Involution Ocean

five men to tear that table loose.

I noticed that the tabletop had a wide circular indenta­tion in it, just the size of the bottom of the glass jar. Sure enough, Desperandum picked up the jar and set it neatly into the hole. He stepped back to admire his work.

“Mr. Bogunheim!” Desperandum rumbled.

“Yes, sir?” said the third mate.

“Have this jar filled up with dust About three-quarters of the way to the top will do.”

Soon Calothrick and a scrawny Nullaquan deckhand were busy carrying buckets. Desperandum retired to his cabin.

There were odd convection currents in that tubful of dust. Particles heated by sunlght through the wall of the jar crept upwards along the side of the glass and diverged across the surface. Cooler dust flowed sluggishly to replace it. The patterns of circulation would change as the sun slid across the sky.

Day was evenly divided here at the center of the crater. Morning lasted five hours. There was no waiting for morn­ing in the dry.shadow of the eastern cliffs as we had in Arnar. In the Highisle dusk came early. It came at the same time every day, and the sun rose at the same spot. Nullaqua had an axial tilt of less than a degree. There were no seasons, no weather to speak of, only sameness, con­stancy, stasis both physical and cultural, forever and ever, amen.

After the last meal of the day Desperandum retrieved his net. He spread it gently on the deck. There were dozens of hard little nuggets in it: three or four hundred pebbles of green-faceted plankton, small white pearls of fish eggs, wormlike coiled cylinders, greenish-speckled ovoids, flat­tened spheres marked with broken brown lines against cream white. There was even a spiny, shiny black egg as large as my fist.

Desperandum kneeled and began to sort his catch, mak­ing quick notes in an open booklet. Then the selected eggs and some of the plankton went into the tub of dust. Des­perandum sent a crewman down to the kitchen for water; when the man returned, Desperandum sprinkled a few ounces over the dust.

“They’ll hatch soon,” Desperandum told me. “Then well see what we’ve got.”

I’ nodded; Desperandum left. It was getting colder now that the sun had set. The dust was flowing in a different way; it cooled at the surface and slid away down the sides of the jar. Carried by the tiny current, the plankton clus­tered against the edge of the glass.

In a way the jar was a microcosim of the crater. Too round of course, and it needed the rocky jutting of islands and cities here and here and here and here. The Highisle, Arnar, Brokenfoot, and shadowy Perseverance. The Lun­glance would be about here, creeping slowly along the north­ern margin of the crater; aboard it, the tiny fleck of proto­plasm that was John Newhouse, visible only with a microscope. A quaint conceit, I told myself. I went below and fell asleep. The ship sailed on.

Next morning there were faint stirrings in the dust. Des­perandum was soon up, fishing delicately in the jar with a long-handled strainer made of woven string. Every few minutes he would pull out a twitching minnow or crablike anthropod and check off an egg on his list. Tinny bass humming came from his mask speaker. He was enjoying himself. I didn’t like the look of the black webwork of stitches on his injured arm. The slash on his neck had healed well, but his arm was puffy and inflamed. I hoped he was taking antibiotics.

There was a discrepancy between the number of eggs on his list and the number of organisms he had been able to catch. It didn’t seem to bother him. He could hardly expect to catch every animal just by fishing blindly with a strainer. After he had caught the same fish three times he shrugged good-naturedly and abandoned his efforts. It showed an un­usual tolerance for frustration on Desperandum’s part, and it surprised me. I had expected him to empty the whole tub through a net. Apparently he thought that might endanger the health of the specimens.

All in all he had caught sixteen specimens from twenty-eight eggs. On the next day he tried again. There were more nuggets of plankton now; their spores had been pres­ent when the dust was first added. Besides that, the other plankton, sensing the presence of water, had spawned. There were dozens of tiny nuggets, no larger than chips of glass. Some of the larger nuggets were missing. They had been eaten.

Desperandum added a little more water to promote the growth of the major food source, then began fishing again.” He had more success this time; he caught twenty speci­mens. Oddly, he was unable to catch some of the earlier specimens, including the fish he had caught three times yesterday. It didn’t seem to bother him. After all, every creature there was entirely under his control.

