"Boyett-CurrentAffairs" - читать интересную книгу автора (Boyett Stephen R)

STEVEN R. BOYETT

CURRENT AFFAIRS

FOUR TIBETAN MONKS work patiently around an ornate circle of colored sand they
are gradually forming on an elevated platform in the Los Angeles Natural History
Museum. They are small men, and though they are not young there is something
youthful about their faces. Each of them looks as if he's remembering the punch
line to a joke he heard earlier in the day, a very funny joke.

It would be hard to guess how old the monks are. Three of them have
close-cropped black hair. The fourth is totally bald, not even any eyebrows, and
has ears like the handle of a jug.

In their bright orange robes the monks meticulously sift tiny amounts of
fine-crushed limestone onto the platform, then mold and paint it into patterns
on an intricate circle seven feet wide. They are creating a mandala, a
patterned, circular symbol that represents the wholeness of nature and the
universe. When it is finished, this mandala will represent the Kalachakra--the
Wheel of Time.

There's a crowd of onlookers behind a low barricade here in the Mammal Hall of
the museum. The Kalachakra demonstration was delayed a week because of a mild
earthquake centered in Sylmar that caused minor damage even to stilt houses high
up in the Hollywood Hills. But now the museum has been inspected and declared
safe, and the monks and their ceremony have been the Thing to See this month.

The monks don't ignore the crowd, instead, they seem to regard it as part of
their work, stopping every once in a while to point at someone and nod and grin
and point at the illuminations and fine-lined designs and whorls taking shape on
the platform.

For its part, the crowd finds the monks themselves as fascinating as the
mandala. The small Tibetan men seem to take great delight in their work. Though
precise and particular, they smile constantly, and even when they don't they
look like children acting serious in the midst of some joyous game.

A museum guide standing beside the platform tells the crowd that these monks,
who are from the Dalai Lama's Namgyai Monastery in India, are beginning a
demonstration of a 2,500-year-old religious ceremony of spiritual empowerment
and tranquility said to have been originated by Buddha himself in 600 B.C.

"Every morning," he tells the spectators, "these men start work on the
Kalachakra by saying a prayer of purification to the spirits they believe live
inside the mandala. They believe that these deities are constantly beckoning
them to finish it."

Orange robes rustle, colored sand sifts.

Tibet, the guide says, is now a part of China, and the monks are forbidden to
practice this ceremony in the country of their birth. They're touring the United
States to demonstrate their beloved ritual and show what their art is like, and
to provide unfamiliar Westerners with a sense of their philosophy and how they
apply it through their daily lives.

A man wearing shorts and thongs and a Cartier watch asks how long will it take
to finish the whatchamacallit, the Wheel?

"Six weeks," says the guide.

The crowd murmurs. That's a lot of work.

"What will they do with it when they're done?" a woman asks. "It looks like it's
going to be beautiful when it's finished. Will it go into the museum ?"

The guide smiles. "No, ma'am. It'll go into the ocean." He even blushes a little
as he points to four small whiskbrooms waiting in one corner of the platform.
"They keep those here as a reminder."

The woman looks perplexed. "You mean they...?" And suddenly horrified. "How
awful!" she says.

There's a kind of nervous, disbelieving laughter.

The smiling monks sift the fine-grained limestone, shape it, paint it.

Suddenly one of the monks, the jug-eared one, covers his mouth and nose -- and
turns away from the mandala to sneeze violently: Ba-shooo!

He vigorously wipes his palms on his bright robe and turns back to the delicate
sand painting. He's grinning sheepishly as he sniffs and picks up another
handful of colored crushed limestone. But he cannot resume his work because the
other monks are laughing, laughing just as hard as they can.

The Creature from the Black Lagoon is liberating lobsters on the ocean floor. A
grand gesture, a political action, really. Shame he can't just shred their trap
and watch them flee, but to be their champion he has to pull them out one at a
time and push them away. They drift downward, legs scrabbling nothing until they
hit bottom.

Half the time they pinch hell out of him. Ingrates. He ought to let them stay in
their trap, they're really too stupid to be useful as anything but food. But the
Creature figures it's the principle of the thing.

The lobster trap is set upon a large concrete container. Inside the container is
illegally dumped toxic waste. The Creature knows where there are many more just
like it -- there are a lot of them up and down the coastline, containing toxic
waste, petroleum by-products from offshore drilling, military and industrial
garbage, munitions, medical refuse, radioactive materials, you name it. There
are also tremendous dump fields of slowly corroding metal drums containing
toxins, contaminants, pesticides, radioactive garbage. Government and private
industry understand the enormous potential of the ocean as a garbage can for
things that can't be recycled or sold to the Third World. To the Creature,
though, the containers are simply convenient landmarks, as they are for the
lobster trappers who wonder what's inside them, but never bother to report their
existence.

The Creature looks up at a splash from on high. He feels it more than hears it.
Wonders who just dropped in.

A repatriated lobster clamps onto the Creature's finger. He shakes it loose and
jumps up. Tall buildings in a single bound? That's nothing down here.

Deirdre Mulligan descends the dune fandango. Her notes and spec reports are
stained by her sweaty hand; a pen is mounted above her ear like a Sidewinder
missile in a Huey gunship. She's dressed in worn jeans, a sleeveless T-shirt,
and black L.A. Gear sneakers with fluorescent yellow laces. Her exposed skin is
slathered with the strongest possible sunblock.

She stops near the beach and surveys the area. The sand is flat and shines like
slate. Gradient gray in the air, but it's overcast, not smog. She hopes, anyway.
Gulls grate overhead. The waves are powerful tall and loud. Two boys in bright
Body Glove bathing suits paddle surfboards out among the troughs. Normally
they'd be wearing wetsuits, but this season the water's ten degrees warmer than
usual. No one knows why. It's caused some pretty exotic finds, such as South
American Humboldt squid and the Tamaria obstipa, a starfish native to coastal
waters off Peru. An influx of South American creatures, muses Deirdre. Maybe
they brought the weather with 'em. Whatever, the Environmental Impact Report
she's supervising will have to take this into account.

Laguna Negra Beach is simply beautiful. The place seems somehow primal, ancient
and still forming. The beach is smooth and dun, the sand fine and hard-packed.
The south end of the crescent that is Laguna Negra is formed by the raw rock of
the San Onofre mountain range meeting the waves. The surf here is usually mild-
but the surfers like it because the waves break obliquely across half the bay.
The obstruction of mountain into breaking waves, however, makes it one of the
few points in Southern California where water intermittently slams rock to make
huge sprays. To the north is a large wooden pier, the only manmade structure
that really intrudes on the beach or into the bay.

Standing here, amid the booming surf and the unlittered sand and the spray
jetting from the clash of water and rock to the misted south, Deirdre can easily
imagine some old, ungainly, top-heavy, square-rigged ship tacking up the coast,
for this is one of the few such areas in this region that seem untouched by
time.

From a real-estate broker's point of view, this place is Nirvana.

Shit.

