Relics, Wrecks and Ruins

River of Stars ^{By David Farland}

Aracai rose to the surface as the fishing boat sped away, motors whining softly. The surface of the Atlantic was dimpled with waves that lapped softly, as if the sea were slightly perturbed. The stars shone so brightly they throbbed, and the moon was in its dark phase, but light from the Arab colonies there created a bright band that slashed across the moon’s equator like a gathering of rogue stars.

He dove beneath the water and followed the backpack dropped by Escalas’s contact twenty meters to the ocean floor. The sea here was alive with sounds—the crackling of snapping shrimp, the eerie bellow of a grouper, the chiming sounds of baitfish. Though the sea was dark, Aracai’s night vision was excellent. He’d been engineered to see in infrared, so many creatures seemed to emit a soft glow.

He followed the backpack down to a place where rocks were covered in splotches of anemones and starfish, all gray shapes in the night, and began circling it, swimming on his side, watching it as if it were some strange creature that he dare not approach.

He made a soft whistle, “Here,” and in moments two more mer swam up, hugging the sand. Like Aracai, they were both nude. Dulce, his young wife, had hair of amber, and his… mentor, an old mer named Escalas, whose streaming white hair was held back by the silver circlet of the mindlink around his head, swam near and circled the backpack, too, but he did not watch the pack. Instead, he swam on his side, deep-set eyes watching Aracai.

He knows what is in the pack, Aracai thought. That’s why he brought us here. And now he is waiting for me to pick it up…

Dulce circled behind them a few meters off.

Three months back, Aracai and Dulce had been living to the south, at the tip of Brasilia, where the cold waters of the Antarctic were among the cleanest in the world and the fisheries still thrived, when he’d met Escalas.

He was a living legend. Not only was he old and wise, he was the only mer to have a mindlink, so if he wanted to know something, he could wonder about it and thus access Heavenly Host—the AIs linked in geosynchronous orbit—and learn what he wanted to know.

Upon meeting, Escalas had eyed Aracai a moment and then said, “Swim with me.” Among the mer, it was an invitation to swim for a ways, to talk, or perhaps to swim for a lifetime.

Now, Aracai realized that the old man had been bringing him to this point for months. “What is in the backpack?” Aracai sang, his voice a low thrumming that ended in a higher squeal.

Escalas hesitated, as if he hoped Aracai would guess, then answered, “A bomb.”

Many questions crowded Aracai’s mind. What kind of bomb? Who will Escalas kill? But one burst to the forefront: “How did you get it?”

Escalas’s answer was leisurely, a rumble. “I bought it… from the neogods.”

The news took Aracai’s breath. It did not surprise him that Escalas had bought the weapon. No, he felt surprised at mention of the neogods. They had been human until their genetic and mechanical upgrades had boosted their intelligence so much that they no longer wished to associate with mankind any more than Aracai would want to associate with amoebas. The neogods had left Earth decades ago, learned to bend space and time, so that now they explored the edges of the universe…

“Those creatures do not talk to men—or bargain with them,” Aracai said, worried that Escalas was teasing him.

“Ah, Spirit Warrior, they bargained with me,” Escalas affirmed. “Perhaps I made the right offer, or asked for the right weapon?” He jutted his chin toward the backpack. “Pick it up.”

Spirit Warrior? He thinks I am a warrior? Aracai had never thought of himself as a warrior at all.

But he had begun to believe over the past weeks that the world needed one. There was poison coming from Rio Negro—heavy metals and acids from mining, human waste, pesticides and industrial chemicals. In some places, over the past four decades, the poisons had turned the sea floor into a wasteland that even crabs could not survive. The mer were dying. Escalas, Dulce, and Arakai were among the last.

Old Escalas had petitioned numerous national leaders, sought to get the humans to stop the “genocidal poisoning of our people.” But the governments in South America did not enforce their own laws. Those who had been charged with protecting the environment merely took bribes and turned a blind eye.

Escalas swam past Aracai, studying him. “It is time to go to war,” he said. “But the notion of violence sickens you.”

