The Shell That Sang
Chapter 9: The Shell That Sang
It was summer vacation, and Nobita was building a terrible sandcastle.
This was not a new observation. Even by the standards of sandcastles built by children who had given no particular thought to structural engineering, Nobita's was unusually bad. It leaned. All four walls leaned. They leaned in different directions, which would have been interesting if it hadn't been structurally disastrous. The tower had collapsed twice. He was beginning a third attempt with the focused optimism of someone who had not yet learned to stop.
"Mine has a moat," Suneo said.
Suneo's castle had a moat. It also had battlements. It also had, somehow, a small flag on the highest tower made from a piece of straw and a candy wrapper. Suneo was regarding it with the satisfaction of someone who felt their best qualities were being accurately reflected.
"The yacht is over there," he added, pointing. His family's yacht was anchored in the deeper water beyond the swimming area, white and gleaming and extremely present.
"We know about the yacht," Giant said. Giant was lying flat on his back on the sand with his cap over his face. He was not building anything. He was on vacation.
Doraemon was in the shade of a beach umbrella, reading. The umbrella was blue and white. The book was about marine biology. He had eaten two ice creams since arriving and was considering a third.
Shizuka walked along the water's edge, where the sand was wet and firm and each wave left a pattern of dark lines before pulling back.
She had not planned to find anything. She was simply walking, the way you walk at the edge of the sea when everything is warm and slow and the afternoon has no particular schedule. The water came up over her feet and retreated. A small crab moved sideways in the shallows.
And then she saw the shell.
It was spiral, and pale, and about the size of her closed fist. Not remarkable, except that the light inside it — or what looked like light — was a very faint blue that she did not think ordinary shells contained. She picked it up. It was smooth and warm from the sun and heavier than she expected.
She held it to her ear.
The ocean was there, the way the ocean is always in a shell: rushing and ancient and enormous.
And then, underneath the ocean, there was a voice.
It was singing.
It was also crying.
These two things were happening at the same time, in a way that Shizuka did not know was possible. The song was small and intricate and full of a kind of sorrow that she could not quite name — not sadness exactly, but the particular feeling of something that has been beautiful for a very long time and is watching itself disappear.
"Help us," the voice said. Or sang. Both.
Shizuka lowered the shell.
The afternoon continued around her. A child shrieked with delight in the shallows. The yacht sat in the distance, gleaming. Suneo was adding a decorative portcullis to his castle gate using a popsicle stick.
She walked back.
"I can't hear anything," Nobita said, pressing the shell to his ear.
"Ocean sounds," Giant said, without moving.
"That's what it sounds like to me," Suneo said. He had tried it briefly and handed it back. "Just the sea. Your ears are doing something weird."
"Doraemon," Shizuka said.
Doraemon set down his marine biology book. He took the shell and turned it in his hands, examining it with the careful expression he used when something was genuinely unfamiliar. He pressed a small round device — a sensor the size of a coin, retrieved from his pocket — against the surface.
He looked at the readings. He looked at the shell again.
"It's broadcasting," he said, "on an empathic frequency."
"A what?" Nobita said.
"Empathic." Doraemon set the sensor away. "Feelings have frequencies. Not always, and not strongly enough to detect — usually. But something is projecting feeling at a level strong enough to be received." He paused. "Most people can't hear that kind of signal. It's like a radio that only works for certain receivers." He looked at Shizuka. "You have very strong empathy."
Shizuka considered this. "Someone is asking for help," she said. "They're frightened. And they're trying to stay hopeful and not quite managing it."
"In the shell," Nobita said. This was the kind of sentence that would have been strange anywhere other than standing next to Doraemon.
"Not in the shell," Doraemon said. "Through it. The shell is picking up the signal. Whatever's generating it is — " He checked the sensor again. "Down. Underwater."
Everyone looked at the sea.
The sea looked back, large and indifferent and full of secrets.
"We should investigate," Shizuka said. It was not a question.
Doraemon reached into his pocket and produced four small tubes. They were slender and pale blue, with white caps, and they looked like the kind of lip balm available at any pharmacy. The label on each read: DEEP SEA CREAM — AQUATIC RESPIRATION FORMULA — ONE APPLICATION: 24 HOURS.
"You rub it on your face," Doraemon said. "Just the face. Concentrate on the nose and mouth."
"Does it taste like anything?" Nobita asked.
"Mint, I think."
"Does it—"
"You'll be able to breathe underwater for twenty-four hours," Doraemon said. "That's all it does. It doesn't do anything to your vision or pressure tolerance, so don't go extremely deep, and it doesn't help with cold, so stay close together." He paused. "Also, don't swallow seawater."
"That's just generally good advice," Shizuka said.
Giant had sat up. He was looking at the tubes with interest. "So we just rub this stuff on and we can breathe underwater?"
"Yes."
"And there's something down there that needs help?"
"Apparently."
Giant looked at the sea. The sea was quite large. Giant was quite large. He seemed to feel this was an even match.
"Fine," he said.
