Involution Ocean

by Bruce Sterling

  1 always planned my menus a week in advance. I was looking up my reference for the night when the hatch creaked open and in came Murphig.

  I looked up and tried to relax the muscles that had instantly tightened at the sight of him. I had never learned how much he knew about our syncophine operation, and I had been unable to think of a way of plumbing his knowledge without revealing yet more.

  “What can I do for you?” I said.

  “I’ve been meaning to come down and talk,” Murphig said, pulling off his targeted dustmask. “I got the message you sent in Arnar. The one through the daisy.”

  I cast my mind back two weeks. I had indeed sent a message. I had assumed that my memory of the action was a fever dream of some kind. I had apologized to Murphig, as I recalled.

  “Yes,” I said. “I was sorry to have broken in on your discussion with the captain.”

  “What did you think of it?” Murphig said, looking at me sharply.

  “I thought he gave your ideas rather short shrift.”

  “Decent of you to notice that,” Murphig said almost airily. His eyes were dark, like chips of brown glass, and his nostril hair, I noticed, had been clipped into neat globes rather than the traditional wiry bush. His accent was lighter than a Nullaquan’s, too; it was almost galactic. It was obvious that he came from an upper-class family; perhaps his parents were bureaucrat/clergy.

  “You saw the results of the sounding. What did you think?”

  “Puzzling.”

  “It fits in well with my theories. I’ve been thinking about the crater lately. About the air. Suppose that at one time Nullaqua had an atmosphere. Then the sun flared and blew it away. But suppose that an intelligent race had already evolved, a race that could see it coming. They would dig a shelter, a vast shelter with room enough for a whole civilization. A giant shelter with seventy-mile-high walls and a layer of dust to insulate them from the radiation. Then, after the catastrophe, the traces of air would leak back in. Eventually the Old People would get used to the dust down there; they would be unable to live without it, perhaps even change their physiques to live without air….

  “Once they were very strong; you can tell because of those Elder Culture outposts at the top of the cliffs. They didn’t dare come into the crater. They might have been … eaten? So now they are much weaker. All they want is peace, stasis, mutual ignorance. They don’t want to hurt or kill, but those that disturb their perfection will be obliterated, silently, swiftly. Already men have lived here five centuries, and though there are rumors, folktales, unconfirmed sightings, mysteries of the deep, there’s nothing really solid. So they may be dying. Or maybe they’re only asleep. But they are there, that’s certain.”

  Murphig’s face had flushed slightly with excitement while he spoke; now he sat on the stool with a sigh.

  “Murphig,” 1 said slowly, “that’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard.”

  The sailor flushed with anger, abruptly pulled on his mask, and left the kitchen.

  Chapter 9

  A Further Conversation with the

  Lookout

  After supper, an excellent crab chowder, Desperandum sent his cabin boy, Meggle, to call me to his cabin. I went, and found Desperandum in his swivel chair. The desk before him was covered with scattered papers. Overhead was a single whale-oil lantern; it cast odd shadows on Desperandum’s broad, bearded face.

  Desperandum leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head. “You’ve been showing some interest in science lately, Newhouse,” he said without preamble, “so I thought I’d explain to you exactly what I was doing today and what I proved.”

  “That’s very thoughtful of you, Captain.”

  “Let’s take the evidence and examine it dispassionately, shall we?” said Desperandum in a tone so elaborately dispassionate that I was overcome with distrust. “The line stopped at variable heights, then was sliced on the way down. What does that suggest to you?”

  “Playfulness,” I said.

  Desperandum glared. “I made some calculations,” he said, ignoring my remark. He indicated the papers on his desk. I looked at them.

  “Calculations based on the properties of granulated rock. You see, I took the specific gravity of the rock, and electrostatic and chemical bonding as a function of surface area. And I applied this data to well-known geological formulae for the formation of metamorphic rock.”

  I continued to look at the papers on the desk. It was a little difficult to make out the figures on the paper, but I was doing it.

