Involution Ocean

unlike any human woman’s. Breath hissed from her nostrils and warmed my cheek.

At last we broke. Already her lips were puffing, swelling, growing sticky and inflamed before my eyes. The seconds seemed to ooze by, moving as slowly as bubbles rising up­ward through sludge. Dalusa said nothing, but tears welled from the corners of her eyes and slid thinly down her cheeks and across her swollen mouth.

I raised my injured hand and held it before her face. Then I clenched my fist and squeezed. The half-formed scab parted stickily and a fresh drop of blood oozed slowly down my wrist. We stood unmoving there and watched each other hurt.

Chapter 7 Arnar

The Lunglance needed docking and repair. Captain Des­perandum set sail for the Pentacle Islands. Ntillaqua’s third-largest settlement, Arnar, was built on the largest of these islands.

It took us three days to limp into harbor. After telephon­ing several shipbuilding companies and arranging things to his satisfaction, Desperandum assembled the crew and granted shore leave to the lot of us. He himself stayed on board.

The men tramped down the gangplank and across the dented metal docks to one of the massive elevators on the Arnar cliffside. The huge cubicle ran on charged metal rails to the city above us. The men filed glumly into the elevator and shut the guard railing behind them. I was with them; so was Calothrick. Dalusa was nowhere in sight; probably, she was riding the thermals upward to the city. I had not talked to Dalusa in the past three days. She had moved some of her concentrated food out of the kitchen and re­tired to her tent on deck. I had gone to speak to her, but she had kept her mask on when I walked into her tent. It was impossible to carry on even a onesided conversation when she faced me with the china white mask, its one blood red teardrop under the right eye providing a gro­tesque counterpoint. Perhaps she was regretting her action, perhaps she was ill from the aftereffects of the kiss, proba­bly both. I refused to bother her.

The second mate punched the activating button and the elevator began to climb sluggishly up the side of the cliff.

The docks, whalers, and merchant vessels below us shrank slowly; the air was gradually clearing, so that from my po­sition at. the rail I could look down on a thin grayish haze blanketing the surface of the Sea of Dust. The opposite rim of the Nullaqua Crater shone in the distance, as small as I had ever seen it, but more sharply delineated now that we were above the haze. It eclipsed only six degrees of the western horizon. It was hard to realize that the rim was a sloping series of cliffs, seventy miles high; it looked more like an encroaching storm front, gray thunderheads loom­ing across the sky. Still, that was enough to give one the gnawing feeling that one was living in a bowl. To the east, behind us, the cliffs of the eastern rim covered almost half the sky. Morning came at noon at the base of the cliffs. It was the gleam of the western cliffs, towering out of the atmosphere and reflecting the raw sunlight with moonlike intensity, that lit the early part of the day.

The air was still clearing, taking on the merciless cloud­less clarity of all Nullaqua’s island cities. I dared to take off my mask and sniff at the air. It was clean. I took in a deep lungful and turned to speak to Calothrick.

All the sailors were staring at me, standing stolid, sullen, and forbidding, as if I had committed some breach of eti­quette. I put my mask back on.

At last the elevator reached the top of the cliff and clicked to a stop in front of a broad metal aisle, fenced on the cliffside with a woven-wire fence seven feet high. This assured that not even the drunkest Nullaquan sailor could stumble off the cliff and squander his bodily fluids on the rocks far below. The second mate grabbed the elevator guardrail and swung it open with a creak. I got ready to step off the elevator.

Suddenly the sailors rushed forward in a body, surprising me and bouncing me off the woven-wire fence with a rattle.

I stumbled after them and found that we were on Starcross Street, the heart of Arnar’s red-light district. Both sides of the broad avenue were lined with bars, nightclubs, wrestling auditoriums, mechanized amusement parlors, and houses of ill repute.

