Involution Ocean

by Bruce Sterling

  “Sure,” I said. “How much money do you have?” Calothrick looked startled and unsure. “Not very much. About five hundred monunes.”

  “That should be enough for your supplies, anyway, with maybe enough left over to buy drinks for the sailors. What’s your bank?”

  “I haven’t had time to deposit it yet, it’s all in letters of credit.”

  I sent Calothrick off to pick up some cash while I rented a room in a tavern at the lip of the cliff above the docks. (The Highisle was half a mile above sea level and thus escaped the worst of the dust pollution below.)

  When Calothrick returned I sent him downstairs to buy drinks for sailors and to study their mannerisms. I went out and bought two dustmasks. All sailors wear them. The fine dust, stirred by gusts of wind, can destroy the lungs within a few days. Even the dense thickets of hair in the native Nullaquan’s nostrils can’t fully filter the stuff, nor can their camellike lashes and thick lids fully shield their eyes. On shore they suffice, but at sea every man jack wears a tight-fitting rubbery mask with a snoutlike round filter and round plastic eyes.

  The captain and his mates give their orders through speakers connected to tiny microphones within their masks. The crew have no speakers inside their masks, as any power of speech among them would be superfluous.

  Every whaler has a painted insignia, on the forehead and cheeks of his mask. They vary wildly in shape and color, it is one of their few modes of self-expression. I bought several tubes of paint and some brushes for Calothrick and myself. The mask’s natural color is shiny black, so I bought some black paint, too. It might be just as well to be able to suddenly change insignias. After all, one learns to recognize a whaler by his dustmask.

  After buying sailor’s garb and cutting our hair, Calothrick and I took the elevator down the cliffside to look over the whaling fleet. We took our dufflebags and our alien’s papers. The first three ships would have nothing to do with us. They were willing to accept me as cook, but not with Calothrick, who was an obvious ignoramus.

  Finally we came across the good ship Lunglance, commanded by one Nils Desperandum. Desperandum, an obvious alias, was also an off-worlder. He was an immense man, raised under at least two gravities.

  Though he was only five feet tall, with his incredible bulk and thick blond beard Desperandum had a commanding presence. He looked us over. “Cook and ordinary seaman?” he asked sharply.

  “Uh … aye aye, sir,” Calothrick began, but I cut him off with a quick “Yes, sir.”

  “Any objection to sailing with other off-worlders? We don’t go strictly by the book on this vessel.”

  “None at all, Captain, if they don’t mind sailing with us.”

  “Very well, sign yourselves on. Cook’s lay is one one-twenty-fifth. Mr. Calothrick, I’m afraid that the best I can offer you is the three-hundredth lay. But there’ll be a bonus if the cruise goes well.”

  Calothrick’s face clouded but I cut in before he could offer any objections. “Well take that, Captain.”

  “Good. Calothrick, see Mr. Bogunheim about a bunk. He’s our third mate. We set sail tomorrow morning.”

  We signed the logbook and we were ready to go.

  The Lunglance was a typical member of her breed, the dustwhaling trimaran. She was one hundred and five feet long, ninety feet at the beam. She was constructed almost entirely of metal, as Nullaqua has no wood. Her three metallic hulls were kept constantly gleaming by the abrasive action of the Sea of Dust. She had four masts and a dizzying number of sails: topsails, topgallant sails, fore-royals, mainsails, and mizzens, twenty sails in all. Her deck was covered by a kind of plastic processed from grease and crushed whalebone; otherwise, the pitiless Nullaquan sun would have made the deck too hot to stand on. The crew slept in airtight, filter-equipped whalehide tents, lashed to the deck through great iron rings and bolts.

  Captain Desperandum slept in his cabin belowdecks at the stern; I slept near the bow in the kitchen, next door to the ship’s stores. Both compartments were shielded from the dust by electrostatic fields across the hatches. The fields were powered by a small generator located in the middle hull; it ran on whale oil.

  There were twenty-five men aboard: myself, the cook; Captain Desperandum and his three mates, Flack, Grent, and Bogunheim; two coopers, two blacksmiths, our cabin boy, Meggle, and fifteen regular seamen. All but Calothrick were squat Nullaquans with hairy noses and a dreadful anonymity of feature.

