Involution Ocean

by Bruce Sterling

  There was a muffled hiss as Desperandum turned on the valves to the oxygen mask. Slowly, we swung outwards, off the deck and over the quietly seething sea.

  Slowly we went down and settled into the dust with a floury rush and a whisper. There were four muffled thumps as the slings were released, and we began to sink. Desperandum turned on the engine, and it began to whir and mumble. We surged slowly forward. Frothing dust washed quietly over the eye plugs and even as I watched, it grew pitch black inside the sub. I quickly ripped off my mask.

  “My death!” I cried out. “It’s black! It’s completely black! Captain, we can’t see a thing!”

  “Of course,” the captain replied urbanely. “The light can’t reach inside, you see. That’s why I had our own lights installed.” There was a click and wan bluish light from a naked bulb overhead filled the sub. A pale charnel-house radiance gleamed off exposed patches of bone amid the dry sinew of the walls and ceiling.

  I sneezed and put my mask back on. The dry mustiness was awful. I returned my attention to the eye plugs. An intricately patterned swirl of dust moved across our lenses, slowly abrading them. I realized with a shock that Desperandum’s calmly stated absurdity had momentarily convinced me. I took off the mask again, ignoring the itch of dust in my sinuses. I swallowed to depressurize my ears and said, “Captain. This is ridiculous. The dust is opaque. We might as well be blindfolded.”

  “Indeed,” Desperandum said. He moved the ends of the levers upwards slightly and the sub nose-dived alarmingly. He pulled us back out of it. My ears popped again, and a chorus of creaks spoke up from the musty joints of ribs and vertebrae.

  “Take us back up, Captain! The trip’s a failure! We can’t see anything, so we’re risking our lives for nothing. Come now, Captain.”

  Desperandum looped the oxygen .mask over the snouted nozzle of his dustmask and inhaled audibly. The ship rolled and he grabbed his fin levers tightly.

  The sounds from his speakers were half-muffled as Desperandum replied. “It’s not your job to theorize on the optical properties of dust, Newhouse. Just keep watching. We should reach one of the translucent layers soon.”

  “The translucent layers! The translucent layers? Captain, this is dust, not glass! For death’s sake!”

  “Really, Newhouse. Your language! I’ve made a long study of subsurface conditions. You needn’t succumb to hysteria. You need some oxygen, that’s all.”

  “I can’t understand why I didn’t think of this before,” I said. “Your insanity must have infected us all.” My last words were lost in a long dry groaning of ribs under pressure. The whaleskin glued over the slash in the sub’s side was forming a herniated bulge as it dimpled inwards.

  “This is absurd,” I said, coughing. “I won’t be involved in your suicide. I’m going to cut my way out.” I picked my way across the tangled ballast toward Desperandum’s axe. With an effort I managed to hoist the huge, double-bladed axe to one shoulder. I moved shakily toward the bulging skin, where it would be easiest to cut. The flooring boomed uneasily under my feet.

  “I wouldn’t do that at this depth if I were you,” Desperandum said. “The rush of dust would knock you to a pulp.”

  I hesitated. “We’re not that deep yet.”

  In answer Desperandum moved the fins and we dived again. I nearly fell down. I set the axe down quickly.

  “Now return to your post,” he said flatly. I went, pulling my mask back on. The dust in the air and the stench inside the whale were making my nose run. It was impossible to tell our depth. Even the increasing pressure was not a reliable indication, because Desperandum had the oxygen tank open and running. Dust ran thickly by the plugs. My mind raced frantically, trying to squirm out from under a lowering weight of despair. After a while I felt a fatalistic inertia settling into the cores of my bones.

  “The air’s getting so heavy,” I said. “I feel numb all over.” I stared out.

  “Come get some oxygen then. I’ve never felt better,” Desperandum said.

  A small amorphous something slid past the glass. “Wait a minute,” I said. “I saw something move just now!”

  “What? What was it?” Desperandum said eagerly.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It was small and wiggly-looking. I think I’d better get some air. I feel drunk.”

