Involution Ocean

by Bruce Sterling

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. But my erstwhile roommates on Piety Street had burned me, maneuvered me, made me their pawn. I was not interested in vengeance of course; that was beneath me. Only simple justice. There would indeed be a large quantity of syncophine, even after I had finished the distilling process. But they would never see any of it. I had already settled that.

  Calothrick might object. But I would deal with him later.

  Chapter 5

  The Lie

  “Tell me about Earth,” Dalusa said.

  “All right.” How many times had I told the lie and to how many women? I had lost count. Over twenty years ago the inspired falsehood had sprung like a full-blown rose into my mind, watered by panic, fertilized by youthful romanticism. I had feigned reluctance countless times; countless times my youthful brow was knit with a counterfeit pain from counterfeit memories. But for Dalusa it was different, Dalusa deserved better. I resolved to lie my hardest for her.

  “I can’t tell you of the whole planet,” I said, picking my words with care. “Only the few acres, here and there, that chance allowed me to know. Thirty-four years ago I was born in Venice, an ancient city, once a nation. It was built on an island, and called the Bride of the Sea. Venice was surrounded by an arm of the World Ocean, a great salt sea called the Middle of the World. As a child I would watch the sea, watch foamy waves batter the shore, and tease my eyes with the scattered gleaming of the sun on the water’s choppy surface. It seemed that, the ocean went on forever, engulfing the planet like a second atmosphere. There is enough water in Earth’s blue and bitter seas to drown the Sea of Dust some thirty times over.

  “But about Venice. Imagine a glorious golden city, so old that it is betrayed by the very rocks beneath it A city once marvellous and proud, glittering, beautiful, holding the slowly gathered loot of the seven seas. There was no navy like the Venetian Navy, no art like her art, no rulers like her doges. Venice was queen among the cities of Italia and Bohemia, like a great diamond among sapphires. Of Earth’s cities Venice was the first to reach for the stars. Of course, Venice was founded long before man knew flight, but Venetian genius turned the long dream into reality. Wooden birds, hatched from the brain of the immortal Leonardo da Venice, sculled through the Venetian skies, carrying the city’s red and silver banners….

  “But the land began to falter. Little was thought Of it at first. There were many to propose solutions, much wealth with which to carry them out. Dike off the sea? No, Venice is surrounded by mudflats. Perhaps float the island itself? But nature responded with fire and earthquake to any such attempt The rock beneath the city was unstable, rotten with caverns, seething with subtle molten fires. The risk of a cataclysm was too great.

  “The decline was slow; many times there were eras of relative stability, when citizens looked at one another and saw the despair slowly melting away. But no sooner was there a renewal of confidence, than there would be another slow shock, a dull descent Then her husband betrayed the Bride of the Sea.

  “By my own time, the Venetians lived in the third and second stories of buildings partially drowned. The population was less than a tenth of that in Venice’s heyday. Mine was a remnant of an ancient noble family. I remember my childhood well. I spent much time poling or paddling my dead black pagoda through the sunken streets. The water was still and clear and always cold. I remember the sunken, shattered pylons, the drowned statues festooned with anemones, sea urchins crawling spinily across the drowned mosaic faces of Venetian madonnas, obscured by scattered sand. Sometimes I dived in the cold water, seeking treasure, and would come home clammy and slimed with weed, to meet my mother’s mild and sad rebuke …” here my voice broke momentarily. My mother had died when I was young; surely it still hurt somewhere inside. And this was my own life, my own lie, a surrogate of my own grafted to my personality. It was flowing tonight as never before, even though I had to give it the elaborate, involuted verbal style favored by Terrans. My own creation, my own He, my own soul. My art. Tears came to my eyes.

  “It was a restrictive culture, stylized past all vitality, still beautiful, like the perfectly preserved cadaver of a young bride. And I was essentially alone. Many times I would leave parties or poetry contests to wander the streets alone in my black pagoda. Many of the Venetian buildings were deserted, theaters, mansions, pensions crumbling in wet decay. I didn’t mind a little mildew, and I often climbed through empty windows and waded across slimy floors with my lantern. I would sometimes collect odd shells—”

  “What?”’ Dalusa said.

