I went back to Starcross Street. There were no electrical display signs—they were forbidden by law—but heavy use had been made of the internal juices of Nullaqua’s luckless bioluminescent life-forms. To my right six unsteady Nullaquan whalers were forming a human pyramid, preparing to climb into the second-story window of a house of ill repute. Loud tuba music emerged from several of the bars, punctuated by the flatulent shrieks of Nullaquan comets. I stepped over a mumbling merchant sailor and looked for a quiet restaurant. There weren’t many, but I finally located one, an establishment that catered to Nullaqua’s decrepit senior citizens. Like all cultures with heavy restriction of technology, Nullaqua simply did not have the rejuvenation techniques necessary to prolong life beyond even a single century. The life expectancy on Nullaqua was only ninety, and the doddering gaffers around me, their nose hairs white with age, looked every year of that.
Still, though the citizens dropped like mayflies, Nullaqua’s civilization had remained fairly stable for the past four hundred years. And although the older generations were hurriedly shuffled into the crematoria, almost everyone was able to have a direct lineal descendant of some kind. The subtle but insidious psychological effects of adult life without children were still being measured by extra-Nullaquan social scientists. And on those advanced planets which did not restrict population growth, the life expectancy, not counting abortions, was only twenty-three. They killed a lot of children on planets like that. And of course, future shock and death-wish encroachment eventually got everyone, especially on advanced planets. Deep down, deep down, we all wanted to die.
But I was in no hurry, I reflected, digging into a tasty octopus pie with an aluminum fork. My appetite was only slightly diminished by stares of dotty curiosity from the resident Nullaquans. An off-worlder was still an unusual sight to some of these relics. I wondered if I should get a nose-wig. On the other hand, my eyelids would still betray my origin; they were not corrugated and my lashes were not dense enough to pass for native.
After supper I lost a little money in a casino, not enough to hurt, but enough to keep me entertained. Then I found a hotel, refused the daisy that the management offered, and tried to sleep. My slumber was fitful, as a chorus of intoxicated sailors reeled beneath my window once every half hour, singing obscene whaling songs. It was impossible to tell whether it was the same chorus each time; at any rate, the singing was uniformly bad. At last, annoyed, I took a blast of Calothrick’s Flare, so potent that my ears rang like church bells and I left consciousness behind in a cloud of blue flame.
Next morning I was awakened by the shouts of a large crowd on Starcross Street, two blocks away. The Lunglance had had the bad luck to land on the eve of a local festival, one of the most important of the year: Growth Day. Festivities began with a Wrestling contest. Wrestling bored me, so, after a leisurely breakfast in the hotel’s restaurant, I went out and got drunk. Staggering into the street, I was accosted by a blonde Nullaquan daisy, who explained to me that she was offering special holiday rates. With unusual psychological insight for a Nullaquan, she even offered to clip her nose before our liaison.
There was no rational reason for refusal. She was cheap, clean, healthy, and devoid of any crippling emotional side effects. Also, I had been two months at sea.
But I was only beginning to plumb the depths of masochism that Dalusa had revealed to me. I gave the daisy a Nullaquan three-monune piece and told her to leave me alone.
But I had reckoned without the Nullaquan’s hearty distaste for charity. She refused to take the money without performing a service in return. Obviously new to the trade, I thought tiredly. So, through a convolution of drunken logic that now seems incomprehensible, I told her to seek out Crewman Murphig of the Lunglance and convey to him apologies from John Newhouse. In return she could keep the money.
“Apologies for what?” she asked.
“If you’re not gone by the time I count three I’ll inform the Trade Synod,” I threatened. She left in a hurry.
By now a parade was going on in the street. Parades have never held much appeal for me either, but, fortifying myself with a quarter-dropperful of Flare, I stood on the corner and watched the colors go by. I had trouble focusing my eyes. I seem to recall that a dozen Nullaquans came by directly in front of me, dressed in a gigantic black whale costume, but that may have been only a fiction of my fevered brain. Once in the mood, I kept feeding myself minimal doses of Flare, in order to maintain a steady glow.