Deirdre Mulligan belongs to a fairly rare species: Californium indigenous, the
native Californian. She was born in Northridge when there were still orange
groves there, and educated in several schools as her father, an assistant
principal, kept getting transferred in accordance with the lifestyle decree that
insists no Southern Californian can remain in one spot longer than three years.
After satisfying her carefree adolescent desires for recreational
pharmaceuticals (well, all right: after whetting them), Deirdre attended UC San
Diego and walked away with a BS in Marine Biology. Then a year of post-grad at
Scripps and a certificate in Environmental Sciences from Berkeley.

Deirdre could have kept collecting initials after her name, but that seemed too
much like hiding to her. Instead she hired out to fledgling environmental
watchdog groups for a pittance, limped along on public funding arid the
occasional government grant, and in general tried to stick by her private
agenda. An agenda not for herself but for the world. Despite a wealth of
training and scientific terminology at her command, Deirdre's desires could be
expressed in simple colors make the land green again, the oceans blue, the skies
clear.

Times were tough for idealistic but practical environmental activists. Openings
in Deirdre's field were plentiful -- if you wanted to tell multinational
conglomerates where to dump their toxic waste, how to store processed uranium,
how to present development proposals so that it won't look like a thousand acres
of arable land weren't being forevermore eradicated. Indications were that
someone was about to renege on that nifty-cool and sparkling 21st-Century
Techno-Eden Deirdre was promised as she rode the slidewalks through Disneyland.

Her job at Eco/Logic, Inc., is her compromise. There she can conduct honest
Environmental Impact Reports, and half the time she can restrict developers who
don't have the environment's best interests at heart when they set to pillaging.
Stopping development is an absurd notion, of course. But at least Deirdre gets
to make sure that what gets built doesn't mess anything up (too badly, at
least), and what will, doesn't get built.

Deirdre's calves tighten as her feet push into the softer sand above the tide
line. It feels like those dreams where you try to run and don't get anywhere.
She has the beach to herself this fine late-summer afternoon. Funny how people
flock away from the beach toward sundown. Dark is when she likes the beach best.

Seagrapes pop beneath the sole of one shoe. Deirdre thinks of the Portuguese man
o' wars that ride the Gulfstream currents. Innocent little gasbag jellyfish;
they look like little laundry bags. Once, on Florida's Gulf Coast, she had seen
a barefoot boy stomp one, pop, before she could yell for him to stop. His foot
had swelled to melon size within minutes. None of that here, she thinks. And if
there was anything like that here-- anything threatening, anything to reduce the
comfort of this spot for human occupation -- why, it'd just have to be removed,
now wouldn't it. To make this Kodak Picture Spot more perfect, more natural.

On a trip to Disney World with Grant she had noticed those signs telling
tourists where to take their pictures: Kodak Picture Spot. Grant had told her he
imagined a guy with a big semi truck full of those signs, driving across the
country looking for picturesque locales. "Grand Canyon?" Grant had said, 'and
mimed hammering. "Wham-wham-wham. Kodak Picture Spot! Yellowstone National Park?
Need a couple dozen trucks there. Wham wham wham!" And Deirdre had laughed at
the image of a landscape crowded with vying signs, Kodak Picture Spot signs as
far as the eye could see.

Only now it doesn't seem so funny.

Still .... The proposed hundred-million-dollar Laguna Negra Resort will have to
meet local, state, and federal clean-water, clean-air, and waste-dumping
standards. Not only that, but before any development or construction can begin,
it must also satisfy the California Environmental Quality Act-- which means it
can't impair its neighbors' view or appreciably lower adjoining property values.
Land grading and drainage must be taken into account. And most important, the
development and construction of the resort must in no way endanger any
specialized or rare flora or fauna.

Deirdre looks out to the Pacific Ocean where the two boys in bright colors are
mounting their surfboards to catch a wave. One boy wears lime green and black
trunks, the other neon orange and black. They're having a great time
eavesdropping on the eternal conversation between the ocean and the shore.

Deirdre turns back to look at the beach, at the sand and acres of undeveloped
land behind it. She sighs. Undeveloped. Like its potential is achingly
unrealized. Bring us your yearning, your huddled parcels of land crying out for
development.

From the north she hears a dull pok! pok! pok! The sound is flattened by the
broad beach. Someone's putting the resort development sign back up.

If I could find one thing, she thinks. One thing to keep them from mining yet
another stretch of beach forever.

A line from an old song comes to her mind. Something about the sea raging like a
man, and the land giving like a woman. She realizes that she does think of the
developers as men, and the land as a woman.

She laughs humorlessly. But just because it's a terrible sexual metaphor doesn't
make it any less true. Or terrible.

ELOISE POST FROWNS down at the scarred sign on the dune. Why, this is vandalism.
Sheer wanton vandalism. Disrespectful children running around destroying
property. Honestly, don't their parents teach them anything?

She squats to examine the sign. Someone really did a job on it. Looks like they
beat it with a crowbar or a claw hammer or something. She's just going to have
to put up a new one. Yep, I went to college so's I could swing a hammer. You
bet.

She sighs, thinking about the remainder of her day. She knows she's mostly
puttering around right now, wasting time, putting off having to go to Roger's to
pick up Jennifer. The beach ought to provide a few hours of freedom from such
thoughts, but it's hard for Eloise to allow herself emotional vacations, however
brief. Especially since Laguna Negra Beach itself contains memories for her.
Remembrances of her and Roger together in happier' times.

Frowns come easily to Eloise's face, as if it had been made ready-to-frown, with
prefolded lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes. How many times must you
frown to wear a groove in something as soft and pliant as skin?

Eloise looks up from the ruined sign to see the water turning metal-bright in
the lowing sun. A sun that sets on the beach is still a novelty to her. Studying
her face, you wonder at the forces at work in her core that have revealed
themselves on the surface, much like continents sliding through the millennia
across the skin of the Earth that, with time and pressure, form mountain ridges
and plains. What lies in the mantle beneath Eloise's young-old face to have
caused such tectonic erosion? In the way that a geologist can look at a groove
in the land and sense the passage of glaciers, we can look at the riverbed
tridents at the corners of Eloise's eyes, the sinkhole depression of parentheses
bracketing her mouth, and see the Ice Age that was her marriage, the chronic
flooding of her Marketing Relations position, the greenhouse effect of her
father's overbearing attention, the firmly buried fossil stratum of her mother's
early death.

Eloise surveys the shore. Looks like the beach is mine, she thinks. She squints.
No -- somebody else down there, near the other side of the bay. Redheaded woman,
looks like.

Eloise gets a brief, absurd image of herself in a cowboy outfit a `stridin'
toward the stranger on the sand. This beach ain't big enough for the two of us.
It shouldn't irritate her, but it does. If the shore were crowded it would be
one thing, but to almost have it to yourself ....

She sighs. Obviously nothing's going to satisfy her today.

She's thinking about the wreckage of her marriage as she turns back to the
shredded resort sign. Pointless vandalism, she thinks again.

What's that, Weezy! whispers a part of her mind she'd pay dearly to have
amputated. Your marriage?