  “Shells. The exoskeletons of dead aquatic organisms. Sometimes I found the barnacled remnants of earlier centuries. The shard of a Greek amphora, a shiny aluminum can from the Industrial Age, some washed-up fragment of a lost memory …”

  “Why did you leave?”

  “I grew older. There was talk of marriage, of an alliance to an ancient family even more decrepit than our own. I knew suddenly that I could not endure another week in Venice, not another day of their gentle melancholy, not another hour of fashionable despair. I might have fled to another city. Paris, Portland, Angkor Wat … but one planet seemed too small. I left and have not .seen Venice since. Nor do I care to see it.”

  My voice shook. This hurt me, bit clear to the bone. This invented history was much closer to me than my actual childhood, those sordid years of rejection and scorn only partially cushioned by my father’s ill-gotten wealth. I had tried to forget my boorish idiot comrades, my father’s muscular attempts to force me into his own mold, and the breakdowns. The breakdowns that had revealed to me the miracle of tranquilizers. Then stimulants, first legitimately, then a whole illicit galaxy of multicolored pills, encapsulated joy. Instant strength, sniffed, swallowed, inhaled, or injected. I had tried to forget the pain and had partially succeeded. But I treasured the memories of those drugs. I knew I had finally found a career I could stomach. Within a few years I was dealing, a respected member of an odd, bat profitable, sub branch of pharmacy. I had never regretted it.

  Later I fell asleep.

  * * *

  The next morning the sailors were unusually voluble. One of the largest, one Perkum by name, paused in midchew to remark, “You know, this captain of ours is really a nut!”

  The others nodded and went back to their meal.

  Captain Desperandum was everywhere that day, taking dust samples with hinged buckets, dissecting a dead pilot fish, taking notes on the behavior of the sharks. In full view of the crew he took my sheared-off whaling spade and bent it double with his bare hands. Seeing this the crew returned to their tasks with redoubled vigor.

  By midmoming we had reached the fringes of the krill soals. Desperandum threw a seine behind the ship and dragged out several hundred pounds of plankton. It scattered across the deck like so many pounds of jewels, nugget-sized organisms in every conceivable geometric shape: pyramids, tetrahedrons, octahedrons, even dodecahedrons, glittering in their silicon armor and crunching into green smears beneath the captain’s boots.

  At noon we found another whale, ploughing sluggishly through the dust and chewing plankton with a noise like grinding pack ice. Three new crewmembers went through the bloodletting ritual. Blackburn returned to his harpoon gun and, surprisingly, missed with the first harpoon. The second and third lodged, though, and as the ship drew nearer he fired a fourth at almost point-blank range, piercing the creature’s lungs so that it choked and spurted purplish blood. It died in convulsions.

  Dalusa swept in from the airborne archimedean spiral that was her scouting pattern. Sharks were approaching at top speed from the south, but they were two miles away. There was plenty of time to butcher the whale; the sharks would be too late to get more than the leavings. I wondered how they knew of the whale’s death at all. Had the flying fish spotted the monster from the air? Or was there a subtler method?

  To the south loomed the massive moon-colored wall of the Nullaqua Crater specifically, the monstrous jutting of the Seagull Peninsula.

&
nbsp; There was a thick white band about a quarter of the way up the peninsular cliffside. I knew intellectually that the band was actually two stacked” miles of white seagulls, nesting, screaming, and squabbling in incredible numbers. Survival was strictly defined for the seagulls; at the bottom, they would be smothered by plummeting guano, at the top, they would starve to death commuting to and from their nests. Beneath the white band it was greenish gray, where tenacious lichen struggled desperately for survival, clinging to centuries of accumulated layers of parched excrement.

