Lagoon 1

Sunlight slit the darkness of the plane's passenger cabin open with hard white radiance when he lifted the windowshade. Dust stirred by the overhead vent speckled the broadening blade slashing in to cut away airline artificial night. He yawned and reminded himself where he was. There had been so many planes in the past months, so many cramped economy class seats, so many places.

He'd set his watch to destination time before he slept and a glance confirmed there were still hours to go before arrival. A halfhearted scroll through in-flight movie options left him settling on the latest superhero movie without any real interest. It would keep his eyes busy, his mind off what was ahead.

Even so, the superhero team had only part of his attention as they first fought, then teamed up with their less famous Atlantean counterparts. He happened to look up when the sub-marine prince's cousin made her debut, cresting from the water in her soaked, clinging pseudo-toga to flutter dewy eyelashes at the "surface-dweller" heroes. The camera panned lasciviously over her garment to where it trailed halfway down her tail and he snorted. The arch-eyebrowed prince himself went bare-chested, of course, but even he wore a green and gold-accented kilt for the sake of modesty. They had to keep that PG-13 rating. She was one of a new crop of maritime actresses: he recognized her face, but didn't know her name.

String lights glowing in twilit palm trees on the cover of the airline magazine peeked at him from the seat-back pocket. The movie receded as he plucked it out for a closer look. Somewhere in Thailand, the headline declared it to be one of "The Best Resorts You've Never Heard Of." It stirred a memory of half a world away and the last vestige of attention to the CGI extravaganza on the screen evaporated.

They'd been the final touch on the cleared lagoon: hundreds of feet of bare-bulbed lights strung from tree to tree to tiki hut. He'd spent the last week setting them up, testing each strand for broken or burned out bulbs, making sure of the spacing between replanted palm trees and reconstructed buildings. Lights colored the shore, glimmered above the saltwater pool, waited to guide non-existent tourists to and from the main building and outlying bungalows. Right now, however, they waited for a single guest.

White, red, orange, green, the strung bulbs beckoned. With night falling he turned on the swimming lights as well and illuminated the cool blue patterned tiles that connected and lined the saltwater pools. These cast their glow up at the sky and spilled out of the canal into the lagoon proper.

He got down on his belly to snag a stray frond from the surface of the pool and throw it away. A month ago there'd still been a capsized boat and broken tree trunks bobbing in the lagoon. Now the water was clear and inviting once again, the sandy, pebbled bottom presented for moneyed vacationers. Whether they'd ever show up again with the election troubles on the island... that was another question, one he was past worrying about.

Ingredients in the tiki hut bar had been laid out ahead of time and he mixed himself a drink. The cocktail fizzed and ice clinked in the glass while he sat down on the steps of the pool to wait. Warm water welcomed his legs when he stretched out and scooted down a step. The seat of his swimming trunks and the hem of his light workout shirt soaked and darkened. Sweat from the scorching evening dried on his face and neck in the ghost of a breeze and the night stretched.

"Actress Named UNESCO Special Envoy in Gala Ceremony" read the article in the glossy magazine. He'd flipped past the eye-candy photos of proudly unknown resorts he'd indeed never heard of and paused at the famous face smiling from behind a specially constructed podium in the Delegates Dining Room. Semi-retired from Hollywood, she'd accepted the honorary appointment as the Special Envoy for Maritime Diplomacy and Cultural Preservation.

The next page showed her in hagiographic profile, highlighting the aquiline features that had become her trademark as much as her place as one of the first maritime leading ladies. "Many challenges face my people today," read the abridged version of her remarks, "both here and beyond the shoreline. I hope to lend my voice to those who go unheard and among the louder cries of modern society. I will speak for fair integration and acceptance, but integration with distinction, and acceptance with understanding." She was also launching a new line of fragrances.

Lish speaking at the UN; a lot had changed in five years. When he'd left the resort, the tail end of landlocked winter at the end of his journey repulsed him. The earth was scorched and salted where he'd once called home. He, too, had to change. It took a long time to make things different.