  Desperandum inhaled hugely. “Wonderful, isn’t it? Tell you what, my lad. You take over navigation for a while, get some good air in your lungs. Let’s see what my trained eyes can make of it.”

  I stumbled over the ballast, took a fiery gulp of oxygen, and grabbed the levers. I had an absurdly light feeling as I took the levers in my hands, the oxygen mask half-dangling from the snout of my dustmask. Now I could slowly and subtly direct us upward again. Desperandum released the levers, and I immediately knew that the levers were far beyond my strength.

  “Captain! Captain!” I said, but my dustmask was on, and the muffled sounds were quickly lost in the drumlike booms of the flooring under Desperandum’s boots. It was a silent, desperate struggle then. I put my full weight against the levers and pulled till my wrists ached and cramps bit the insides of my biceps. It was no use. They escaped me, the ends of the levers sweeping violently upward and cracking my dustmask’s right lens. We went into an immediate nosedive. Desperandum was crouching at the port eye plug and he fell over immediately. Then the tangled mass of ballast slid onto him like an avalanche. I heard his scream and a yowl of feedback as his speakers shorted out. Then he was lost beneath it all.

  I would have fallen on him if I had not been holding the starboard finlever. As it was I dangled about ten feet above him, my feet just above the treacherous, unstable heap of metal and cable and crates. The smell of preserving fluid went through the dry musty air like a knife.

  The oxygen tank had taken its mask attachment with it when it tumbled free. The engine, though, was secured to the sub’s skeleton, and it had stayed in place. It was still running. Painfully, I pulled myself up the length of the lever until I could wrap my legs around it. Then I pulled off my mask.

  “I’m so sorry I came down here,” I said. “I’m really, really sorry I did it, and it wasn’t my idea at all, and if I ever get away from here I’ll never, ever let this happen again—”

  “Newhouse …”

  “—to me or anyone else, ever, ever again….”

  “Newhouse. Turn off the engines. Turn them off!”

  “Captain! Captain Desperandum!”

  “Turn off the engines, Newhouse,” came Desperandum’s reasonable voice. “I think I hear something down here.” Tears were running down my face. “I don’t know if I can do it, Captain,” I said. “There’s something wrong with me.”

  “It’s nitrogen narcosis, my lad. We’re too deep, far too deep. You’ll have to turn off the engine. I can’t do it. I can’t feel my legs.”

  I shuddered. “All right, Captain. I’ll try.” I inched my way up the lever, dug my feet and fingers into the stinking, desiccated flesh around the ribs, and leapt. The whirling propeller shaft almost brushed against my face, but I wrapped my arms around the bulk of the engine. I kicked once, twice against the switch, and the engine shut down with a moan and a mumble.

  Then there was silence. I heard the crunch and rustle of Desperandum moving amid the rubble. “I can just see out the eyehole,” he said. “There. Do you hear that?”

  I got up on top of the engine block, and it groaned a little. The whole belly of the hollow whale was bulging inward at my back. “I don’t hear anything, Captain. Just the dust … I think.”

  “I see them moving out there,” Desperandum said matter-of-factly. “They’re quite small. And they’re shining—sort of an amorphous glow. There are hundreds of them. I can see them strung off into the distance.”

  “Captain,” I said. “Captain, how are we going to get back to the surface? We can’t navigate while the ship is standing on its head like this.” I burst into feeble giggles. It was half the nitrogen poisoning, half the pure deadly
ludicrousness of the situation.

  “That’s not important now, Newhouse. But it’s vital that you come down here and confirm this sighting. We’re making scientific history.”

  “No.” I said. “I’m not going to look at them. They have a right to their privacy. God I wish I had some clean air. I feel so weak.”

  Desperandum was silent for a while. Then he said coaxingly, “The oxygen’s down here with me. I can hear it hissing. You’ll pass out in a little while if you don’t get some, you know. And maybe you could get these pipes off my legs. I think they’re bleeding, but it might just be the preservative fluid. Then you could have a look. Just a little one. What do you have to lose?”

  “No!” I said more urgently, my fogged brain stung a little now with panic. “I don’t want to look at them. I don’t think they want me to.”