Growing hungry, I bought a fried cylinder of meat-on-a-stick from a sidewalk vendor. I ate it to the accompaniment of a large and thoroughly incompetent brass band.
The Lunglance would set sail tomorrow morning. It was imperative that I be aboard before midnight. There was plenty of time left, though. My head was beginning to dear again and I took another short blast of Flare. A large battalion of Nullaquan urchins, clad in identical lilac blue uniforms, were marching down Starcross Street and chanting in unison. The sight would have been absolutely intolerable had I been sober.
I repressed any thoughts about Dalusa. Soon enough I would be back in the emotional pressure cooker of the Lunglance. At the thought a drug-inspired depression settled over me. Already I was beginning to feel sick, trapped, frustrated, and weak. A quick watery glimpse of Dalusa’s blistered face appeared in my mind, and I shuddered. I was like a man sick almost to death with nausea, wanting to thrash and struggle but knowing it could only increase the misery.
The Flare was getting me down, I concluded suddenly. An enterprising Nullaquan had set up a bar outside his establishment and I ordered a light beer. I liked Nullaquan light beers, the lighter the better. The lightest ones were almost tasteless.
Four or five beers later I found myself on a whirring electric-powered commuter train, heading north to the second, northern, cluster of docks. From there one could take ferries to the other four islands in the Pentacle group. The train moved with irritating sluggishness, perhaps six miles an hour, the speed of a fast walk. I felt like getting out and pushing, but settled back against the whalehide seat, jostling the kerchief-headed, suspicious Nullaquan matron beside me. Her natural distrust of sailors was only amplified by my being an off-worlder.
The train cars were little metal and plastic cubicles with room for only four people. Each car had two whalehide couches, one facing forward, one backward. With the return of sobriety I noted that the two dour Nullaquan businessmen in the seats facing me were giving me the stem benefit of their attention. I looked away and leaned against the side of the car, letting one arm droop languidly over the side. The car had a sunroof, but no windows. It didn’t need them. It never rained on Nullaqua.
Nullaquan sunsets were impressive, I noted comfortably to myself sometime later. The train was returning from the docks and was full of mustachioed fishermen. Shrimpers, mostly. They waxed the ends of their mustaches.
The sun had already sunk in the west. Now the ridged edge of sunlight was slowly crawling tip the eastern cliff wall. The light was much sharper, much less roseate than the dust-altered clifflight at sea level. Up and up it went, unnaturally sharp, already far above the limits of the atmosphere. The rocks had an albedo of around 30 percent, more in spots where long melted streaks had given the cliff-side an obsidianoid sheen, piercingly bright where veins of metal were exposed. The stars were coming out.
The sunlight finished its performance by climbing to the lip of the cliffs. For an instant the broken crags at the very peak shone with stellar brilliance; then they winked out and joined the rest of the crater in shadowed dimness.
And at that very instant, calculated no doubt by parsimonious mathematicians, the Arnar streetlights came on. They were weak. The light in the railroad car flickered on also, a single dim yellow bulb set above our heads in the sunroof.
Only the areas around the cliffside elevators were well lit. There were no excuses for sailors. I piled into the elevator with a dozen glum Nullaquans, and we flew down the cliffside with stomach-turning speed.
The docks were lit, too. There was no chance of stumbling off a pier into the dust. And, there was a faint green glow by the docks. A sparse population of Nullaquan plankton had sprung up around them, nourished by water from occasional spills in loading and unloading.
The repairmen had finished their work; the Lunglance was in fine shape. The repair crew had even returned the tents and try-pots to the deck, now that it was newly sheathed in plastic. Government workers from the Synod of Ecology were loading whale eggs into the Lunglance‘s port hull. The eggs, already fertilized, would be released overboard, three of them for every whale killed. It was no small task; the white, dimpled eggs were a foot across and weighed fifty pounds each. They came from the whale farm on another of the Pentacle Islands. There was a large depression in the top of one of the islands and it had been laboriously filled with dust, ton by ton. Now, captive whales fed and spawned in the shallow lake, and some attempts at specialized breeding were being made. Their young replenished the ocean, and for most of the incubation period their eggs were safe from the needle-beaked octopi that, sucked most eggs dry and normally kept the whale population within bounds.
