The Bucket of Almost Nothing

The eel was not an eel. Maya knew that much the second the fisherman tipped the trap and it slid out onto the wet planks, pale as a peeled thing, no fins, no scales, two little slits where eyes should be.

"Hagfish," said the fisherman. His name was Denny and he smelled like diesel and salt. "Trash catch. Gums up the traps." He reached for it with a gloved hand, ready to fling it back over the rail.

"Wait," Soren said. "What's it doing?"

The hagfish had gone tense in Denny's grip. And then the plank under it was wrong. Where there had been a wet gray fish there was suddenly a spreading clear mass, like the water itself had thickened and stood up. It happened faster than a blink. One heartbeat: fish. Next heartbeat: fish inside a swelling cloud of glass.

Denny swore and let go. His glove came away trailing long strings that did not break. They stretched. They kept stretching. The clear stuff climbed his wrist and dripped off his elbow and pooled on the dock, and there was so much of it, so much more than the animal could possibly have held.

"Every time," Denny muttered, shaking his hand. The slime would not shake off. It clung and stretched and reformed. "Rinse it, that's the only thing. Salt water sets it worse." He stalked off toward the freshwater hose, flapping his arm.

Maya crouched down. The hagfish lay in the middle of a puddle bigger than a dinner plate, and the puddle was growing. She put one finger near the edge, not touching, and watched a filament of it follow her fingertip through the air like it wanted to.

"That's not water it made," she said. "It's too clear. Water doesn't hold a shape."

"It grabbed the water," Soren said slowly. He had crouched too, his notebook already open on his knee, his pencil moving. "It didn't make the gallon. It made a little bit of something and the ocean did the rest."

Maya looked at the animal. It was so small now that the slime had come out of it. A skinny gray rope. And around it, this enormous transparent country of gel.

"Show me," she said.

Soren dipped the pencil tip into the puddle and lifted. A thread came up with it, thin as spider silk, catching the last orange light off the water. He pulled his hand up. The thread went up with it, a foot, two feet, not snapping.

"Pull harder," Maya said.

He pulled. The thread held. He stood all the way up, arm over his head, and the single strand ran from the pencil to the puddle without breaking, quivering, thinner than a hair.

"That should have snapped ages ago," Soren said. His voice had gone quiet and careful. "Something that thin. It's holding my whole arm's worth of pull."

Maya reached up and touched the strand with one fingertip, just to feel it. It did not feel like glue. It felt like almost nothing, like the memory of a thread, and it did not give.

"Stronger than it has any right to be," she said.

Denny came back with his hand dripping fresh water, the slime finally gone from his glove. "Freshwater breaks it up. Don't ask me why. Chef I know soaks it, spins it, makes noodles out of the fiber." He said this the way people say facts they have stopped finding strange. "Just throw the ugly thing back when it's done. Whole gallon of snot from a critter you could fit in a soda can."

He went back to his traps.

Maya was still looking at the strand between Soren's pencil and the puddle. A whole gallon. From a soda-can animal. She ran it in her head and it did not add up, and the not-adding-up was the best part.

"It can't be storing a gallon," she said. "There's no room. So it's storing the instructions for a gallon. A pinch of the right stuff, folded up small, and the water unfolds it."

"Threads," Soren said, watching his one strand. "It's all threads, coiled up tiny, and when the water hits them they let go and stretch out and tangle." He moved the pencil sideways. The whole puddle-edge shivered and followed, one connected thing. "That's why the gill thing works. A predator bites, gets a mouthful of nothing, and the nothing turns into a net inside its throat. Faster than swallowing."

Maya sat back on her heels. The tide was coming in under the dock, slapping the pilings, an entire ocean of the exact ingredient this animal needed, everywhere, always, for free. It had never needed to carry its armor. It carried a signal and let the sea build the wall.

"Everything down there is in water," she said. "So everything down there could do this. We just can't, because we're dry. We'd have to carry the whole gallon around."

Soren wrote that down. Then he stopped writing and looked at the strand still hanging off his pencil, unbroken, thinner than thread, holding.

"They want to make clothes out of this," he said. "Denny's chef makes noodles. But somebody wants to weave it. Stronger than steel and you spin it out of a few drops and some seawater."

The hagfish gave a slow flex in its puddle. The gel had started, very gently, to loosen, the fresh evening damp working at it the way Denny's hose had.

Maya scooped both hands under the animal and the whole clear country came with it, sliding, stretching, refusing to let go of itself, and she carried the impossible dripping armful to the rail and tipped it back into the dark where the sea was already waiting to be asked again.