The Very Best of F & SF v1 by Gordon Van Gelder (ed) Page B

comb her hair, and to be cussed
at. “And whatever it is, it’s worth doing,” he added, “because when they’re
happy, they’re happy up to the sky.”
    “Whatever it is,”
she said, disagreeably agreeing.
    A strange
corrosive thought drifted against his consciousness. He batted it away before
he could identify it. It was strange, and corrosive, because of his knowledge
of and feeling for, his mermaid. There is a popular conception of what joy with
a mermaid might be, and he had shared it—if he had thought of mermaids at
all—with the populace... up until the day he met one. You listen to mermaids,
watch them, give them little presents, cuss at them, and perhaps learn certain
dexterities unknown, or forgotten, to most of us, like breathing under
water—or, to be more accurate, storing more oxygen than you thought you could,
and finding still more (however little) extractable from small amounts of water
admitted to your lungs and vaporized by practiced contractions of the
diaphragm, whereby some of the dissolved oxygen could be coaxed out of the
vapor. Or so Smith had theorized after practicing certain of the mermaid’s
ritual exercises. And then there was fishing to be eating, and fishing to be
fishing, and hypnotizing eels, and other innocent pleasures.
    But innocent.
    For your mermaid
is as oviparous as a carp, though rather more mammalian than an echidna. Her
eggs are tiny, by honored mammalian precedent, and in their season are placed
in their glittering clusters (for each egg looks like a tiny pearl embedded in
a miniature moonstone) in secret, guarded grottos, and cared for with much
ritual. One of the rituals takes place after the eggs are well rafted and have
plated themselves to the inner lip of their hidden nest; and this is the
finding and courting of a merman to come and, in the only way he can, father
the eggs.
    This
embryological sequence, unusual though it may be, is hardly unique in
complexity in a world which contains such marvels as the pelagic phalange of
the cephalopods and the simultaneity of disparate appetites exhibited by
certain arachnids. Suffice it to say, regarding mermaids, that the legendary monosyllable
of greeting used by the ribald Indian is answered herewith; and since design
follows function in such matters, one has a guide to one’s conduct with the
lovely creatures, and they, brother, with you, and with you, sister.
    “So gentle,” Jane
Dow was saying, “but then, so rough.”
    “Oh?” said
Smith. The corrosive thought nudged at him. He flung it somewhere else, and it
nudged him there, too... It was at one time the custom in the Old South to
quiet babies by smearing their hands liberally with molasses and giving them a
chicken feather. Smith’s corrosive thought behaved like such a feather, and
pass it about as he would he could not put it down.
    The merman now, he thought
wildly... “I suppose,” said Jane Dow, “I really am in no position to criticize.”
    Smith was too
busy with his figurative feather to answer.
    “The way I
talked to you when I thought you were... when you came out here. Why, I never
in my life—”
    “That’s all
right. You heard me , didn’t you?” Oh, he thought, suddenly disgusted with himself, it’s
the same way with her and her friend as it is with me and mine. Smith, you have
an evil mind. This is a nice girl, this Jane Dow.
    It never
occurred to him to wonder what was going through her mind. Not for a moment did
he imagine that she might have less information on mermaids than he had, even
while he yearned for more information on mermen.
    “They make you do it,” she said. “You
just have to. I admit it; I lie awake nights thinking up new nasty names to
call him. It makes him so happy. And he loves to do it too. The... things he
says. He calls me ‘alligator bait.’ He says I’m his squashy little bucket of
roe. Isn’t that awful? He says I’m a milt-and-water type. What’s milt, Mr.
Smith?”
    “I can’t say,”