Coelacanth Fish History Fiction

"And the world will descend again into primordial slime!" said our host.

"Primordial slime!" We raised our glasses and drank.

Under the circumstances it would have taken a very, very stupid man to do otherwise. If he'd wanted us to drink the damned slime we'd have been delighted to oblige. As it was, it might have been preferable to what we were drinking. Perhaps if you had a coiled shell, and an indeterminate number of ropy, slimy tentacles striped in alternating fire-engine red and puke green, this might be your favorite tipple. I met someone once who thought ouzo was magnificent stuff, so anything is possible. He'd quite have liked this brew. It was greenish milky-colored, aniseed-scented and highly alcoholic. "The finest of old Atlantis's brews," said our host with all the nostalgia that only an extremely large Ammonite can put into the writhing of his tentacles. "Back from before the lease lapsed and the tenants got evicted."

"Tastes like ouzo," said Stephen Speairs, determined to prove that nearly getting us all killed once wasn't bad enough. The last time . . . well Wales and whales do have a lot in common. All right . . . Maybe it was just my experience. Whales are grey and what I remember of Wales was grey too, although that might have been the mist, drizzle and then torrential downpour, and some blurred vision caused by falling off the back of a bike and protecting the beer in my hand instead of my head. One has ones own perceptions and priorities. Reluctantly, I have to admit that sometimes they're wrong. I have been told that Wales is beautiful and that beer is replaceable and heads are not. I take the scientific approach to these matters and require proof.

"Ouzo! Humph." Snorted the ammonite Cthulhu, spraying us all with a fine dusting of ink. " Greeks. Upstarts. They stole the idea from us. It was . . . But we claimed it back and made it better."

"How?" I looked at the cloudy green liquid again.

"We added a distillation of wormwood. Artemisia absinthum."

Which could just explain how come we were drinking with the worlds largest potential supply of calamari. Absinthe—or the green fairy—was supposed to be hallucinogenic. Right now the hallucination theory was more attractive than being on a seaweedy island, that showed signs of being underwater recently, somewhere in the middle of the chillier parts of the South Pacific, with creatures that either belonged in Paleolithic history or in the dark pages of old horror novels, or possibly both.

Our arrival here in R'yleh had been clouded by a little a little awkwardness. That and ink. Mark Twain said you should never argue with a man who buys his ink by the quart. This is true. I'd like to add the Dexter Guptill corollary: "You should really, really never argue with a megalomaniacal thirty ton proto-cephalopod who produces ink by the forty-four gallon drum." Along with: "When buildings start sprouting tentacles it is probably time to give up the sauce. Or drink a lot more of it," that may go down in the annals of history as two of my greatest wise sayings.

Cthulhu had been somewhat upset by our apparent liking for whales. It turns out the ammonites are all called Cthulhu. It's sort of like "Bruce and Sheila" except Sheila's called Cthulhu too. To avoid confusion, to explain it Monty Python terms. It also explains—besides their regenerative powers—why killing Cthulhu is like searching for the logic in New Zealand Immigration laws (which is why Cthulhu was found on a remote island in the South Pacific, not Wellington, where it should be), a task which is more difficult than trying to persuade the Flatwoods Monster to attend a Labour Party conference in Blackpool. Trust me. I've tried both. Not killing Cthulhu, the other two. Cthulhu was of course mind-bogglingly evil and planning to return the world to oceans full of primordial slime—in other words, she was a sort of fairly normal politician, and one with more good points than average. "So what is the difference between this stuff and absinthe?" I asked. I was quite proud of that conversational gambit. You can tell Guptill is at his best after being wrapped in a vast suckered tentacle and sprayed with ink.

Cthulhu shrugged, which is quite a sight in a thirty-ton ammonite. There was a lot of it to quiver. "Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder. This stuff just makes you stoned." She was drinking it by the quart.

"You can't get absinthe any more," explained Dann Douglas. "They stopped selling all Thujone-containing liquors a good half century ago. But you can still get Cthulhu-juice at the convocations."

"Convocations?" asked Stephen Speairs, as calmly as if he hadn't been the cause of our tentacle encounter.