Warmer climes now called, places where the sun broke on expanses of blue water. Old connections found him a job at Jaxport, helping open a Transearth office there. The container shipping company was expanding its foothold in the Americas and needed locals.

For the first year, he'd barely looked at the ocean, letting the sun beat down through the office window on his back while he puzzled out Port Authority and customs regulations. The second year, he'd risked a glance, found himself straining to find white shoulders bobbing against the blue of the waterway, past the cranes and container yards out toward Blount Island and the estuary. After that he kept his head down again and chased memories of sandbar rendezvous from his mind with bills of lading and berthing schedules. The third year, he'd given up avoiding it, and stared out at the water until the reflected sun danced white spots on his vision. The fourth year, he accepted that he was staying and made the first payment for an old house on the intercoastal. The water quality reports showed it was comfortably brackish. The fifth year, he'd left.

Nassau came first. It was a natural place for pods to congregate, mingle, and set off again on their long migrations with the currents. It also had a Transearth office where he could pretend he was still working.

The Nassau beaches were crowded with locals, tourists and prominent signs that read "Beach-Goers Must Be Properly Attired" in several languages. The signs all faced the ocean. He had to leave the city to find someone he could ask for help.

The pod lazed in the sun on a stone beach on the far side of the island, away from easily offended eyes. Dark-skinned, they'd traveled Caribbean waters for longer than living memory, following ships across the Atlantic in the plantation days. A few white and tanned bodies stood out, but not the one he was looking for.

"I'm trying to find someone," he admitted, squatting down and holding out a laminated photo. What he could remember from a glimpse of her Maritime ID was penciled on the back. He felt ridiculous in slacks and a button-down. No one else was wearing more than a belt. Curious hands passed around the picture while everyone else continued their sunning. At the edge of the water, a few were shucking oysters and they regarded him with suspicious eyes, wary of aquaculture inspectors. Heads shook, but one finally nodded.

From the lagoon that night she swam silent and confident. They'd seen each other almost every day. A flick of her powerful tail propelled her through the outflow current of the hotel canal and into the pool. She was a long white and green shape against soft blue tile and the pool lights threw her rippled shadow onto the overhanging palms and awnings. Her face poked above the surface near him and she flashed her toothy smile.

"Am I late?"

He shook his head. The cocktail on the edge of the pool next to him was freshly made, his third. A careless laugh showed she understood.

"It's beautiful." She rolled over in the shallow end of the pool, nipples and breasts briefly breaching the surface. A sweep of her arms indicated the aquascaped lagoon, renovated pavillion and swaying strands of lights, and propelled her right up to where he sat. "It's the first time I've seen it closer than the lagoon. A few people have been up here on work passes, but..." A distracting shrug ended the thought.

"I'm happy you finally got to," a sip of his drink covered his still-wandering eyes, "better take it all in now."

Sighing, she rolled over again and rested her head in her arms on the step next to him. One grey eye cocked at him in a sly squint. He was still obvious. "You think it will be that bad?" she asked instead of teasing, "or do you just mean that you'll be..." She trailed off in a more open-ended and melancholy fashion this time.

He shook his head. "I heard police broke up the election protests earlier. The owners' group is going to sell. Tourists won't be back for years at this rate." The riots reignited later in the evening according to the radio news, and the protesters would probably own the night.

"Then we're both leaving," her voice was a far cry from her usual breezy happiness. He nodded and for a while the only sound was the blood-warm wind off the lagoon and the ghost of sirens from the distant city. It was only a short reach, and he threaded his fingers into the drying strands of her brown hair. She turned her pale face into his touch and he could feel the brush of soft cheek and lips against his palm and wrist. Her mood was mercurial, though, and next her nose butted his hand away and she grinned.

Incongruously she walked the index and middle fingers of one hand through the shallow water to his thigh and tugged the hem of his swimsuit. "Did you bring that for me to try?" A dip of her chin indicated his drink.

Without a word he handed it over. Her nostrils flared over the bruised leaves that rested atop ice in the glass. She took a tentative sip and frowned. "It's," she interrupted herself with a larger gulp and then snorted, sloshing some of the drink into the pool, "it's full of bubbles!" Her coughs fluttered the bright pink lines above the swell of scaled flesh that would have been her hips.