Eloise's face gets all pinched, looking. "The sign," she says out loud, and then
feels herself turning red. She glances around. No-one to hear her.

You let a community know that someone's come along to beautify the area and up
their real-estate values, she thinks, forcing her train of thought onto a
different set of rails, .and they bash your sign and file petitions to stop you.
And the community happily signs the petitions because, after all, you are a
developer.

The cries of gulls carry over the waves' crashing.

Eloise's position at Villa Nova Development is one of three in the Marketing
Department. Basically, she makes development proposals look attractive and
attends meetings and assuages homeowners and tries to argue politely and
rationally with 150K young execs who think of themselves as environmentalists
and have the L.L. Bean shirts and spotless Jeep Cherokees to prove it.

Now, Eloise is not naive. Villa Nova isn't developing from any altruistic desire
for civic improvement. They want money, lots of it, and they spend a lot to make
even more. But Eloise thinks of herself as a kind of lawyer she's paid to go to
bat for the people who are paying her. She doesn't have to believe in the
company's aims, as long as she doesn't disbelieve them, and as long as she
benefits from them. Like any good remora, Eloise is along for the ride.

Eloise looks at the papers in her hand: Villa Nova's resort proposal and
Eco/Logic's prospectus describing the parameters and scope of the Environmental
Impact Report.

The right to build Laguna Negra Resort is not at all established yet in fact, a
clear ownership of the real-estate parcel will not be official until that right
is secured. It all hinges on the Environmental Impact Report and the county's
approval of it.

Eloise kicks ineffectually at the vandalized resort sign. Here comes the Big Bad
Developer.

One of Eloise's duties is to anticipate that EIR for which her company is paying
a cool million, and prepare an assessment of her own that preempts it, and, if
necessary, negates it. It helps that L.A. County allows developers to hire
whoever the hell they want to conduct the EIR, and no law say's that they can't
hire someone else if they don't like the results. Technically the EIR is a
public document, but when completed it will be sent to the lawyer who negotiated
the deal between Eeo/Logic and Villa Nova, so that it's protected as a
privileged lawyer-client communication.

She begins trudging inland. Got to get a new sign out of the car and drag it
back here. Won't that be fun?

Recent environmental legislation has made the issue of coastal development quite
a hot potato, one that gets tossed from committee to committee until it's hard
to figure where it will land. And the California Coastal Commission may sound
like an important body of experts with large important offices in large
important government buildings, but basically it's a dozen overworked, underpaid
people in an office without air conditioning in Sacramento, including exactly
one field manager for the entire Southland.

As she fishes her car keys from her purse (carrying a purse on the beach! in
tennis shoes and a dress! in, this heat!), Eloise thinks of ways to work this
situation in her favor -- fully aware that everyone else involved can, too.

It's frustrating enough to make King Solomon take up finger-painting, and
complicated enough to make you wonder that anything ever gets built at all.

But things do. Time after time after time.

THE CREATURE HEADS toward shore toting a heavy metal drum on his plated back.
It's the drum that made the splash that distracted him while he was liberating
the lobsters. Not a diver, just another boat using his living room for a garbage
can.

If the Creature hadn't been environmentally sensitive because of his (admittedly
small) act of rebellion, he might have been inclined to let this invasion slide.
But that drum had come barreling down the water to land smack on top of a
lobster the Creature had freed not three minutes before. It smashed the lobster
flatter than a leper joke and twice as tasteless. It kicked up a smoky cloud of
bottom mud like a detonating depth charge, and when it settled the Creature
could see the paint-stenciled letters on the side of the drum. HAZARDOUS
MATERIALS, it read.

The Creature got hopping mad. On the outside, hopping mad for the Creature is
pretty mild: he folded his scaled arms and opened his mouth to feel the pulse of
the current, and he just stood there, letting lobsters scurry away, ignoring the
few that remained in the trap. But inside the Creature was a slow burn. It was
your basic core meltdown, where the outside looks fine while the inside
collapses and heats up, and nothing shows on the outside until the inside
explodes past it.

The Creature looks at that HAZARDOUS MATERIALS stencil, and he wonders how many
drumfuls of hazardous materials you have to have before you need a stencil to
label them all. A lot, he figures. Twenty or thirty, maybe as much as a hundred.

The Creature doesn't like this.

Which is why he's toting that drum back toward shore with the intent to leave it
in plain sight for someone to find and properly dispose of on land. If these are
their HAZARDOUS MATERIALS, then they should keep them.

He leaves the drum in the shallows forty or fifty feet offshore, figuring to let
the tide do the rest of the work. The drum will be a lot heavier out of the
water, and the Creature just doesn't feel like lugging it around. Besides which,
these days he's trying to keep his shoreline appearances to a minimum, and then
only at night. It's starting to get a bit too crowded around here for his taste.
He's cut the sensitive soles of his otherwise armored feet on more broken glass
and can lids than he can remember; motorboat drones keep him awake in the grotto
(which he tries to sleep in by day, good goddamn luck); and he's been hit in the
head by surfboards not once, not twice, but three times.

The Creature doesn't like the thought of leaving though. The grotto is nice, and
he's invested a lot of time turning it into a place he likes spending time in.
Like most of us, the Creature wants little more than to lead his life
undisturbed, to keep his head above water, so to speak.

He kicks off from the drum and swims shoreward to take a quick look at likely
places for the drum to appear.

The Creature surfaces. Immediately he feels the sun pressing down on him like a
hot fabric. Yowza. His scaly plated skin begins to tighten like drying leather
-- which, in a way, it is. His vision blurs as his eyes dehydrate. He slaps
water into them and gazes toward shore.

Pok! pok! pok!

The Creature has no eyelids, and he hates noises that make him want to blink.

Pok! pok! pok!

You just don't know how much Eloise hates this. Pounding signs into the sand is
hardly in her job description. One of the Mexicans hired by Villa Nova should be
out here in his pickup truck to take care of this sort of thing. But Smith
Webber asked her to do it as long as she was out here, "to keep our presence
felt and keep our name in front of those people."

Eloise swings the hammer again, pok! She hates that sound. It makes her blink.
Every time she strikes, she tries to will her eyes from blinking.

At her feet are the Resort Proposal and Eco/Logic's EIR prospectus.

Pok! Eloise blinks. It becomes a matter of proving her will not to blink.

She's probably going to pull a triceps muscle. Eloise is secretly proud to know
the names of muscles. She learned them in aerobics classes, which she took up in
order to regain her slim figure after Jennifer was born. Pok! She'd wanted to
look appealing again for Roger. Fat lot of good that had done her. Pok! Get it?
Fat lot of good ....

Oh, never mind.

Eloise is thinking about how to take the wind out of Eco/Logic's sails should
the EIR turn out unfavorable--

--when a shadow falls across her newly erected sign.

The Creature looks from the running woman to the papers lying beside the mallet
she dropped on the sand. A spiral-bound report and a stapled sheaf of paper. He
bends to pick them up. Yow: bad backs run in his family. Too much time on land
causes curvature of the spine. Across the top margin of the notepad is
scribbled, Laguna Negra Prelim Assmnt Notes. Wonder what that could mean? The
page is filled with hard-to-read scrawls. The Creature tries to puzzle them out,
but it's no use. He's been out of the water way too long and his vision's
blurry. It'll be nice to have something to read back at the grotto, though; that
Jackie Collins novel -- while really good -- was getting kind of moldy.

