Involution Ocean

Thoughtfully, Desperandum leaned on the collapsible rail and watched the dust swirl where the windlass had gone down. Then he turned to stare at the whaling hoists attached to the masts, as if he thought them admirable deep-sea fishing tackle. I saw several crew members exchange significant glances. Then Desperadum returned to his cabin. In a moment came the order to set sail again.

The two blacksmiths produced their hammers and weld­ing equipment and repaired the holes in the deck that the bolts had made when they pulled through.

I was about to return to the kitchen when a sudden shadow flickered across the deck in front of me. I glanced up and was shocked to see some kind of winged monster sliding and darting through the air. It stopped, fluttered, and settled neatly inside the crow’s nest. It was Dalusa.

There came a coded series of blasts from the horns in the crow’s nest. On her scouting flight the lookout woman had seen a dustwhale, two miles to starboard. Desperandum was out on deck at once. At his orders, the Lunglance turned into the wind, in the position known as all aback. Then the foresail lines were rapidly hauled through their winches so that the foresails were almost perpendicular to the wind. For a moment the clew lines hung slack; then the sails filled with a muffled snap and the ship heeled onto a starboard tack. The foresails were straightened and the Lunglance moved sluggishly forward. The Lunglance al­ways moved sluggishly. She was not built for speed, and there was little chance of wind with any force in the 500-mile Nullaqua Crater.

Soon the whale was in sight. As the ship crept up on the lethargic beast, three of the seamen opened veins in their elbows and collected blood in a beaker. Blackburn, our harpooneer, took the beaker and poured the blood into the central chamber of his piston-equipped harpoon with its four shiny barbed vanes. Then he walked nonchalantly to the starboard harpoon gun and loaded it. There was enough blood left for two extra harpoons if need be.

It was odd, but convenient, that human blood should be a lethal poison to the dustwhale. But it was no odder than the whale’s production of Flare. Like all good things, syn­cophine in sufficient quantity is a lethal poison.

We sailed closer to the creature, and it grew larger and larger. It seemed that no living creature had a right to be that huge.

Suddenly there was a loud chunk sound from the star­board. The vast bulk in the distance suddenly sprouted a harpoon. The silence was broken by a shrill scream. It was the whale.

The beast, bewildered, began to swim toward us. Black­burn took the opportunity to sink a second and a third poisoned harpoon into its vast, armored back. With a final frightened squeal the creature sounded, only a few yards from our bow. It was under for less than a minute; then it floated to the surface, dead.

The dustwhale was a vast flounderlike creature, seventy-five feet long and perhaps thirty feet across. The largest part of its body was its mouth, a huge crevasse bristling with tough baleen. It had teeth in its throat to crush the hard-shelled Nullaquan plankton. It used the large amount of silicon it ingested in this way to build a tough black armor, jointed by strips of gray whaleskin. Such armor is tough, but flexible; if it were rigid, the dustwhale would be forced to molt when it grew. This gave the whale an odd sort of hexagon checkerboard pattern of black and gray on its entire body. One could tell a whale’s age by counting the growth rings on an armor plate. The rings were not very well defined, since Nullaqua has no seasons and the food supply is constant. But they were there, and it was seldom that one found a whale more than fifty years old. Like all Nullaquan surface fish, the dustwhale is air-breathing and cold-blooded. Dustwhales often travel in pods.

We cruised to the side of the dead monster. Six crew­men, one of them Calothrick, leapt off the ship onto the creature’s back, carrying huge hooks attached to metal ca­bles.

The lookout honked her horn twice, sharply. This was the warning signal for sharks. A coded blast off the smaller horn gave their position: three points off the port bow.

Mr. Grent, the second mate, was overseeing the loading operation. He grew agitated and the crew began to jump frantically, imbedding their hooks as deeply as possible into the flesh of the monster. It was best to snag a rib.

I had heard much about the Nullaquan shark, so I walked across the deck to see their approach. What a dis­ appointment! Advancing from the west was a small flock of flying fish, their jewellike chitinous wings flashing green in the sunlight. Were these the legendary carnivores, these fluttery creatures little larger than earthly goldfish? But then perhaps there were vast numbers of them, with small, but sharp teeth and a total disregard for their own preser­vation. ...

