Involution Ocean

Chapter 3 A Conversation with the Lookout

We set sail at dawn, bound south-southeast for the krill grounds near the Seagull Peninsula. Breakfast was gruel, requiring little effort on my part; the captain and his mates ate muffins and kippered octopi.

The men ate on deck in a long galley tent. Even without his mask the Nullaquan sailor is unusually terse while at sea. I saw that Calothrick had painted his mask during the night; he now had an electric blue lightning bolt on each cheek. It was unique. No native Nullaquan had ever seen a lightning bolt.

After some thought I settled cm a large broken heart as my own motif.

Lunch proved more difficult. My predecessor had left me battered utensils, great pots and tubs of dubious cleanli­ness, and a cupboard full of unmarked Nullaquan spices. I pride myself on my control of the gastronomic art, but these primitive conditions hampered me.

I had young Meggle, the cabin boy, clean the pots while I sampled the spices. One had a sharp metallic taste remi­niscent of rusty iron; the second was vaguely like horse­radish; a third was analogous to mustard but with a bitter af­tertaste. The fourth was salt. I never found out what the fifth was. A single whiff convinced me that it had spoiled.

I dragged a barrel of hardtack from the ship’s stores next door and managed to make it palatable. It was an epic task, but I was rewarded by the single-minded attention paid by the whalers to their food. Without their masks they all looked the same. They were so quiet, except for the occasional belch, that I wondered if they were planning a mutiny.

They seemed a surly lot. All wore drab brown or blue bellbottom trousers and corduroy shirts. Their arms were tanned, their faces pale, with faint seams along the sides where their dustmasks adhered. Six of the men had shaved a narrow band along their temples, around their heads, and across their jaws to get a better seal. To a man, the crew was bedecked with Aspect necklaces, thin metal chains from which dangled one or more symbols of the fragments of God, for, according to the odd Nullaquan creed, the most any man could expect was the attention of a minor fraction of the Deity. Growth, Luck, Love, Dominance, the usual sailor’s Aspects were all represented, some also on rings and bracelets. The jewelry was not considered magi­cal in itself, but merely served as a focal point for prayer. Although I was not religious, I myself owned a platinum Creation ring; it was an artist’s Aspect.

The men ate mechanically, their faces impassive, as if they were unused to expressing emotion, or as if the pale faces were only another kind of mask, held on with invisi­ble straps.

They ate at a long plastic-topped table, bolted to the deck. Another table stood at its head at the end of the gal­ley tent, like the cap to a T. It held food. There was just enough room between the two tables for the men to pick up plastic plates and serve themselves.

Calothrick, tired of the monotonous working of jaws, tried to start a conversation with the grizzled veteran at his right. “Fine weather today,” he said.

All the men stopped eating. Forks in hands, they stared at the unfortunate Calothrick, giving him the clinical inter­est that a doctor might give to a boil. Finally, concluding from his embarrassed silence that he had nothing more to say, they continued eating.

It was an unfortunate conversational gambit, anyway. There was no weather in Nullaqua. Only climate.

My first meeting with the alien woman, Dalusa, came at the last meal of the day. The sun had already sunk beyond the western rim of the Nullaqua Crater, and evening was lit by the dust-filtered roseate glow reflected from the cliffs four hundred miles to the east. I was working in the kitchen when she came through the hatch.

Dalusa was five feet tall. Black, fur-covered batwjngs furled around her, attached to bony struts that were elon­gated metacarpals and phalanges. She had ten fingers on each hand; five supported the wing, the others were free, much like a human hand, even to red lacquer on the finger­nails. Her arms were of unusual length; they would have hung to her knees if she had not habitually carried them bent at the elbows, her hands in front of her breast.

I felt an instant’s bewilderment, unable to tell if she were a bat altered to look like a woman, or a woman attempting bathood.

Dalusa’s face had a refined, sculpted beauty that could only have come from surgical alteration. An artist had weilded the scalpels.

She wore a loose, extremely lightweight white robe, ac­tually just an opaque film that hung from her muscular shoulders and pectorals down to her knees. There was something subtly wrong with her legs. There was a list, al­most a waddle, in her walk. It seemed obvious that she had been born with legs radically different from the mock-human ones now supporting her.

Dalusa had shoulder-length black hair with the same dull sheen as the velvety fur on her wings.

