Her Scales Shine Like Music Read Online Free PDF Page A

stuff, but I meant every word. It was only when I heard my voice cracking hoarsely that I felt my tears streaming, freezing on my cheeks. The night had turned colder than any I’d experienced here, and despite my parka’s efforts, I shivered.
    One of her tendrils lifted up and, so softly, touched my iced face. Did she somehow understand how I felt? I don’t know, but all her tendrils pulled away and she slowly tilted farther than I’d ever seen her tilt, until part of a mouth that could’ve held a herd of elephants came free of the water.
    She bellowed like a thousand foghorns resounding at once. I felt the vibration through my insulated boots, and standing wave patterns rose on the lake’s surface as if her cry tortured the water. Then she vanished, this time pulling a cloud of bubbles after her.
    *   *   *
    The following day and evening she didn’t appear, and I was afraid that I’d permanently driven her away.
    Next morning, I headed right to the beach, determined to camp there all day. Every few minutes, I called to her. Stupid, I know, but I desperately needed her companionship.
    She rose from the lake in the late afternoon like the birth of some alien oversized Venus, and swiftly fashioned a new sculpture, a near-perfect replica of the chair currently supporting me. The only things missing were the little guy wires I’d improvised to keep the thing from blowing away when I wasn’t ensconced in it.
    She pushed this replica halfway toward me, set it down on the sand, and waited. I’d formed an idea of what she’d been trying to tell me with her other two sculptures, but had kept playing stupid. Sure, my hopes of rescue were reduced to fumes, but if the RE cavalry did arrive, I wanted the alien campsite to hold full value. If I was right about her motivations, and went along, it would punch a big hole in the potential money bucket.
    Now her invitation had become too obvious to ignore. Question was, did I trust her enough to accept? And if I did, and it led where I expected, could I refuse her the help she’d been requesting for so long?
    Some decisions—maybe most of them, for all I know—aren’t conscious. While I thought my internal debate still raged, my legs pushed me out of my chair and carried me over to hers. I turned around and sat. Even the texture her fronds had generated duplicated the feel of my chair. They lifted me high into the air as I watched the beach recede.
    No queen or king had ever been carried on such a litter, or enjoyed such a butter-smooth ride. I’d expected my pilot-cum-vehicle to merely swing sideways to head in the right direction, but she backed quite a distance from the shore before she turned, never lowering me closer to the water by so much as a millimeter. Maybe she needed some serious elbow room to get her fins correctly aligned. If she had elbows, or fins.
    Moving forward at last, with me for a figurehead, she didn’t rush but moved steadily parallel to the shore. She stopped, as I’d expected and feared, opposite the abandoned equipment, spun leisurely until my litter faced the campsite, and placed me so softly down on this beach that it felt like love.
    I stood up, took a few steps toward higher ground, and watched her extend a squadron of tendrils straight toward the massive artifact she’d been mimicking for weeks. She stretched her flimsy-looking tentacles farther than seemed possible, but fell short of reaching the generator, if generator it was, by a good twenty meters. The tendrils trembled with strain, but had clearly reached their limit.
    No mime had ever conveyed longing so plainly.
    She held the posture for a full minute before withdrawing her tendrils all the way back into the lake, and then she waited, her equine-portion eyes steadily watching me.
    I felt sick as I reviewed my lovely options and their ugly consequences. Just being this close to the campsite could be grounds to