  “For stability’s sake!” Desperandum said, resorting to Nullaquan profanity in his final crisis. “Don’t you have a shred of plain human curiosity? Just think how interesting they are! I never realized they were so small! And the way they move is so fascinating, almost a kind of dance. Like little colored lights. See how they move away to the sides now! And—Oh my God!”

  Desperandum began to scream. “Look at that thing! Look at the size of it! It’s coming closer! It’s coming too close! It’s coming too close to us! Don’t! Don’t do it!” There was a jar that nearly knocked me loose from the engine. Then a hideous cracking and crumbling. Something was squeezing us. Big dimpled indentations, like troughs, appeared in the back and belly of the whale—five of them. There were four of them across the back and a big thumblike one almost directly behind me. The great dry bones added their screaming to the captain’s. There was a crunch, a scream, a great rupturing sound at the savage bursting of our vessel, a rush and roar of exploding air—grayness— and blackness.

  Chapter 15

  The Dream

  The sky was that blackness, and I was in the sky, floating weightless, disembodied. Far below me, baked in raw sunlight, was the shimmering, seething Nullaqua Crater. And as the landscape cleared, I saw before me a city of the Elder Culture, reborn.

  The city was a miracle. It was whole, beautiful, charged with the energy of life, its fluted spires and broad black plazas shrouded from vacuum by a thin protective field, the iridescent essence of a bubble. As I watched I saw delicate, insect-wing tints chase one another across its translucent surface. It was far beyond anything made by man. This was the Elder Culture at its peak.

  Something moved me closer. I slipped without difficulty through the field surrounding the city. There was no sense of transition; suddenly I was watching a citizen at work. He was a reptilian centaurlike being, his skin one long sheen of tiny golden red scales. He had eight eyes circling his pink head like studs in a headband.

  He sat alone in a small, hexagonal room, lit by a shifting geometric pattern of tiny bulbs in the ceiling. Incense smoldered in a corner. Before him on a low black pedestal was a device that might best be called a sculpture. The core of it was a solid yellow cylinder, shrouded by a blindingly intricate linking and twisting of multicolored beads, glowing like winter stars through a cloud of mist.

  I had an intuition that was not my own. I saw the object’s significance at once. It was at the same time a work of art, a religious symbol, and a physical representation of its owner’s persona.

  He looked at the sculpture intently. He was dissatisfied. Out of the thousands of beads, three abruptly winked out. He had just destroyed a month’s work.

  His latest work had been too rushed, too hurried. The stresses of the past months had affected him subliminally, and true soul sculpture required complete repose.

  He wanted peace. Surcease. Electropsychic nirvana, the dynamic joy, the more than religious content that would come when, his personality was fused with the sculpture, and he died. Friends would launch his soul into an infinity of space, to float eternally.

  Once this belief had been their faith, but now it was the literal truth. The Elder Culture had made it so.

  Changing, I floated from the centaur’s room and into the city streets. There was an incredible throng, members of a race that took a pure hedonistic joy in the possibilities of surgical alteration. They switched bodies, sexes, ages, and races as easily as breathing, and their happy disdain for uniformity was Haggling- There were great spiny bipeds; slinking doglike things with the hands of men; big creeping bulks with multiplicities of crablike pincered legs; hairy, globular beings with long, warty, cranelike legs and huge, incongrous wings; things on wheels or tracks with great grapelike clusters of dozens of eyes and ears; things that flew, that slid, that humped, that wallowed; things that traveled in colonies, or linked by long umbilicals, or moved in great multiheaded hybrids like whole families grafted together. It seemed so natural, rainbow people in the rainbow streets; humans seemed drab and antlike in comparison.

  But there was fear, an underlying itchy unease, the knowledge that there were enemies below. There had been no opposition to the establishment of the two outposts, which despite their aesthetic qualities were only minor biological waystations. They had been established high above the crater to avoid any possible biocontamination. The first years had gone smoothly, with only the disturbing presence of certain anomalies in the crater to disrupt routine.

  Soundings didn’t work. The first real trouble came with seismic probing of the depths. Results were inconclusive; then came ominous rumblings from the depths of the crater. It might have been a fault, disturbed by the first explosions, seeking equilibrium. But the shocks seemed to come from random areas at random times.