Really, though, the ooga booga had been foolish this time out. Whatever that
human woman had been, she was no unsuspecing beach type. She was costumed
differently, and was obviously perturbed about the sign he'd destroyed in a fit
of pique, because she'd been putting up a new one.

And suddenly the Creature wants to know what this writing in his hand is all
about.

He's lost in thought, trying to come up with a way to get these papers back to
the grotto --

-- when a shadow falls across the page.

Deirdre Mulligan stares in stunned wonder across the corrugated ocean. Lowing
sunlight sparks diamond from wave caps.

She has just seen a rare and amazing thing. Deirdre Mulligan quivers exalted,
sublime, like an Old Testament citizen sharing a drink at a well with an angel.
Privileged. She feels an astonishing calm inside.

It hadn't frightened her. Oh, her heart is yammering, her hands are shaking; she
feels the kind of apprehensive thrill Pasteur must have felt when he held up the
petri dish and saw that the bread mold had vanquished the disease. But she is
not frightened.

The Scientist part of her mind objects. Hoax/it cries. Piltdown Man/ Hollywood
monster movie, decorated diving suit, publicity stunt mirage mass hysteria
sunspots!

And as a scientist she responds: the thing had had unseamed joints; she could
see the skeletal motion of ball-in-socket and hinge joints at knee and elbow,
see the supportive understructure of ribs, metacarpals, metatarsals, phalanges.
And the unidirectional flanging of the gills and cup-shaped spread of hands, the
elongated and widened feet, the delta-gouge of mouth in a head designed to pivot
up and lead the rest of the body -- all spoke of a design evolved for horizontal
travel underwater. The skin was skin, not latex: textured, iridescent from
secretions, patched with algae, draped with seagrape, scaled and plated,
flexible and contouring.

Whatever it was, it wasn't a guy in a costume. It had moved too fluidly, too
naturally -- though not very quickly. It looked too real.

And it had gone into the water, and not come back up.

No, it was real, a real, living creature.

But -- what was it? Where had it come from? Why had it left no evolutionary
record?

"It lives in the water, stupid," Deirdre says aloud. Ahh. And how much of that
fossil record has been played on the turntable of Science?

Top Forty only.

And what if its bones aren't bones at all, but cartilage./ Rapid decomposition,
no fossilization. Cartilage delende est.

In the same way a comparative morphologist, a zoologist -- any member of a score
of sciences -- can look at a seal and see a dog that fetched an evolutionary
stick fifty million years ago on the Darwinian shore and never returned, can see
the horse in the hippo, the elephant in the manatee, the monkey in the man -- in
that way, Deirdre looked at the creature and saw a human being that had changed
its naturally selective mind however many million years ago and returned to the
protean aquatic womb.

A dolphin is a distant cousin. This is a brother.

And it's living off her beach.

She's standing in calf-high water with her jeans rolled past her knees. The
unusually warm water feels good against her legs. Looking down at the foam
sliding past, Deirdre has the sensation that she is moving and the water is
stationary --- a feeling she remembers from being on the beach as a child. Funny
how a sensation, an aroma, a quick play of light, can be a pipeline back to
childhood, how all of it can rush back right there in front of you as if no time
has passed.

And suddenly inside her is a deep rushing echo of that outer sensation. She
looks out to sea again, at an imagined place where her creature (her creature!)
swims unseen. And realizes she's found her EIR's ace in the hole.

Deirdre hoots. Deirdre hollers. She kicks a spray of salt water and digs a
trough in the malleable wet sand.

Something exposed there gleams green. Some kind of stone? Deirdre bends, touches
its smooth surface. Surf roils round her legs. She hooks fingers beneath the
object and pries it loose, swirls it in the water to wash away the sand. Holds
it up to the sun.

It's the most amazing color green. Not jade, not emerald. Its edges are rounded
and polished by the lapidary ocean. It is, she realizes, a fragment of a
soft-drink bottle. For years it has been softened and burnished by the tides and
the sand, until the ocean has turned it into something neither glass nor stone
nor jewel. There's a name for it, what is it....?

Driftglass.

She looks out to sea. And looks at the ethereal green lozenge in her hand.

All right, Deirdre-m'darlin'. Let's say you turn in an EIR that says you can't
build a mammoth resort because there's a bona fide green gill man living off
Laguna Negra beach. And let's say you can prove it before they lock you
somewhere that doesn't have any edges. What then? No resort, no siree. And maybe
Mr. Gills ends up on some laboratory's meat slicer. Or on Leno. Which amounts to
the same thing.

"Aw ...." She can't think of an expletive that quite describes her feelings.

She's still turning the glass about in her hands, watching the play of gold
California sunlight across its slick surface, when a commotion behind her makes
her turn.

Four Tibetan monks in orange robes are walking toward the water. One of them
carries a glass vase filled with colored sands. They are grinning at the ocean
like kids contemplating some really great prank. Behind them is a crowd of
spectators and news reporters.

For a moment Deirdre thinks the newspeople are there because of the Creature;
they've already been notified and Deirdre's precious knowledge of the Creature's
existence is achingly over. Then she sees the Buddhist monks and thinks that,
no, the Creature wasn't a creature at all but a fake, some kind of PR deal, a
movie promo, and here's the rest of it.

Then she watches the monks themselves.

The wind whips at their orange robes as they stride without hesitation into the
water, unmindful of the cold and not bothering to hitch up their hems. The one
holding the vase raises it high, and cameras begin to click. The monks start
chanting prayers.

They are perhaps twenty feet away from Deirdre now.

They pray, smiling throughout, then bow -- to the vase, to the ocean, to one
another. The one holding the vase is completely bald, not even any eyebrows, and
his ears stick out like jug handles. Happily he lowers the vase, and the other
three monks laugh and say "Ahh!" when he upends it and scatters multicolored
sand into the ocean.

Some in the crowd applaud. Some seem startled. The monks pay no heed. They
gleefully bend to the water and begin sloshing it everywhere, laughing as they
mix the sand with the seawater, splashing each other and talking a mile a minute
in their singsong language. Then they bow to one another again, and to the
ocean, and turn away.

One of them, the bald one with the jug-handle ears, sees Deirdre staring in
startled wonder there in the water. He looks at the gleaming green thing in her
hand, and he grins and nods as if he knows what it is, and even as if he knows
what it means to her. He bows to Deirdre, nothing solemn about it at all, and
Deirdre finds herself bowing back.

And then they are gone, clapping each other on the back, kicking back little
trails of sand from their sandals, bright orange robes flapping like sails, and
the crowd leaves with them.

Deirdre looks at the water where they scattered the colored sand. It has blended
in; there's no sign it was ever there at all. Just grayish green, the way the
water always looks.

She looks at the driftglass in her hand. Suddenly happy and sad at the same
time, she brings her arm back and throws it, throws it just as far as she can.