“Yes,” Aracai said. His whole frame was shaking.

“As it should,” Escalas said, swimming close. “Feral humans do not need a reason to go to war. Violence is in their nature. But when they made us mer, they took our bloodlust away. So the idea sickens you, though it is long past time for us to act.” He jerked a nod toward the backpack. “The problem with us mer is that we circle our problems endlessly, when we should merely grasp at the solutions.”

A bomb? War is a solution? Aracai studied Escalas. The old mer held a trace of a smile, as if he were amused. That was the problem with the old man. In the past months, Aracai had learned a lot, but Escalas always seemed to be three steps ahead.

“Do not do this thing,” Aracai warned, “whatever you have planned.”

“Oh, I am not going to do it,” Escalas said softly. “You are!”

Aracai could not imagine himself harming another. “But—”

Escalas raised a hand. “The feral humans who are poisoning our seas hurt themselves almost as much as they do us. Their society is toxic, and what do humans do when they perceive another society to be toxic? They go to war. History is full of toxic societies that are no more.”

Aracai could hardly believe what he heard. He wanted to argue, but did not know where to start.

The old mer swam lazily. “This is the answer. Pick it up.”

Numb, Aracai pulled at the backpack and dumped out the bomb—a strange device, all metal, a heavy black disk. Soft, white lights displayed the time and the bomb’s GPS coordinates on top.

He lifted it. The bomb was heavier than anything so small should be. Heavier than lead. Heavier even than gold. Uranium?

Aracai trilled a warning to the others, “Stay back!” He suspected it was a nuclear device, but it was too small to have much in the way of shielding. Being this close could expose them all to radiation.

He threw it back to the ocean floor, raising a cloud of filth, but Dulce swam near and wrenched it from the mud. There was sadness in her dark eyes. “Let me carry it,” she demanded. “She was my daughter, too…”

An image flashed in Aracai’s mind—their infant daughter, cold and rigid, eyes and fingers gone equally white in death. The poisons had contained some sort of mutagen, so that she was born with only a small part of her brain.

“Too many mer children have died,” she said.

“We can try for another,” Aracai promised.

But the gill slits along Dulce’s neck flared in anger. “No, no we can’t,” she said. They had been trying for five years. “You know that. I want to carry my vengeance in my own hands.”

With a flick of her tail, she lunged forward, upstream through the brackish water.

Old Escalas said, “It is not vengeance I seek, but change.”

In the night they swam, pushing through heavy headwaters, and Escalas sang to them of the dangers of the Amazon, a chant that formed dreams in Aracai’s mind. There were huge, black eels ahead that could emit a killing, electric jolt of blue light, and piranhas with bright-red bellies that hung like rubies in the slow waters until they smelled blood, when they would lunge and tear chunks of flesh from bones. He sang of coral-colored dolphins, anacondas, and other dangers. The fresh water itself was poison to the mer, for in time their kidneys would fail in the reduced salinity.

So Aracai feared the river.

The waters became quieter as they swam. The crackle of snapping shrimp died away and only the sloshing of waves could be heard.

Aracai saw evidence of toxins. There were no snails or freshwater clams on the muddy floor. They passed no schools of fish—only a pair of huge bull sharks swimming upstream to spawn. The sharks eyed the mer hungrily.

The waters at the mouth of the Amazon were deserted. Flecks of dark moss and white decomposing bits of dead insects and fish drifted about. The water was oxygen rich, but smelled of decay, and the toxins in it made his gills itch.

So Aracai pleaded for reason as they swam in the darkness. “We cannot bomb the humans. Innocent children will be hurt.”

“I do not want to hurt innocent children,” Escalas agreed. “But the humans must change their ways. I have done all that I know how in order to convince them. Now, we must go to war.” The old man seemed to change subjects. “The poison that killed your daughter is called C54.”

The news sent Dulce into a wail of pain. Her tail thrashed, so that she surged ahead and became invisible in the cloudy water.

Aracai had never heard of C54 and felt relieved that Escalas had put a name to the toxin.

