Forty signs of rain - Kim Stanley Robinson [75]
As he paddled, caught waves and rode the lefts in long ecstatic seconds, and then worked to get back outside, he wondered again about this strangely powerful feeling of saltwater as home. There must be an evolutionary reason for such joy at being cast forward by a wave. Perhaps there was a part of the brain that predated the split with the aquatic mammals, some deep and fundamental part of mentation that craved the experience. Certainly the cerebellum conserved very ancient brain workings. On the other hand perhaps the moments of weightlessness, and the way one floated, mimicked the uterine months of life, which were then called back to mind when one swam. Or maybe it was a very sophisticated aesthetic response, an encounter with the sublime, as one was constantly falling and yet not dying or even getting hurt, so that the discrepancy in information between the danger signals and the comfort signals was experienced as a kind of triumph over reality.
Whatever; it was a lot of fun. And made him feel vastly better.
Then it was time to go. He took one last ride, and rather than kicking out when the fast part was over, rode the broken wave straight in toward the shore.
He lay in the shallows and let the hissing whitewater shove him around. Back and forth, ebb and flow. For a long time he lolled there. In his childhood and youth he had spent a fair bit of time at the end of every ocean session doing this, “grunioning” he called it; and he had often thought that no matter how much people worked to make more complicated sports in the ocean, grunioning was all you really needed. Now he splayed out and let the water wash him back and forth, feeling the sandy surges lift and push him. Grooming by ocean. As it ran back out to sea the water sifted the fine black flakes in the sand, mixing them into the rounded tan and white grains until they made networks of overlapping black V’s. Coursing patterns of nature—
“Are you okay?”
He jerked his head up. It was Marta, on her way out.
“Oh, hi. Yeah I’m okay.”
“What’s this, stalking me now?”
“No,” then realizing it might be a little bit true: “No!”
He stared at her, getting angry. She stared back.
“I’m just catching some waves,” he said, mouth tight. “You’ve got no reason to say such a thing to me.”
“No? Then why did you ask me out yesterday?”
“A mistake, obviously. I thought it might do some good to talk.”
“Last year, maybe. But you didn’t want to then. You didn’t want to so much that you ran off to NSF instead. Now it’s too late. So just leave me alone, Frank.”
“I am!”
“Leave me alone.”
She turned and ran into the surf, diving onto her board and paddling hard. When she got out far enough she sat up on her board and balanced, looking outward.
Women in wetsuits looked funny, Frank thought as he watched her. Not just the obvious, but also the subtler differences in body morphology were accentuated: the callipygosity, the shorter torso-to-leg ratio, the 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio—whatever it was, it was different, and it drew his eye like a magnet. He could tell the difference from as far away as he could see people at all. Every surfer could.
What did that mean? That he was in thrall to a woman who despised him? That he had messed up the main relationship of his life and his best chance so far for reproductive success? That sexual dimorphism was a powerful driver in the urge to reproduction? That he was a slave to his sperm, and an idiot?
All of the above.
His good mood shattered, he hauled himself to his feet. He stripped off the booties and long john, toweled off at his rental car, drove back up to his storage unit, and dropped off his gear. Returned to his hotel room, showered, checked out, and drove down the coast highway to the airport, feeling like an exile even while he was still here on his own home ground.
Something was deeply wrong.
He checked in the car, robotted