  “It turns out that the dynamics of the Sea of Dust are more complex than we had suspected,” Desperandum continued blithely. “Under certain conditions, which cannot be duplicated here on the surface, the dust is fused by pressure into long thin horizontal strata of flattened rock. They are always shifting and being eaten away; they are highly unstable. But they’re stable enough to stop a plumb line, and the edges are thin and sharp, like flint. They can cut.”

  “So that was what did it,” I said. I had just realized that the papers I had been studying were indeed covered with numbers. But there was no sign of any computation. There were three or four scattered multiplication signs, and a pair of large integrals, but they had nothing to do with the numbers themselves. There were no totals. Only numbers. Large numbers, too, numbers in the millions and billions, as if adding comma after comma gave the numbers an increased significance, a stronger hold on reality. The other papers were the same. Meaningless random scribblings.

  “Yes, that’s it,” Desperandum said kindly. “There’s other confirmation, too. One can see that barriers like that would give rise to freakishly strong currents. Imagine, for instance, if a rock barrier separating two thermoclines suddenly gave way. There would be a sudden turbulence. Perhaps giving rise to a storm.”

  “Very convincing,” I said. Our eyes met in a quick mutual flash of suspicion.

  Later that night, much later, I was awakened by a whispered tread on the stairs. Only one person could walk so lightly, Dalusa.

  It was almost totally dark, so dark that strange dim purples and maroons moved nebulously across my field of vision. When I looked up through the hatch from my pallet on the kitchen floor, I could see a single weak dust-filtered star.

  It was cold at night on the Sea of Dust. The dust did not have the heat-holding, weather-tempering properties of water. I slept in my pallet, a stitched quilt of black and white hexagons pulled up to my chin.

  “Dalusa,” I said. My voice sounded unnaturally loud in the silence.

  “I wanted to talk,” she whispered. I heard her walk toward me. Were her eyes better in the dark than mine? Perhaps she could see the infrared waves I radiated, or could see by the light of the single star. At any rate, she came unerringly closer, adjusted the edge of the quilt around my chin, and rested her cheek on my chest. The quilt separated us, but I could feel the heat of her body and the weight. She weighed no more than a child.

  My pulse accelerated; I sought calmness. “What did .you think of our captain’s antics today?”

  “It was nothing new,” she murmured, snuggling closer. She put her hands on my biceps, under the quilt. I felt a sudden niggling urge for a blast of Flare. I tried to forget it.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve been on three trips with the captain,” she said. “In all that time I think I’ve seen him do twenty soundings, perhaps, and he never succeeds. Sometimes he accepts the first figure. Sometimes he keeps trying. There are never two that are the same.”

  “You mean he’s done it all before?”

  “Time and time again. With a new crew each time, except for me.”

  I laughed in the dark. Dalusa stirred against me. The whole situation was so tragically ludicrous that the only human responses were to laugh or get drunk. It was too late at night to drink. “Why does he do that? Why does he keep fighting it?”

  Dalusa moved and I could sense, but not see, her face looming only inches above mine. Her ho
t breath, faintly redolent of alien spices, touched my nose and mouth. “Did you ever think that Captain Desperandum might not be sane?”

  A powerful surge of déjà vu overcame me. “Don’t tell me that it’s an obsession,” I muttered.

  “But it is,” Dalusa said sweetly. “You know that in very old people, the urge to die begins to grow more and more powerful. Death comes in ways that no one understands. But you can live, I think they say, if you have a purpose, a goal, something that means so much to you that every cell in your body knows about it and stays alive for its sake.”

  I tried absentmindedly to embrace her, keeping the blanket between us. But I had forgotten that her wings were attached to the sides of her torso, all the way down to the short ribs. I settled for putting my hands over her buttocks.

  Dalusa continued unheedingly, “That’s what Desperandum wants to do. He wants to live, on and on and on. But the mind is tricky. When you war against yourself you can only lose.”

  “I have every confidence in the captain,” I said. I was sure that he would find a way to kill himself.

