TOM

 

PAUL CORNELL

 

Paul Cornell has been Hugo Award-nominated for his work in prose, TV and comics. He’s won the BSFA Award and the Eagle Award. His latest novel is the urban fantasy London Falling, out from Tor.

 

 

YOU EXPECT THE platform to be stable. But actually it sways like a boat, gently, even though its legs are sunk into rock under the reef. That means if you come out on the launch just about keeping your nausea under control, you should get underwater as quickly as possible, let your inner ear sort itself. Having been an instructor here for five years, I’d stopped noticing that sway. But now I appreciate it again, because Tom appreciates it.

That feeling, looking at Tom’s face, takes me back to a moment when the platform was swaying more violently. When the big guy showed up. I never got a name. Swav would never tell me. I don’t know who that was meant to protect. Or maybe the males don’t bother with names. I can see him even now, leaping, all blue muscle, with bright yellow stripes down his flanks, all the other colours on his skin that were at the edge of what we’re able to see, that made strange rainbows through the spray. He hurled himself against the platform, time after time, making the tourists and the other scuba guides scream and fall around. He was the size of two or three orca. I couldn’t see any similarity between him and Swav. I couldn’t see a face, even. If there were eyes they were hidden in the dark lines along what might have been his head. I couldn’t imagine how they could ever be together. I was holding onto Swav, both of us getting soaked. All I was thinking was that, emotionally, I was fucked. I could hear him calling her name. He was booming it underwater, her name vibrating the platform as much as the waves did.

I looked into Swav’s face, and there was an expression there I couldn’t read at all. It was an arrangement of muscles on something very like a human face that wasn’t akin to any expression I’d seen before. She broke from my arms, suddenly slippery, like I’d loved a mermaid. She ran for the rail. She leapt into the water as I was calling her name, my shout lost in his. She jumped into water that was suddenly full of him rising around her, an enormous mass that overwhelmed her. He twisted her round and slammed her against the side of the platform, so hard I was sure it had killed her. He held her there with slaps, battering her, left and right with his fins or wings or whatever they were. I’d run to the side, but there was nothing I could do but shout. She’d told me what she expected, but she’d never experienced it. Would she have dived in if she’d known what it would be like? She was pinned there, against the metal over the underwater dock, her fingers gripping the wire netting now, her knuckles, suddenly so human, white with the effort. I remember Annie, the biologist, came up behind me and grabbed me when I looked like I was going to jump in after her. I don’t know if I really would have. We watched together as that huge white puppet snake of a penis rose out of the water, a flap like a flower jerking atop it, sucking air. Swav threw her head back and I could see something odd at her neck, kind of like a wound, and I screamed her name again because again I thought he’d killed her. And then the penis wrapped round her, impossibly fast, and the flap rose above her head like a snake about to strike. In that second, she turned and looked at me, and this time what I saw on her face I read as terror. Then the flap grabbed her around her head. He let himself fall from the platform and with an enormous splash took her with him into the depths.

I recall the water hitting us again. How we were swept aside. And then how we all found ourselves just sliding against the rails, the water draining off in seconds, as it was meant to, children screaming, guides yelling to grab onto the cables. But everyone was safe, it turned out. Except me. I felt as if I’d been beaten. I’d had something ripped out of me. Annie made me look her in the face, and I could see every detail of what she was feeling, such a contrast, like coming back to reality after a dream, just for a moment. “She’ll come back to you,” she said. “I’m pretty sure of it.”

 

 

I WAS ONE of the first, I guess, to have that experience. My working on the Great Barrier Reef made it more likely. The Carviv always asked to visit reefs, and because they always asked to work, a lot of them in the first party ended up as tour guides, things like that. Their hosts tried to dissuade them, but the companies that took them on were delighted. Mate, we’ve got a guide who is herself a tourist attraction. The Carviv presence funded the regrowth initiative and the carbon sinks. It was so unthreatening, you know? They didn’t want to see our armed forces, they wanted to be near our water. The females separated, integrated by not staying in groups at all, spreading out all round the Pacific Rim. The males, we saw on television, lay on the ocean surface, somewhere off Hawaii, sleeping most of the time. Aussie blokes identified with that. That was a good first year, with the whole planet kind of sighing in relief. We’d met the aliens, and they turned out to be quite like us, really. None of the predictions of outrage and uprising came true. After a little while, nobody had that much of a problem. Humanity looked at itself in comparison with these guys, and decided we weren’t that bad or that good, and stopped worrying so much about the end of the world. There was, after all, another one just over there, seventy light years away, and those guys didn’t seem to think we were so bad. Looking back, I guess we started tidying the place up, now that the neighbours had come visiting. So much ecological repair in such a short time. The Carviv refused, even when asked, to express any negative opinions about the world they were visiting. But I think their love for the water contributed to us turning a corner, ecologically.