Composing herself, she licked her lips and considered. "And lime and rum." Familiar flavors apparently.

"The leaves are mint," he supplied. She eyed the drink again and took another sip before handing it back and subsiding to the surface of the pool. A crook of her finger invited his hand to return to its place in her hair. It had dried flaxen and tickled his fingers trailing down to her milkweed-soft neck.

The caress brought a soft sigh of pleasure bubbling from her throat and a shiver through her spine that turned into a languorous stretch all the way down her tail. Translucent flukes stirred the pool's glassy surface. For what felt like the first time she met his gaze directly with her wide, captured-cloud eyes. Reflected there he could see his want matched by her own.

After the bright sun and pastels of Nassau, the Grand Canal Development Zone was miserable rain and earthtones. Work continued in a listless fashion in spite of the financial ruin of the developers as if there was no money left even to shut the project down. Rusting suction dredges shifted silt away from the mouth of the Punta Gorda, shepherded by migrant workers with their flanks wrapped in cloth against the muddy water. Rising around the unfinished Camilo Lock complex were mountains of overburden high enough to seem rivals to the jungle peaks inland.

Prefabricated barracks for workers sprawled out north of the original settlement at the mouth of the river. The village itself was long gone and the ground it sat on hauled away to widen the channel for superfreighters that would never be coming now. The buildings were empty and dark in the lashing rain and their inhabitants departed in search of work elsewhere. Only a few HKND Group holdouts staffed the company offices to wind down operations until new capital could be found or the project truly abandoned. The few he could get to do more than shrug when asked about maritime workers pointed him to where offshore dorms had been constructed north of the Punta Gorda, away from the choking sediment.

Once there had been daily ferries to the maritime dormitory to bring workers to the job site. Now there was a dilapidated speedboat belonging to a local that took HKND managers out there on the rare occasion it was required. The workers, they could swim the miles to the Development Zone if they still wanted the job. He clutched the gunwale of the algae-stained vessel while it bumped over choppy waves and under soaking skies.

The dormitory platform was an anchored floating plastic hexagon with low freeboard. Waves slopped over the edges with enough frequency that his pants were soaked moments after the boat tied up and he climbed aboard. While most of the traffic to and from the platform was underwater, a flooded central courtyard of sorts allowed the workers to congregate and make contact with their surface counterparts. Looking down through the ten-foot depth of the courtyard, he could see the transparent walls of the dormitories proper, and a few shapes moving within. Back at the office he'd been told to knock on the deck, and so he did, eventually hammering the heel of his shoe to get someone's attention.

When someone finally emerged, it was a tanned migrant with his tail mottled black and white. All sharp nose, sparse, trailing moustache and receding chin, the worker eyed him, gave a febrile cough and spat mud-tinged phlegm on the deck. Too ill for canal work.

"She came here from Nassau." The creased photo was accepted by calloused and blunt fingers. He could see each nail rimmed black as the worker turned the photo over and mouthed the hand-written words on the back. Rain pelted him and chop sloshed into his shoes while he waited.

Again the migrant cast a jaundiced eye on him. He could imagine his measure being taken: slacks, but sturdy ones unsuited to an office chair, a raincoat, but not one with a company logo, and his business? Searching for a woman.

When the worker finally decided to speak to him, it was in a coughed mixture of English and Spanish that taxed his limited ability of his audience in the latter. Yes, he had seen her. Her hair had been much longer, but it was her.

It had been several years ago when she'd come to the Development Zone, traveling with a mixed pod, most of them Pacific. They seemed a tight group, with her and a few others the outsiders. The core of the pod worked the dredges, while she had done odd jobs village-side. She'd never spoken about work to him, though he'd wondered without asking. Some pods didn't work at all on their long migratory wanderings, eschewed most surface trappings or contact and subsisted on what they could catch. She'd never spoken about a pod, either.