“In Venezuela, it is used as a chemical warfare agent. That is where we are going—to set the bomb off at the factory. The poison is colorless, tasteless. It was not meant to kill anyone, though it has unforeseen effects on the mer. It was designed as a mind-control weapon. The drug causes the victim’s brain to release the hormone dopamine, making victims carefree and happy, but over time the victim’s prefrontal lobes shrink, limiting their ability to plan ahead. This makes the Venezuelan’s enemies stupid.”

The waters were dark, and Aracai’s gills itched. He swam briefly to the surface and flashed his gills, shaking his head, to try to rid them of grit.

Aracai wondered long about the C54, horrified that such a weapon would be unleashed on others, crippling the minds of children.

He thought of his daughter, her tiny fingers as rubbery as the tentacles of a dead octopus, her blind eyes, the malformed brain that would not work well enough to let her breathe.

“The Venezuelans create this drug, and the other nations, they do not fight back?” Aracai asked.

“Oh, they fight back,” Escalas sang. “Humans have never discovered a stick that could not be turned into a club. Venezuela’s enemies wage economic war, making their country the poorest of the world’s poor, and they bribe AIs to withhold information from them. Each of Venezuela’s enemies have iconic celebrities who mock the Venezuelans, weakening their spirits. They use viruses and nanobots…”

“And if we go to war,” Aracai asked, “are we any better than they are?” The possibility that they weren’t frustrated Aracai. He did not know much about humans. He had seen the hulls of their boats above water, but had never wanted to meet one.

Truth be told, he despised them. The humans had made him poorly. His eyes did not face forward like those of a human, which made it dangerous to swim too far, too fast, lest he crack his skull on something. He had no need for hair, and would have preferred to have flesh alone, or perhaps scales, instead of flowing locks that were always picking up bits of seaweed and becoming home to tiny crabs. His shoulders were too large, not sleek enough to slice through the water.

It is the right of any creature to dislike his creators, he thought. The humans created us according to some nightmarish aesthetic instead of constructing something more elegant.

“I am what they made me,” Aracai said.

“Is that all you are?” Escalas asked. “Do you not also make yourself?”

Aracai dodged between two rocks. “We can always better ourselves.”

“I think,” Escalas said, “that it is almost a duty for a man to better himself, or a people to better themselves. We must swim forward, not be content to drift with the tides. Don’t you think?”

There it was again, that secretive tone. Was he talking of genetic manipulation? That cost a lot of money, something that a mer, living off the bounties of the ocean, did not need.

But Aracai thought, I could make money. There are still treasures under the sea—Spanish galleons full of emeralds, sunken Mayan ruins off the coast of Mexico, filled with artifacts. Humans pay well for such curiosities. Perhaps I could find a cure for the poisons.

But the old mer seemed to want to send a message.

“So,” Aracai said at last, “do humans actually die in these wars?”

“Some die,” Escalas admitted. “But there are various theories on war. The goal is not to kill, it is to demoralize, to alter the behavior of the enemy.” The old mer struggled to talk and breathe at the same time. He rose to the surface, gasped a deep breath, and continued. “To be honest though, I do not think that humans value life as much as you and I do. When I found you, Spirit Warrior, you were the first mer that I had met in two years. I felt so alone, and so I begged you, ‘Swim with me.’ Among the mer, we crave each other’s company. But with over two hundred billion human souls on earth, there are too many. If one of them dies, the others feel relief rather than loss. Why, on the Amazon alone, there are sixteen million humans living along its banks It is the largest river in the world, and holds one fifth of all the fresh water…” he droned on.

Ahead of them, Dulce was slowing, and she had begun to sing in the way mer women will, a threnody whose tune was beat out in the lashing of her tail.

The old mer glanced ahead and said, “She is a fine wife for a Spirit Warrior. I hope that at the end of this, you will be able to have the children you deserve.”

“Why do you call me ‘Spirit Warrior,’” Aracai asked.

The old mer slowed his swimming and did a roll, so that he could peer into Aracai’s face. “Among the humans, men contend with one another. But you fight your own weaknesses, your own inner demons. That is why I brought you.”