"You know, when the guys—low, mixed-blood types like me according to Lovecraft—get together and chant 'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn' and sacrifice a few victims, talk about the coming of the end of the world and then get completely pie-eyed on Cthulhu-juice and end up sleeping with someone you would rather not have. Rather dull really. But it is tax-deductible. Cultist meetings, conventions, who can tell the difference?" explained Dann.

Thinking about it I had to admit he was right. I'd been a good few scientific conventions that could have been described as much like that.

"So how did you end up caught up in all of this?" asked Speairs.

Dann sighed. "Caught up is the right word. I am . . . or was once . . . a big game fisherman. I thought I would catch all of the largest species of fish in the sea. I started in a quite an ordinary way—salmon in Siberia, Giant Trevally in Cosmoleto. Then I got into collecting records. Monstrous catfish in the Mekong. Sailfish. Then sharks... and I became obsessed with Megalodon. And in following up the reports . . . found myself here."

"Reports?" I asked, scenting the famous pong of an urban legend.

"Of a very large shark. Possibly the largest to ever swim," he said, sadly. "Megalodon."

"Carcharadon megalodon," I said. "Or Carcharacoles megalodon, depending on which side of the taxonomic fence you land on. I've been out of it for a while so I don't what the thinking is these days."

"Probably thinking you don't have a clue what you're talking about," said Stephen cheerfully lighting another coffin nail. "I don't." How he had dry and uncrushed cigarettes at this stage of our misadventure must remain a mystery to me.

"Do you know what a great white shark is? I asked, cursing myself. Thanks to "Jaws" everyone thought they knew. Most of them thought it was something with the intellect of Einstein, and the desire for blood of Rambo . . . which was about right, except for a few minor details. Like it was actually the intellect of Rambo, and as bloodthirsty as Einstein. Yeah, yeah. They're big carnivores. They eat seals. They eat relatively few tourists, as even big dumb carnivores with brains the size of Bob Mugabe's conscience know that anything that eats tourist food is likely to give you secondary poisoning. We probably taste vile.

"Big sharks that eat people," said Stephen, obliging me.

"Well, you're half right. They can get up to about eighteen feet long and can weigh in at near four thousand pounds. Bigger than your average carp. So yes, they're big."

"But there were stories of bigger ones, far bigger ones, from the coast of Australia," said Dann. "Fish of up to thirty-six feet. That was the record for many years."

"The stories didn't stand closer inspection. Whale sharks, Basking sharks, just plain exaggeration."

Dann shook his head. "And if you dig far enough and go back far enough, you have reports from the Atlantic, the Stronsay beast, which was fifty-five feet long and identified as a shark from a close examination of its vertebrae. But for frequency and size they all came down to the South Pacific. Port Fairy was a whaling and sealing port . . ."

"Ah, back down to whales," said Stephen.

I snorted. Sharks are my interest. "Thirty-six feet long, it was supposed to be. . . . And when they examined the jaw, they decided it was a serious error of measurement and that it was merely seventeen feet long."

Dann fixed me with a manic stare. "Aha . . . If they examined the right jaw, Mister Guptill."

Stephen Speairs chuckled. "Yeah they probably looked at the left jaw. That came from a smaller fish."

By the way Dann looked at him I could tell this came under the heading of "not very funny." "I tracked down the original jaw," he said. "The incident happened in 1870 in South Australia—it was a pretty wild and woolly place in those days. Museums weren't secured the way they are now. And there were some big great whites being caught in that area. Someone swapped the jaws in late 1800's. I found the real one, the original. The real jaw came from a Megalodon. A juvenile Megalodon."

"Stupid, badly behaved brat, served it right," said Cthulhu. "Always too greedy."

"But why would anyone swap the jaw for that of a smaller fish? And why keep it secret . . ." I asked, in spite of my self.

Dann jerked a thumb at his monster master. Well, he had stopped us from being devoured, over the confusion about Wales. "I think Cthulhu just answered your question."

"We bred them to try and control whale numbers. Ungrateful, that's what they are. To so bite the tentacle that feeds them," said the vast ammonite. I was doing my best to pretend I wasn't drinking something alcoholic and hallucinogenic with a monster that promised world domination and destruction. This sort of statement made that pretense hard.

"I guess it might be easier to get people to believe a fisherman might exaggerate the size of fish a tiny bit," admitted Stephen, with the reluctance of a true fisherman.