STEVEN R. BOYETT

CURRENT AFFAIRS

FOUR TIBETAN MONKS work patiently around an ornate circle of colored sand they
are gradually forming on an elevated platform in the Los Angeles Natural History
Museum. They are small men, and though they are not young there is something
youthful about their faces. Each of them looks as if he's remembering the punch
line to a joke he heard earlier in the day, a very funny joke.

It would be hard to guess how old the monks are. Three of them have
close-cropped black hair. The fourth is totally bald, not even any eyebrows, and
has ears like the handle of a jug.

In their bright orange robes the monks meticulously sift tiny amounts of
fine-crushed limestone onto the platform, then mold and paint it into patterns
on an intricate circle seven feet wide. They are creating a mandala, a
patterned, circular symbol that represents the wholeness of nature and the
universe. When it is finished, this mandala will represent the Kalachakra--the
Wheel of Time.

There's a crowd of onlookers behind a low barricade here in the Mammal Hall of
the museum. The Kalachakra demonstration was delayed a week because of a mild
earthquake centered in Sylmar that caused minor damage even to stilt houses high
up in the Hollywood Hills. But now the museum has been inspected and declared
safe, and the monks and their ceremony have been the Thing to See this month.

The monks don't ignore the crowd, instead, they seem to regard it as part of
their work, stopping every once in a while to point at someone and nod and grin
and point at the illuminations and fine-lined designs and whorls taking shape on
the platform.

For its part, the crowd finds the monks themselves as fascinating as the
mandala. The small Tibetan men seem to take great delight in their work. Though
precise and particular, they smile constantly, and even when they don't they
look like children acting serious in the midst of some joyous game.

A museum guide standing beside the platform tells the crowd that these monks,
who are from the Dalai Lama's Namgyai Monastery in India, are beginning a
demonstration of a 2,500-year-old religious ceremony of spiritual empowerment
and tranquility said to have been originated by Buddha himself in 600 B.C.

"Every morning," he tells the spectators, "these men start work on the
Kalachakra by saying a prayer of purification to the spirits they believe live
inside the mandala. They believe that these deities are constantly beckoning
them to finish it."

Orange robes rustle, colored sand sifts.

Tibet, the guide says, is now a part of China, and the monks are forbidden to
practice this ceremony in the country of their birth. They're touring the United
States to demonstrate their beloved ritual and show what their art is like, and
to provide unfamiliar Westerners with a sense of their philosophy and how they
apply it through their daily lives.

A man wearing shorts and thongs and a Cartier watch asks how long will it take
to finish the whatchamacallit, the Wheel?

"Six weeks," says the guide.

The crowd murmurs. That's a lot of work.

"What will they do with it when they're done?" a woman asks. "It looks like it's
going to be beautiful when it's finished. Will it go into the museum ?"

The guide smiles. "No, ma'am. It'll go into the ocean." He even blushes a little
as he points to four small whiskbrooms waiting in one corner of the platform.
"They keep those here as a reminder."

The woman looks perplexed. "You mean they...?" And suddenly horrified. "How
awful!" she says.

There's a kind of nervous, disbelieving laughter.

The smiling monks sift the fine-grained limestone, shape it, paint it.

Suddenly one of the monks, the jug-eared one, covers his mouth and nose -- and
turns away from the mandala to sneeze violently: Ba-shooo!

He vigorously wipes his palms on his bright robe and turns back to the delicate
sand painting. He's grinning sheepishly as he sniffs and picks up another
handful of colored crushed limestone. But he cannot resume his work because the
other monks are laughing, laughing just as hard as they can.

The Creature from the Black Lagoon is liberating lobsters on the ocean floor. A
grand gesture, a political action, really. Shame he can't just shred their trap
and watch them flee, but to be their champion he has to pull them out one at a
time and push them away. They drift downward, legs scrabbling nothing until they
hit bottom.

Half the time they pinch hell out of him. Ingrates. He ought to let them stay in
their trap, they're really too stupid to be useful as anything but food. But the
Creature figures it's the principle of the thing.

The lobster trap is set upon a large concrete container. Inside the container is
illegally dumped toxic waste. The Creature knows where there are many more just
like it -- there are a lot of them up and down the coastline, containing toxic
waste, petroleum by-products from offshore drilling, military and industrial
garbage, munitions, medical refuse, radioactive materials, you name it. There
are also tremendous dump fields of slowly corroding metal drums containing
toxins, contaminants, pesticides, radioactive garbage. Government and private
industry understand the enormous potential of the ocean as a garbage can for
things that can't be recycled or sold to the Third World. To the Creature,
though, the containers are simply convenient landmarks, as they are for the
lobster trappers who wonder what's inside them, but never bother to report their
existence.

The Creature looks up at a splash from on high. He feels it more than hears it.
Wonders who just dropped in.

A repatriated lobster clamps onto the Creature's finger. He shakes it loose and
jumps up. Tall buildings in a single bound? That's nothing down here.

Deirdre Mulligan descends the dune fandango. Her notes and spec reports are
stained by her sweaty hand; a pen is mounted above her ear like a Sidewinder
missile in a Huey gunship. She's dressed in worn jeans, a sleeveless T-shirt,
and black L.A. Gear sneakers with fluorescent yellow laces. Her exposed skin is
slathered with the strongest possible sunblock.

She stops near the beach and surveys the area. The sand is flat and shines like
slate. Gradient gray in the air, but it's overcast, not smog. She hopes, anyway.
Gulls grate overhead. The waves are powerful tall and loud. Two boys in bright
Body Glove bathing suits paddle surfboards out among the troughs. Normally
they'd be wearing wetsuits, but this season the water's ten degrees warmer than
usual. No one knows why. It's caused some pretty exotic finds, such as South
American Humboldt squid and the Tamaria obstipa, a starfish native to coastal
waters off Peru. An influx of South American creatures, muses Deirdre. Maybe
they brought the weather with 'em. Whatever, the Environmental Impact Report
she's supervising will have to take this into account.

Laguna Negra Beach is simply beautiful. The place seems somehow primal, ancient
and still forming. The beach is smooth and dun, the sand fine and hard-packed.
The south end of the crescent that is Laguna Negra is formed by the raw rock of
the San Onofre mountain range meeting the waves. The surf here is usually mild-
but the surfers like it because the waves break obliquely across half the bay.
The obstruction of mountain into breaking waves, however, makes it one of the
few points in Southern California where water intermittently slams rock to make
huge sprays. To the north is a large wooden pier, the only manmade structure
that really intrudes on the beach or into the bay.

Standing here, amid the booming surf and the unlittered sand and the spray
jetting from the clash of water and rock to the misted south, Deirdre can easily
imagine some old, ungainly, top-heavy, square-rigged ship tacking up the coast,
for this is one of the few such areas in this region that seem untouched by
time.

From a real-estate broker's point of view, this place is Nirvana.

Shit.

