The Waters of Centaurus by Rosel George Brown

The smell of breakfast drifted in and Sibyl squashed out her cigar in the bottom of her coffee cup.  This fantasy went strangely with the homey smell of eggs and bacon.  Missy held captive in some fairy palace.  But it was easier to believe that than to believe Missy was dead.   Only...  "Mussy wasn't kidnapped," Sibyl pointed out.  "She ran out and threw herself into the water as if she wanted to drown."  

Let's return to the future of 1990, when trade and immigration routes have been established between Earth and planet Centaurus, home of a civilization of scaly reptile people who smoke all the time and are (somehow) sexually compatible with human beings!  In our last episode, we read Rosel George Brown's 1966 novel Sibyl Sue Blue, in which the eponymous female cop foiled a plot to integrate all life on Centaurus and Earth into a vegetable collective consciousness originating from jungle planet Radix.  In 1970's The Waters of Centaurus, published three years after Brown's death at age 41 (damn), 40-year-old easy Earth girl Sibyl Sue Blue has traveled to Centaurus with her 16-year-old daughter--let's join the ladies and see how they're doing!

Only one firm has spaceships that can travel between Centaurus and Earth, and that company's owner, Stuart Grant, was killed in Sibyl Sue Blue.  Grant left behind twelve identical offspring, the product of his union with a Centaurian woman native to a remote island on Centaurus, and they are 23 Earth years old.  The U.S. government sent Sibyl, who was Grant's last lover, to that island to spend time with the "twelve twins," as she calls them, fostering good relations between Earth and Centaurus and between the government and the company with the trade route monopoly.  As the story begins, Sibyl is getting a tan on the beach and is assaulted by a figure she never clearly sees because he blinds her with sand; they wrestle, he kisses her (she can feel his sharp Centaurian teeth) and then he vanishes.  

In Chapter Two three humans arrive on a helicopter.  There's Steer, the spaceman who piloted them all here, a married man and Sibyl's current boyfriend.  There's Pugh, a college student studying the flora and fauna of Centaurus.  And Victoria, a blonde rich girl, daughter of a State Department official and a fortune hunter who is always flirting with every available man but is most interested in marrying one of the twelve twins so she can get her claws into the Grant fortune.  Victoria is a broad comic character whom Sibyl and Missy don't like and whom we readers are not supposed to like; the way they make fun of her and play jokes on her gives the portions of the novel in which she is present the air of a sitcom--she is like Clayton Endicott III on Benson or Charles Emerson Winchester III on MASH, the rich person you are supposed to have contempt for, an appeal to readers' class envy.

Darld, the hybrid "twin" who has spent time on Earth and has the best English of the "twins" (and is also the best-looking of them--one of Brown's recurring jokes in The Waters of Centaurus being that the islanders, who are ethnically and culturally distinct from the Centaurians on the mainland, base their social order on physical appearance, with the best-looking guy being made king) disappears.  Soon after, Missy disappears after running into the ocean and swimming away.  Pugh, using a microscope and deep diving gear, figures out that the islanders, the hybrid "twins," and even pure-strain humans, can develop gills and breathe underwater if exposed to a hormone that is periodically endemic to the waters around the island.  This suggests that Darld and Missy are visiting or have been captured by some underwater nation or civilization.

Sure enough, a new character comes on stage, a particularly beautiful Centarian whom Sybil immediately lusts after, a member of a third distinct Centaurian racial/ethnic demographic.  This joker, Gide Girais, is the de facto leader of an underwater kingdom of people who have a ready supply of that hormone so they can choose to operate ashore or underwater.  He takes over the island by bamboozling the scatterbrained king and the gullible islanders into thinking he is a god and orders the previously peaceful islanders to eject the humans.  During the confusion, Victoria is allegedly raped by one of the hybrid "twins," an event which is treated by Brown as a joke; I guess we are supposed to recognize that the sex was consensual and Victoria is trying to force this heir to one twelfth of the Grant fortune to marry her, but it seems odd to include this sort of comic relief scene in the middle of the tense sequence about being forced off the island by spear-wielding natives.

Pugh, Steer and Victoria flee the island on a helicopter.  Sibyl remains, hiding, determined to figure out where Missy and Darld are.  She seduces Gide Girais; GG has been to Terra and hates humans and Earth out of a mix of envy and fear of Earth's more complex and more accomplished civilization, and Brown spices up the Sibyl--GG sexual relationship with some S&M elements.  ("Don't push me away," Sibyl whispered.  "Strangle me, break my Terran bones, but don't keep yourself from me.")  Laying together after their inter-species coupling, Sibyl steals a dose of the hormones that will give her the ability to breathe underwater and runs off; GG swears revenge.

The first half of The Waters of Centaurus is sort of weak.  The secondary characters--Steer, Pugh and Victoria--are boring and lame.  There is too much text about cooking, eating, drinking and smoking.  Things perk up when Gide Girais, who has an interesting motivation and is an actual threatening villain (unlike punching bag comedy relief Victoria) shows up and S, P and V are shifted off screen.  Instead of scenes of people mixing drinks and cooking steaks we get a creepy sex scene, a chase and a fight in the jungle, and Brown's effective depiction of the experience of losing your ability to breathe air and gaining the ability to breathe water.  We can hear anti-racist preaching, denunciations of rich people, and songs of praise to booze and beef anytime we want from newspapers, TV shows, conventional literature and the ordinary people at the office and in our families--we read speculative fiction to experience things that are new or crazy, and I was happy when Brown unleashed the real SF stuff when the hormones took effect on Sibyl and she had to run to the ocean because she had started drowning in the air.

Once we are underwater, Brown offers good scenes of interaction with aquatic life as Sibyl explores, searching for where Missy must be held.  Brown is actually capable when it comes to adventure narrative and SF elements (e. g., all the Centaurian animals in The Waters of Centaurus are well done); the problem is the "comedy of manners" stuff that is supposed to be funny and, I guess, say something about social mores and class norms. 

Most of the final third of The Waters of Centaurus is set down in Gide Girais's underwater kingdom, where we witness a lot of tense travel through tunnels and plenty of bloody fighting against monsters and aquatic reptile people.  There is also some love triangle business--both Sybil and Missy are fascinated by the sexalicious GG, who tricked Missy into falling in love with him but has not had sex with her as he has with Sibyl, leading to jealousy and resentment on Missy's part.  As we saw in Sibyl Sue Blue, when Sibyl fell in love with villain Stuart Grant, Sibyl can become infatuated with a sexy guy at the drop of a hat, and I guess Missy has inherited this emotional volatility.  When she is captured by GG and about to be tortured to death along with Missy, Sibyl uses her feminine wiles on him and buys Missy and Darld time to figure out a way to escape. 

Back on the surface Sybil and Missy join up with Steer and Pugh and they race to stop Gide Girais from putting into action his plan to flood all land on Centaurus by detonating nuclear bombs at the glacial pole--this will make his people rulers of the planet and make it unattractive to Terrans.  Unfortunately for us readers, after all the blood and guts action adventure we enjoyed underwater, it is comedy time again as we have to deal with Victoria again as well as a comic relief coach driver and Victoria's comic relief parents.  Pugh develops a chemical agent that will counteract the hormone and render GG's people unable to breathe underwater, and Sybil and Steer deliver it to the submarine kingdom commando raid style, forcing the villains to vacate their lair before they can detonate the nukes.  Sybil stabs GG to death and then we get our comic relief denouement.

The Waters of Centaurus is just OK; if there was a third Sibyl Sue Blue novel I wouldn't read it.  

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In the next episode of MPoricus Fiction Log, postwar American short stories from everybody's favorite magazine.