The Only Thing Older, The Only Thing Wiser

Scott Edelman, making his Sunday Morning Transport debut this week, has arrived with a story, and a creature, that spans time.

May brings with it fantastic Sunday Morning Transport stories by Ken Liu, LaShawn Wanak, Scott Edelman, and Kelly Robson.

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~ Julian and Fran, May 17, 2026

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The Only Thing Older, The Only Thing Wiser

by Scott Edelman

Long ago and far away, when nothing yet lived above the ceiling of the sea, a fish—who might have been the first fish and may end up being the last—assumed he was a fish like any other. He started his life as most fish did, unaware for the most part of the passage of time, each day much like the rest.

For what is time to a fish?

He swam, he ate, he enjoyed the tickle of water through his gills, he fertilized, he hid from predators, and from time to time he danced along the shoreline and the emptiness above.

But most important—he survived.

Until one day, and he knew not what day that was, he became aware of differences appearing in those who came into existence around him, differences at first subtle and therefore capable of being ignored, but eventually growing to be both undeniable and unexplainable.

His first hint something odd was in the offing happened when he could no longer find any of his familiar companions within the school. At first he assumed they were merely elsewhere among his swarm, circumnavigating the distant edges. After searching among and through, though, he realized . . . they were gone. Every one of them.

He couldn’t understand how he’d lost them all without having been aware of the attrition. How could that have happened? He was a survivor, he knew that, for he’d always kept his wits about him. That level of alertness should have left him informed. So to be the last of his cohort without having noticed he was becoming so seemed wrong.

Not so wrong that first stage couldn’t be explained away due to chance alone, however. Not so wrong it implied anything catastrophic to his status quo.

No, that second sort of awareness didn’t arise until he noticed strange bumps and protuberances on some of the latest generation who swam the sea. The natures of those newer ones changed with the tides, seemingly useless at first, mere warts and other random growths, but then the grotesque began to abound around him. He spotted some who’d gained extra fins where no fins should exist, others whose rows of flippers ended bony and flailing, and some with tails splintered and unable to ever catch the waves—all senseless changes that impeded rather than aided the survival of their owners. The useless alterations to those new life-forms made it more difficult for them to swim, more difficult for them to feed, more difficult for them to escape.

He had no sense of how long this proliferation continued, as his relationship to time seemed to have broken, but regardless of how many months and years had passed, the increasing number of foreign bodies came to frighten him. For though the random appendages were at first relatively rare, they soon appeared in greater numbers and with even wider and more monstrous variables, causing increased discomfort not just to those who bore them, but to him from their mere existence alone. What turned his initial curiosity to fear was the thought it was likely all the result of a contagion that would soon take him as well.

And the effects of whatever was occurring eventually worsened, for he began to see, during his occasional trips to wander along the shore, the skins and bones above that were all that remained of those who had in what must have been an infected madness thrown themselves there. He felt sorry for the lost ones, but he felt sorrier for himself, because he did not want to end up as they had.

So he endeavored to spend most of his days as far from them as he could, to stay as long as possible in the darkness of whatever depths he was capable of reaching without being crushed by the pressure. He rose again only when the need to feed was unbearable, which to his surprise was not as often as it had been in the past. Strangely, he felt no more the sluggish for it. He behaved that way until the day he discovered, during one of his infrequent risings, the wave of change had suddenly ceased, the disappearance of the bizarre mutations making as little sense as their arrival.

He credited his isolation for having saved him from their fate, and attempted to forget the discomforting strangers and mysterious interlude. He would go on with his life, and consider it normal.

He sought out new friends, friends with whom together he formed a fresh school to swim with when in the mood. The group did not have him feeling quite the same as in the old days, for those in whose midst he found himself were not like those he’d known, but at least they were still to his mind fish as fish were meant to be, with no alarming changes. And they were company. Or so he forced himself to believe.

And for a while, the loneliness he had been feeling faded.