  There was a shift in the patterns of currents in the dust; directly beneath the two outposts, seventy miles down, slow gray vortexes appeared. Probes were sent down to investigate. The dust exhibited a previously unknown quality; apparently acting through static attraction, it leapt out of the air to ding to the probes, smothering them, weighing them down until their engines failed and they fell buzzing into the depths.

  The Elder Culture scientists were intrigued. Was there intelligent life in the crater? Radio signals met with no response; after a few months, a heavily armored probe was sent into the dust It met no resistance; it sank two miles into the black depths, until it hit what appeared to be solid rock. When it tried to move sideways, there was a sudden shock; the sea floor gave way under the probe, and it fell into a blistering pool of magma. Its signals ceased.

  A second, temperature-resistant probe was launched. It was being closely followed when a sudden meteorite rain provided a distraction. Power was diverted to the shields; the static from the disintegration of the meteors in the atmosphere below caused a break in contact with the probe. It vanished without a trace.

  Now the scientists were nonplussed. While they thought over the situation, there was a sudden, violent explosion across the crater, high above the atmosphere, at the southern edge of the rim.

  There was no explanation for it The smooth, glassy crater-with-the-crater, still partially molten when the outposts investigated, had no traces of radioactivity. There were no meteorite fragments or signs of any chemical explosive. Apparently there had simply been a sudden release of energy from a point source, coming from nowhere, revealing nothing. It was odd that the new crater was of the same radius as the Culture’s circular cities. The message was unmistakeable.

  The two cities were determined not to overreact. They didn’t want to leave the planet, or act with cowardice, or call in a fleet—a distasteful act of aggression. They compromised, deciding to set a large thermonuclear device in stationary orbit over the big crater. In the event of attack it would be a simple, if regrettable process to sterilize the crater. They began work at once.

  And the landscape shifted. Beneath the first outpost; something tendril-thin was snaking up the side of the cliff wall. It seemed almost threadlike in the distance, nearly invisible; it was a cylindrical pipe, only six inches wide and the color of a mirror. It was coming from the dust
upwards along the wall like the extended tentacle of a monstrous silver octopus. It was apparently in no particular hurry….

  Occasionally bulges traveled rapidly up its miles-long length, as if some thick fluid were being pumped upwards in surges inside it. At its very tip, which narrowed to needle sharpness, it moved languidly back and forth along the cliff face, sometimes patting the rock with its sharp blind head, seeming to search, like an earthworm looking for the juiciest part of a corpse…. It progressed effortlessly upwards, supporting its miles of exposed length easily, as if gravity were somehow irrelevant. It was already far above the atmosphere, now halfway up the cliff face, now stopping to slide greasily with a snake’s speed across a blasted, airless plateau, caressing the rock with its thin, silvered belly.

  I was swept closer. Dread seized me. It was forty miles up now, fifty, sixty, still daintily kissing the rock with its pointed, featureless snout. Day came, left, and came again. The snake continued to rise. The rainbow bubble over the city would keep it out, I thought. Nothing could pierce the film as long as the city’s generators kept it going. It was only a few miles below the city now. Would the other outpost see it? Or were they too smug to look?

  Across the crater I could see the second city. In the cliff face beneath it there was a soundless snap. A hole a yard across appeared in the rock, and an incredible torrent of dust—no, pulverized rock—bunt outward like a horizontal geyser. Each particle fell through airlessness like lead, cascading down the cliffside with incredible speed and without cohesion. The geyser slowed to a trickle and dust flowed like water.

  And now the diver worm had found something, a thin vertical split in the rock, eight feet high, five inches wide. It did its narrow head into the rock. Surely the fault was too thin for even its slender body. No matter. The snake slid confidently inward. A bulge came rippling up its sixty-mile length, did not even slow as it entered the crevice. Rock cracked, snapped, and split like hot glass dropped in ice-water. Jagged chips broke out from the cliff, falling soundlessly mile after mile, fathering enough speed to be melted into tektites when they hit the atmosphere below.