Involution Ocean

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.”

“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.