And the years after have continued to be good. But I still occasionally feel... well, just sometimes I don’t know how I feel. Until I look at Tom.

 

 

EVERYONE TURNED OUT to welcome Swav when she arrived at the platform. She travelled on one of their boats, those slim white shells, their hulls shaped reassuringly like our own yachts, but with some sort of power source that made no sound, the sail only for braking, billowing out to do so as it approached us.

“Hi, everyone,” she said as she stepped off the ladder onto the platform. Her accent already sounded Aussie. “Thanks for having me.” She was sparkling white, a rounded head like a bowling pin, a diagonal sash that was decorated with dense designs as her only clothing, slim shoulders, big, three-fingered hands like a cartoon character. She swept downwards to a tiny pair of feet, her whole body leaning to one side or the other with every step. There were no visible... well, it’s weird to use a word like “genitalia” thinking back to that moment, but that’s how biologists, how Annie, actually, would have been looking at her. Her chest was just... rounded, as if she was a clothed human. But it was her face that was the most extraordinary thing. Those enormous blue eyes; utterly like ours, but impossibly expressive. The ridges above them which danced like extraordinary eyebrows. The button nose with a single nostril. The wry squiggle of a mouth, never open enough so that you could see her teeth, but always in motion, saying so much even when she wasn’t. She had a waterproof rucksack on her back that looked like she’d just bought it.

The others clustered around her, Helena, the boss, doing the air kissing which we’d been told delighted the Carviv. And it seemed, indeed, to do the business with Swav. That was when I heard that huge, honest, laugh for the first time. I was holding back for some reason, Annie, her arms folded, beside me. Swav glanced over and looked at me. And held my gaze, her laugh suddenly turning into what looked like quite a shy smile. I found myself smiling back.

 

 

UNDERWATER, SWAV WAS incredible. She swam in a blur of motion, her whole body vibrating, able to turn on a dime and talk to us in our scuba gear by directing individual yells right at our ears. Which must have been, as Annie put it, like shooting daisies from a rollercoaster. The fish, initially, hated her. Carl, our bump-headed parrot fish, who’d learned to come to the diving pit beside the platform twice a day for food and photo opportunities, actually left. Which made the crew feel kind of awkward: nobody knew how long swimming with Swav would be a tourist attraction, while Carl had served us well for a decade. There was one night at dinner when Swav became aware that there was something nobody was talking to her about. She made Helena tell her about Carl. And the sadness on her face when she heard, oh man! It was breaking my heart. She suddenly got up, and ran to the door, and stopped and made a gesture for nobody to follow her, that it would all be okay. And then she was gone and we heard a splash, and we all got to our feet, and went to see, but all there was in the moonlight was a trail of foam that already stretched out past the reef.

She was back for breakfast, hardly able to contain herself. “Guys, come and see!” she said. I jumped over the side with a couple of the others, and there was Carl, laid back as ever, but a notch hungrier, if his bumping against us was anything to go by. And behind him, as if intrigued by this food they’d heard about, was a shoal of clownfish, our other major attraction, or they had been, when they’d been more common around here. “I found out what they were smelling about me,” whispered Swav in my ear as she rocketed past, going round and round the platform in excitement. “I reversed it.”

That night, in her honour, we got the grog out. There’d been a few who were a little awkward around Swav. Mostly I think they felt it was like being around, you know, someone who’s very religious or a tranny or something; you get tense because you want to make sure you do everything right and don’t offend them. But I had to admit, when I caught her in the corner of my eye, or ran into her without expecting to, I did react to her like she was a ghost. In a nanosecond, your brain realises you’re not looking at what you thought you were, only she’s enough like us that it slips gears a bit, and you find yourself jumping a moment after the conscious part of you has thought ‘oh, it’s just Swav’. She noticed, the second time it happened, and stopped me from making some sort of awkward apology. “It’s okay,” she said, “it happens to me too. You guys are kind of... large, you know?”

I laughed. “Not as large as your blokes! Oh, sorry –”

“Stop saying sorry! They’re their sort of thing, not the sort of thing I expect to run into in a corridor.”

“Are we ever going to get a visit from one of them?”