I stopped my speculation. It was past my ability to fathom Desperandum’s mental states; like all old people, he had passed into a different orientation, as different from my own as childhood is from adulthood.

We killed a whale that day and dumped three eggs overboard.

On the next day Desperandum caught only fifteen speci­mens. One of them was a small predatory octopus, which accounted for the disappearance of a few of the fish. Des­perandum pulled it out of the tank and dissected it.

Twelve specimens on the next day. Desperandum rid himself of three omnivorous fish, assuming that they were the culprits. On his checklist he had correlated twenty-seven of the twenty-eight eggs. The shiny, spiny, black one remained unidentified.

When he found only four specimens on the day after that Desperandum grew annoyed. He emptied out the jar. Dust rustled sluggishly across the deck and flowed under the rail into the sea. Desperandum quickly rescued the specimens that lay struggling or scuttling on the deck; three crabs, a small vegetarian octopus, and the larva of a dust strider. He frowned. All of his captives ate nothing but plankton or, when they could get it, the long linked ropes of kelp common in this part of the crater.

Then he turned to the jar. There, stuck to the side of the glass with a dust-colored suction disk, was a small Nulla­quan anemone.

“Astonishing!” Desperandum said aloud. “An anemone. What a stroke of luck.”

The anemone looked quite healthy, as might be ex­pected when it need only reach out one of its thorny arms for prey. It had eight arms, long, supple, pale brown tenta­cles studded with nastily sharp black thorns, like the branches of a rosebush. Each thorn was. hollow, as were the arms; each thorn was a sacking, vampirish beak. Hie arms sprouted from a short, thick trunk; at the bottom of the trunk was a snaillike suction foot At the junction of the arms was a complicated pink arrangement of layers, not unlike the petals of a flower. Like a flower, it was a genital organ. The anemone was quite strong for a creature of its size. It’s foot-long tentacles waved freely even without the support of the dust. It breathed through the siphonlike tips of its arms; they were thin, so it was not surprising that they had never been noticed.

The anemone seemed disturbed by the loss of its dust. It waved its tentacles indecisively, and finally hooked one over the rim of the jar. Then it released its suction hold on the glass with a faint pop and began to pull itself slowly and laboriously up the side of the glass.

“Dust! Quickly!” Desperandum snapped, watching the anemone with all the concern of a devoted parent for a sick child. Soon a crewman arrived with a bucket and Desper­andum poured it slowly into the tub. “More, more,” Des­perandum demanded impatiently. Soon the level of the dust swirled up to one of the anemone’s slowly threshing tenta­cles. The plantlike animal released its hold and slipped into the dust almost gratefully, it seemed to me.

Desperandum noticed my attention. “They’re extremely rare,” he told me. “I’d heard that there was a last colony of them living in the bay northwest of here, but I’d never seen one. No wonder I couldn’t account for that last egg.” Des­perandum laughed jovially. He was enjoying himself.

I hoped that his new pet wouldn’t bite him. The way it had tried to climb out of its jar struck me as ominous. I would hate to wake up some night and pry its barbs away from my throat.

Next day I climbed up on deck after leaving the break­fast dishes for Dalusa. I found Desperandum standing be­side the glass urn, holding a wiggling spratling over the . dust. Hesitantly, a brown, barbed arm lifted from the opac­ity and wrapped itself around the fish. The fish flapped weakly a few times and then stiffened. Testing the anem­one’s strength, Desperandum kept a firm grip on the fish’s dry gray tail. Soon another tentacle snaked upward out of the dust; Desperandum snatched his fingers back just before the second tentacle lashed out at his hand. The fish disappeared under the surface.

“Strong little monster!” Desperandum said admiringly. “They were all over the crater before it was settled, you know. They kept attacking ships, innocently enough, and poisoned themselves. One sip of human blood through one “of those thorn-beaks killed them almost instantly. I’d even heard that they were extinct. No one would visit their last stronghold up north for fear of mutual destruction. Perhaps they’re making a comeback.”