They communicated through echolocation. They could see through us. They could see through our bones. They could see our hearts, beating faster.
Astra rose with us to the surface. Strands of her hair, so dark it could be green, clung to her fluttering gills. Her face was a silken deep brown. Her cheekbones were terrifying. Her smile reached her ears. Merrows have wide mouths and their corners are naturally fixed into a smile, a friendly effect undermined by their sharp teeth.
Since the 1980s, CAP’s photo-ID catalog had swelled to seven merrow groups, lumped under two pods, with over forty members. More than a hundred of them, of crisp Grade 5 quality, belonged to Astra, our most receptive merrow to date.
Triton and Alto joined her. In simple English, we told Astra we found Alto stranded on the beach. We didn’t mention his reluctance to be saved. Looking back, perhaps we should have.
Astra looped her arms around them both and laughed, full-throated: “My poor unfortunate fools.” A magnificent voice. Her underwater cries haunted us, but when she spoke in our tongue, she carried a lilt so persuasive, it was no surprise fishermen used to drown in the past, lured under the waves. She had a voice like sea glass, the edges weathered from years of tidal beatings. But it was her laughter we treasured. She cackled and giggled. She chattered and shrieked. She laughed, unheeding, like a child.
She was the alpha of the pod. She was their matriarch. She was our star.
In 2001 we’d picked her up when she was neither Astra nor he nor she, but a young merling with dark fins, black as a slippery eel. We’d tracked the A pod for weeks along the coast of Kyushu. The September drive hunt was looming forth where fishermen herded merrows into coves, strangled them in nets, and dragged them by the flukes. The most attractive mermaids were captured and sold. The rest were slaughtered. The Japanese believed in longevity from the consumption of merrow flesh, advertised as Ningyo Sashimi! in neon-trimmed Shinjuku bars, often with the painting of a splayed mermaid, bite-sized chunks of her pink marbled flesh laid out on her ivory skin.
Our methods of rescue were still primitive back then. We’d select the most vulnerable members of the pod and keep them safe in our sea pens until the drive hunt ended. Astra was one of these rescues. The rest of her pod watched us with accusing eyes, corralled behind the net, a bobbing of wet heads. We promised we’d return her, safe. But Astra’s mother, a mermaid with yellow eyes and a scarred mouth, wouldn’t stop screaming, her gills flaring obscenely.
Astra was five years old, the size of a young child but with the strength of an adult man. It turned out to be the perfect age. She wasn’t so immature she’d imprint on us and turn deviant like Fabio, but she was young enough to be curious and calm. We had to return two of the merlings within hours. One became so agitated his gills shut and he sank unmoving to the bottom of his tank.
Astra was different from the moment we hauled her in. We bundled her in our net like a swaddle. Instead of squeaking in fright, Astra smiled up at us through her seaweed hair.
Now we know better. Merrow smiles are an anatomical lie, arising from the configuration of their jaws. Their smiles drag humans down bottomless spring pools. Their smiles convince us they’re happy.
After the scratchathon we invited Astra for a health check due to the risk of open wounds and infection. Some members of her pod were coerced into following, including Triton, her mate. Oh, Triton, we’d often sigh. Triton, t-A13, was a survivor of a measleslike viral epidemic that decimated his pod, the T pod from the Great Barrier Reef, in 2002. Before we traced his lineage, we used to call him Flame, or catalog number X13.[20] He had a braided mane, dark as coagulated blood, and when he reached sexual maturity, his silver tail deepened into a royal blue mottled with flakes of crimson, like a fire flickering between red and blue, hot and hotter.
He was a troublemaker. He had a track record of being netted. At first we wrote it off as low intelligence, which was why some of us, Marla included, were disappointed when Astra chose him as her primary mate. Later we learned it was recklessness. After the T pod was wiped out, Triton traveled hundreds of miles as a solo merling before the A pod accepted him. Aside from Astra and Alto, he never bonded with the pod.[21] He hunted alone, targeting fish farms where he risked entanglement. Instead of waiting for someone to cut him loose, he lashed out with his tail. Once he broke a fisherman’s ribs. We apologized on Triton’s behalf, but we knew Triton had held back. We’d seen him hunt, stunning a school of sardines with a whip of his tail, like a shockwave.
Despite this streak of aggression, we tried to avoid sedating Triton, or any of the merrows, when we checked them for possible injuries from the scratchathon. He was devoted enough to follow Astra to the outer rim of our facility. Astra pulled herself onto the dock, familiar with the squeaking wooden planks.
Triton protested. Leaving the waters was deemed too dangerous. He rammed against the dock. He slapped his tail on the surface. He screeched and clanked like the chains of a shipwreck. Alto treaded about five feet away. He eyed Astra and Triton with a quiet, gleaming look. As the beta, his duty was to support Triton, but in almost every triad, tensions between the alpha and beta male bubbled.
Now Triton began to whimper, holding out his arms. Astra, with impatience in her smile, lunged for his neck. Her teeth sank into his shoulder. Alto reared up, but the shock passed and he sank back down, tucking his chin under the water.
Triton winced but his smile didn’t waver. There was an almost gratefulness to his pain.
Even after the 2001 September drive hunt, we’d kept Astra, a sexually immature merling, in a sea pen by the dock. Our volunteers taught her signs on laminated flashcards and rewarded her with fish, mackerel being her favorite. She liked to mimic us.[22] “Good morning!” she’d crow. “Hello! Do you want fish? Yes, you want fish. What do you want? I want to go back.”
She liked to perform for us. Once she threw up her mackerel[23] and waved it at us, gripping the fish at the base. A week into her rescue, she tore into the fish instead of swallowing it whole. Astra was mimicking how we ate. We scolded her. We didn’t want her to pick up unnatural habits, invasive to her way of life. Astra responded to our chiding with a furtive, bloodied smile. But she was eager to please. She learned to swallow. She learned to ask for fish. She learned over two thousand verbal words, but what made Astra truly remarkable was her grammar. By Day 41 her level of grammatical orderliness and conceptual complexity was typical of a three-year-old human child.
Jared, the head researcher at the time, was thrilled. He had Astra tested at the Jeju research center. Using a magnetic resonance imaging scanner, we made a tremendous discovery. Astra had a portion of the brain that was missing in even humans. Her anterior cingulate cortex, the language center, was unusually dense, twice as heavy as the average bilingual’s.
Some of us held the childish belief we’d cultivated Astra’s exceptionality. Again, this was 2001. We used to play mermaid films to impressionable merlings, hoping to massage their gender predisposition. Marla hated the films, especially Splash!, which spawned the multibillion-dollar industry in Marine World, but we were desperate for more females. All merrows are born protandrous hermaphroditic, meaning they’re born male.
20
The catalog letter
21
Every merrow population has a unique call or “dialect.” These acoustic differences are used to identify membership of a pod and prevent inbreeding. Dr. John Bigg’s groundbreaking research on merrow dialects has since proven why outsider merrows have difficulty overcoming these “language barriers.”
22
Aggressive mimicry is the most popular theory on why merrows imitate human speech, stemming from stories of merrows that drowned humans in oceans, lakes, or rivers. This theory is largely dismissed as superseded within the scientific community. It may have even contributed to the extinction of the freshwater merrow species.
23
Merrows have two stomachs, one for digestion, one for storage, where food can be regurgitated at will.