Humanity Prime Read online

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 1971, 2012 by Bruce McAllister

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  DEDICATION

  For Caroline:

  “these changing leaves...on the

  stem of the eternal tree”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Waterjoyup is the name of my woman. Waterjoyup is the name of her soul.

  When each child is born in the shadows of towering yau—high in their broad wrinkled leaves, near the surface where ocean meets dryness—the mother takes a deep first look into her child’s soul, reaches the strongest image of rhythm there—not at darkest depths, but at deepest rim of light. And that vision is the child’s name, the truest truth of naming.

  Her mother found her soul a rushing, contented, rising current. So her name is waterjoyup, veined with light, and her name’s image drew me to her when I was young, needing currents to ride against slow dark dreams of death.

  And above waterjoyup’s deepest light are delicate rivers of soft coral colors, which attracted me too at our first meeting.

  And above her unspoken streams, precisely webbed thoughts find ordered dance, and those added to my pleasure, as they still do.

  And embracing all of these in the solid world—her rushing rivering colors under tumbling feeling thoughts—lives her personal flesh, which is simple to love as the cupping hand of the deeper her.

  (Do not hide in the past.)

  ...But this is not the moment of waterjoyup’s birth, nor our long first meeting.

  She is dying.

  Never alone in her desire, she has always wanted death. But her soul now gives neither the brightest blue of dancing joy, nor pale flow of a single comfort. Were I another man in this moment, her name would seem allpain, closedead, darkdowndim.

  I look with my face’s eyes to the skin, flesh and bone of her face, which twitches now like a fish’s tail, twists and bobs among the wrinkled brown leaves waving and weaving around us. No healthy color remains now to any part of her trembling body.

  She is pained by the white moss of sickness on her skin, and by the nearing birth of our child.

  My soul opens itself to swallow hers, and in turn she swallows me.

  My body twitches in our twisting bobbing, and my soul shakes in our sharing screaming.

  The white moss began seven days ago. To our faces’ eyes it first appeared in the fine creases of webbing between her fingers. It went on to cover her arms, her shoulders, her back, the back of her legs, down to the ends of her tails, which slowly began to shrivel as the pale growth covered her.

  To the ignorant eye alone, she might seem beautiful white coral in the shape of a woman—but the jagged moans of her darkened soul—

  “I am sorryyy...,” she cries, and her coral rivers harden, black teeth now, crying, “Darksparklepains, sageragingdark, makingmetakeme...”

  “The crawwwwling pain of skin,” she cries in her fading web of thoughts, “hides the good pain of the child’s coming. It is wrong not to feel its birth. It won’t be born tailless, will it?”

  “No,” I say as I sink with her, “it will be all right.”

  But our first child was born without tails.

  Old poundgrayly took the child away.... We both hinted to our euyom friend—we could not do it ourselves. Poundgrayly took the infant far away from us and pressed his ancient scaly limbs over the tiny nose and mouth.

  That is all I know about it, because poundgrayly was kind. He received it himself, but he never let the child’s moment of death slip from his memory to our two souls.

  (The screaming again.)

  “No, it will be all right,” I repeat, urging her.

  “I am so sorrryyyy....”

  Our leafy shelter of swaying yau is but a day’s swim from the territories of neighboring souls, but they seem so far away now—the truest truth of lonely loss, another’s dying...when mine would be the good one, long desired.

  (Hide in some shallow truth.)

  We worked together to weave the living yau stems, for a basket to hold our second child. Such stems are thick, slippery, but weaving and knotting them seemed easy for us together—even in her sickness, which is—

  (No, hide!)

  When the basket was finished, my body’s work was too. The work yet ahead for my soul would be simple. (“A father,” every father tells his son, “must guard his soul against involvement with the mother’s pain, to leave him free, to let him watch for any hungry jaws attracted by birth’s agony.”)

  But it is difficult to keep my soul from touching hers. The pains of white sickness have been calling for a long time. I have shared them without will. To leave her alone now, to deny a bond of pain, is the dark of wrong.

  “Is it my fault?” she cried. “I ate wrong things? I did not eat enough? Would finer sponges or fish or shell’s meat have ended this sickness, made me ready for the second child?”

  “No fault,” I say. “Sickness is never one soul’s fault.”

  (Whose fault?)

  (Hide in blaming!)

  I do blame! Her? The mother of us all...never letting us leave...never giving birth...one body of darkness, wetness hold....

  (You cannot hide.)

  Her pains run deeper now. The muscles of soul, black hardened reef, chum shoals of deepest night.

  My own muscles of back, arms and legs twitch in sharing pain, echo in quiver of tails’ ends.

  (Now!)

  “Comes the child!” she cries, I cry. Her body curls up, her soul curls down.

  Sickness pains swallow screams between thighs, and soul’s voice screams to me, screaming me. Screaming.

  Our child leaves her, slips out, floats away from her. The brown leaves wave around them both. The currents are calm, leave them alone.

  He floats inside his glistening sac. It is thin, and my eyes touch him faintly, twisting, turning.