Aracai eyed Escalas. “You do not want to kill humans either, do you?”

Escalas admitted, “To take a life is… reprehensible. To even force another into a certain path… weighs on my soul. But we will not reach our destination for many days and so I have time to ponder.”

Aracai thought long. He realized that he need not make a decision to go to war now. He could abandon the bomb at any moment, let it sink into the mud. Changing course would be as simple as a flick of his tail.

But he plunged ahead, through the night, wondering.

By early dawn they had traveled many kilometers upriver, reaching the old gods that guarded its mouth.

The old gods came in the form of enormous ancient busts of men and monkeys, all grimacing, each perhaps sixty feet tall. A line of them had been discovered across the river channel back in the twenty-second century, sunk deep into the mud, but no one knew what civilization had carved them. Aracai worried for Dulce. The bomb she carried was very heavy. She held the disk clasped against her belly as she swam, near her womb, and he knew enough to be afraid for her, for them all.

How much radiation did the bomb emit? How much could they handle?

Did it even matter? When they set the bomb off, he might not have a chance to escape the blast. Even if he got away from the fireball, the detonation would create a wall of sound, a sonic boom that would carry downriver, stunning and killing fish, including him.

And he had to wonder, was there any life left in Dulce’s womb worth worrying about anyway?

He took the bomb, to give her a rest, but then determined that she would carry it no more.

Escalas continued to struggle in the swift water. Aracai was smart enough to wonder if the old man had brought him on this journey, planned it months or even years ago, just so that he’d have strong arms to carry the weapon. Aracai considered asking, but knew he would not get a straight answer. Escalas was always forcing him to think for himself.

So Aracai swam, hampered by muddled thoughts, a heavy burden, and strong currents. The riverbed below him looked remarkably dead in the morning light. Escalas’s warnings about ferocious fish and deadly stingrays seemed to be without merit.

At dawn Aracai rose to the surface, drew a great breath, and peered about. The bank to the north was so far away he could make out only water, but to the south he saw buildings—squat and colorful in shades of lavender and canary and pearl, sitting in tiers along the bank. Peasants with mule carts walked along the roads in bare feet.

There had to be tens of thousands of them, freakish things. There were no gleaming hovercars with wealthy passengers, like he’d once seen in Chile.

Aracai dove deep and swam near the bottom.

Then came the new gods.

Aracai was flapping his tail hard, driving upstream through the sepia waters, falling behind the others. Soot and algae beat against him like a storm, and suddenly he heard a ping. A brilliant blue beam of light struck his face and he squinted to see huge metal struts ahead that seemed to be covered by seaweed. He realized that it wasn’t seaweed at all, but strands of plasteet—a material used to capture energy from wave action—and he followed new movement as the barrel of a cannon swiveled his way.

His heart froze and he ceased swimming, only to hear the ping and a squelchy mechanical noise that he recognized as a droid’s demand for an identification signal.

“Watch out!” Escalas called a moment too late, and Aracai heard the grinding of massive metal beams, then something heavy hit the ground, raising clouds of mud.

Suddenly Aracai put the images together. There was a war droid ahead—a giant titanium crablike droid the size of a ship, scuttling on the river bottom, menacing them.

Aracai stopped to let the muddy tide carry him back from danger, just as a single shot seared through the water. An energy beam sent a tube of bubbling super-heated water toward Escalas, striking him just once. The old mer went limp as the cloud of muddy water engulfed them all.

Aracai froze, not daring to breathe, fearing a second shot. He squinted in order to avoid being blinded. He hoped the dark waters would shield him from the droid’s sensors.

No more shots followed; his heart pounded.

He heard a buzz and something whipped over his head. He squinted up to see a squid-like drone with a gelatinous body. Its infrared signature made it look like a fiery octopus.

Hunters!

Aracai recognized the tech. It was called a squill—an ancient assassin droid, perhaps a hundred years old.

He did not know what sensory array it might have. Motion detectors? Vision? Heat? Sound? Scent?