She laughed, like she was embarrassed. “Well, let’s see how things work out.” It was like I’d said something a little racy. Then she realised I was looking awkward again. “No, come on, I love them, honestly, but I like to get away, and... you know. Do stuff.” Those huge eyes had been moving quickly, her attention resting briefly on every part of my face, as if she was taking me in. And enjoying it. She was waiting to see what I did next.

You hear blokes saying they fancy a cartoon character: Wilma Flintstone; Daphne from Scooby Doo; Mrs Incredible. But Swav kind of brought that feeling front and centre. Confronted you with it. I’d seen some of the other guys look at her, and then look away, awkward. Your eyes got halfway with it, and stayed on a curve or a motion, then they were lured into applying that feeling to something completely outside the lexicon of love. It felt kind of like fancying Carl. The women had started to make jokes about it. “And she walks about starkers,” said Mia, another of the guides. “It’s shameless.” Swav looked puzzled when people said things like that, but now I think that was an affectation, to let everyone stay comfortable. Or maybe it was kind of like someone laughing along with a racist joke about them, I don’t know.

“Is this...?” I wanted to ask her if she was coming on to me, but the thought seemed vastly weird and conceited and hey, potential diplomatic incident, plus all the guys laughing at me, forever. So I shut up again.

But she cocked her head on one side. “I guess. Maybe.” While I was processing that, she took my hand in what felt very like a normal hand. “We’ve got a couple of hours. Let’s have a cuppa.”

 

 

SHE LED ME into her cabin. I didn’t close the door, she did. I went to the kettle, but she came up behind me and put her hand on my chest. I started to turn around, and she very gently kissed me.

People always used to ask what it was like, before enough of them experienced it for themselves. I’ve got a bit fed up with describing it, honestly. It was great. It didn’t feel very weird. I kept feeling that I wanted to close my eyes and then stopping myself because that might be insulting. What I was seeing might have been more complicated than I was used to, but it was still good. She didn’t have breasts, but a curve that felt like them from behind. Her skin became softer and softer as I touched her. She laughed as she showed me all the incredibly complicated folds and openings and protrusions of her, and put my fingers where it would give her most pleasure, and I felt a huge sense of pride that I was arousing her so much, that I was seeing all this extra detail in what was normally a smooth surface. That she could even want me. She wanted to see me then, so I showed her, and what to do. She took to that! She told me not to worry about her teeth. I enjoyed that for a while, and then told her not to worry about mine. Although, you know, that was like my first time had been; I had no idea if I was doing it right, or even what I was aiming for. She smelt great, not like anything I’d ever smelt before, so there were no associations with it. It didn’t take me back to any other time; there was just this enormous great now, this tremendous focus on this being just her and me. And even now, the smell of Tom takes me back only to her. I thought it was all going to be like teenagers playing around. While that was kind of frustrating, emotionally, for me, I assumed there couldn’t be anything more. But then she told me that there wasn’t really any equivalent of orgasm for her without penetration, that actually it was only the feeling of her partner coming that could set her off. She leaned over the bed, and moved her gorgeous roundness a little. “So, erm... how would you feel about...? I mean, I know it’s a bit scary –”

It was, but no way was that enough to stop me. It had been established pretty quickly that, having evolved in different biospheres, there wasn’t any need to worry about humans and Carviv catching anything off... you know, I regret mentioning that now. “No possibility of biological interaction”, that’s what we thought back then. Well, I guess it’s what a lot of people still think now. A lot of idiots. But that was nowhere in my head just then. I positioned myself behind her and let her reach for me and guide me into one of the many channels. “Push,” she whispered, and I did. Something bigger than it needed to be suddenly contracted around me, until it was just the right size, so welcoming and tight that it felt like an invitation and a violation at the same time. Things were touching me that wouldn’t normally be, let us say. Part of her slid urgently into place to cup me around my balls as I was inside her. She must have heard the noise I made and realised what that was about. She looked over my shoulder and grinned. “You all right there?”

I laughed. “God, you’re beautiful. Is this the first time you’ve... you know, I mean with...?” I had visions in my head of one of those big guys lying in the ocean. I’d wondered about what she was used to, if you know what I mean.

“With anyone. My lot either.”

“Oh –!” I suddenly felt like I should have acted a lot differently, somehow, but I wasn’t sure exactly how.

