Aracai gasped at the thought and wondered what the old mer could have traded for such a boon. But there was nothing in this world that he could have given.
His life, Aracai suspected.
Had the bargain amused the neogods? One amoeba trading its life to help all others?
Perhaps it had amused them. Or perhaps they had recognized the nobility behind the request.
It all made a bit of sense to Aracai now. The GPS on the bomb, its red light. It could only be set off in one location, at Dos Brujas.
But why? He asked the Heavenly Host, but it went silent. Even it did not know all of the answers.
His blood did not call predators, but as Aracai swam he grew weaker. Many times he considered turning around, heading out to sea.
But it is too late to go home, he realized. He was too weak to swim that far. The ache in his muscles multiplied.
I will die no matter what I do.
So Aracai chose to die for a cause, just as a billion other martyrs had chosen to die for their causes over the millennia.
Huzzah! Huzzah for the martyrs, he thought.
If he had lived, the old mer would have revealed his plans to Aracai, he believed. He might even have begged the younger mers to help him. But Escalas had failed.
Eventually Aracai found the place. The full moon was setting in the west, glistening on the water and tinged red from the smoke of distant fires.
He spotted Dos Brujas, with its dark tower rising from the black waters. A red light at its top was probably meant to warn away aircraft, but it seemed to glare out over the river like a red eye.
There, on either bank, were the factories with their sewage pipes spewing poison.
Aracai felt beyond weary, numb beyond thinking. Adrenaline seemed to carry him this far, but now it was gone and he fumbled to fulfill his mission. He lay gasping, gills flaring, and rose to the surface, floating on his stomach.
Aracai found the button, saw that it now emitted a soft green light. He pressed it for what seemed minutes.
The disk twisted in his hand, began spinning rapidly in the water, then rose above the surface, whirling faster and faster until it began to rise into the air.
He watched it ascend into the night sky. Tiny white LEDs on its bottom became a blurring ring, so that as it rose, it brightened and seemed to take its place among the blazing stars.
It ascended above the city of Dos Brujas.
Aracai feared a flash of light more blinding than the midday sun and a ball of fire to end his life, but instead, at perhaps three thousand feet, the bomb suddenly exploded with a shrieking whistle, sending its contents spinning and streaming in every direction.
It looked as if a watery shield suddenly spread over the city—as if a mist raced for miles in every direction. The viruses spread wide, a plague of wisdom.
He wondered how many people they would infect, and Heavenly Host answered: The infection will start here, among the poorest people of South America, and then the viruses will be carried by the winds across Africa and India, until the plagues encompass the earth, putting an end to stupidity and avarice, waging war against war itself.
There was no thunder, no rumbling of the earth. In wonder Aracai faded from consciousness, now sure of what he had unleashed. Change, he thought. Change for the better. A new world, where men can take responsibility for their own evolution. I am so lucky to have witnessed this. Our children will inherit the stars.
For a while he floated downstream, gasping, floundering. His eyes dimmed, he struggled to breathe, soot and poisons choking him.
A buzz rang in his ears, and suddenly he heard old Escalas’s voice one last time: Come swim with me.
He looked up and saw the Milky Way, stars shining like a river of light in the heavens. Escalas was swimming down toward him, with Dulce smiling at his side, and holding her hand was their tiny daughter.
He reached up, and with a firm grip around his wrist, Dulce pulled him free of his wasted flesh.
The Mirror in the Mirror
By Jack Dann
So, like most things, it began and ended in the bathroom. Specifically, a bathroom in Lighthouse Point, Florida and a bathroom in the dilapidated Lucerne Hotel on West 79th Street in New York City. (It might also be noted that there is a third bathroom involved in this story, located in the swanky Pierre Hotel on New York’s Upper East Side. However, I will leave it to the reader to determine whether this one is an integral part of the story’s resolution or merely an epilogical literary device.)
And I should tell you that all these bathrooms were the very same bathroom. Sort of, but not really. To explain, allow me to introduce you to Norman and Laura Gumbeiner, who on Wednesday, November 10th, 2020, at 9:30 in the morning, were standing beside each other in their ensuite bathroom located in their stucco, pink, single-story, two-bedroom house overlooking the Intercoastal Waterway.
“Can’t you see I’m in the bathroom?” Norman asked, as he swished his chrome safety razor in the faux-antique marble sink’s frothy hot water. He was a spry eighty-five-year-old hypochondriac, who often deflected his wife’s sarcastic remarks about his attention to body, mind, and receded hairline by repeating the canticle that “What you call hypochondria is what has kept me alive all these years.” Or he would ask, “Do you think colonoscopies where precancerous growths are discovered every time should not be performed?” Or, if he was in a really expansive mood, he would soliloquize about his encounters with Fuch’s dystrophy, urinary infections, arthritis, irritable bowel syndrome, amongst a host of other undeniable empirical ‘proofs’—all that to crush, to utterly crush his white-haired (with a touch of hairdresser’s blue), seventy-nine-year-old assailant.
Laura looked intently at her husband’s reflection in the bronze framed mirror, which was a family heirloom (her family) and would be out of place in any bathroom, except perhaps one in Windsor Castle. She was already dressed, showered, and perfumed. A handsome, if rather overweight woman, Laura Gumbeiner smelled like happy memories of Coney Island.
“You’re mowing the lawn today,” she said sweetly, talking directly to the reflection, as if by doing so, she wouldn’t have to interact with the familiar stranger beside her.
“You’re not my boss. And I’ll mow the goddamn lawn—”
“Today,” Laura, said, recasting what he was about to say.
In response, Norman nicked his chin with the razor, then jutted his jaw forward so that his life mate could apply the styptic pencil she already had in hand.
“Okay, I’ll do it this afternoon.”
“Not in that heat you won’t. You’ll do it this morning.” She smiled wryly. “And after that, who knows? If you’re not exhausted, maybe a little hanky-panky.”
He smiled back at his wife in the mirror. “But if I take one of those get-up-and-do-your-duty pills and have a heart attack, it’ll be on your head.”
“I’ll take that chance,” she said. Then she made an odd gurgling sound and suddenly stepped backwards, as if she had just seen a ghost, which, in a sense, she had.
“Whasamatter?” Norman asked, turning towards his wife. He still had patches of shaving soap under his sideburns.
“Look!”
“At what?”
“At yourself. There.” She pointed at the mirror, then stepped forward, looking intently into it. “At us.”
Norman complied, looked at their reflections in the mirror, and repressed a fart. “Yes, I see you, and I see me. Now what the hell’s the matter with you?”