  I lifted my knees, slowly, and Dalusa settled luxuriously against my groin. She rested her sharp chin on my chest. “I love you,” she said.

  “I love you too.” It was still true.

  We were silent for a few seconds. “I can hear your blood moving,” Dalusa whispered.

  There followed several minutes of extreme frustration. Afterwards, I felt I had reached the apex of a new emotion, one previously unknown to me, a grotesque hybrid of lust and anger that found its culmination in pain. Dalusa’s sudden whimpered gasp as I caught her elbow in a viselike grasp was music to my ears.

  At last the realization of my sadism hit me and I released her arm.

  Dalusa drew in a loud ragged breath, close to my ear.

  I gritted my teeth. “There was no satisfaction in it, no climax—”

  My complaint was cut off suddenly when Dalusa punched me in the stomach. Her clenched fist was backed by all the massive strength of her shoulders and pectorals; it hit so hard that a vivid red flash showed before my eyes and air gusted from my lungs.

  “Better now?” Dalusa asked melodiously.

  I clenched my fist to break her teeth in, but realized suddenly that it was better. It was my first insight into the joy of pain.

  “You hurt me,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said contritely. “You started it; I thought that was what you wanted. Please don’t be angry.” She stiffened miserably against me.

  “I’m not like, you;” I said after a long silence. “You can’t expect me to hurt like you do. I can’t bleed for you, Dalusa. I can’t, and I won’t. If you can’t face that, maybe we should forget the whole thing.”

  “We’ll see how things will be,” she whispered, and her thick dull hair fell gently over my face.

  Chapter 10

  Flying Fish

  My next days were occupied mostly by cooking. I spent much time studying Nullaquan tastes, thinking that when I returned to Reverie I would startle my friends with odd Nullaqua-style delicacies. Unfortunately, while she was sweeping the kitchen Dalusa accidentally upset the container of horseradishlike spice into one of my stews. A single taste of this inadvertent dish puckered my mouth for two hours. I almost threw it out, but served it at the last minute. The crew ate it with their usual stolidity and attention. Had Nullaqua grown trees, they would have eaten the bark and found it good.

  There was not much wind in this part of the Sea of Dust. The equator was at the verge of the two convection cells that determine the crater’s climate, and eternal calm stretched from wall to wall. The air was clearer, too, and to either side of Lunglance a silvery heat haze stretched shimmering into the distance. One could squint through the lenses of one’s mask and almost imagine the Lunglance serenely afloat on a monstrous ocean of mercury. The sky seemed bluer than usual here, almost violet, and the low rim of cliffs, far to the west, were tinged purple with distance. Every scrap of plastic sail that the Lunglance had was set, even the tiny auxiliary ones at the very top whose masts were no thicker than broomsticks. Only the merest whisper of wind propelled us and the ship seemed to slide almost regretfully through the dust.

  I was sweating inside my mask; I had to tilt my head back and shake it to keep perspiration out of my eyes. The crew, with thicker eyebrows than mine, had no such problem. I leaned over the rail again and stared moodily into the distance, still a little glazed from the Flare I had done that morning. It was an affecting scene, I noted. I thought about writing a poem. I decided against it.

  Dalusa, back from her morning patrol, swooped by me at the rail, so close that the wake of her passage stirred my hair. I waved in acknowledgement. Dalusa, I noticed, was getting her own equivalent of a tan; she was growing paler and paler with repeated exposure to the sun. It was a more logical arrangement than my own. After all, pale skin reflects the heat.

  I looked around unobtrusively and was relieved to find Murphig nowhere in sight. I had been sure that he was standing around somewhere, watching.

  Perhaps I would have to make a friend of Murphig. He was an open, inquiring mind, and despite his oddities he seemed firmly rooted in sanity. Suppose, for instance, that Desperandum suddenly became dangerous. Little help could be expected from the tradition-bound mates or oxlike crew. They would probably poison their mothers before they would soil their souls with mutiny. Calothrick was a zero, also. He was still resentful because I had not given him his own store of Flare, as I had learned just yesterday when he had come back to fill up all three of his packets. He was growing dirtier, too; his hair was lank and greasy, and the lightning-stripes were slowly peeling off the sides of his mask. He could not be trusted.