Then I saw fins split the surface beneath the flying fish and a half-dozen shiny black bodies surged through the dust like advancing torpedoes. It was startling, almost ma­cabre, to see the bulbous tip of each black fin suddenly open to reveal a large, staring blue eye!

So, then the flying fish were only pilot fish, leading the sharks to slaughter in exchange for tidbits. With their wings they could go much higher and see much farther than the dust-bound sharks.

Suddenly the third mate, Mr. Bogunheim, thrust a long whaling spade into my hand and yelled at me to help repel the creatures. Nothing loath, I ran across the deck to the rail to join the rest of the crew.

The sharks were already attacking. The dust roiled like lava, and thick gouts of purplish liquid burst from the lac­erated body ef the whale. The sailors had finished imbed­ding their hooks, and they jumped to the relative safety of the deck. There came a loud clanking and clattering from the hoists and triple tackle as the whale was slowly, slowly, hauled on board. The ship began to list. I stabbed down­ward into the thrashing mass of sharks and felt my spade bite flesh. A sailor moaned through his mask as one of the pilot fish flew on deck and bit him stingingly on the calf. Those fish were small but they had sharp teeth. They flut­tered on board to harass the sailors, fell to the deck, then scuttled overboard on their stiff wings like so many mons­ter ants.

I stopped my attack on the sharks for a moment to stamp on a flying fish. Suddenly the whaling spade was almost wrenched from my grasp. Startled, I pulled up a five-foot metal stub, bitten clean through. I was taken aback. Then I saw a pilot fish flap toward me. Swinging my stub like a bat, I sent it splattered back into the sea.

Suddenly a swift shape, borne aloft on crooked batwings, swooped past the edge of the ship. It was Dalusa, dragging a metal-mesh net. The fluttering group of pilot fish stopped harassing the crew and quickly sought the safety of the sea.

The crew moved out of the way as the hoisted whale slowly settled onto the deck. The Lunglance listed and thick purplish blood ran out under the rail and into the sea. One shark, more voracious than the rest, leapt onto the deck after its vanished prey. Flopping and snapping it bit out a final oozing chunk of meat and then rolled overboard again.

The sharks milled indecisively in the bloody dust Then they towed their dead comrades out of spade range, de­voured them in a leisurely manner, and swam languidly away.

The crew settled down to the task of butchering the whale. First, the armored skin was peeled off in strips and soaked in a copper tub with a chemical that made it more pliable. Then the meat was efficiently sliced off with spades and axes. Piece by piece, it was fed into a clanking hand-powered grinder and processed for oil and water. Our two coopers sawed through the broad, stavelike ribs and began to machine them into ivory barrels. The smaller ribs and a few of the vertebrae were taken for scrimshaw.

Under the pretense of getting whale steaks I shoved a few pounds of the intestine into an iron bucket and hid it in the kitchen.

The crew shoved the remaining offal overboard with shovels and tough metal-bristled pushbrooms. I looked over the side. At the touch of moisture, the parched dust had clumped into a slate gray, doughy mass. Soon, I knew, the crystalline spores of Nullaquan plankton would sense the presence of water and begin to grow, soaking up all the moisture through their tiny pores and biochemically alter­ing the dust into a transparent micalike shell. A strange world, I thought, where a man could lean over the rail and spit emeralds.

A crude but satisfactory method of extracting syncophine was through processing with ethyl alcohol. So, when the crew celebrated that night, I appropriated a few pints of strong ale and started work.

The process was about half done when I heard a quick triple rap on the hatch. I took the brew off the range and put it in the oven, then went up the stairs and opened the hatch. It was Calothrick.

“Holy Death,” he said profanely, walking down the stairs and pulling off his lightning-striped dustmask. There were red indentations from the seal of the dustmask on his temples and across his sparsely stubbled cheeks. “I can’t stand that beer.” He sniffed at the air, then grinned.

“Knew I could depend on you, John,” he said happily. He zipped open his sailor’s tunic and pulled out a flattened plastic pouch from an inside pocket. There were a few drops of syncophine in one corner.