Very big on ecology, the Nullaquans. Very concerned with stability. Since I was growing a little dehydrated from processing the alcohol I had drunk, I went down to the kitchen for some water.
I had just finished my first glass when young Dumonty Calothrick came clattering down the stairs.
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “You were robbed. All your money’s gone.”
Calothrick looked puzzled. “Money? I got all my money. Somebody stole my Flare!”
“You mean that daisy didn’t rob you blind?”
“Aw, death, ho,” Calothrick said impatiently. “She charged me a monune and a half for bed space and left me alone. I wasn’t in the mood. Especially not with her.” Calothrick shuddered. “Hey … you got some Flare left, right? Give me some.”
I noticed for the first time that the whites of Calothrick’s eyes were tinged with a film of yellow, a film like the thin striated layer that first forms on the surface of a pot of molten wax.
“I’ve got your packet,” I said. “I took it when we were in the alley.” I pulled the packet out of my shirt and held it out; Calothrick snatched it from my fingers. “You got the dropper too, huh?”
I handed him the dropper; he took’ it and glared at me resentfully. “You’re sharp, Newhouse. Mighty sharp. I see you’ve been helping yourself.” He looked at the lowered level of Flare in the packet and slurped up a full dropper.
“I was afraid you’d be searched. It’s illegal now, remember?”
“Illegal. What makes you think any of these deadheads would have known what it was? I would have told them it was medicine.”
“You were pretty blasted.”
“You must think I’m some kind of rube!” snapped Calothrick, tilting his head back and taking a blast from the eyedropper. “Get this straight. I may be young, but I’m not blind.” He paused to belch. “You’ve been keeping most of the money and all of the Flare. I want some more. Maybe a bottleful. Especially if you’re going to be using mine all the time.”
I was angry. I stopped to yawn. “A bottle. What would you do with it? Where would you put it? The mates would find it for sure. If you want more, you can crane down here after it.”
Calothrick hesitated; the Flare was taking hold. “Well, listen, man,” he said vaguely. “I’m not addicted to it or anything, see, but I’m getting more interested in it, and I feel like it’d be better if I always had some with me. What if it all gets stolen again? I need plenty. A couple of weeks’ worth at least.”
“How much is that?”
“Oh … about four dropperfuls a day … two or three packetfuls, I guess.”
“You’ve got till midnight,” I said. “Go up to Arnar and buy yourself some packets.”
Calothrick left, scowling. Four droppers a day, I reflected. A dosage of that size would probably kill me. And if he kept it up at such a rate, Calothrick’s brain cells would be destroyed. Burnt out. Unless he was of unusual physical resilience, Calothrick would be reduced to a condition of imbecility within a few years.
But it was his brain.
The Lunglance left at dawn, with a full company. After the two-day debauchery, the crew was more dour than ever. Not a word was exchanged at breakfast; the crew ate like sullen machines.
We sailed northeast. After two weeks we left the Pentacles behind. This part of the Sea of Dust was monopolized by a peculiar life form known as the lilypad. There were hundreds of acres of these strange plants. Their photosynthetic organ was a single round leaf, yards in diameter but less than an inch thick. It floated on the surface, spreading itself in order to absorb as much sunlight as possible. The gray sea was greenly polka-dotted with thousands of the plants; they were free floating and strangely sensitive. When disturbed, the leaf curled inwards, wrinkling over its entire surface and withdrawing completely into its root, a thick, round bulb. This immediately sank into the opaque depths, away from the reach of herbivores.