  And it would take at least two of us to handle Desperandum; it would probably take two just to kill him, even with the harpoons. I even had my doubts about Dalusa as a confederate. She loved me, there was no doubt about that. But in what way? How much did love mean to her, anyway? There was no way to tell, as she refused to talk about her cultural background. Dalusa obsessed me but I was not yet blind.

  We killed two whales later that day and dropped six fertilized eggs overboard. I cooked whale steaks that night. They were noxious.

  Next morning there was a cloud on the southern horizon. This could only bode ill, as Nullaqua never had the decent, normal clouds of harmless vapor that grace the skies of other planets.

  “What do you make of it, Mr. Flack?” I heard Desperandum say to his first mate, handing the man a pair of binoculars.

  “Flying fish, sir,” replied the laconic whaler.

  “Good! Good!” said Desperandum gruffly. “Mr. Flack, have two men ready to help me with equipment. The rest of the crew will retire belowdecks.”

  While two crewmen dragged monitoring devices from Desperandum’s cabin, the rest of us sought shelter below. Before I went in, I glanced quickly around for Dalusa. She was nowhere in sight. I later discovered that she had gone below before I did. I sat on the stool in the kitchen while the rest of the crew tramped down the stairs. Calothrick walked by and gave me a glazed, yellow-toothed grin.

  I debated a short blast of Flare while the migration passed. The pro side was winning when Flack stuck his head through the hatch and said flatly, “Cookie wanted on deck.”

  I went On deck, Desperandum and the two crewmen were stringing nets between the masts. I noticed that six cubical boxes with swiveling wire-mesh radar dishes had been set several feet apart in front of the nets. Red and blue wiring trailed in tangles from the boxes to a sort of metal pillbox, fitted together out of five thin sheets of iron. It had a thick visorlike window, facing south toward the cloud. Already the sails had been furled, to give the migratory horde leeway. In. the feeble winds of the equator, we could not possibly have outrun or dodged the fish.

  The nets were ready. “Get below, men,” Desperandum told the crewmen. They hastened into the hold and slammed the hatch behind them. Already the fish swarm was ass
uming ominous proportions.

  “Newhouse!” the captain shouted. I walked closer and saluted. “This way if you please,” Desperandum continued. He opened a low door in the side of the metal pillbox and we walked inside. Touching switches, Desperandum turned on a dim light in the ceiling and set an air filter humming.

  They were rather cramped quarters, only seven feet by seven feet, and Desperandum’s vast bulk took up much of that. In addition, there was a metal counter that supported Desperandum’s binoculars and a large flat tally box with a small television screen. Two tiny white blips crossed the screen, starting from the top and moving slowly and erratically.

  Desperandum reached under the counter and handed me a notebook and a pen. “You can take off your mask,” he said. “The filters should have cleaned the air by now.”

  I took off my mask and dropped it under the counter. “You can write, I hope,” Desperandum said.

  “Certainly, Captain,” I said.

  “Good. You’re here to take notes. Copy down the numbers I give you into that column I’ve listed as ‘individuals. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, taking the notebook and lodging it in the crook of my left elbow.

  “Two,” said Desperandum. “We’ll be just on the fringes of the horde for a few minutes, so you can take it easy. Stay alert though. You want to look before they arrive?”

  Without waiting for an answer he handed me the binoculars. I stooped to get them at the level of the visor, which was set at Desperandum’s height. I focused the binoculars.

  The cloud resolved itself into thousands of individual fish, foot-long creatures with thin, brightly colored wings. They dipped and pirouetted like the molecules of a gas.

  “They look like butterflies,” I said.

  “What are butterflies?”

  “Earth fauna. Six-legged invertebrates with multicolored wings. They sometimes travel in swarms.”

  “Are they aquatic?”