Could it hear his heartbeat, recognize his form?

He played dead, not daring to call out, hoping that his wife would be wise enough to do the same.

The huge war droid marched north, blocking their path, stirring up more muck, impenetrably dark.

The squill began to circle and was soon followed by dozens more.

Are they armed? he wondered. The drones often carried a sac of neurotoxin, so that their stingers could kill. He’d heard legends about squills with explosives built into them. But some, he knew, were built just for reconnaissance.

Aracai drifted downstream, and often the drones passed near in the darkness, but still he dared not move. So he floated, letting the current take him, until many kilometers later the buzzing of drones faded and he was left merely floating. As the water cleared, he peered around, but his search showed him nothing.

He caught movement: Dulce drove toward the surface, and Aracai saw a familiar form floating there.

Aracai raced upward, met them as Dulce wrapped her arms tenderly around the old mer and tried to drag him under, to safety.

When Aracai got near, the old man was a horror. Boiling water had made his skin bubble over on half of his chest and face, and skin tore away in tatters. His hair was burned off, as was his right eye. What flesh Escalas had left was red and blistered.

“Old man,” Dulce asked, “can you swim with me?”

The old man’s mouth was in ruins, and yet he spoke. “I can swim.” He gasped for several moments, gills flashing, and glanced down. “My flesh is burned. I cannot… last…”

“What can we do to help?” Dulce asked. The old mer shook his head. “My sight…” His mouth tried to work, but pieces of flesh fell from the hole where his lips had been, showing teeth. He gasped and sang in broken thoughts. “You, go on. Up Rio Negro, to the town Dos Brujas, where smokestacks rise, and open sewers dump into the river from both banks. There you will find a pylon, a black tower, with a light on top like a single red eye. That is where you must detonate…”

He lost his train of thought. “Take my implant…” he said, offering his greatest possession, the silver band around his head.

Escalas sang more, but his words became a soft slur, like wind lashing the water, until it died and went silent.

Dulce cried out, a barking sound, as if she had taken a mortal wound.

“Quiet,” Aracai warned, swimming up to put a hand over her mouth, but she twisted her head away and wailed in frustration.

He removed the band from Escalas’s head, put it on his own. The band was a silver wire, but almost as soon as he put it on, he felt a pinch at the base of his neck as nanobots began to send out probes to establish a link with his mind, one that would take days to form.

He let go of the old mer’s body and let it drift away, bouncing against the muddy bottom of the river.

Dulce made a juddering cry, more of a moan than a song, and together they clasped hands and swam toward the south bank before sneaking upriver, and thus passed the warbot unseen.

He wondered why the warbot was even posted there. It was ancient, this war crab, perhaps left by governments that had fallen a century ago, during some old war. Perhaps it was as forgotten now as Aracai and his people.

Hour after hour Aracai and Dulce pushed ahead, Dulce shaking in fear and grief. He could not get the image from his mind of Escalas floating downstream, his mouth a gaping maw. He tried to calm his wife as they swam together, her holding his shoulders so that they spooned, swimming in unison.

He drifted into a waking dream, haunted by images of squills and warbots. They swam close to shore, where water gurgled through half-submerged trees and a howler monkeys hooted overhead. The sunlight piercing the mud turned the river into a golden road.

They dared not slow or stop. Aracai’s gut suggested that the squills might still be hunting. He suspected that they had quickly used up their energy in the initial hunt, but that after recharging, they would be loosed again.

A boat plied the water overhead, and Aracai rose to the surface and searched the river as he cleared gunk from his gills.

To the south, he saw houses—built so close together that they glimmered like pebbles upon a beach. Children were out playing in the rain, two girls twirling a rope so that a small brown boy could jump.

Guilt weighed in Aracai’s stomach as he considered what his bomb would do to them.

He dove again, lugging his burden, and began to wonder. How many days would it take to reach the target? Did he really want to kill people—children?

Was it self-defense, or something more like revenge?

He imagined Escalas talking to him, in his old reassuring tones.

Have you considered the benefits of war? the old man asked in Aracai’s mind. It sweeps away toxic societies.