The pod left and she with it when the Shanghai Exchange crash wiped out the canal investors and HKND Group's downfall began. Capable of escaping surface troubles and savvy enough to see them coming, the group she was with was tough and smart. They might have been headed down the coast, perhaps to work in Brazilian harbors. The worker had heard jobs were good there, but he couldn't make the trip. The conversation was concluded with another brown wad of mucus spat on the deck before his information source disappeared into the dormitory again.

With her hands on his knees, she thrust herself out of the water to kiss him. It came suddenly: she freed herself from his stroking fingers, scooted closer, and then surged upward. Her mouth was soft and moist, all sweet and salt with their tongues sliding together. No hesitation marred the kiss; his response came as natural as her initiation was abrupt. His mouth watered and the connection lingered until her arms gave way. Thick saliva trailed out between their lips and she slipped between his legs with a giggle and a splash.

In the time he'd known her, every touch seemed casual. She swam alongside, rested against him, invited his arms around her, his hands on her, but never with more purpose than the touch itself. It was, he sensed, just the maritime way. This way was different.

When he stooped and ran his hands down her slick back she arched coyly, playing corded muscle beneath soft insulating flesh. She nipped the leg of his trunks and laughed wet and low. Again she pushed herself up, this time with her palms flat on the pool steps and fastened her lips to his collarbone. He caught her in an embrace with his shirt riding up and it squashed her full breasts against his stomach for a moment of glorious contact, but she slid out of his grasp and he was left tangling his fingers into her shoulder-length hair. Her agile tongue traced a switchbacked path down through the hair on his chest and stomach.

Propped up between his legs, she grinned wide and wicked and plucked at the drawstring of his shorts. The belated erection stiffened to curving rigidity while she loosed the waistband. Both of them laughed at his squirming to free himself from the swimsuit's liner.

She made a liquid noise of curiosity at the sight of his member then ran her fingers down his treasure trail and into the thicker brown tangle below. Her attention was rapt when she cradled his undercarriage and gently tugged the sack's soft and loose skin. Cool, wet fingers tickled, but couldn't diminish his arousal. "Yes." He was almost frightened by his own intensity.

At the sound of his voice, she peered up at him from beneath her uneven, overgrown fringe. Despite the preceding exploration her eyes were limpid, vulnerable and he wondered for a moment if it was artifice or genuine. He pushed her fringe aside, his own wet hand plastering it higher on her forehead to reveal full eyebrows. He caressed her cheek and his fingers followed the lower orbit of one eye, then down the warship-strong, tumblehome prow of her nose. Her lips gave way when his thumb settled on them and the tip of her tongue laved him obligingly.

His eyes remained locked with hers and he could see the trust and relish grow there. Gentle pressure from his palm encouraged and her accommodating mouth took him to his base. Her tongue couched his cock and she shook her head languidly, tormenting him with the brush of the inside of her cheeks. Slowly, his engorged shaft emerged from between her open lips and then vanished into her cool mouth again.

Shallow water slopped around them while she bobbed her head. Her tongue circled his knob and lingered to explore the base of the glans. Equally inquisitive, her fingers carefully kneaded his sack, fascinated by the unfamiliar tissue. Throughout, his hand still rested on her cheek, her forehead, the nape of her neck as an unnecessary guide. She knew what she was about, but he couldn't bear to break that connection. Instead he grasped a hank of her hair and rode the uneven rise and fall of her movements.

She gulped and salivated, working with noisy enthusiasm. "Yes," was all he could manage intelligibly before he was reduced to a choking moan. She lodged his head in her throat and the squeezing pressure coaxed a deeper growl out of him. His balls felt swollen and hot in her wet grasp, full to bursting.

Small bubbles slipped from her flanks when she answered him with a deep and indulgent moan. Later, he couldn't figure out what she had said. It might have been as mundane as "good," as provocative as "give," but it had finished him. The sweet eagerness in her eyes and her sopping attempt to speak around his cock sent blood thundering to his head in a roar and hot cum jetting into her mouth.

Rough and trembling, he massaged her scalp through her waning ministrations and groaned out the orgasm. She withdrew into the pool a few feet with hair mussed and her lips pursed in a satisfied smile. One pale fingertip chased an escaped drop of wheyish moisture from her chin. "Hmmm," she said softly, and sank up to her nose.