  No blood flows from her. It is all inside the sac, which the child attacks with tiny fists, with nervous light of his simpler soul.

  He breaks through.

  Blood flows out, red, ocean’s gray flows in, and they blend, and he takes his first weak breath.

  (Salt of blood, salt of sea.)

  His fists rip the sac completely.

  (Now!)

  He breathes pure water.

  (Now!)

  Waterjoyup dies.

  Ripping pains of death, over moss, over child, descend in the wave of sharing.

  I die, glad to die, brown pounding with her down.

  Praise the end of water’s embrace!

  (But—)

  A light jumps from the dying her. To me a light, one image, and then I lose it. Darkness only as she dies.

  As we die, the ripping nearing end....

  I am dead.

  (But—)

  I am—

  It clears. Death’s dark colors brighten, and I live. Still screaming, blaming still.

  Waterjoyup’s soul is still here, somewhere nearer than darkness. Screaming still, but distant. Body near, but dead.

  Even if the screaming is hers, nothing can be done. The cupping hand is gone, the flesh is finished.

  We are never certain about the screams that follow body’s end. Perhaps they are merely the face of our own deepest screams...from the loss of a soul once nearest.

  (Move on.)

  With face’s eyes I look to the second son. I look for a long time.

  (His raw new soul, you must enter it. Find his name.)

  No...I refuse.

  The first son was born deformed—legs without tails, hands without webbing. The second son is no different. He has small normal tails moving before me, has webbed fingers fanning the water, but he is deformed, for his soul will be deformed.

  His soul will have no mother. And a father broken by his woman’s death.

  With face’s eyes again, I look at the child. Floats in water reddened by birth. His left hand is twisted in its bones, and always will be. No matter; he has greater deformity.

  I look beneath his skin. He floats in shallow darkness, wanting touch of warming flesh and still warmer rivers of some mother’s soul.

  (Look deeper.)

  I cannot. Will not.

  I am screamdeep, and my soul cries to me: “He does not know what his birth has done!”

  I refuse to enter.

  (Listen!)

  Suddenly something rises, some light to the inner eye.

  From a hidden crack in my soul, from pains shared in her death, springs again the last brief light she gave me.

  In her sinking down, her rushing out, she found a truth as a mother finds. Found a moment to look deep in the soul of the son, and to throw her finding out and up, to another soul.

  Her vision bobs up in sight, and remains for me to know and hold.

  “I haaave found it!” she cries, as she secretly cried before she died. “In it, in it, in his soul, I seeeee a million fish dancing on the surface, on the sea, dancing in dangerous dryness—but they sing, glad singing!”

  (Misunderstand?)

  Is it not the same vision?

  There is another vision, known to every man when given by man to woman, in the truest act before their child’s birth. The vision of a fish...pale scaleless flesh...crawling gasping from the sea to dangerous dryness....

  No, that is another vision—lacks singing, dancing.

  So I take him now, my hands larger than his head. To place him in the basket of living stems.

  So I know that th
is living son’s name is fishsinger.

  I—

  I—

  No, I—

  I am—

  I am fishsinger. The pink waking in the real now!

  I am fishsinger, but I can be my father or mother or a thousand of my forefathers whenever I want—or whenever I am pulled, pushed, sucked into such memories. Such is the purple manner of soul and memory for us all, and the truth is one sparkling crag: the precision of sharing and talk between the souls makes past times, places and souls no less than now, as near as here.

  Yes, of course, a brown truth: There are dangers in memories given to you by others...and they are dangers without promise of a real death, only dangers of madness.

  Mother’s death through Father’s eyes happened to me many times—but the impressive time in memory’s eye was four hundred twenty-one days after Father’s—yes, Father’s—death.

  So look to see it all:

  In body, I am alone this day, in the territory given me by screamdeep’s death on the four hundred twenty-first day before. My flesh is alone, without the two other bodies familiar to my soul and eyes. The old poundgrayly, sensing the proper season, has gone to be with his gentle females. And the dumb ayom, whom I know as murmursome, is away for no reason other than the fickle bouncing of his dumb pale soul.

  I am floating, one leg and tail curled around a thick brown yau stem, not far from the surface of the sea. I am floating where the light from the twin lights shining in dryness far beyond sea’s surface softens all the darkness thrown up by the ocean floor. The water around me was as warm as blood, woven with fish-eye sparkle, bright with the murmuring souls of nearby fish, of plants flowing leafy brown around.

  See further: ah, the distant bottom. Dark pores of crags. Endless coral souls in yellow mumblings. Red roaring souls of taloned ioe. Enormous oio, dangerous only in their bulky carelessness.

  So I am floating where the quiet current comforts those souls of brighter colors, where no fish flees, since no teeth snap nor dark souls scream. I am the young body who wants to relax alongside the simpler games of fish.

  My soul churns in the deep brown mounds of aloneness. Though unaware that a common wish for death is the arm of my deepest churning, still I feel it, and try to flee through my face’s eyes alone.

  My eyes move; I look. I ignore my deepest soul.

  But the scales of nearby fish flash in a way that reminds me of Father’s eyes, and this brings more churning.