She laughed again. “Mate, it’s not such a big deal for us. There are plants that have evolved on my world to do basically what you’re... and there’s a lot of jokes about that amongst the shoal, you know, I’m just going to leave Mum and all the guys and go on to the land to have a walk among the pretty flowers. La la la! Your girl friends tell you about it and so then you kind of want a go, and your mum gets all emotional, and the guys all take turns saying surely you’re not ready to go exploring on unsettled land yet, shit like that. Until Mum basically put me in the boat and said do what you like! That’s how the plants pollinate, so you get these enormous forests of flowers on the islands. We look over to them every now and then and go, hey, we were pretty horny this year.” Her voice became softer again, serious. “But I wanted to know what it was like with, you know, someone here. Someone cool. And you don’t need to worry. I shrink. I clutch. You feel...” and she raised one of those things that looked a lot like eyebrows and now her voice dropped to a whisper, “pretty big, actually. So, you just go ahead and... let yourself go.”

So I did.

 

 

WE LAY TOGETHER afterwards. I watched, fascinated, as her bits sorted themselves out, retracted and relaxed until she looked smooth again. I was feeling pretty emotional. I mean, not that I wouldn’t normally be, but... I felt I’d just gone through something intense, and I wasn’t quite sure how I was meant to feel about it. Had we done something wrong? She must have realised that I wasn’t feeling right. “It’s okay,” she said.

“Was it... all right?”

“It was brilliant. Mate, you’re much better than a flower.”

“I’ve never been told that before.”

She looked suddenly serious. “Now you have to fight one of our males.”

I looked at her shocked, and she burst out laughing. “Sucked in! You should have seen your face!” She wrapped her arms around me and I lay against her chest. “You needn’t worry. I know I’m going home eventually.”

“I wasn’t going to say –!”

“It was fun. Lovely fun.” She kissed me again, and I felt a kind of ache at what she’d just said. But she was right, it couldn’t be more than that. Or so I thought then.

 

 

OVER THE NEXT few weeks, the crew cottoned on to what we were getting up to. I got a lot of ribbing, but it was all good natured. The only person who seemed to have a problem was Annie, who looked away whenever I tried to make eye contact. I guess that was the start of the jealousy that would lead her to hurt me so much later on.

 

 

ONE NIGHT, SWAV came to my cabin and held me back when I tried to kiss her. “I’ve had a message,” she said, indicating a patch on her sash, “one of our males is on his way here. Now, you mustn’t freak out...”

And she told me that he was coming to the platform in order to mate with her, that something had changed in the water temperature that made it feel like mating season back home, and so the males were all about to swim in various directions, meet up with the females and, well –

“It’s not like you and me,” she said. “I’ve seen it, and... you might want to go ashore rather than wait for –”

“What, and think about you and him? Do you have to do this? I mean, are you and he –?”

“It’s not like anything you guys have. You shouldn’t be jealous.”

I asked loads more questions, none of which mattered, and she answered all of them, and, you know, I like to think I’m a guy who accepts different cultures, but I was still left feeling pretty damn small.

 

 

I WATCHED FOR any sign of mockery from the others. I knew Helena had told them about the forthcoming visit. They didn’t say a word until the evening, when Ben clapped me round the shoulder. “What can I say, mate? You’re about to be publically cuckolded by a fucking enormous whale.”

“It’s like the porn version of Moby Dick,” added Mia.

“We can only hope,” finished off Helena, “that he’s not bi-curious.”

I started to laugh. “You bastards.” And we had a few drinks. They’d waited until Swav wasn’t around, and they hadn’t let it stay silent and terrible and I was grateful for that.

 

 

EVERYONE WAS SHOCKED by how the male arrived. That he surged like a torpedo towards the platform, without any message to us, that it swiftly became clear that that day’s tourists were going to be at the very least alarmed, and not, as expected, entertained by the spectacle of seeing one of the larger Carviv up close. Once we helped them to their feet, Helena elected to give them their money back and send them to dry land on the launch. The kids were already starting to ask awkward questions about the violence of what Swav had said would take place entirely underwater and out of sight. Maybe that had been the male’s choice, and what she’d seen before had been different. Maybe the bastard had just been showing off.

I stayed by the rail, Annie beside me. “Why are you so sure she’ll be back?” I asked.

She shook her head.

At that moment, Swav’s head burst to the surface. We all helped her back on deck. She looked dazed, and she kept putting a hand to her neck. “It’s sealed again,” she said. “My... you know.”

“I don’t think I do,” I said, and I couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my voice.

She wrapped her arms around me and I let her, in front of everyone. The smell of her had changed. I realised I still liked it. Only that felt wrong now. Or for just a moment it did. “He’s gone now,” she said. “It’s all going to be okay.”

