news from the big blue making its way to the depths. Zoa devoured the sagas like snow from above; pure entertainment. Cnida, of course, dismissed the whole art form, convinced that whoever the whale riders were, they had to be making it all up. No one could actually believe the nonsense they were spreading.

How can you two listen to that dreck? Cnida signaled, and punctuated her remark by deploying her neurotoxin on a cutthroat eel she felt had invaded her space.

The eel’s body seized and spasmed and tied itself into involuntary knots.

How can you make even a stonefish seem cuddly? Ceph retorted.

Cnida snorted bubbles of amusement, while Zoa cleared the chemical cloud with a spiraling of her body. The eel regained its senses enough to squirm out of reach.

They sometimes joked that Zoa had three kind hearts and Cnida none at all.

Cnida flashed a mocking array of colors at her sisters, teasing them for their misguided compassion.

To shut her up, Ceph’s slithered her arm close to her sister’s gill cavity to feign choking her, but Cnida laughed out a propulsion of bubbles and ducked away. Ceph’s spiky sister might be heartless, but she did have a sense of humor.

Come on, Zoa called to Ceph and pulled her up into the murk, lifting them higher so they could catch the sonar swells of the distant whale rider’s song.

Venus’s flower basket blooms in the deep.

She weaves herself of sea-glass fibres

as young dreamers sleep.

If the currents favor fortune, as currents often do,

then into her heart, will come a lucky two.

Young crustaceans adrift,

slip between the slender slits …

Inside her heart, the shrimp bows to his bride.

They tend to their basket, and the basket provides.

The basket feeds and nurtures,

until they’re trapped inside.

It is there they raise a family

it is there they feed and grow

it is there they release their babies

to find a glass house of their own.

Where they in turn will live forever

in an intricate vase of lace.

But who could ever want escape

from such a delicate embrace?

Zoa twirled and danced and sent out a bubble net of applause at the end of the song, even though it would never carry as far as the distant whale rider. Wasn’t that romantic? Zoa’s skin patterns fluttered like her accelerated heart rate.

Ceph’s coloring was more muted. Was that romantic?

Zoa kept swirling in her mesmerizing dance. The faint cilia along her arms crackled, bioluminescent nodes shimmer­ing at the ends of the filaments.

The sight was so lovely that Ceph had to turn away. Ceph had a reputation for her elegant and precise dance — no mimic octopus alive could ever capture her essence — but the open­ness and expression of Zoa’s movements, the longing and ache, was transmitted to all creatures who saw it.

I WANT THAT. Zoa flung her arms open wide with such force that her dance sent superheated shock waves in eight directions. Ceph busied herself with calculating the distance the pressure waves might travel, so as not to get lost in the chemicals her sister was releasing, maybe unintentionally.

WHAT do you want? Ceph flashed, even though she could taste what her sister meant. A deep dark love. You want to be shrimp trapped for the rest of your life?

No. Zoa was twirling so fast now, thrashing. I WANT TO BE THE BASKET! She came to an abrupt stop, her arms fanned out in an expansive gesture as she released another blast of endorphins and chromatic flares. Ceph gasped, stunned. Like the other creatures that had been lured close by the movement and light and chemicals. The firework jellies and squid and nearly imperceptible zooplankton; they all floated, immobile. They’d been overpowered by the release of Zoa’s emotion. Intoxicating, and somehow more dangerous than the girls’ defensive neurotoxins.

Still dizzy, Ceph threaded her arms around her spent and drifting sister. She pulled Zoa in close. Maybe Cnida was right, Ceph let a taste seep out to her sister. We shouldn’t be listening to those stories.

Crab divider

The sisters chided Ceph when she returned Zoa’s listless form to their care. Cnida blasted Ceph back with a jet of superheated ire before descending to tend to Zoa. Ceph accepted the blast; the brief searing shook her out of the lingering mesmer of Zoa’s dance. She watched them fuss over Zoa, then fanned wide before propelling herself away.

Sure, Zoa had told them all before of her desire, her wish to find the right guy and incubate a brood. But they never really took her seriously; Ceph, at least, never took her sister seriously.

Mone was the one who was going to go out there and carry their genetic material into the next generations. Ane and Ceria were eager for it. They would be the aunties who would raise and care for the young, just as their father’s sisters had cared for the six of them. They’d never met their father, and the aunties left when the sisters were old enough to care for each other, to attend to their father’s new brood soon ready to hatch, as their culture and custom expected.

They’d never met their mother, obviously. The women of their kind died soon after their babies emerged from their