Being observed was killing him
He felt sick. Hypertensive, his heartbeat pattering as the blood drained from his face and fingertips to the muscles. His arms tingled. A surge of adrenaline flooded his body as it primitively readied itself for danger.
But in this sealed world nothing happened--nothing real.
And even if the kraken he'd imagined burst through in a torrent of poison and darkness, he couldn't fight or flee. His mind was like a nub of amber dotted with trapped facts, bodies of argument and--above all--science. But his body was seventy-seven years old and under this constant stress the flesh was ready to capitulate.
Relax, you old fool.
The ichthyologist made a limp star of his body as he floated in the patch of warm bright water. His eyes were unfocused behind the face mask, his breath laboring loudly through the snorkel.
He forced himself to believe that the artificial island was real. Then he did what he always did when he tried to relax. Even forty years after his wife's death, he could summon the memory of her voice. It was a trick that now helped him keep death at arm's length.
Time to meditate.
Listen first to the ebb and flow of your breath. Feel it fill you. Make your breathing as slow and regular as the waves on a shore.
Empty your mind.
What do you see?
The memory helped, and for a second he felt her cool hand on his forehead.
Then his thoughts strayed randomly.
He imagined he had a lateral line--that he could sense the presence of other bodies in the water....
Other tankmates....
Stop thinking, damn it.
But what did it matter now that he could no longer meditate? What did anything matter when even Ichthyology was redundant? Kippered, he thought, and would have smiled if his teeth hadn't been clamped into the rubber mouthpiece.
The light was so perfectly like sunlight, and in only two meters of glassy water the wavelets concentrated it into bands that streaked over the sea floor. Below him were real sea urchins like clusters of dark stars, and blennies patrolling their tiny territories, and there an octopus probing between the big stones... But his strange empathic take on science--the habit of a lifetime--would not leave him now, even though all of them were as doomed as he.
For what would happen to this cube of reality when he went? He felt for a moment like a kind of Bishop Berkeley, believing the world would be pinched out like a tallow candle when he was no longer there to experience it.
Weightless in the near-blood-warm water, he let the radiation on his tensed neck penetrate his UV suit and help his rheumatism. Despite everything, the tank's illusion had worked. For several brief seconds he'd felt young again--still spellbound by the sea.
Lifting his face, he saw the rocky shoreline and the lip of white sand. But beyond the isle in this cube of light, the wall of blackness began where there should have been sky. But today the black flashed violet, as lightning stabbed down at what had once been ocean.
The darkness was unavoidable now. He looked up, the glass of his face mask partially misted. Were there eyes out there? Hard crystalline eyes like those of trilobites? Were a million compound crystal eyes watching him every second of every day?
He clawed back to the shore. Ungainly on land, he trudged to the hut constructed from the hull of a smashed boat and backed into it like a hermit crab.
Close your eyes.
Watch your thoughts.
Transformation is the key to meditation.
Transform the words your mind creates into something visual. Make a sentence into an image of a shoal of fish, and watch them swim out. into the blue...
Sappho brought one home first. A perfect koi carp. They were standing in the back garden. The koi was in a big plastic bag and she'd held it up for him to examine. He was not an expert on Japanese carp but it seemed to be a Tashio Sanke with its big-scaled white body, splotched with red patches accented by black. Apart from minute adjustments with its pectoral fins, it seemed to be extremely still and watchful. Unconcerned even.
"Guess," said Sappho, her face beaming up at him, reminding him painfully of his wife.
"It's a fish."
She made a face.
"A Tashio Sanke koi, I think."
"Wrong!" She was delighted.
"Showa Sanke?"
"Nope."
His daughter was twelve, and already almost a woman. But right this second, she was being a girl. He put his hand on her head. She scowled at him slightly, but did not move.
"It's a koibot."
)
When he was in his thirties one of his students had swapped the J of his real name Joel for a C and he got the name Coel. It's short for Coelacanth, the ancient fish famously dredged up in a shark gill net from the cool deep of the Madagascan Straight near the mouth of the Chalumna River. So begins the evolution, the transformation, of a scientist who studies fish, when touched by tragedy in this universe in which we all swim. Then again, the arrival of a koibot relative of trilobites, extinct these 245 million years, clues Joel that new industrial forces are working with nature's ancient ones.
