Involution Ocean

There was no mistaking that gesture—sharks. She pointed their direction, half-sinking as she did so.

“It’s all over then,” I said inside the mask, but she must have heard only a mumble. She swam around to my head with quick sculling motions of her wings. She took my left hand and gently wrapped it around her left ankle. Then she tried to fly.

Her impetus broke my grip at once. As I turned over onto my stomach, wallowing in the dust, I saw a flash of green zip by. Dalusa flinched aside, then snapped opt with one preternaturally long arm, snatching a pilot fish out of the air. I heard the rattle of its thin wings against her wrist as she quickly, reflexively, bit through its spine. She threw it aside, and pointed behind me.

I got my hands together and grabbed her ankle in a dou­ble panic grip.

She couldn’t quite fly; my weight was too much for her. Instead she flopped and splashed, and swam, dust bursting up in dirty plumes beneath her. She would leap upward from the dust to fly foward with great powerful surging strokes, fall to dust again, scrabble and swim with wings and hands and her free leg, and leap up once more to fly through the hot, sterile air as if she had to rip her way through it.

We didn’t look back. The pain in my arms was filling up the whole crater and spilling out over its edges. I felt fresh blood on my palms, and the slickness of sweat. I felt the skin of Dalusa’s ankle beginning to blister, its texture roughening as her skin was devoured with hives.

I couldn’t see the blistering because of the dust. I like to think that I would have let her go if I had seen it, accepted my own death rather than hurt her.

But we were always at our best when pain united us. I wanted to live—for her sake almost as much as my own, for the hope we could give each other. In my pain and confusion I could hardly comprehend the sacrifice she was making. It was only later that I grew to understand it.

I didn’t let go until we stopped moving. I didn’t know how long she had been towing me. It felt like days or weeks. I felt the harshness of rope around my chest I felt it tighten around my ribs, and, as the sailors hauled me up out of the dust to the deck of the Lunglance, I blacked out.

I was vaguely aware of movement beside me before I awoke.

“Here Mr. Cookie. Drink some of this.” Meggle, the cabin boy, was holding a ladleful of thin, yellowish broth. I lifted my head and tried to steady the end of the ladle. When I saw the bluish, broken nails of my right hand I started and spilled a little of the broth on my quilt I drank the rest feeling the flat saltiness of it sting myjnouth and soothe my raw throat Meggle set down a kettle of it.

“Drink it all,” he said. “Mr. Flack says you need lots of water.”

I sat up, wincing at the pain in my hand Someone had’ sponged the dust off me. I was naked under the quilt “What time is it?” I said, almost croaking.

“Cfifflight.”

I drank some more soup. “So Fm rescued,” I said. I started to cough rackingly and dropped the ladle with a clatter on the kitchen floor. Innocently, Meggle picked it up and handed it back to me.

“Have you seen anything unusual?” I asked him at last.

“Anything big moving under the dust—sharks—like that?”

Meggle looked at me incuriously. “No,” he said. He seemed unhappy with my questions, as if my forcing him to answer was an imposition.

“Well, what about Dalusa? Is her leg all right?”

“I dunno Mr. Cookie,” Meggle said, reaching up uneas­ily to tug at a strand of his coarse and incredibly dirty- looking hair. “I only saw its leg when it brought you in. Then it flew off to look for the captain.”

“No!” I said, stricken.

Meggle ducked his head guiltily into hunched dioulders. “Mr. Flack tried to stop it,” he said. “But it said it had to go look while it still had the strength. Its leg was really awful-looking, all swelled up past the knee and everything, but it said it had to go look for him. The captain I mean. It said it had to find him before the sharks bit all his blood out. That’s just what it said: ‘Bit all his blood out.’ Mr. Flack tried to stop it” Meggle looked away.

“How long has she been gone?”

“Three . . . hours.”

“Then we might as well go home,” I said. “We might as well all go home. She won’t be back.”

“It might Mr. Cookie. Mr. Flack put bandages on it and stopped the bleeding. Are you all right Mr. Cookie? Your eyes are red as fire.”

I couldn’t say anything. I only waved him away as I looked down into the soup kettle. Meggle put on his mask and went up the stairs out on deck. Salt tears fell into my broth, adding a lingering bitterness to my lonely meal.

It was her last act of faithfulness to those who hurt her, a last misguided act of sham humanity. She must have found the captain, because she never came back.

Chapter 16 The Voyage Ends

My recovery was rapid. I stopped coughing after the first day, and my hearing wasn’t affected, even though my ears had bled. I would bear scars on my palms and shins, but only until I could get to a cosmetic surgeon off planet. The other scars were not so quick to heal; they would stay until the passage of time wore my personality away.

When I rifled Desperandum’s cabin I discovered that he had had more money than any of us had suspected. Luckily some superstition kept First mate Flack from sleeping in the dead man’s quarters. Perhaps he still felt guilty about Desperandum’s notebooks.

We had thrown all of Desperandum’s notebooks over­board. Flack protested, but only mildly, when I explained to him that their destruction had been the captain’s last wish. While lying in my sickbed I had invented a detailed and elaborately worked out lie about our submarine voy­age: how our navigation had failed us, how we became mired in the layer of sludge below the surface; the captain’s bitter regret and his request that I destroy the evidence of his folly, should I escape; our destruction of the ship; my rescue. My artistry was entirely wasted on the crew; they accepted the explanation without enthusiasm, without even caring.

It was very sad, as sad as watching the abandoned notebooks sink slowly astern, their close-crowded pages rif­fling slowly in the sluggish breeze. I had watched them long after the crew had returned to their scrimshaw and their silent pursuits.

Even with bruised and swollen hands it was not difficult to break into the cabinet and take the money. To be quite frank, I might have done it in any event; but with Dalusa’s death, the money became a kind of wergild. I was able to skim enough off the top to take me away from the planet, while leaving enough for the crew’s wages and even a bo­nus.

We reached the Highisle in two days. Desperandum had left no will, and Flack, as captain, left as soon as we docked to report the situation to the maritime Synod. They would probably give him the ship. It was highly unlikely that Desperandum had heirs on Nullaqua, and the govern­ment would frankly not bother with locating any interstel­ lar ones.

I was soon paid off, with a generous bonus. I had thought that Flack would quietly squirrel away a large part of what was left of Desperandum’s money; he needed capi­tal, after all. But whether it was some superstitious dread, respect for Desperandum’s departed spirit, or plain dumb honesty, he paid us all off handsomely.

I took the elevator up to the city. My first act was to buy a new suit of clothes. I discarded my tattered, repellent whaler’s outfit in a recycling chute at the tailor’s. Then I reclaimed the goods I had put into storage. With rings on my fingers and my dustmask sold back to a shop for scrap, I felt almost my old self again. But not exactly: there was an unreal quality to it, as if I were haunted by the frail and friendly ghost of my old self.

I walked along Devotion Street, an airy boulevard de­voted mostly to restaurants. I let the bright Nullaquan sun touch my face, pale from months behind a mask. I stopped at an outdoor table at one of the restaurants. I had traded in my duffel bag for a smart suitcase. I opened it and took out my only keepsake from Dalusa: a single strand of her hair that I had found in her tent I didn’t dare handle it often, for fear that it would disintegrate, so I