  So I close my face’s eyes, try another fleeing, try thoughts of common truths.

  (See it: Your own skin is not shiny scaly. Its color is a yellowed gray, and it feels like the raspy hide of a muyom.)

  I open my eyes.

  The cracks of the gills of nearby fish remind me of Father’s scars, shiny marks on a muscular back, and I close my eyes again.

  (See it: You do not have slits on your neck for breathing. Instead the waters pass through your nose—or sometimes through your mouth—into your chest, and then back out again, warmer than when they entered.)

  I open my eyes once more. But the image of scars persists, so I hide in the light of a wider truth.

  (But you are not so alone in differences. The bodies of fish are not wholly unlike yours. Your legs end in darker tails that ripple like yau leaves when you want to move—not unlike the smaller tails of the smaller bodies darting around you. Their tails take them where they wish to go—just as yours do, though your destinations are different than theirs. See it: You swim the familiarity of your territory, or venture farther when you choose to attend one of the congregations of your kind of “fish” every two hundred days....)

  But on this day I have no desire to move, to travel anywhere. My right hand clenches and unclenches, and my twisted left hand trembles, both of them following the nervous motion that is deeper than my body.

  All the raging travel I need is within my soul, and I try to deny it.

  (See it: On the outer edge of your soul runs the babble of fish swimming near you, some within eyes’ touch, but most beyond it. And among their yellow babble flow the pale murmurs of those tiny souls that inhabit every point in the sea, though the eye never manages to touch them. “Those millions of tiny souls,” your father told you often, “make possible the talk and touch between our souls, and all larger souls. Without will, they capture our colors and thoughts; without will, they pass on the talk of our souls, through their own endless hordes until our feeling thoughts reach other souls of our kind, or the friendly soul of another kind, or the dark raging soul of a toothed jaw.)

  But the churning traveling in me rushes deeper than these thoughtful lights.

  At other times I would be able to touch the mumblings of dumb murmursome—a simple friend—or the wisdom of poundgrayly, the old euyom befriended by screamdeep in his own youth. But today no such touches can be made, and I do not even pause to question murmursome’s rare absence, or the unusual length of poundgrayly’s visit to his females and their islands.

  Because Mother is with me, as is Father. Though screaming dying, she is still alive in screamdeep’s memory of her day of death, and I pried this memory from Father long ago.

  I become Father watching and sharing Mother’s dying....

  “A soul may give his experience to another soul,” Father once said. “The soul who receives is able to remember the gift of event as if it were his own, from the beginning and in the now. But the dark truth is: such gifts can be dangerous. The truth is: a child who receives too many gifts from others’ memories may lose his own personal soul, may forget who he is and fall into splitting darkness. And if too many of the gifts are moments of death...

  I become Mother dying.

  And Father’s soul, in Father’s memory, will not let go of me.

  I struggle to leave, and in the end, when the memory is spent, I win.

  But I lose in other ways.

  Once again I return from waterjoyup’s death, screamdeep’s agony, and my own raw birth with the bleeding sore of a truest truth: I am a terrible child named fishsinger, killer of mothers.

  I always wanted—as any soul would—the memory of my own birth. But when I finally received it, it became death itself; and still I want it—as any soul would.

  I started young to pry, coax, plead for Father to give it to me, soul to soul, in the vivid now of given events.

  Father refused, denied, protected me from it with the pretended pink of a lie: “Waterjoyup...? She died when you were young. That is all. The simplest of truest truths.”

  But dark colors of mood, strange rivers of feeling flowed often from screamdeep’s soul when the momentary thought of waterjoyup came to either of us. So I continued to pry, to peer, to question, or to probe at more dishonest levels.

  Sixty days before screamdeep’s death, I found him asleep in the yau, and pierced his memory for the truer truth—

  —that fishsinger’s life had brought waterjoyup’s death.

  It did not matter that Father no longer saw it that way. He had once, and once would always be now.

  Curiosity brought me pains that cannot be dimmed by time. And still my blue curiosity learned nothing from the experience.

  The next time—after Father’s death—brings equal pains, in a probe of poundgrayly’s soul.

  The face of wrinkled scales, the tiny eyes, the ancient depths, witnessed screamdeep’s death. Without will, the man offered his death’s moment, and such an offering can never be refused, with or without will.

  To my own eyes and eye of soul the day of Father’s death occurred too simply—incomplete:

  I was sick, not from white moss on skin, but from the smallest invisible souls who had chosen my stomach as their territory. Screamdeep left me with a man and woman in the nearest territory and went with poundgrayly to find a scarce food called “eye shells” whose meat was believed good for sicknesses of the stomach and chest.

  I waited, and was surprised when the pains of stomach began to leave on their own, as the thousands of tiny souls within began dying and dimming in the victory of my body.

  Poundgrayly came back.

  The return of one soul—when two had left—should have been enough to bring understanding, but I could not touch the truth so easily.

  Eyes always have less range than souls. It was one lone soul, indistinguishable in the distance, who called softly to me from gray waters:

  “I am called poundgrayly, who is alone and sorry.”