Deirdre Mulligan belongs to a fairly rare species: Californium indigenous, the
native Californian. She was born in Northridge when there were still orange
groves there, and educated in several schools as her father, an assistant
principal, kept getting transferred in accordance with the lifestyle decree that
insists no Southern Californian can remain in one spot longer than three years.
After satisfying her carefree adolescent desires for recreational
pharmaceuticals (well, all right: after whetting them), Deirdre attended UC San
Diego and walked away with a BS in Marine Biology. Then a year of post-grad at
Scripps and a certificate in Environmental Sciences from Berkeley.

Deirdre could have kept collecting initials after her name, but that seemed too
much like hiding to her. Instead she hired out to fledgling environmental
watchdog groups for a pittance, limped along on public funding arid the
occasional government grant, and in general tried to stick by her private
agenda. An agenda not for herself but for the world. Despite a wealth of
training and scientific terminology at her command, Deirdre's desires could be
expressed in simple colors make the land green again, the oceans blue, the skies
clear.

Times were tough for idealistic but practical environmental activists. Openings
in Deirdre's field were plentiful -- if you wanted to tell multinational
conglomerates where to dump their toxic waste, how to store processed uranium,
how to present development proposals so that it won't look like a thousand acres
of arable land weren't being forevermore eradicated. Indications were that
someone was about to renege on that nifty-cool and sparkling 21st-Century
Techno-Eden Deirdre was promised as she rode the slidewalks through Disneyland.

Her job at Eco/Logic, Inc., is her compromise. There she can conduct honest
Environmental Impact Reports, and half the time she can restrict developers who
don't have the environment's best interests at heart when they set to pillaging.
Stopping development is an absurd notion, of course. But at least Deirdre gets
to make sure that what gets built doesn't mess anything up (too badly, at
least), and what will, doesn't get built.

Deirdre's calves tighten as her feet push into the softer sand above the tide
line. It feels like those dreams where you try to run and don't get anywhere.
She has the beach to herself this fine late-summer afternoon. Funny how people
flock away from the beach toward sundown. Dark is when she likes the beach best.

Seagrapes pop beneath the sole of one shoe. Deirdre thinks of the Portuguese man
o' wars that ride the Gulfstream currents. Innocent little gasbag jellyfish;
they look like little laundry bags. Once, on Florida's Gulf Coast, she had seen
a barefoot boy stomp one, pop, before she could yell for him to stop. His foot
had swelled to melon size within minutes. None of that here, she thinks. And if
there was anything like that here-- anything threatening, anything to reduce the
comfort of this spot for human occupation -- why, it'd just have to be removed,
now wouldn't it. To make this Kodak Picture Spot more perfect, more natural.

On a trip to Disney World with Grant she had noticed those signs telling
tourists where to take their pictures: Kodak Picture Spot. Grant had told her he
imagined a guy with a big semi truck full of those signs, driving across the
country looking for picturesque locales. "Grand Canyon?" Grant had said, 'and
mimed hammering. "Wham-wham-wham. Kodak Picture Spot! Yellowstone National Park?
Need a couple dozen trucks there. Wham wham wham!" And Deirdre had laughed at
the image of a landscape crowded with vying signs, Kodak Picture Spot signs as
far as the eye could see.

Only now it doesn't seem so funny.

Still .... The proposed hundred-million-dollar Laguna Negra Resort will have to
meet local, state, and federal clean-water, clean-air, and waste-dumping
standards. Not only that, but before any development or construction can begin,
it must also satisfy the California Environmental Quality Act-- which means it
can't impair its neighbors' view or appreciably lower adjoining property values.
Land grading and drainage must be taken into account. And most important, the
development and construction of the resort must in no way endanger any
specialized or rare flora or fauna.

Deirdre looks out to the Pacific Ocean where the two boys in bright colors are
mounting their surfboards to catch a wave. One boy wears lime green and black
trunks, the other neon orange and black. They're having a great time
eavesdropping on the eternal conversation between the ocean and the shore.

Deirdre turns back to look at the beach, at the sand and acres of undeveloped
land behind it. She sighs. Undeveloped. Like its potential is achingly
unrealized. Bring us your yearning, your huddled parcels of land crying out for
development.

From the north she hears a dull pok! pok! pok! The sound is flattened by the
broad beach. Someone's putting the resort development sign back up.

If I could find one thing, she thinks. One thing to keep them from mining yet
another stretch of beach forever.

A line from an old song comes to her mind. Something about the sea raging like a
man, and the land giving like a woman. She realizes that she does think of the
developers as men, and the land as a woman.

She laughs humorlessly. But just because it's a terrible sexual metaphor doesn't
make it any less true. Or terrible.

ELOISE POST FROWNS down at the scarred sign on the dune. Why, this is vandalism.
Sheer wanton vandalism. Disrespectful children running around destroying
property. Honestly, don't their parents teach them anything?

She squats to examine the sign. Someone really did a job on it. Looks like they
beat it with a crowbar or a claw hammer or something. She's just going to have
to put up a new one. Yep, I went to college so's I could swing a hammer. You
bet.

She sighs, thinking about the remainder of her day. She knows she's mostly
puttering around right now, wasting time, putting off having to go to Roger's to
pick up Jennifer. The beach ought to provide a few hours of freedom from such
thoughts, but it's hard for Eloise to allow herself emotional vacations, however
brief. Especially since Laguna Negra Beach itself contains memories for her.
Remembrances of her and Roger together in happier' times.

Frowns come easily to Eloise's face, as if it had been made ready-to-frown, with
prefolded lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes. How many times must you
frown to wear a groove in something as soft and pliant as skin?

Eloise looks up from the ruined sign to see the water turning metal-bright in
the lowing sun. A sun that sets on the beach is still a novelty to her. Studying
her face, you wonder at the forces at work in her core that have revealed
themselves on the surface, much like continents sliding through the millennia
across the skin of the Earth that, with time and pressure, form mountain ridges
and plains. What lies in the mantle beneath Eloise's young-old face to have
caused such tectonic erosion? In the way that a geologist can look at a groove
in the land and sense the passage of glaciers, we can look at the riverbed
tridents at the corners of Eloise's eyes, the sinkhole depression of parentheses
bracketing her mouth, and see the Ice Age that was her marriage, the chronic
flooding of her Marketing Relations position, the greenhouse effect of her
father's overbearing attention, the firmly buried fossil stratum of her mother's
early death.

Eloise surveys the shore. Looks like the beach is mine, she thinks. She squints.
No -- somebody else down there, near the other side of the bay. Redheaded woman,
looks like.

Eloise gets a brief, absurd image of herself in a cowboy outfit a `stridin'
toward the stranger on the sand. This beach ain't big enough for the two of us.
It shouldn't irritate her, but it does. If the shore were crowded it would be
one thing, but to almost have it to yourself ....

She sighs. Obviously nothing's going to satisfy her today.

She's thinking about the wreckage of her marriage as she turns back to the
shredded resort sign. Pointless vandalism, she thinks again.

What's that, Weezy! whispers a part of her mind she'd pay dearly to have
amputated. Your marriage?

Eloise's face gets all pinched, looking. "The sign," she says out loud, and then
feels herself turning red. She glances around. No-one to hear her.