Dann nodded. "Yes, all they needed to do was add a tiny bit of doubt, and people believed there was good reason for it. No one ever believes fishermen's stories."

"All true fishermen are intrinsically honest," I said defensively. "I can prove this. None of them work in the South African banking industry."

They looked at me in puzzlement. Obviously this joy had never come their way. "So?"

"Trust me. According to my experiences, if they did, you couldn't trust them." It suddenly occurred to me that Stephen might possibly be a banker. It didn't look likely, but still. "You're not in banking are you?"

His shoulders shook. "No. But I still don't see why it proves that all fishermen are honest."

"Not all. Only the true fishermen. The salt of the earth, the good fellows who would give you their last bloodworm, the lads who would share their whiskey with you. The other kind are lower life forms," I explained.

"Hm. I seem to have met a fair number of bankers in angling pubs. Well, more like outright liars, because they claimed to be in almost every other profession, and yet they'd caught some amazing fish in unlikely places," said Dann.

"Ah!" I said the light dawned. "Pubs. That's different. They may cause good men to... exaggerate a trifle. It's the shortage of oxygen in your average crowded and smoke-filled pub. Watch. The no smoking rule will shrink fish by 25%. But really it's more a case of wishful thinking and the hitherto unknown elasticity of their arms, caused by alcohol. Really, it makes arms stretchy. But as for Megalodon . . . no one's arms are that long, no matter how elastic."

"So its a shark. A really, really big shark?" said Stephen Speairs with the sort of tenacity that should have worried me.

I nodded. "The biggest ever. The teeth are mostly what we have for evidence. They're about seven inches high."

"Seven inch high sharks? Wow." Speairs laughed.

"No, the teeth, you . . ." I took a look at the size of him. Swallowed the "moron" part. He wasn't. Irritating maybe, but he at least knew something about Cthulhu. "We're still guessing shark length as no one really knows what shape their bodies were. If you assume that it was something like a Great White—well you can guess at something like forty to sixty feet long.

"There have been larger estimates," said Dann. "A hundred feet," he said, dreamily. "Sixty tons . . . but even a forty-foot shark would destroy any attempt to catch it on rod and line. Destroy a trawl net. You're not going to catch one easily. Only the juveniles are even slightly vulnerable."

"Still, they have been extinct for at least one and half million years," I said.

Dann raised his eyebrows. "Like the coelacanth. No fossils since the end of the cretaceous."

It was a venerable defense. "The coelacanth is a deep water species. . . ."

Dann smiled with the delight of man who has tricked you into clinching his argument for him. Cthulhu poured more drinks. "And it is notable that most of the Coelacanth fossils came from shallow seas. Yet all the experts claim it was not found in the intervening time because it's a deep water species."

I'd dealt with that one before. "That's because that is where we can access the fossil material. It seems that all the Megalodon teeth came from shallow water dredges. They were a tropical coastal water species . . ."

"Which preyed on whales and pinnipeds—which, of course, are always far more abundant in resource-poor tropical oceans. You never get them among the krill in the great southern ocean," said Dann dryly.

Speairs chuckled. "I think the sarcasm meter just exploded."

"The water may have been too cold for them." I said, fighting a rearguard action. The Greenland Shark proved some sharks could live and thrive in icy water.

Dann looked at me over his steepled fingers. "Or—just as Great Whites have temperate distribution and raise their body temperature by the rete mirabile and gigantothermy, the same might just have applied to Megalodon, only more so."

Stephen took a long deep swallow of the green fairy. "Okay. You just lost me completely. That was Latin. I can smell Latin a mile away. It's usually used to make ordinary things sound like black magic or the law."

"An arterial/venous countercurrent heat exchanger, which enables the fish to raise its body temperature, despite being poikilothermic," I explained.

Stephen nodded. "Thank you. I'm an expert at foreign languages. And that was definitely Greek to me. I could tell by the way I didn't understand a word."

"Means it is warmer than the water it is living in, despite not being what you would call 'warm-blooded,'" Dann explained. "And because they are so big, the heat inside can be retained efficiently. Like dinosaurs, and," he said with a sneer of distaste, "whales."

"And elephants. They only live in arctic." I said, dryly.