  Somewhere in that immense gray band was a small dung-covered lump that was the Highislite warship Progress. It was a quarter of a mile up the cliff, tossed to destruction by the dust tsunami of the Glimmer Catastrophe, three centuries ago. For decades the wreck had been visible, its gleaming mangled metal a memento mori, a symbol of guilt to generations of Nullaquans. For years a pair of binoculars could pick out the crushed mummies that were the Progresses crew, perfectly preserved, their yawning mouths with blackened tongues, slowly packing full of dry gray guano. Ton after ton of raining birdshit slowly buried the wreck, clinging like ice to the tangled rigging, dripping across the metal hull like gray stalactites. Now the wreck was completely shrouded, dotted with lichen, buried by time like a childhood aspiration never attained or an unhappy love affair slowly smoothed over by the amassed trivia of day-to-day living. It was a final end to the Nullaquan Civil War, and the supposed punishment for sin had resulted in a crushing moral victory for the slaughtered Perseverans, fanatic fundamentalists of the worst stripe. It was true that they had been butchered to a man a year before the catastrophe but even so, after three centuries their dead hands were still locked around Nullaqua’s living throat.

  I knew all this intellectually, but to the eye, it was only a cliff with a white band and a green band.

  I saw a sudden green flash of wings in the distance. The sharks were coming.

  I sensed someone looming at my right shoulder. I turned.

  Suddenly I was staring directly into a pair of eyes, dark eyes, much like my own, eyes framed by the plastic lenses of a dustmask that was decorated with green and white target shapes. The man, Murphig, was exactly my height. The whole contact lasted only a second. Then, uncomfortably, we both turned to watch the advance of the sharks. They were closing rapidly. I shuddered. I was not sure why; it wasn’t the sharks.

  Surprisingly, the sharks and their winged comrades declined to attack the crew. Instead they slashed sullenly at the floating, dust-caked intestines that we had thrown overboard. With more-than-beastlike sagacity, they knew that the whale had already been processed. There could be no profit in aggression. Still, they stayed out of range of our whaling spades.

  I returned to the kitchen and began to run my brew through a crude but efficient still I had jury-rigged out of some loose copper tubing. At lunch I explained plausibly to Dalusa that it was a still and I planned to make brandy. She immediately lost interest; alcohol had no appeal for her.

  I finished before supper with a little less than an ounce of watery black fluid, The black-market Flare I had refined from pure Nullaquan gut oil was almost transparent. I wondered if I should try straining the new brew.

  Supper was uneventful. I piled the unbreakable dishes into a large coarse-woven sack and carried them into the kitchen. I found Dalusa there. Spread on the cabinet before her was a large Nullaquan seagull, dead. Pale purple fluid leaked from a triple puncture in its breast. Dalusa was staring at the dead bird in rapt fascination, her own wings furled, her hands clasped before her breast.

  I walked heavily down the stairs, but she showed no sign of realizing my presence. I looked at the bird. It had a wingspan of about four feet; its yellow eyes, glazed and dead, were half veiled by lids that moved from the bottom of the eye upward. Its beak was lined with tiny conical teeth.

  Its feet were strangest, long black weblike nets, weighted at the bottom with nodules of bone. Obviously its fishing pattern was to swoop above the opaque dust and net blindly for whatever might be below the surface.

  I loomed at Dalusa’s shoulder. She did not look up, but continued to stare at the bird. A thick drop of lavender blood oozed slowly across one of its breast feathers and dripped onto the cabinet top. There was no remorse in the lookout’s face, only absorption, mixed with an emotion I could not name. Perhaps no human could.

  “Dalusa,” I said softly.

  She jumped, half unfurling her wings; it was the inborn reflex of any flying creature. Her feet clicked when they touched the deck again. I looked down. She was wearing a whalehide sandal arrangement on each foot; straps crossed her instep and looped around the outside of her heel. Curling upward from the base of the toes on each foot were three stainless steel hooks, six indies long and barbed. Artificial claws.

  “You’ve been hunting,” I observed.

  “Yes.”

  “And you caught this bird.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to eat it?”

  “Eat it?” she repeated blankly. She looked at me in confusion. She was adorable. I felt a sudden strong sadistic urge to kiss her.

  I restrained myself. “You’re wearing claws,” I said.

  “Yes!” she said, almost defiantly. “We all had than, in the old days.” Silence. “Did you know, did I tell you, I was there when your people met mine for the first time?”

  I blinked. “A scientific expedition?”

  “Yes, they said so.”

  “Sponsored by the Academy, no doubt,” I told myself aloud.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. What happened then?”