Many creatures lived in symbiosis or parasitism with the lilypad. Desperandum, who made a detailed study of the plant, isolated 257 separate species of associate organisms, including leaf nibblers, leaf miners, stem borers, leaf suckers, root feeders, and gall makers. Besides these there were twenty-six species of predators, fifty-five species of primary parasites, nine secondary parasites, and three tertiary parasites. Among all these creatures was a small six-legged crab that made a fine chowder. When our prows touched the lilypads they immediately shrank and sank, leaving their crabby passengers swimming frantically. Desperandum caught hundreds of the creatures simply by dragging a net after the ship.
Some of the lilypads were in bloom; they had a long straight stalk and a puffy white flower like a head of grain. Armored bees whined from stalk to stalk, scattering pollen. They were stingless, but inedible.
Everyone wanted chowder. Eventually I found a pair of crabcrackers in a bottom drawer, rattly geared objects with rusty hinges and sharp metal beaks, difficult to describe. One fitted a crab into a skeletal framework and pushed down on a worn plastic lever, neatly splitting its carapace and its legs.
The cook was expected to kill the crabs by dipping them in a dilute solution of his own blood. Nullaquans had a remarkably casual attitude toward bleeding. Besides, Dalusa, whose mouth had now healed so that only a few small black scabs were left on the edges of her lips, would be unable to help me as she had offered to do, if the crabs were contaminated with human blood. So I found a use for the whiskey after all. The alcohol seemed to act like a nerve poison on the crabs, producing a brief epileptic flurry followed by rapid death.
I cracked the poisoned crabs while Dalusa extracted their meat with her long, sharp-nailed fingers.
I still had my gloves. Our attempts to use them had resulted in failure. As soon as my gloved hands began to slide over her body, she burst into tears and hid her face in her wings. Perhaps, I thought, it was her inability to reciprocate that bothered her. She was unable to use the gloves once I had, because my palms were sweaty, understandably, and the insides of the gloves would have given her a rash. Logically, I boiled one of the gloves to remove contaminants, not realizing that its slick unstable plastics were vulnerable to heat. It melted.
But I still had one glove left. I have always had a vivid imagination and I was able to think of no less than five ways of using the glove to obtain mutual satisfaction. But Dalusa would have none of it. At the very sight of the glove she burst into tears and left the kitchen. It was disappointing, to say the least I was able to see that there was a possible sordidness about the situation, but desperate times call for desperate action.
As a sort of compensation, Dalusa spent more and more time with me in the kitchen, making obviously false attempts at cheerfulness. She tried in her clumsy, artistically mutilated way to help with the cooking. I was touched by her attempt, so touched that I did not throw her out of the
kitchen, although I could have done the work myself twice as quickly.
So we cracked crabs together.
After we had cleared the lily fields, Desperandum decided to do a sounding. He had come well prepared; he brought out another mile or so of superceramic fishing line and an immense lump of lead with a metal loop on top. Tying the line securely he heaved the lump overboard and then began to pay out line on a small winch.
In the shadow of the mainmast, Murphig was watching. He saw me watching him watch Desperandum, so he watched me for a while. It was an uncomfortable situation.
Desperandum got a depth of seventy-five feet. With a smile he set the figures down in a small blade logbook. Then doubt crossed his bearded features. He walked to the other side of the ship and paid out the line again. He got a depth of almost half a mile.
Apparently we were floating above the edge of a very steep plateau. Another would have shrugged and gone on. But Desperandum had the skepticism of the true scientist. He did the first sounding again and got a depth of a little less than six thousand feet.
The second sounding repeated got eight hundred feet.
Desperandum frowned belligerently and did the first sounding once more. He paid out all the line he had, two and a half miles, and still did not reach bottom. He hauled all the line back in, a process that took a full hour. He sat and thought for a while, then decided to do the second sounding again.
He reached a depth of nine thousand feet and then the line went limp. Desperandum reeled it back in. Something seven thousand feet down had neatly sliced the line.
Desperandum’s face did not change at the sight of the sliced line, but hard knots of muscle appeared on the sides of his jaws, making his dustmask bulge.
I went back down to the kitchen. Dalusa was out on patrol. Soon I would have to start work on the third meal of the day, traditionally eaten by clifflight.
Involution Ocean Page 8