I helped her back to her cabin.

 

 

I HAD TO ask how it had been. I had to. I don’t know what I was expecting to hear. It was always going to be bad. “Just this enormous... natural experience,” she said.

“Good?”

She looked pained for me, like she didn’t want to lie to me. After that, she wouldn’t say any more about it. It took us a few nights to get back to our old routine, but we did. I might have been kind of rough with her the first time, I don’t know.

 

 

SWAV APOLOGISED HUGELY to the crew for what the male’s arrival had been like, even offered Helena her resignation. She hadn’t known he’d make such a show of it, most didn’t. Helena said her leaving was out of the question. Was there going to be a... happy event? Swav looked shocked for a moment at Helena’s directness, then touched her neck and said she didn’t know.

 

 

BUT IN THE next few weeks, it became obvious. The side of her neck and her lower back swelled, and you could see something shifting inside the translucent skin. She’d been spending a lot more time in the water, going deep under for hours at a stretch, for a long time now, even before there had been visible signs of her pregnancy. “And I’m going to have to be down there,” she told me, “when it bursts.” I spent as much time as I could down there with her. I didn’t know how I felt about what she was carrying, but I wanted to be there for her, to help.

 

 

OF COURSE, WHEN it finally happened, I was on the platform, making dinner. I heard a weird cry from outside the galley, and rushed out, leaving the others, who hadn’t heard it. Swav, who’d been deep underwater for most of that day, was bobbing on the surface, and in her arms was... Tom.

I looked at him, the little fella, small and blue and sleek, and I could see something about him, an expression in those eyes that were almost hidden in the folds of his face, an expression which just hadn’t been there on that big male.

Swav smiled up at me, such an enormous smile of joy, and she didn’t have to tell me what had happened. How it happened... well, they’re still debating that.

It was something chemical. The greatest rush of my life. I leapt into the water and took my boy into my arms.

 

 

IN THE NEXT few weeks we took turns looking after Tom. Swav was going out to the edge of the reef on a regular basis to consult with a whole pack of males, yeah, including that one. They were talking, she said, about heading home soon.

“Do I get to come with?” I said.

“There’s no way you could live on my world.”

“But –”

“You want to be around Tom. I get that. So that’s something else we’ve been talking about. How about you look after him for a bit? Then he comes back home with the second party, back to visit you again with the third?”

I was pleased at that. Though of course I’d miss Swav too. This arrangement would make it all feel much more grown up, and less like I’d feared, an adolescent melodrama, spurred on by my out of control hormones. I’d asked if her lot’s scientists had come up with any ideas about how the two of us could have conceived, and she’d looked awkward. “Tom’s not the only one,” she said. “It’s happened a lot.”

 

 

AND INDEED, IT was soon all over the news, proud fathers clutching human/Carviv kids. Though I’ve got to say, I didn’t think any of them looked as much like them as Tom looked like me.

It was then that Annie made her feelings plain. I found her watching a clip of some nature show in the galley. She switched it off before I could see what it was, which made me ask if it was porn.

“Yeah,” she said, “if you’re a dunnock.”

She didn’t take much persuading to show it to me. It was a whole bunch of garden birds hopping about. “It’s for this thesis I’m writing,” she said. “The female dunnock mates with a number of males, each of which ends up thinking it’s the father of her kids. So when the eggs are laid, all of them protect them.”

“I thought you specialised in marine life?”

She paused, but I guess she couldn’t help herself. “These days,” she said, “I specialise in the Carviv.”

It took me a moment to get what she meant. I think I was pretty harsh back to her. She deserved it. It was the last time we spoke.

 

 

EVEN AFTER ALL these years, looking after Tom is still a joy. He swims like a torpedo. He’s still only got a few words of English, but I’ve learned a lot of Carviv off him. He gets that just by listening to the sea. It sometimes makes me a little jealous about the guys who had Carviv daughters, the oldest of which are in school now, and charming the world. But no, I couldn’t ask for more. There’s this incredible bond between me and him, it just takes a while for others to see it. Every now and then I think about what Annie said, I mean, it comes up in some debate, but no... no, and anyway, even if it was true, so what?

Swav’s been back once, and we took Tom over to Hawaii together, where the Carviv, having helped us sort out our climate issues, have started building an underwater holiday destination for their people. There are all these little islands covered in... well, those flowers Swav told me about.

“Tempted?” I asked.

“’Course not,” she said, “I’ve got you.”