"It is you, isn't it?" he said. She was close enough to catch his words now.
"It's me," she said.
"I thought maybe I'd lost my mind. Maybe I'd imagined it all."
"No," she said. "I dreamed you here, Joe."
Now it was he who approached, looking down at his hands. "You certainly put some flesh on me," he said. "But the spirit@' one of those hands went to his chesrt, "what's in here-that's me. The Joe you found out in the weeds."
"I was certain I dreamed you."
"You did. And I heard. And I came. But I'm not some fantasy, Phoebe. This is Joe." "So what happened to you?" she said. "Where did-2' "The rest of me come from?"
"Yes."
Joe turned his gaze towards the water. "Me 'shu. The spirit-pilots." Phoebe remembered Musnakaff s short lesson on that subject well enough: Pieces of the Creator, he'd said, or not. "I threw myself into the water, hoping I'd drown, but they found me. Surrounded me. Dreamed the rest of me into being." He raised his hand for her scrutiny. "As you can see," he said, "I think they put a little of their own nature into me while they were doing it." The limb was more strangely f@hioned than she'd first realized; the fingers webbed, the skin full of subtle ripples. "Does it offend you?"
"Lord, no... " she said. "I'm just grateful to have you back."
Now at last, she opened her arms and went to him. He gathered her to his body, which was warm despite the rain and spray, his embrace as fierce as hers.
"I still can't quite believe you followed me," he murmured.
"What else was I going to do?" she replied.
"You know there's no way back, don't you?"
"Why would we want to go?" she said.
they stayed there on the shore for a long while, talking sometimes, but mostly just cradling one another. they didn't make love. That was for another day. For many days, in fact. Now, just embraces, just kisses, just tenderness, until the storm had exhausted itself.
When they returned along the quay, several hours later, the heavens clearing, the air pristine, scarcely a gaze was turned in their direction. People were too busy. There were damaged hulls to be repaired, torn sails to be mended, scattered cargoes to be gathered up and restowed.
And for those audacious fishermen who'd dared the violence of the storm, and returned unharmed, prayers offered up on the quayside as the boats were unloaded. Prayers of thanks for their survival and for the dream-sea's largesse. The prophets who'd predicted the tempest had been proved correct: The frenzied waters had indeed thrown up an unprecedented catch.
While the lovers wandered unnoticed to the house on the hill (where they would with time, come to a certain notoriety), the contents of the nets were heaped on the dock. Up out of Quiddity, from its unfathomed places, had come creatures strange even to the fisherinen's eyes. they were like things made in the first days of the world, some of them; others like the scrawlings of an infant on a wall. A few were featureless, many more bright with colors that had no name. Some flickered with their own luminescence, even in the daylight. Only the
'shu were thrown back. The rest were sorted, put in baskets, and carried up to the fish-market where a crowd had already gathered in anticipation of this bounty. Even the ugliest, the least of the infant's scrawls, would nourish somebody. Nothing would be wasted; nothing lost.