The Pup With No Father

The bonnethead tank glowed blue after the lights went down. Behind the public glass, in the narrow corridor where the pumps hummed, Maya pressed her face close to the service window and watched the smallest shark in the tank turn a slow circle.

"That one's new," she said. "It wasn't here in spring."

Soren was reading the laminated card taped beside the pump. "Three females. That's what it says. Three."

"Then where'd the little one come from?"

The aquarist, a man named Dev with salt stains on his sleeves and a clipboard he kept dropping, looked over without much energy. It was nearly nine. "Good question for tomorrow," he said. "We don't have a male. Never have."

"So somebody added the pup," Soren said. "From another tank."

"Nope." Dev almost smiled. "Born here. We've got it on the morning cameras."

Maya stepped back from the glass. "Born here. With no father."

"That's the part nobody can explain to me either," Dev said, and went back to his readings, because his shift was the readings, not the riddles.

Maya looked at Soren. Soren looked at the pup.

"Okay," Soren said. "Eggs need to be fertilized. That's the rule. So either the rule is wrong, or one of these three females isn't a female."

"Or," Maya said, "a female did it alone."

"You can't make a baby from half the instructions."

"Why not?"

Soren opened his mouth, then closed it. He pulled the notebook from his jacket and wrote a single line, his pen scratching in the pump-hum. "Because. The other half comes from the male. Half from mom, half from dad. Everybody knows that."

"Everybody knew the pup couldn't be here," Maya said. "And it's here."

They both watched it. The pup swam like the adults swam, the flat shovel of its head sweeping side to side, reading the water for things they couldn't see.

"Say it's a half-clone," Maya said slowly. "Say the mom used her own half. Twice."

"Twice how?"

"I don't know how. But if a cell that was supposed to be thrown away, the leftover half, came back instead of a dad's half. If it doubled up."

Soren stopped writing.

"What," Maya said.

"That's a real thing," he said quietly. "When eggs form, the body makes spare little cells and dumps them. Polar bodies. We read it. They're the half-sets that don't get used." He flipped back two pages, found it, tapped it hard. "What if one of those doesn't get dumped. What if it pairs with the egg instead of a sperm."

"Then the pup is made of only mom."

"Made of only mom," Soren said. "Half of her, doubled." He looked up. "A half-clone. You said half-clone before you knew why."

"I guessed."

"You guessed the answer." He wasn't annoyed. He was delighted, in the particular way he got when Maya arrived somewhere before the evidence and the evidence came along behind her and agreed.

Dev had stopped pretending to read his clipboard. "You two are making that up."

"Is the pup male or female?" Maya asked.

Dev checked a sheet. "Female."

"It would have to be," Soren said. "If it's only mom, there's no Y. No father, no Y, you can't get a son. It almost has to be a daughter." He wrote that down too, and underlined it.

Dev set the clipboard on the pump housing. "There's no way to know any of that for sure without genetics."

"They did genetics," Maya said. "Somewhere. Some aquarium, somewhere, this happened and they tested the pup and it matched only the mother. I'd bet my whole list on it."

"Your what?"

"Her list," Soren said. "Of things that don't make sense yet."

Maya was still watching the small shark. "It just got shorter by one," she said. "And longer by about ten."

"Longer how," Dev asked, despite himself.

Maya turned around in the blue light. "If she can do it alone, then a female shark out in the actual ocean, with no males for miles, isn't stuck. She's not waiting for anybody. She can just keep going."

"By herself," Soren said. "With nothing but herself."

"That's not a backup plan, that's a superpower," Maya said. "And if sharks can, who else can? How many things on the whole planet can make a life out of half of themselves and we just never caught them doing it?"

The corridor went quiet except for the pumps.

"Eight," Soren said suddenly.

"Eight what?"

He was staring at nothing, counting against something in his head. "It can't only be this one tank. If it's a thing the body can do, it's a thing lots of bodies can do. I bet it's been seen in a bunch of species by now. I'd guess. I'd guess eight, at least. Probably more they haven't checked."

"You always have to put a number on it," Maya said.

"I commit to my guesses."

Dev picked his clipboard back up, but he didn't write anything on it. He was looking at the pup like he'd never properly looked at it before, like the smallest shark in the tank had quietly become the strangest thing in the building.

"You're going to make me look this up tonight," he said. "Aren't you."

"You should," Maya said. "It's the kind of thing that makes the ocean bigger."

The pup completed another circle. It had never met its father because it had no father, had never needed one, had been written entirely in its mother's hand and copied out into the cold blue water, and it swam now exactly like a creature that did not know it was a miracle, which is the only way miracles ever swim.

Maya leaned back toward the service window. The pup came around once more and, for a moment, hung level with her eyes on the other side of the glass, its small shovel-head sweeping, sweeping, reading a world she couldn't read.

Then it swept its head once toward her, turned, and slid back into the dark water after its mother, who was also, somehow, itself.