“I did!” Elayna snickered.
“Well…” Rachel said, coloring slightly. “If… if there’s such a thing as an ‘antislut’ that’s me. That doesn’t mean I’m down on girls who enjoy bed hopping; Marguerite was one of my best friends before the Fall and she lost her virginity about the time she started blooming tits. And never looked back. But me… I’ve just never been interested.”
“You mean in guys?” Elayna asked.
“I mean in sex,” Rachel responded. “Guys or girls. I just don’t care. I like guys, and girls, as friends. But I’m not interested in… all the squishy awfulness. It sort of makes me queasy to tell you the truth.”
“That’s weird,” Elayna said. “I can’t really imagine that.”
“That’s because you’ve got a sex drive,” Rachel said with a sad frown. “I don’t. It’s like being tone-deaf. You can listen to the music, but all it is is noise. Unpleasant noise at that. The thought of… Herzer’s dick in me is… ooooh!” she ended with a shudder of disgust.
“Okay,” Antja said. “I have to agree, that’s weird.”
“Well if a normal sex drive is like a five,” Rachel said with a shrug. “And Elayna here is, say, an eight, I’m like a negative one.”
“And what’s Bast?” Elayna said.
“Three thousand one hundred and fifteen,” Rachel laughed. “More or less.”
They had drifted to an area of scattered patch reef, most of them a meter or so high, and Antja suddenly darted downward, reaching into a crevice.
“Gotcha,” she said, pulling the lobster out of its hole. It waved its antennae at her furiously and kicked with its tail but most of the motion stopped when she wrung the body off of the tail and dropped the latter into her bag.
“They generally hang out under ledges and in cracks,” Antja said, dropping down to the sand bottom to swim along the side of the section of reef. She was peering into the ledges under the rock and then darted her hand in again. This time she drew it out with an expression of disgust.
“What we need is spears for this,” she said. “It’s not particularly sporting but we’re not here for sport.”
Rachel coasted a little farther down and picked out her own patch of rock. She got down on the sand and looked under the reef but it was nearly black to her eyes. The sun was high and shining down through the water as if the ten meters or so over her head wasn’t even there. And the shadows under the rock were nearly impenetrable. But she could see stuff on the sides, little fish darting in and out. Then she saw a shadow move under the rock and backed up in a hurry as a small shark came sculling out lazily. At least, she thought it was a shark. It looked a little like one except that the mouth was pursed as if it had been eating a lemon.
“Nurse shark,” Elayna said as she swam by. “They’re harmless if you don’t bother them. On the other hand, they’ll tear you a new one if you do. A guy before the Fall, a mer and he should have known better, tried to ride one. Fortunately the nannites fixed him right up. But he Changed back to normal human and never got in the water again.”
“How do you see under here?” Rachel said. She had changed patches and was now looking under the new rock, warily.
“You get used to it,” Antja said, drifting past. She now had three lobster tails in her bag, one of which was huge. “Watch them, though, they’ve got spines. You have to grip them firmly but not hard. Firmly enough that they can’t get away; they’ll rip you up struggling out of your hand. But don’t grab them so hard that you poke yourself.”
“Great,” Rachel said, catching a glimpse of some antennae waving just down the reef. She pushed herself off the bottom with her fingers and snuck up on the crayfish. It was apparently unworried about her approach, except for waving its antennae more aggressively. She moved her hand in closer and then lunged. She wasn’t quite fast enough, but she got ahold of the antennae at the base, surprised by the struggle the lobster was putting up. She managed to get her other hand around it and then wrung the tail off quickly.
“Got one,” she said, happily. Then noticed the small cuts in the fingers that had snagged the antennae. The salt water stung them but there wasn’t much she could do about that.
“Gloves,” Elayna said, popping up from a section of reef about ten meters away. “That’s what we really need: Gloves.”
“Not if you use a spear,” Antja said. She was out of sight, only her golden-red tail sticking up out of the reef. The colors only really came out when they were close to the surface.
“Why do you guys all have colorful tails when the water makes them all look brown or green at depth?” Rachel asked, going back to her hunting.
“Our eyes process out the blue light,” Antja replied, then paused as she apparently lunged for another lobster. “Until we get deep and that’s all there is. But when we’re at, say, twenty meters, we see things just as clearly, color-wise, as you do up here. But by the time you get down to say, thirty or forty meters, it kicks back over to ‘normal’ vision because just about everything but blue has gone away.”
“Is it harder for you to see?” Rachel asked. “I mean, down by the town and stuff. Everything down there is blue.”
“No,” Elayna replied. “We’ve got superior night vision, too. Kind of like a cat. We can probably see better than you can. That might be why we can see under the rocks better, too.”
“I see this one,” Rachel said, darting in and getting ahold of the body this time. She’d figured out her grip and didn’t get cut for her troubles, but her hand scraped on the rock as she drew the struggling crustacean out. She also realized that she was tired. And there was a long swim back against the current. “This isn’t easy.”
“No, it’s not,” Antja said. “I’m not sure we’re getting more calories than we’re going to burn off, especially with having to swim back against the current carrying the tails.”
Rachel thought about that and then laughed.
“I’ll carry them back,” she said, spotting another lobster. “I can walk up on the shore. That way you guys don’t have to wait for me to catch up.”
“Works,” Elayna said. “But we can keep in the shallows, that way you’ll have company. That way you can tell me all of Herzer’s terrible secrets.”
“I think those are Herzer’s to tell,” Rachel said, pausing in her hunt.
“Oh, that’s no fun,” Elayna replied.
“Well, most of Herzer’s life before the Fall doesn’t contain many terrible secrets,” Rachel replied as her hand darted in and just missed the more wary crayfish. It had been a large one, too. “He had a genetic condition that my mom cured, just before the Fall, fortunately. It got worse as he got older and especially worse around puberty. He… didn’t have many friends and no girlfriends to speak of.”
“That’s pretty unbelievable,” Antja said. Her bag was nearly full and she rested on the top of the reef for a moment. Rachel suddenly realized that the scales on their tails had more than decorative purposes; if she had tried that, with the mild swell that was pushing over the rocks, she would have come away with a scraped-raw butt.
“He… twitched,” Rachel said, finding it hard to explain. “He worked out but he couldn’t keep any muscle mass; he was like a shaking twig all the time. And he had a speech impediment. Sometimes he’d drool or one of his limbs would just start spasming. It was… awful to watch. He’d been a fun kid, played sports, and then this… disease just wasted him away. I admit I started avoiding him. I’m pretty ashamed by that but it was just too weird. Anyway, Mom figured out a cure just before the Fall. Basically she killed and brought him back to life.” Rachel swallowed at another thought she didn’t want to voice. “Which… makes them bound in a weird way. Anyway, that’s why he didn’t have girlfriends. Now after the Fall,” she continued with an evil glint in her voice, “that’s another story.”