Page 72 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

Homo Aquatilis

Perversity Tinderstack’s turn was next. She avoided looking at
Rutger Schlager: the man was still nursing a grudge against the way
his sort of personality, once unquestionably dominant, was now
under attack, even in the realm of speculative fiction. But he
listened to her presentation as attentively as the others.
“I have a different take on a staple of sci-fi horror, the almost-
human monster from the depths. He is the ugly flipside of the
mermaid, at least as far as she is portrayed nowadays: an infantile
but seductive fish-girl with a seashell brassiere and an unhealthy
attraction to human males. The stereotypical gill-man, contrarily, is
a version of the foreign barbarian intent on raping and pillaging his
way across our familiar terrestrial landscape. But these are ultimately
conventions of the cinema; we fictioneers can follow paths both
less juvenile and more fantastic, simply by normalizing these
creatures as our ancestral cousins evolving along parallel paths in
different habitats.”
“My story would be set in a semi-secret research facility just off
the coast of an American base in Antarctica. This is a half-
submerged lab run by the Department of Defense under cover of a
well-known oceanographic institution in California. Studies of the
effects on atmospheric change on seawater are being carried on
there—at least publicly, for any curious members of the press. That
is upstairs, as it were. Downstairs, below the waterline, a different
activity is in full swing: interaction of H. sapiens and his long-lost
cousin, H. aquatilis. The latter, completely adapted to undersea
existence, have until recently avoided our branch of the tribe of
hominins. Their appearance at a time of crisis, both for their
environment and ours, is not coincidental.”
“It is no secret that the oceans are dying, thanks to human—that
is, Homo sapiens—activity. The aquafolk are suffering, too, as
victims. But they never developed the sort of aggressive,
competitive personalities so prevalent among us air-breathers. So
they misunderstand their position of weakness in ways the
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