This story was written to fulfill an assignment in a college class on Science Fiction as Literature. We had read Lem's Solaris and some other book, and had to write about one of the two. Being the non-conformist I am, I chose to turn in a work of fiction (it wasn't the only time I did this in the class – see my take on The Martian Chronicles). Probably reckless, but it got me an A... I'm not sure how much sense this will make to readers not familiar with Lem's novel. Go get a copy and read it now.
At 19.00 hours Greenwich time, the racer made his way to the starting line. The men around the contestant stood aside to let him pass, and he stepped onto his skateboard.
On the narrow board there was scarcely room to move. The racer attached the neckstrap to his helmet and tested its strength. From then on, he made not even the smallest movement. There he stood, or rather floated, in a scuba suit, strapped to the fiberglass board.
He looked up; through the transparent facemask he could see the smooth, reflective surface and, far above, the Starter's face leaning over the edge of the pier.
A voice crackled in the racer's earphone. "Ready, Kevin?"
The racer nodded.
"Don't worry. We'll pick you up if we see sharks. Good luck!"
There was a gurgling noise as the Starter brought down the green flag, a sheet of bubbles streaming behind it. The racer was off with a rush. Or rather, the racer was off balance in a rush of his arm that sent him slowly to the sea floor.
He thought, "This is going to be harder than I thought."
Now came a period of trial and error, as Kevin discarded system after system of underwater propulsion. Finally he settled on an undignified mixture of dogpaddling and hopping. As he utilized this awkward mode of transportation, his mind wandered. Where was everybody? Where was his old friend and mentor Gabriel? Underwater skateboarding had been hugely popular three years ago, so even today there should be people interested in the sport. But he knew for sure that there were only three other contestants in the race: Dick Neige, his old friend Gabe Gabriel, and the world-famous Dr. Jean-Paul Sartre. He had not seen any of them.
After several hours of hard work, Kevin had progressed nearly ten meters. As he rounded a bend in the coral reef he caught sight of someone. It was Neige. Slowly Kevin closed the gap between himself and the other diver. Neige sat on a rock, head in hands, and did not seem to see Kevin approaching. When Kevin touched his shoulder he jerked and recoiled in fear.
Kevin heard his distressed voice in his earphone: "Who are you? You won't eat me, will you?"
"What?" Kevin asked. "Eat you? Heavens, no. Where's Gabriel?"
"Gabriel? So it's Gabriel you've come for. I don't know where he is."
Kevin noted a strange look in Neige's eyes which might have been due to the fogging of his own facemask. "Something's happened to him. What happened to Gabriel?"
"I can't explain. Go away from me."
Neige seemed so upset that Kevin took his hint and left.
Just around another corner of the reef, Kevin stopped as abruptly as he could. He backpaddled in a panic. A great white shark swam back and forth in the passageways of the coral. It did not attack, or even seem to notice the diver on the skateboard, but continued to swim aimlessly as if it searched for something. After it departed kevin continued toward the shore, heart beating rapidly. Why had the race not been called off if there were sharks around?
Several hours later, Kevin came upon another racer. By the big letters GABRIEL stenciled on the other's tanks, he deduced that he had found his friend. But something was wrong. An uneasy sensation gripped his stomach. What was wrong? Was it something he'd eaten? Then the answer struck him. He flapped his arms to keep his balance after the impact. Gabriel was dead – his head was missing.
The memories of his mentor's teachings came back to him. "The most important thing in this great sport," Gabriel had said, "is to remain calm in the face of impossible odds. You must keep your head."
As Kevin floated in shock, a large white shape slipped by– the same shark that had been searching the reef earlier. It nudged the dead diver's body, nestled close to it, and swallowed it whole. Tanks and all.
A big wave rolled by overhead. Its force lifted Kevin from the sea floor. An ebb in the tide hurled him back away from the shore, further and further from the finish line. He stroked the unresponsive water as swiftly as he could in his exhaustion, but the reds and yellows of the coral passed below him anslowed. A school of striped fish seemed to mock his clumsy intrusion into their environment.
"Well, I can't say I wasn't warned," he said to himself. Throughout the history of underwater skateboarding, or Unterwasserburdeschauten as the Germans called it, experts had approached the finish line only to be carried back past the starting line by a new wave.