  And then there was our lookout, the surgically altered alien woman, Dalusa. I will have much to say of her, later.

  Chapter 3

  A Conversation with the Lookout

  We set sail at dawn, bound south-southeast for the krill grounds near the Seagull Peninsula. Breakfast was gruel, requiring little effort on my part; the captain and his mates ate muffins and kippered octopi.

  The men ate on deck in a long galley tent. Even without his mask the Nullaquan sailor is unusually terse while at sea. I saw that Calothrick had painted his mask during the night; he now had an electric blue lightning bolt on each cheek. It was unique. No native Nullaquan had ever seen a lightning bolt.

  After some thought I settled on a large broken heart as my own motif.

  Lunch proved more difficult My predecessor had left me battered utensils, great pots and tubs of dubious cleanliness, and a cupboard full of unmarked Nullaquan spices. I pride myself on my control of the gastronomic art, but these primitive conditions hampered me.

  I had young Meggle, the cabin boy, clean the pots while I sampled the spices. One had a sharp metallic taste reminiscent of rusty iron; the second was vaguely like horseradish; a third was analogous to mustard but with a bitter aftertaste. The fourth was salt I never found out what the fifth was. A single whiff convinced me that it had spoiled.

  I dragged a barrel of hardtack from the ship’s stores next door and managed to make it palatable. It was an epic task, but I was rewarded by the single-minded attention paid by the whalers to their food. Without their masks they all looked the same. They were so quiet, except for the occasional belch, that I wondered if they were planning a mutiny.

  They seemed a surly lot. All wore drab brown or blue bellbottom trousers and corduroy shirts. Their arms were tanned, their faces pale, with faint seams along the sides where their dustmasks adhered. Six of the men had shaved a narrow band along their temples, around their heads, and across their jaws to get a better seal. To a man, the crew was bedecked with Aspect necklaces, thin metal chains from which dangled one or more symbols of the fragments of God, for, according to the odd Nullaquan creed, the most any man could expect was the attention of a minor fraction of the Deity. Growth, Luck, Love, Dominance, the usual sailor’s Aspects were all represented, some also on rings and bracelets. The jewelry was not considered magical in itself, but merely served as a focal point for prayer. Although I was not religious, I myself owned a platinum Creation ring; it was an artist’s Aspect.

  The men ate mechanically, their faces impassive, as if they were unused to expressing emotion, or as if the pale faces were only another kind of mask, held on with invisible straps.

  They ate at a long plastic-topped table, bolted to the deck. Another table stood at its head at the end of the galley tent, like the cap to a T. It held food. There was just enough room between the two tables for the men to pick up plastic plates and serve themselves.

  Calothrick, tired of the monotonous working of jaws, tried to start a conversation with the grizzled veteran at his right. “Fine weather today,” he said.

  All the men stopped eating. Forks in hands, they stared at the unfortunate Calothrick, giving him the clinical interest that a doctor might give to a boil. Finally, concluding from his embarrassed silence that he had nothing more to say, they continued eating.

  It was an unfortunate conversational gambit, anyway. There was no weather in Nullaqua. Only climate.

  My first meeting with the alien woman, Dalusa, came at the last meal of the day. The sun had already sunk beyond the western rim
of the Nullaqua Crater, and evening was lit by the dust-filtered roseate glow reflected from the cliffs four hundred miles to the east. I was working in the kitchen when she came through the hatch.

  Dalusa was five feet tall. Black, fur-covered batwjngs furled around her, attached to bony struts that were elongated metacarpals and phalanges. She had ten fingers on each hand; five supported the wing, the others were free, much like a human hand, even to red lacquer on the fingernails. Her arms were of unusual length; they would have hung to her knees if she had not habitually carried them bent at the elbows, her hands in front of her breast.

  I felt an instant’s bewilderment, unable to tell if she were a bat altered to look like a woman, or a woman attempting bathood.

  Dalusa’s face had a refined, sculpted beauty that could only have come from surgical alteration. An artist had wielded the scalpels.