Aracai exercised his imagination, tried to find a rebuttal. What if the toxic society wins? he asked. For if he started a war with the humans, he knew that he personally would surely die.

Indeed, it seemed that too often the most toxic society would win the battle and thus spread.

And yet we must try, the old mer replied. We are not just trying to save ourselves, we are hoping to save uncounted billions of people in the future.

Aracai recalled the children out skipping and playing jump rope in the streets beside the river and pictured what would happen to them when the bomb blew. Even if he did manage to set it off, he would lose his soul.

Our species is dying, he thought. Soon we will all be as dead as the whales.

Does it really matter? Extinction? Every man must face his own personal extinction.

After long hours, Dulce said, “I’m hungry.”

He could feel pangs in his own belly.

But the river was dead.

Aracai had once hunted briefly in freshwater, in crystalline streams that tumbled from the Andes. Cold as ice and clearer than raindrops, thick with trout.

An idea struck, and he took Dulce’s hand and led her along the riverbank until they found a tributary, a small river that twisted through the jungle.

They swam upstream for a mile until the river came alive. Overhead, huge ferns and trees shadowed the water. Pollywogs wiggled among rushes, while frogs whistled in the trees. Water beetles buzzed in whirligig patterns and fish began to sing.

A mile up, Aracai met schools of fish—silver perch that darted in front of him like a moving screen. Huge red-tailed catfish plied the muddy bottom, using whiskers to taste for food. A parrot bass, half as long as him, hid in the shadows of a pool, the yellows and greens around its gills muted as it emitted a sonorous snoring sound.

Here, Aracai watched freshwater crabs of deep mossy green march among some stones, then he gathered water lettuce and taro roots. Dulce offered a blessing on the meal.

As they ate, Aracai tried to speak delicately. “This will be a long journey, and hard.”

Dulce peered at him with exhaustion in her dark eyes. “And you wonder if there is honor in killing humans?”

“No,” he said. “I know there is no honor in it.”

She bit her lip, and a lightning flash made her eyes glow startlingly green.

“It is not about honor,” he said. “I just wonder if it even makes sense. I do not want to hurt anyone. What good can come of it? Our species… is doomed.” Dulce remained pensive. Aracai continued, “We could leave the bomb, hide it in the mud.”

Anger flared in Dulce’s eyes. “Don’t even think of it.” Her tone brooked no argument. She held his gaze, her dainty nose beguiling him. She drew close and kissed his lips, pressing hard and long. “Promise me. Promise you won’t turn back.”

“If we do this, the humans will hunt us down.”

“Everyone dies,” she said.

So they ate and for a while they slept in the forest shadows, cradled in one another’s arms.

The journey stretched long after that. After their nap, Aracai felt a sharp pain in his urethra. He recognized from the rhythmic motions that it was a fish. It had swum up an inch or more into him, and so he tried to pee it out.

But the tiny fish had barbs and could not be extricated, so he suffered the pain.

For four days they continued swimming along the shore of the Amazon, sometimes stopping to rest in an estuary. He saw the promised anacondas overhead and fell afoul of an electric eel. He saw colorful birds flashing over languid pools and swam unharmed through schools of piranha. There were giant arapaima longer than he and his wife, and alligator longer than any mer. The trees overhead, dripping with bright blossoms, were a marvel.

As they swam, he grew sicker. On the third day, he could no longer pee, nor could his wife. It was not the fish that had done it. Their kidneys were failing.

His body began to ache as uric acid built inside, so that every muscle felt beaten and bruised. His scales took on a milky coating. With each passing hour, he felt more certain that this journey would kill them. Freshwater was deadly. On the fifth day, he could no longer eat. His gut had given up digesting, and it felt better to starve than to take nourishment.

As sick as he felt, Dulce was worse. She wept as she fought her way upstream, and each day she grew slower and slower. She held to his back often as they swam, and he pushed for both, so that sometimes he blanked out and swam blind from fatigue.

He judged that they had come a thousand kilometers when they reached the junction to Rio Negro, full of its poisons.