You let a community know that someone's come along to beautify the area and up
their real-estate values, she thinks, forcing her train of thought onto a
different set of rails, .and they bash your sign and file petitions to stop you.
And the community happily signs the petitions because, after all, you are a
developer.

The cries of gulls carry over the waves' crashing.

Eloise's position at Villa Nova Development is one of three in the Marketing
Department. Basically, she makes development proposals look attractive and
attends meetings and assuages homeowners and tries to argue politely and
rationally with 150K young execs who think of themselves as environmentalists
and have the L.L. Bean shirts and spotless Jeep Cherokees to prove it.

Now, Eloise is not naive. Villa Nova isn't developing from any altruistic desire
for civic improvement. They want money, lots of it, and they spend a lot to make
even more. But Eloise thinks of herself as a kind of lawyer she's paid to go to
bat for the people who are paying her. She doesn't have to believe in the
company's aims, as long as she doesn't disbelieve them, and as long as she
benefits from them. Like any good remora, Eloise is along for the ride.

Eloise looks at the papers in her hand: Villa Nova's resort proposal and
Eco/Logic's prospectus describing the parameters and scope of the Environmental
Impact Report.

The right to build Laguna Negra Resort is not at all established yet in fact, a
clear ownership of the real-estate parcel will not be official until that right
is secured. It all hinges on the Environmental Impact Report and the county's
approval of it.

Eloise kicks ineffectually at the vandalized resort sign. Here comes the Big Bad
Developer.

One of Eloise's duties is to anticipate that EIR for which her company is paying
a cool million, and prepare an assessment of her own that preempts it, and, if
necessary, negates it. It helps that L.A. County allows developers to hire
whoever the hell they want to conduct the EIR, and no law say's that they can't
hire someone else if they don't like the results. Technically the EIR is a
public document, but when completed it will be sent to the lawyer who negotiated
the deal between Eeo/Logic and Villa Nova, so that it's protected as a
privileged lawyer-client communication.

She begins trudging inland. Got to get a new sign out of the car and drag it
back here. Won't that be fun?

Recent environmental legislation has made the issue of coastal development quite
a hot potato, one that gets tossed from committee to committee until it's hard
to figure where it will land. And the California Coastal Commission may sound
like an important body of experts with large important offices in large
important government buildings, but basically it's a dozen overworked, underpaid
people in an office without air conditioning in Sacramento, including exactly
one field manager for the entire Southland.

As she fishes her car keys from her purse (carrying a purse on the beach! in
tennis shoes and a dress! in, this heat!), Eloise thinks of ways to work this
situation in her favor -- fully aware that everyone else involved can, too.

It's frustrating enough to make King Solomon take up finger-painting, and
complicated enough to make you wonder that anything ever gets built at all.

But things do. Time after time after time.

THE CREATURE HEADS toward shore toting a heavy metal drum on his plated back.
It's the drum that made the splash that distracted him while he was liberating
the lobsters. Not a diver, just another boat using his living room for a garbage
can.

If the Creature hadn't been environmentally sensitive because of his (admittedly
small) act of rebellion, he might have been inclined to let this invasion slide.
But that drum had come barreling down the water to land smack on top of a
lobster the Creature had freed not three minutes before. It smashed the lobster
flatter than a leper joke and twice as tasteless. It kicked up a smoky cloud of
bottom mud like a detonating depth charge, and when it settled the Creature
could see the paint-stenciled letters on the side of the drum. HAZARDOUS
MATERIALS, it read.

The Creature got hopping mad. On the outside, hopping mad for the Creature is
pretty mild: he folded his scaled arms and opened his mouth to feel the pulse of
the current, and he just stood there, letting lobsters scurry away, ignoring the
few that remained in the trap. But inside the Creature was a slow burn. It was
your basic core meltdown, where the outside looks fine while the inside
collapses and heats up, and nothing shows on the outside until the inside
explodes past it.

The Creature looks at that HAZARDOUS MATERIALS stencil, and he wonders how many
drumfuls of hazardous materials you have to have before you need a stencil to
label them all. A lot, he figures. Twenty or thirty, maybe as much as a hundred.

The Creature doesn't like this.

Which is why he's toting that drum back toward shore with the intent to leave it
in plain sight for someone to find and properly dispose of on land. If these are
their HAZARDOUS MATERIALS, then they should keep them.

He leaves the drum in the shallows forty or fifty feet offshore, figuring to let
the tide do the rest of the work. The drum will be a lot heavier out of the
water, and the Creature just doesn't feel like lugging it around. Besides which,
these days he's trying to keep his shoreline appearances to a minimum, and then
only at night. It's starting to get a bit too crowded around here for his taste.
He's cut the sensitive soles of his otherwise armored feet on more broken glass
and can lids than he can remember; motorboat drones keep him awake in the grotto
(which he tries to sleep in by day, good goddamn luck); and he's been hit in the
head by surfboards not once, not twice, but three times.

The Creature doesn't like the thought of leaving though. The grotto is nice, and
he's invested a lot of time turning it into a place he likes spending time in.
Like most of us, the Creature wants little more than to lead his life
undisturbed, to keep his head above water, so to speak.

He kicks off from the drum and swims shoreward to take a quick look at likely
places for the drum to appear.

The Creature surfaces. Immediately he feels the sun pressing down on him like a
hot fabric. Yowza. His scaly plated skin begins to tighten like drying leather
-- which, in a way, it is. His vision blurs as his eyes dehydrate. He slaps
water into them and gazes toward shore.

Pok! pok! pok!

The Creature has no eyelids, and he hates noises that make him want to blink.

Pok! pok! pok!

You just don't know how much Eloise hates this. Pounding signs into the sand is
hardly in her job description. One of the Mexicans hired by Villa Nova should be
out here in his pickup truck to take care of this sort of thing. But Smith
Webber asked her to do it as long as she was out here, "to keep our presence
felt and keep our name in front of those people."

Eloise swings the hammer again, pok! She hates that sound. It makes her blink.
Every time she strikes, she tries to will her eyes from blinking.

At her feet are the Resort Proposal and Eco/Logic's EIR prospectus.

Pok! Eloise blinks. It becomes a matter of proving her will not to blink.

She's probably going to pull a triceps muscle. Eloise is secretly proud to know
the names of muscles. She learned them in aerobics classes, which she took up in
order to regain her slim figure after Jennifer was born. Pok! She'd wanted to
look appealing again for Roger. Fat lot of good that had done her. Pok! Get it?
Fat lot of good ....

Oh, never mind.

Eloise is thinking about how to take the wind out of Eco/Logic's sails should
the EIR turn out unfavorable--

--when a shadow falls across her newly erected sign.

The Creature looks from the running woman to the papers lying beside the mallet
she dropped on the sand. A spiral-bound report and a stapled sheaf of paper. He
bends to pick them up. Yow: bad backs run in his family. Too much time on land
causes curvature of the spine. Across the top margin of the notepad is
scribbled, Laguna Negra Prelim Assmnt Notes. Wonder what that could mean? The
page is filled with hard-to-read scrawls. The Creature tries to puzzle them out,
but it's no use. He's been out of the water way too long and his vision's
blurry. It'll be nice to have something to read back at the grotto, though; that
Jackie Collins novel -- while really good -- was getting kind of moldy.