  “They talked to us,” Dalusa said. She ran one pale fingertip along the wing of the bird, slowly. “How beautifully they spoke. From my place in the shadows my heart went out to them. How wise they were. How graceful in the way they walked, always touching the ground. They were so solid and stable. But the elders listened and were angry. They swooped on them from above and tore the humans, ripped them to tatters with their claws. I could do nothing, me, only a child and not kikiye. I could only love them and cry by myself in the darkness. But even their blood was beautiful, rich and red, like flower petals. Not like this thing’s …”

  There was a triple rap on the hatch. Calothrick. “Come in,” I shouted, and Calothrick entered, pulling off his mask. He stopped dead when he saw Dalusa.

  “You have things to discuss,” she said suddenly. She pulled open the oven, snatched a pair of insulated potholders off two hooks on the side of a cupboard, and pulled out a covered dish. “I will go eat with the sailors.”

  “No, stay,” I said. She stopped for a second, then glanced at me with such an intensity of emotion that I was taken aback. “We will talk later tonight.” She picked up her mask from the table, a china white mask with a single blood red teardrop from the corner of the right eye. She started up the stairs; Calothrick, coming down, gave her a wide berth. She left; the hatch snapped shut.

  “Weird,” opined Calothrick, shaking his head. Wisps of tangled blond hair fell over his eyes. He brushed them aside with one hand. His fingernails were dirty. “Say … you’re not carrying on with that, um—” he searched for a noun and couldn’t find it “—with her, are you?”

  “Yes and no,” I said. “I might if there were any point to it. But there isn’t.”

  “With that?” said Calothrick incredulously. He seemed more shrill than usual. I looked at him closely. Sure enough, the whites of his eyes were tinged slightly yellow with Flare withdrawal. He was suffering. “What about Millicent?”

  “Yes, of course, there’s always her,” I lied smoothly.

  After the way she betrayed me I wouldn’t have touched her with an electric prod. “But after all, what is love but an emotional obsession …”

  “Caused by sexual deprivation, yeah, I know that one,” Calothrick said. “But that bat-woman gives me the creeps. She looks all right, but it’s all surgery, y’know? I mean, if it weren’t for the scalpel she’d have big ea
rs and claws and fangs. She has her own tent, y’know. The men say she sleeps upside down. Hangs by her toes from the ridgepole.”

  I was annoyed. “Mmm,” I said. I changed the subject. “What do you think of the behavior of those sharks?”

  “Sharks? I dunno. Murphig was talking to me about them just a while back. He spends a lot of his time watching things, just sort of looking at them. He says they can smell death at a distance. Maybe, he says, smell it before it happens. The kid’s as nuts as Desperandum. Yeah, and speaking of Murphig … how’s the stuff coming?”

  I swung open a cabinet door and took out a metal bottle. In the bottom was a thin scum of syncophine. “Terrific,” said Calothrick, sniffing the bottle. He pulled his plastic packet out of his shirt and poured in a thin rivulet of the brew. “Ugh. It’s black,” he commented, sealing the bag. “First thing tomorrow, then, Murphig gets it.”

  “Not too much,” I said. “It could be extremely powerful stuff.”

  “Yeah, yeah, right, I’ll be careful,” Calothrick said impatiently. “Oh, by the way, d’you see that plankton out there tonight? Quite a sight.” He strapped his mask back on, slipped the Flare inside his shirt and went up through the hatch.

  I sat down on the kitchen stool and began to clean out the still, meticulously. Sooner or later I would have to brew some spirits with it, if only to divert any possible suspicions of Dalusa’s. I wondered about my attraction to the woman. There were mixed motives, I decided.

  Not least of which were the amplified joys to be derived from her company. It may seem strange to you, reader, but put yourself in my place. Did your mistress, lover, companion, ever lean forward to breathe hotly on your neck? Do you remember the quasi-erotic shiver it sent down your spine? Then imagine a like stimulus from Dalusa, whose body temperature exceeded that of a human being. Remember the contagious excitement received when your partner’s heartbeat grows more rapid? Dalusa’s was almost twice that of a normal woman. If the idea of woman as an object of mystery appeals to you, well, Dalusa’s alien origin gave her a permanent romantic shroud. And she was beautiful. What matter if her classic loveliness was the gift of surgery? Surely you agree that it is the soul inside that we love, rather than the mere exterior. You agree with it, whether you believe it or not.