Involution Ocean

“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 papas 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. Per-, haps 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 Jhe 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 hot 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 deja 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.

Tm 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 cant expect me to hurt like you do. I cant 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.