Wearily, they stopped and tried to get a breath in a small lagoon upstream from the Rio Negro. The place was magical, pristine, the water far cleaner than any that they had encountered. It was as if they were entering a lost world, the great green jungles rising above the water, vast trees streaming epiphytes. A pair of dolphins swam along the river briskly, laughing as dolphins will, their coral-colored hides a delight.

He felt as if he had found some primal place that man had never touched and marveled that such jungles still existed.

They swam into a flooded creek. Blue crayfish scuttled among tree roots and clung to floating duckweed. The day was windy, and Aracai could hear roots groaning as the trees swayed and stretched. The waters in the lagoon were golden, and huge red-bellied pacu as long as his arm swam about.

As the trees stirred, dark, round nuts fell, and the pacu would bite the nuts, crunching them with powerful teeth, so that though the fish looked like enormous piranhas, they seemed like gentle giants.

Here, Aracai gazed into Dulce’s eyes and said goodbye. “I want you to go back downstream,” he begged. “You won’t have to fight the current, and you can swim swiftly. Once you hit the saltwater, you will begin to heal.” He did not know if it were true, but hoped that it was.

To his astonishment, she did not fight him. She peered deep into his eyes, reached out and stroked his beard, and apologized. “I don’t have the strength to go on.”

He nodded, knowing she was right.

He glanced up at the surface of the water, which rippled with waves, and listened to the plop of falling nuts, the groan of straining roots, the crunching of pacu.

Aracai considered swimming home to the sea, giving up this sad quest. He could leave the bomb in the mud. He looked up. Swarms of dragonflies were hovering above the lagoon—electric blue, fiery red, leafy green.

Dulce grabbed his bicep and peered into his face. “Promise you will go on,” she said. “Do it for your daughter, for all the mer yet to be born.”

Aracai imagined their child again, that sad thing thrashing about after birth as she drowned. He imagined her growing cold and stiff, her blue eyes turning to white. She’d died without a name.

He nodded.

He did not want to kill. He had argued for and against it in his mind time and time again, until nothing made sense anymore. His wife wanted him to fight, as had Escalas. That was all that mattered.

Aracai kissed Dulce goodbye, hugged her tightly, and she swam back, as if the idea of swimming downstream invigorated her.

She rose near the surface so that the sun caught her hair. But there was a flash from the surface, a violent disturbance.

Dulce gave a blood-curdling shriek and jerked hard, swimming first to the left in a wide arc, then diving, but there was a metal rod stuck in her back, with a heavy cord tied to it. No matter how hard she swam, the cord pulled her upward.

Terror and grief coursed through Aracai. Time slowed. He realized that his wife had been struck by a spear fisherman, and the harpoon had taken her in the back. She burst up toward the surface, becoming airborne, and he heard a man shout in delight, “Ela é uma grande!” She’s a big one!

He dropped the bomb and swam toward her fast. The harpoon had hit near her right lung. He doubted she could survive long.

Blood stained the water. Aracai could taste it. The giant pacu suddenly seemed to spasm, instantly turning their interest from nuts to flesh. They sped up and swam toward Dulce, who spun onto her back and grabbed the line that held the harpoon. Desperately, she jerked. “Help!” she sang.

Aracai raced to her, realizing that this must be some mistake. He’d seen monster fish in other lagoons, and though no humans had been fishing near the poison water, up here where things were more pristine, someone must have mistaken his wife for a meal.

The spear fisherman was pulling the line, trying to drag Dulce to shore. Aracai raced up and grabbed the line, tugged violently, and felt the human go off balance. A man cried out in fear.

Aracai rose to the surface, whistled a shrill warning. He could not speak the human tongue, but he could make his anger known.

He peered up into a sandbox palm, where three young men hunted from a tree fort. One held the fishing line. Another held a spear gun. A third bore an ancient rifle.

“Há outro!” the spearman called. He raised his spear gun and fired hastily. The bolt tore past Aracai’s head.

“You’ve made a mistake,” Aracai sang in his own tongue.