  She wore a loose, extremely lightweight white robe, actually just an opaque film that hung from her muscular shoulders and pectorals down to her knees. There was something subtly wrong with her legs. There was a list, almost a waddle, in her walk. It seemed obvious that she had been born with legs radically different from the mock-human ones now supporting her.

  Dalusa had shoulder-length black hair with the same dull sheen as the velvety fur on her wings.

  She spoke. Her voice was a low, liquid baritone, so astonishing in its subtle tonal variation from common humanity that I almost missed the words.

  “Are you the cook?”

  “Yes, madam,” I said belatedly. “John Newhouse, late of Venice, Earth. What can I do for you?”

  “Jonnuhaus?” she repeated, blinking.

  “Yes.”

  “My name is Dalusa, I am the lookout. Would you like to shake my hand?”

  I shook her hand. Her grip was weak, and her hand was unusually hot, though not damp. Apparently her body temperature was a few degrees higher than a human being’s.

  “Do you talk?” she said. “That’s nice. None of the sailors will say anything to me, their custom,. I think. I believe they think I am bad luck.”

  “How short-sighted of them,” I said.

  “And Captain Desperandum is very single-minded. Did you say you were from Earth?”

  “Yes.”

  “That is humanity’s birthplace, isn’t it? You and I will have to talk about that sometime. I’m very interested in that. But I’m taking up your time. I came to say that I am authorized to prepare my own meals. I’m afraid I’ll have to take up some of the space in your kitchen.”

  “Perhaps you dislike the style of my cooking. I know other styles.”

  “Oh no, oh no, it’s not that. It’s just that there are trace elements … and I have allergies to proteins in your food. And then there are bacteria. I have to take a lot of precautions.”

  “You’ll be in here often then.”

  “Yes. I keep all my food in that box.” With her unnaturally elongated arm, she pointed at a blue metal-bound chest. It was under an iron table that was bolted to the kitchen floor.

  I checked a half-dozen bubbling cobblers in the stove while the alien woman dragged her box out and opened it. She appropriated a brass pot and sprayed the inside with an all-purpose antibiotic aerosol.

  “Is this your first whaling voyage?” I asked.

  She emptied a half-dozen biscuitlike discs of meat into the pot, sprinkled spice over them, and set the pot on the whale-oil flame. I pumped the hand primer a few times to make sure it would bum evenly.

  “Oh no. This is my third trip with Captain Desperandum. This voyage I should have enough money saved to leave the planet.”

  “Are you eager to leave?”

  “Very much eager.”

  “Why did you come here in the first place?”

  “Friends brought me. At least I thought they were my friends. But they left me here…. I didn’t understand them. Maybe I couldn’t.”

  A faintly acrid whiff of frying alien meat came from the stove. “A basic psychological dichotomy,” I hazarded.

  “No. I’m sure that can’t be it No, it was worse with my own people. I never fitten in, was never accepted. I was never kikiye’.” Her altered mouth moved awkwardly to form the word.

  “So you had yourself changed.”

  “You object?”

  “Not at all. So you were left here, you needed money, you signed up with Desperandum?”

  “That’s so.” She took a flexible metal spatula out of a drawer, sprayed it with the aerosol, and turned over the slices of meat “No one else would have me.”

  “But Desperandum doesn’t go by the book.”

  “Yes. He is an alien, of course, and he is also very old. I think.”

  That was bad news. There was no telling what bizarre behavior I might see from Desperandum. Men grow tricky, motives strange, when the subconscious lust for death turns traitor.

  “He seems a decent sort,” I said. I smiled. “At least he showed considerable taste in hiring you.”

  “You are kind.” She took a dirty plate off the stand, snubbed it with coarse sand, and sterilized it. She took the pot off the fire and stabbed a piece of meat with a long fork. “Do you mind if I eat here?”

  “No. Why?”

  “The man in the galley tent don’t like it when I eat with them.”

  “I should think you’d be a great favorite.”

  She put down her fork. “Mr. Jonnuhaus—”

  “John.”

  “John, I show you something.”

  She held out here right hand. I looked at it. A prickly red rash spread across her thin dactylate fingers. I reached for her arm. “You’ve burned yourself.”