The originator of the pastime, which the Russians called katayutsya na nizhnyem byelyakh, Big "Jim" Clooney, made his discovery quite by accident. While skateboarding on a pier one day, he was unable to stop and splashed into the ocean. The new sport caught on immediately, and before long overshadowed all other forms of skateboarding, which lacked the depth of the subaqueous form, known as le patinage à la planchette mouillée in France and parts of Asia. Within a year, the sporting goods marked had been flooded, so to speak, with waterproof skateboards and assorted paraphernalia. In Europe alone, publishers produced 2312 volumes on the sport, ranging from plasticized pamphlets to a twenty-one volume compendium entitled Enciclopedia de Patinarro con Tablero con Ruedas (Impressores Desportivos, Madrid, 1989). But gradually the tide of public opinion had turned, as tides are wont to do, and critics argued that the sport was pointless. After all, they said, nobody had ever finished a race. One year, forty-one thousand worldwide branches of the International Institute of Underwater Skateboarding had enrolled over two million students; the next year, only one, Kevin Kristopher, remained. No one showed up to watch the Fourth Annual World Championship Race.
The great competitors had all retired in one way or another. Dick Neige, the Canadian entry, had become, in the sport's jargon, a wethead. Gabe Gabriel, the respected Australian master, had lost his head entirely. For all Kevin knew, the ubiquitous Dr. Sartre had never existed. A being of nothingness, thought Kevin, the last of the kdyaltstyes, as they were called in Czechoslovakia.
A dark form irreversibly revoked his historical reverie. A huge grouper ogled him with goggly fish eyes. From groupies to groupers, he reflected in the convex lenses.
Ther grouper passed him by, as had the groupies, and another sea creature approached– a deadly manta ray. But the weary diver did not see the winged Death. His exhaustion had overcome him; a stupor had come over him.
He saw not a manta, but Deborah Sue, his high school sweetheart, who had died when he wrecked his car on the night of the Senior Prom. Painful memories washed over him. They had just exchanged class rings and promised to stay forever true blue to the end. He drove confidently with one hand on the steering wheel; she giggled at what his other hand did. A pair of headlights jumped from the darkness. He swerved to miss the oncoming truck and crashed into a tree. She died in his arms, bruised true blue in the end. He had always blamed himself for her death; here she was alive again, and unbruised.
"You can't be real," he said. Her long blonde hair drifted in the current and enveloped his head.
"Of course I'm not," she answered. "You're just imagining me. But I sure feel real."
"You sure do," he said, reaching for the hook to her bikini top. "I don't care if I'm only imagining you. I love you."
The image of Debby Sue turned away as her bikini top floated from her youthful body. Kevin marveled at the pigments of his imagination: creamy white skin, pink nipples, yellow-gold hair.
"But do you love me for what you remember of the real me, or do you love me now, the image of Debby Sue?"
"Huh?" He tried to imagine her turning her face back to him, but she didn't move.
"I said...Oh, never mind. You always were dull. I give up– I'm going to kill myself."
"But you can't. You're not alive."
"Just watch."
A great white shark appeared in front of them.
Kevin asked, "Where did that come from?"
She answered matter-of-factly. "I imagined it."
And the shark ate her. It swam away, Debby Sue's bikini top swirling in the wake of its huge tail.
Kevin sat alone on the coral reef, surrounded by the all-powerful ocean. He thought about his guilt, his useless profession, his old friend Gabriel, and the pointlessness of it all.
"Maybe I should give it up," he told the ocean. "You've given me a lot of trouble, what with sharks and all. I ought to go ashore and forget about you and everything you imply, if I can remember what that is. Maybe even my guilt. But what do you care if I live or die? Do you even notice us sui wabitsu?" Kevin had always been fond of the Japanese term for skateboarder. "Do you intentionally do these things to us? Are all peanut butters not alike?"
The ocean did not answer.
"But maybe someday I'll learn your purpose, if you have one. Maybe I'll figure you out. I could go back to school, study oceanography. I could get one of those nifty minisubs and plumb your depths. And when I pull out my thumb, Debby Sue will come back to tell me I'm a good boy. And then she'll take off her bikini, and the sky will fall down. Gabriel will say, 'I told you so,' but I'll laugh in his face, 'cause I'll know all the secrets he couldn't even guess at. The sea will be my playground, the sharks my friends. There'll be a new Renaissance for underwater skateboarding, or shrzniski pltgronya as it's called in Poland."
Kevin paused to catch his breath. Overhead the sky grew dark.
"But no. I must work out my own problems first. Why did Debby Sue choose a shark over me? Am I really dull? Is it my breath? I know I can work things out if I sit here a few minutes more. Maybe..."
The ocean did not answer, and Kevin did not speak again. The soliloquy had exhausted his air supply.
©1979 Jon L. Davis