Suneo had gone quiet in the way he went quiet when he was calculating the risk-to-reward ratio. This calculation was visible on his face: the slight narrowing of the eyes, the glance at the yacht (too far to reach quickly if things went wrong), the rapid assessment of everyone else's commitment.
"If things go badly," he said, "we swim up. That's the plan."
"That's always the plan," Nobita said.
They applied the cream. It went on smooth and cool and did, faintly, smell of mint. It dried in seconds and left no trace. Shizuka kept the shell in her hand. Doraemon closed his pocket with the practiced efficiency of someone who had done this many times before.
They walked into the sea.
The water was warm near the surface and cooler below. The light changed from ordinary afternoon to something cathedral — long green shafts reaching down through blue, dimming slowly as the surface retreated above them.
It worked. The breathing worked. This was, in the way of Doraemon's gadgets, simultaneously amazing and entirely matter-of-fact. You breathed in, and water came, and oxygen came with it, the way it comes through gills. Nobody said anything about how strange this was because there was too much else to say nothing about.
The reef began twenty meters down. Coral in shapes that had no name in Japanese and possibly no name in any language — towers and fans and branching things that moved in the current like slow thoughts. Fish went about their business with total indifference to five children descending through their living room. Shafts of light caught silver scales and scattered them.
"Oh," Shizuka said, and the word worked underwater, muffled and bubbled, but understood.
Nobita said nothing. He was watching a school of fish move in perfect formation, all of them turning at the same instant like one idea having a thought.
Giant was looking down.
Below the reef, further than the light reached clearly, something was glowing.
Not the blue of bioluminescence, though it was blue. Not the white of phosphorescence. Something warmer, more complicated, more like the color a city looks from an airplane at night when all the lights are on.
They descended.
The city appeared all at once, the way large things appear when you've been too close to see them.
It was enormous. It spread across the seafloor in every direction from a central structure — a tower that rose up through the dark water trailing light the way a candle trails heat. Streets connected buildings that were made of coral and something else, something that wasn't coral but grew the way coral does, in curves and arches and organic spirals. Bioluminescent plants grew in gardens along the streets and gave off a steady gentle light in shifting colors: blues and greens and a pale gold that came and went. The architecture was not angular anywhere. There were no right angles. Everything curved, everything breathed.
It was the most beautiful thing any of them had ever seen.
Suneo, who found beauty difficult to admit to without a practical angle, said nothing for several seconds.
"It's a civilization," Doraemon said quietly.
"How long has it been here?" Shizuka asked.
"A long time." He looked at the tower at the center. "A very long time."
Then Nobita pointed. "What are those?"
At the edges of the city — at the outer reaches where the light gave way to dark water — there were other shapes. Not organic. Angular and dark and moving with mechanical purpose. Six of them, maybe more. Submarines, but not the kind from any history book: sleek and low and black, with something that looked like arms extending from their hulls. Excavation arms. Cutting arms. They were dismantling the outer wall of the city with the calm systematic efficiency of a construction crew, except in reverse.
On each submarine hull, a symbol: an iron mask, severe and angular. A face with no expression.
"Those are not friendly," Giant said.
The underwater people had gathered in the streets near the central tower. You could see them from above as you descended — humanoid figures with a shimmer to their skin that was not quite scales but was something like scales, and eyes that caught the light with the particular quality of deep-water creatures who have learned to see in the dark. They were not fighting. They were watching the machines at the outer wall with an expression, even from a distance, that Shizuka recognized immediately.
They were trying to be calm. They were failing.
The city lights flickered once as a section of outer wall came down.
Shizuka swam down faster.
The girl was at the edge of the crowd, apart from the others. She was roughly Shizuka's age, or looked it. Her hair moved around her in the current. Her eyes, which were a very dark blue, were full of tears that dispersed in the water the moment they fell.
She saw Shizuka approaching. She did not run.
She stared.
Shizuka stopped. She held up one hand, open, in the universal gesture that means I am not a threat, and it seems to work in most of the world's languages and apparently also in this one.
The girl stared a little longer. Then she held up her own hand the same way.
Shizuka came closer. The girl did not move. Up close, her skin caught the light with that faint shimmer — not scales, but something that lived just beneath the surface, like sunlight through moving water.
"You heard the signal," the girl said. Her mouth formed Japanese words with a slight delay, as if the language were arriving just a moment after the meaning. Or possibly the Deep Sea Cream was doing something to Shizuka's hearing that it hadn't mentioned on the label.
"The shell sang," Shizuka said. "I heard you crying."
The girl looked at her for a long moment. Behind her, another section of outer wall came down. The crowd flinched together.
"We don't know how to fight," the girl said. Her voice was very quiet. "We never learned. We don't have weapons." She looked at the machines at the wall. "We only know how to feel."
The lights in the nearest building pulsed once, warm gold, and then dimmed again.
Shizuka looked at the building. Then at the girl. Then at the lights.
"Tell me everything," she said.
The girl's eyes were full of tears. But she nodded.