Suddenly Flack ripped off his checkered mask and emit­ted an ear-splitting whoop. As if on signal, the rest of the sailors pulled off their masks and clipped them onto rings on the sides of their belts. Meanwhile Flack had launched into an elaborate spiel, delivered at the top of his lungs:

“I’m Flack, the first mate of the Lunglance, the finest ship in the fleet!”

Hie rest of the sailors whooped in agreement.

“I’m tough as spring steel and as tall as the mainmast! I leave footsteps in concrete and crack rocks with my fists! I can kill a flying fish by looking at it and bite a shark to death in a fair fight! Harpoons are my toothpicks and I dean my nails with jackhammers!”

Flack put his hands on his hips and did a quick jig step, then leapt into the air and clicked his heels together three times before landing. The Lunglance’s crew burst into fren­zied applause. Already a crowd was gathering, mostly gar­ishly dressed Nullaquan “dairies” and their pimps. There were also upwards of a dozen hairy-nosed Nullaquan ur­chins and several rival sailors, easily spotted by their tanned arms and pale faces.

Now Grent was starting his speech. “Stand back, stand back, give me room to strut, or I’ll make room over your massacred bodies! don’t tangle with me, I’m way out of your league! I can stick my arm in the ocean and fish peb­bles off the bottom! Don’t try me, don’t try me or I’ll kick down the Nullaqua Wall and spill out all your air! I can tie a knot in a mainmast with one hand, my breath melts sheet steel. ...”

Seeing that this was likely to go on for some timet I tugged on Calothrick’s sleeve and we dipped unobtrusively out of the crowd and up the street.

“Hey, wow, you want a quick blast? Let’s go up that alley,” Calothrick said, pulling his eyedropper out of his belt I followed him into the dim shade cast by the wall of a tattoo parlor. With a grin, Calothrick pulled his plastic packet out of his shirt and slurped up a frightening dose of Flare. He handed me the eyedropper.

“Monty, I can’t use this much,” I said.

“Aw, death, John, that’s no dose for a red-blooded man like yourself,” Calothrick protested. He took the dropper out of my fingers, tilted his head back, and squirted the entire dose down his throat. “See?” He put his dropper back into the packet and slurped up another massive overdose.

“I’m cutting down.” I said. “We have to save all we can for the folks back at the New House.”

“Aw, there’ll be plenty. How many more whales are we going to kill, anyway? Twenty? Thirty? You could have gallons of the stuff by the time we get back. Sure you don’t want a shot?”

“Not one that size.”

“Suit yourself,” Calothrick shrugged, and swallowed a< second massive dose.

“You must have diluted it,” I concluded suddenly. Tak­ing the packet out of his limp fingers, I helped myself to a quarter of a dropperful. “Here’s to Ericald Svobold,” I said. “May he rest in the peace he deserves.”

“Who?”

“Ericald Svobold. He was the discoverer of Flare. That’s what they tell me anyway.”

I swallowed the dose. The reaction was instant and pow­erful; a blue electric rush leapt up my spine and turned my carefully organized neuronic circuitry into a random, cha­otic mass of spar kings and fusings. Like Calothrick, I leaned against the wall, grinning helplessly.

A voice sounded close to my ear. “Are you good-natured, darlin’?”

I quickly slipped the Flare packet inside my shirt and at­tempted to rally my scattered faculties. “What?”

A middle-aged Nullaquan daisy, her face decorated with a thin scattering of multicolored powder on her cheek­bones, had appeared in the alley during my incapacitation. “You lookin’ for a good time, sailor?”

“I, uh, I don’t . .

“I think I need to lie down,” Calothrick mumbled, slumped against the wall.

The daisy helped him to his feet. “Come along, darlin’. I know just the place for you.” She pulled his arm over her hefty shoulders, reaching behind him to pat his wallet with maternal fingers. She winked at me; to my Flare- scorched mind her face seemed glazed and intolerably bright.

“Goodbye and greasy luck, whaler. Drop by Madam An­nie’s some time. Ask for Melda.”