But the gunman peered at him with deadly intent, an eager smile playing over his face. He raised his rifle and fired. Heat tore through Aracai’s shoulder and he dove for cover, down into the inky darkness beneath the tree roots.

A second shot burst through the water and at first Aracai thought it was aimed at him, but the humans had dragged his wife close to the surface and that bullet took her in the back.

She went limp, arms falling wide.

The pacu lunged at her and nipped her flesh.

The humans yanked her into the air. As Aracai gazed up, a pacu hit him hard in the back, testing for a response.

Dulce was hauled out of the water, and he could not get to her. He could not even retrieve her body. So he turned and lunged away as fast as he could, and grabbed the bomb.

He wanted to rescue his wife, worried that she was still alive, that the men were torturing her. He swam to some ferns that hung over the water and rose, using them for cover.

The three men were young, hardly more than boys. They had pulled Dulce up onto their hunting platform and were admiring her, as if she were a prize catch.

One knelt and fondled her breast while another laughed. The gunman peered into the water, still hunting.

Dulce did not move. She was as dead as their daughter.

Aracai called out in grief, an involuntary wail that echoed over the water. The young man with the spear gun called, “Get out! This is our river.”

Feral humans. Aracai had always used the term to refer to those without genetic upgrades. Now he saw the truth.

He dove, swimming near the bottom as fast as he could. He realized that he might not have much time. His wound was not bad, but the bleeding would draw predators. So he swam to the Rio Negro and became lost in its black waters.

Now the poisons and pollution worked in his favor. He did not have to face piranhas as he swam. The river was black with soot, as if ash had mixed into the water, and the riverbed was a wasteland.

So he swam, wasting himself, surging upstream, mind numb.

Until the mindlink finally meshed with the nerves in his spinal column and suddenly he understood more than he had thought possible.

He knew the names of the trees that he had seen, the weeds and the frogs. The fish inside his penis was called a candiru, and if he had known of its existence, he could have tied a band around his organ to protect it.

He realized that the bomb could not be nuclear. He had been holding it close and no boils had formed from radiation. So he considered Escalas’s last words. Always the old mer had spoken with double entendre, always hiding his meaning, trying to force Aracai to think.

The neogods would never have lent their efforts to killing others.

But the old mer had begged a boon from them. A bomb. A heavy bomb, heavier than gold. As he guessed at the bomb’s intent, his energy redoubled, and he swam forward with excitement, brimming with wonder.

Escalas had urged him to take responsibility for his own evolution.

So he asked the Heavenly Hosts: If a bomb were packed with retroviruses, how heavy would it be?

The AIs answered: The viruses would be pure DNA, and have no cell membranes or empty plasma around them. They would weigh more than a kilo per cubic centimeter.

Heavier than gold.

I am carrying a viral weapon, he realized. But what will it do?

He knew Escalas. The old mer had not had a cruel bone in his body. He had always urged Aracai to ponder. Even his last gift had been his greatest possession, the mindlink.

But viruses could be more than weapons. A retrovirus could insert itself among a person’s DNA to repair damage, or even to upgrade a person.

Viruses to make us wise, he thought. That is what Escalas would have wanted. And through his mindlink he asked the AIs of Heavenly Host if retroviruses might be used to do that. The answers amazed him. There were viruses that could quadruple the number of neural connections in the human brain, while others could increase the numbers of neurons alone. Those two viruses in and of themselves could quadruple a person’s thinking power.

But there were more; the AIs showed him, viruses that could make a man live longer, eradicate diseases, love one another more. Over a hundred thousand upgrades had been developed, and dozen more were coming every day.

As Aracai studied the lists, he saw that Escalas had tagged thousands of such viruses.

Escalas would have wanted all of them. Aracai thought he understood. The bomb would rid the world of feral humans once and for all.

But how valuable would such upgrades be? Human doctors charged huge sums to administer such things. After all, any upgrade could give a man huge advantages.

To his surprise, the AIs already knew: The bomb you carry is probably worth more than the sum total of all the earth’s wealth for the next thousand years.

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.