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, malting 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 black 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 clifHight.
I 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,” I 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 duplicted 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.”