Really, though, the ooga booga had been foolish this time out. Whatever that
human woman had been, she was no unsuspecing beach type. She was costumed
differently, and was obviously perturbed about the sign he'd destroyed in a fit
of pique, because she'd been putting up a new one.

And suddenly the Creature wants to know what this writing in his hand is all
about.

He's lost in thought, trying to come up with a way to get these papers back to
the grotto --

-- when a shadow falls across the page.

Deirdre Mulligan stares in stunned wonder across the corrugated ocean. Lowing
sunlight sparks diamond from wave caps.

She has just seen a rare and amazing thing. Deirdre Mulligan quivers exalted,
sublime, like an Old Testament citizen sharing a drink at a well with an angel.
Privileged. She feels an astonishing calm inside.

It hadn't frightened her. Oh, her heart is yammering, her hands are shaking; she
feels the kind of apprehensive thrill Pasteur must have felt when he held up the
petri dish and saw that the bread mold had vanquished the disease. But she is
not frightened.

The Scientist part of her mind objects. Hoax/it cries. Piltdown Man/ Hollywood
monster movie, decorated diving suit, publicity stunt mirage mass hysteria
sunspots!

And as a scientist she responds: the thing had had unseamed joints; she could
see the skeletal motion of ball-in-socket and hinge joints at knee and elbow,
see the supportive understructure of ribs, metacarpals, metatarsals, phalanges.
And the unidirectional flanging of the gills and cup-shaped spread of hands, the
elongated and widened feet, the delta-gouge of mouth in a head designed to pivot
up and lead the rest of the body -- all spoke of a design evolved for horizontal
travel underwater. The skin was skin, not latex: textured, iridescent from
secretions, patched with algae, draped with seagrape, scaled and plated,
flexible and contouring.

Whatever it was, it wasn't a guy in a costume. It had moved too fluidly, too
naturally -- though not very quickly. It looked too real.

And it had gone into the water, and not come back up.

No, it was real, a real, living creature.

But -- what was it? Where had it come from? Why had it left no evolutionary
record?

"It lives in the water, stupid," Deirdre says aloud. Ahh. And how much of that
fossil record has been played on the turntable of Science?

Top Forty only.

And what if its bones aren't bones at all, but cartilage./ Rapid decomposition,
no fossilization. Cartilage delende est.

In the same way a comparative morphologist, a zoologist -- any member of a score
of sciences -- can look at a seal and see a dog that fetched an evolutionary
stick fifty million years ago on the Darwinian shore and never returned, can see
the horse in the hippo, the elephant in the manatee, the monkey in the man -- in
that way, Deirdre looked at the creature and saw a human being that had changed
its naturally selective mind however many million years ago and returned to the
protean aquatic womb.

A dolphin is a distant cousin. This is a brother.

And it's living off her beach.

She's standing in calf-high water with her jeans rolled past her knees. The
unusually warm water feels good against her legs. Looking down at the foam
sliding past, Deirdre has the sensation that she is moving and the water is
stationary --- a feeling she remembers from being on the beach as a child. Funny
how a sensation, an aroma, a quick play of light, can be a pipeline back to
childhood, how all of it can rush back right there in front of you as if no time
has passed.

And suddenly inside her is a deep rushing echo of that outer sensation. She
looks out to sea again, at an imagined place where her creature (her creature!)
swims unseen. And realizes she's found her EIR's ace in the hole.

Deirdre hoots. Deirdre hollers. She kicks a spray of salt water and digs a
trough in the malleable wet sand.

Something exposed there gleams green. Some kind of stone? Deirdre bends, touches
its smooth surface. Surf roils round her legs. She hooks fingers beneath the
object and pries it loose, swirls it in the water to wash away the sand. Holds
it up to the sun.

It's the most amazing color green. Not jade, not emerald. Its edges are rounded
and polished by the lapidary ocean. It is, she realizes, a fragment of a
soft-drink bottle. For years it has been softened and burnished by the tides and
the sand, until the ocean has turned it into something neither glass nor stone
nor jewel. There's a name for it, what is it....?

Driftglass.

She looks out to sea. And looks at the ethereal green lozenge in her hand.

All right, Deirdre-m'darlin'. Let's say you turn in an EIR that says you can't
build a mammoth resort because there's a bona fide green gill man living off
Laguna Negra beach. And let's say you can prove it before they lock you
somewhere that doesn't have any edges. What then? No resort, no siree. And maybe
Mr. Gills ends up on some laboratory's meat slicer. Or on Leno. Which amounts to
the same thing.

"Aw ...." She can't think of an expletive that quite describes her feelings.

She's still turning the glass about in her hands, watching the play of gold
California sunlight across its slick surface, when a commotion behind her makes
her turn.

Four Tibetan monks in orange robes are walking toward the water. One of them
carries a glass vase filled with colored sands. They are grinning at the ocean
like kids contemplating some really great prank. Behind them is a crowd of
spectators and news reporters.

For a moment Deirdre thinks the newspeople are there because of the Creature;
they've already been notified and Deirdre's precious knowledge of the Creature's
existence is achingly over. Then she sees the Buddhist monks and thinks that,
no, the Creature wasn't a creature at all but a fake, some kind of PR deal, a
movie promo, and here's the rest of it.

Then she watches the monks themselves.

The wind whips at their orange robes as they stride without hesitation into the
water, unmindful of the cold and not bothering to hitch up their hems. The one
holding the vase raises it high, and cameras begin to click. The monks start
chanting prayers.

They are perhaps twenty feet away from Deirdre now.

They pray, smiling throughout, then bow -- to the vase, to the ocean, to one
another. The one holding the vase is completely bald, not even any eyebrows, and
his ears stick out like jug handles. Happily he lowers the vase, and the other
three monks laugh and say "Ahh!" when he upends it and scatters multicolored
sand into the ocean.

Some in the crowd applaud. Some seem startled. The monks pay no heed. They
gleefully bend to the water and begin sloshing it everywhere, laughing as they
mix the sand with the seawater, splashing each other and talking a mile a minute
in their singsong language. Then they bow to one another again, and to the
ocean, and turn away.

One of them, the bald one with the jug-handle ears, sees Deirdre staring in
startled wonder there in the water. He looks at the gleaming green thing in her
hand, and he grins and nods as if he knows what it is, and even as if he knows
what it means to her. He bows to Deirdre, nothing solemn about it at all, and
Deirdre finds herself bowing back.

And then they are gone, clapping each other on the back, kicking back little
trails of sand from their sandals, bright orange robes flapping like sails, and
the crowd leaves with them.

Deirdre looks at the water where they scattered the colored sand. It has blended
in; there's no sign it was ever there at all. Just grayish green, the way the
water always looks.

She looks at the driftglass in her hand. Suddenly happy and sad at the same
time, she brings her arm back and throws it, throws it just as far as she can.