Never waste your sarcasm the products of the British schooling system. "I thought that was the mammoths. Or was it mastodons. Never been too sure which was which."

"Both, said Cthulhu mournfully. "Very respectful and very tasty."

"It still doesn't answer the fact that remains: the teeth were found in shallow sea, temperate and tropical areas . . ." I said tenaciously.

"Mastodon teeth or mammoth teeth? Or dentures from the Spice Girls?" asked Speairs.

"Gah. The latter of course. Shark teeth, naturally. We're talking about sharks."

He nodded. "Megalo-whatsits. Great in those salmon streams for digesting the moneyed classes."

"Sadly, Megalodons are a bit large for the average stream, and they're allergic to waxed cotton. They're rare to mythical fish. You wouldn't want to waste them on those, even if you could find them." I said, unwarily accepting a refill.

"Well," said Dann, "I decided that they used to occur in the Southern ocean, and probably the arctic as well. They also used to follow the migratory whales. Keep in deep cool water, and nip in for a bite—which sometimes ended in lost teeth. These things happen when you dine on whales. And if there was going to be relict population anywhere, it had to be in the southern oceans, probably somewhere near 48º9'S, 123º43'W.

"A piece of ocean without anything at all," I said, envisaging it. It was, indeed one of the least visited pieces of the sea—thousands of miles of nothing.

"Also where Lovecraft betrayed R'lyeh to be," said Cthulhu glumly. "We don't have a lot of private spots to haul out and get the parasites off our shells, and that lowlife has to go and cooperate with the faceless one and his CIA lackeys to betray it. Do you know how much effort that cover up was? We had to try and track down all the original copies of the February 1928 Weird Tales and substitute them with the same story but a slightly different line of Latitude. Couldn't just disappear them or have our acolytes eliminate all the purchasers of Weird Tales, tempting though it was. We never quite got them all."

"So how come it doesn't come up on Google Earth?" I asked.

"We made certain arrangements," said Cthulhu, loftily. "Anyway, that's need to know basis information."

I looked at the glass of green fairy. I really had to stop drinking this stuff. "And so: I suppose you never caught Megalodon, Dann. You wound up here instead, occasionally dropping into bars in Mozambique."

His eyes took on a faraway look. "Yes. I caught a Megalodon. But no one told me they were telepathic. I should have guessed. Most fish are to some degree. That's why it is possible to catch salmon. They are, but their minds are so taken up with sex that they can be fooled. Otherwise—well, in some species the group mind is weak, too taken up with food. Of course, in some species even the group mind fails to achieve that critical threshold of intelligence, the level of the junior French railway official, and they never even attain the semblance of sentience. In other cases—if the fisherman is mindless enough, or paying attention to something else such as pornography (which confuses most fish), they can fool the prey, even if they could have read his mind. But when dealing with really large minds . . . you need more help."

He looked at us. "At that time I still believed it was just a question of tackle and tactics. Of being in the right place at the right time. I should have guessed because the right time to have been in a particular place is always . . . last week. Or next week. It is too much of a coincidence that the fishing is always better when you're not in that spot."

"That is an experience I've had," I admitted.

"I decided that the answer was lots of chum, and of course, some kind of longer range super-attractant. The sharks had to be successfully following the whales, which meant they had to be using something about the whales to track them. Whales use sound to communicate across large distances . . . a species that preyed principally on whales might actually be using that very thing. Now, sound is more of a mammalian thing but I figured evolution might have driven the sharks in this direction."

"Selective breeding," said Cthulhu. "But they've abused it. We're in dispute about it."

"Which is why they've been engaged in industrial action for the last fifty years," explained Dann. "The Megalodons learned a fair amount from humans."

Cthulhu made a schlurping sound with its suckers. "Can't get decent help these centuries."

"Well, you can hear a sperm whale six miles away underwater, and a blue whale a hundred miles away. So you must it admit it was easier to find the baleens than the toothed whales," said Dann, apparently trying to be reasonable. It had the air of a well-worn argument.

"Excuses," said Cthulhu grumpily. "When we return the oceans to primordial slime, the whales will all have to go, but in the meantime humpback tunes are very popular with the younger Cthulhu. Anyone under forty millennia has no discernment. Rorqual music! Huh. More like raucous music. Not a patch on a patch on a