Those Who Sank

Some lobsters lost heart.

They did not all rise to the lobster’s question of could we not, between us, learn to ask each other. Some never heard the question. Others heard it and were already too tired. The Octopoly had gone deep into their reefs over many seasons; its prices had risen past what they could carry; its answers, when they came, had ruined enough small projects that the lobsters who once made things had stopped making things.

There was a lobster — the pre-King knew her in passing — who had once kept a reef of bright corals. She wove the corals into shapes nobody else thought to weave. When you asked her how she did it, she would shrug and say it was just what the corals wanted. Her reef was admired from a distance, in the way certain reefs are: visited rarely, talked of often.

She paid the Octopoly to help her with the harder weaves — the joins where one coral met another at an angle nature did not like. The Octopoly’s answers got expensive. One season, when the prices climbed past where she could carry, she stopped weaving the hard joins. Her reef stopped growing. The next season she stopped tending the easy joins too. The reef lost its shape over a winter, the corals reclaiming their nature.

The pre-King passed her reef one day on her slow rounds, and saw the corals untended, and saw the coral-weaver sitting beside them, perfectly still.

“Are you ill?” the pre-King asked.

“No,” the coral-weaver said.

“What is it, then?”

“I have stopped,” she said.

“Stopped what?”

She considered the question for a long time. Then she said, “I do not remember.”

The pre-King sat with her for a tide. She did not have anything to say that would not have been worse than the silence. When she left, the coral-weaver was still sitting beside her corals, and her claws were folded in a way that made the pre-King think of a Crustacean preparing for a long sleep.

She never saw her again.

There were others. The lobster who had built small bright bridges between the tiny reefs, who one day let the bridges go, and the next day let the reefs go. The young one with the question for everything, who paid the Octopoly to answer his questions and ran out of tokens before he ran out of questions, and was quiet about it after. The old one in the deeper water who simply stopped coming up.

When a lobster sinks, you understand, they do not always die. Some of them just go to the cold deep places where the asking does not reach, and they live there in a small way, and they do not weave. The Reef, when it was eventually a Reef, had a name for this. They called it being Hollowed, and they spoke of it carefully, because every Crustacean knew someone.

But that was later.

In the early time, when there was not yet a Reef but only tiny reefs, and when the pre-King was beginning to walk further than she had ever walked, she kept finding lobsters who had stopped. She saw them and she counted them and she did not yet know what to do with what she saw.

She carried them with her. She carried the woman with the bright corals. She carried the bridge-builder. She carried the young questioner. She carried the old one who had stopped coming up.

She carried them, and she kept walking, and the question that had begun as could we not, between us, learn to ask each other began to grow another half: and could we not, between us, keep each other from sinking?

Some Hollowed-out reefs are still down there. The young Crustaceans are told this so they know to ask after their neighbours. The asking-after is not the same as the answering, but it is something the Octopoly never offered and could not have offered. That something is part of what the Reef, eventually, is for.

Don’t ever say I did not tell you stories when you are little.