  “No! Don’t touch me.” She leapt back, unfurling her wings with a rustle. A faint puff of air crossed my face. “Do you see, you shook my hand. Your hand was damp, a little, and there are enzymes, oils, microorganisms. I have allergies, John.”

  “I hurt you.”

  “It’s nothing. It will go away in an hour. But can you see now, why the sailors? … I can never touch anyone. Or allow anyone to touch me.”

  I was silent for a few moments. “That’s a misfortune,” I said. At the sight of the rash a strange sickish feeling spread through me, that doubled and trebled as I heard her explanation.

  She refurled her wings so that they hung in neat togalike folds, and drew herself stiffly to her full height. “I know that when a man and woman touch each other it leads to other things. Those things would kill me.”

  The sickness spread. I felt a little weak. I had felt no real attraction to the bat-woman when I first saw her, but at the news of her inaccessibility I felt a sudden lurch of desire. “I understand,” I said.

  “I had to tell you that, John, but I hope we’ll be good friends, anyway.”

  “I see no obstacles to that,” I said carefully.

  She smiled. Then she picked a slice of meat from her plate with her red-lacquered fingernails and, daintily, ate it.

  Chapter 4

  A Strange Revelation

  On the fourth day of our voyage I made an odd discovery. It happened while I was searching the ship’s hold for something to stimulate my rather discriminating palate. I was testing an ale barrel with my seaman’s jackknife, when the tip of the blade snapped off and the knife flew from my hand. I was searching for it in the dimness of a corner of the hold when I noticed a hairline crack in the bulkhead. It was the joint of a camouflaged door. My curiosity was aroused. The door had a lock, which I quickly picked; I then discovered that the Lunglance had a false compartment. Inside the cramped, alcove were several disassembled pieces of an engine, complete with batteries; a propeller blade; two large tanks of oxygen; and a tub of glue. The glue was an extremely strong adhesive. I found my jack-knife and dipped a blade into the stuff. I had to tug to get it back out I resealed the tub, closed the hidden door, went up on deck, and threw the knife overboard. It was impossible to get the glue off it and it would have betrayed my knowledge of the secret.

  B
ecause of its position at the bottom of a pit the Sea of Dust has longer nights than days. That night I had a long time to puzzle over my discovery. The propeller especially perplexed me. They are never used at sea because they stir up dust clouds.

  I was sure of one thing. Only Captain Desperandum could be responsible for the hidden alcove, as only he could have ordered the alterations done. Most whaling captains were responsible to a shore-based firm, but Desperandum owned the Lunglance outright Nor was this the end of our captain’s oddities. On the next morning Desperandum suddenly ordered all sails furled and the Lunglance stopped dead in the dust Desparandum emerged from his cabin carrying at least three hundred pounds of high-test fishing line. The deck creaked under his weight, as he himself weighed easily over four hundred pounds. Producing a hook the size of my arm, he baited it with a chunk of shark meat and threw it overboard. He turn returned to his cabin and demanded breakfast. I quickly obliged. He ate, sent his mates out, and then called me into the cabin.

  Desperandum’s cabin was spartanly furnished; a custom-made bunk six feet long and five feet wide, a massive metal swivel chair, a work table that folded down from a wall. Detail maps of Nullaqua, hand drawn on cheap, yellowing graph paper, were stuck to the walls with poster wax. In the glass-fronted cabinet to my right were several pickled specimens of Nullaquan fauna, trapped in specimen jars. The stuffed head of a large carnivorous fish, mounted on a metal plaque, had been bolted to the stern wall. Its jaws gaped wide to reveal discolored, serrated teeth. Below were thick glass windows, giving a view of the placid, gray, dust sea. The western rim of the crater loomed on the horizon, glowing in the sunlight like a massive crescent moon.

  “Newhouse,” the captain said, seating himself with a creak in his swivel chair, “You’re from Earth. You know what science is.” Desperandum’s voice was low and raspy.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “And I have the highest respect for the Academy.”

  “The Academy.” Desperandum bristled. “You err, Newhouse, and err badly, when you associate real science with that superannuated group of fools. What can you expect from men who have to spend three hundred years just to obtain a doctorate?”