She spoke. Her voice was a low, liquid baritone, so as­tonishing in its subtle tonal variation from common hu­manity that I almost missed the words.

“Are you the cook?”

“Yes, madam,” I said belatedly. “John Newhouse, late of Venice, Earth. What can I do for you?”

“Jonnuhaus?” she repeated, blinking.

“Yes.”

“My name is Dalusa, I am the lookout. Would you like to shake my hand?”

I shook her hand. Her grip was weak, and her hand was unusually hot, though not damp. Apparently her body tem­perature was a few degrees higher than a human being’s.

“Do you talk?” she said. “That’s nice. None of the sail-on will say anything to me, their custom,. I think. I be­lieve they think I am bad luck.”

“How short-sighted of them,” I said.

“And Captain Desperandum is very single-minded. Did you say you were from Earth?”

“Yes.”

“That is humanity’s birthplace, isn’t it? You and I will have to talk about that sometime. I’m very interested in that. But I’m taking up your time. I came to say that I am authorized to prepare my own meals. I’m afraid I’ll have to take up some of the space in your kitchen.”

“Perhaps you dislike the style of my cooking. I know other styles.”

“Oh no, oh no, it’s not that. It’s just that there are trace elements . . . and I have allergies to proteins in your food. And then there are bacteria. I have to take a lot of precautions.”

“You’ll be in here often then.”

“Yes. I keep all my food in that box.” With her unnatu­rally elongated arm, she pointed at a blue metal-bound chest. It was under an iron table that was bolted to the kitchen floor.

I checked a half-dozen bubbling cobblers in the stove while tha alien woman dragged her box out and opened it. She appropriated a brass pot and sprayed the inside with an all-purpose antibiotic aerosol.

“Is this your first whaling voyage?” I asked.

She emptied a half-dozen biscuitlike discs of meat into the pot, sprinkled spice over them, and set the pot on the whale-oil flame. I pumped the hand primer a few times to make sure it would burn evenly.

“Oh no. This is my third trip with Captain Desperan­dum. This voyage I should have enough money saved to leave the planet.”

“Are you eager to leave?”

“Very much eager.”

“Why did you come here in the first place?”

“Friends brought me. At least I thought they were my friends. But they left me here. ... I didn’t understand them. Maybe I couldn’t.”

A faintly acrid whiff of frying alien meat came from the stove. “A basic psychological dichotomy,” I hazarded.

“No. I’m sure that can’t be it. No, it was worse with my own people. I never fitten in, was never accepted. I was never kikiye’.” Her altered mouth moved awkwardly to form the word.

“So you had yourself changed.”

“You object?”

“Not at all. So you were left here, you needed money, you signed up with Desperandum?”

“That’s so.” She took a flexible metal spatula out of a drawer, sprayed it with the aerosol, and turned over the slices of meat “No one else would have me.”

“But Desperandum doesn’t go by the book.”

“Yes. He is an alien, of course, and he is also very old. I think.”

That was bad news. There was no telling what bizarre behavior I might see from Desperandum. Men grow tricky, motives strange, when the subconscious lust for death turns traitor.

“He seems a decent sort,” I said. I smiled. “At least he showed considerable taste in hiring you.”

“You are kind.” She took a dirty plate off the stand, scrubbed it with coarse sand, and sterilized it. She took the pot off the fire and stabbed a piece of meat with a long fork. “Do you mind if I eat here?”

“No. Why?”

“The man in the galley tent don’t like it when I eat with them.”

“I should think you’d be a great favorite.”

She put down her fork. “Mr. Jonnuhaus—" .

“John.”

“John, I show you something.”

She held out here right hand. I looked at it. A prickly red rash spread across her thin dactylate fingers. I reached for her arm. “You’ve burned yourself.”

“No! Don’t touch me.” She leapt back, unfurling her wings with a rustle. A faint puff of air crossed my face. “Do you see, you shook my hand. Your hand was damp, a little, and there are enzymes, oils, microorganisms. I have allergies, John.”

“I hurt you.”

“It’s nothing. It will go away in an hour. But can you see now, why the sailors? ... I can never touch anyone. Or allow anyone to touch me.”

I was silent for a few moments. “That’s a misfortune,” I said. At the sight of the rash a strange sickish feeling spread through me, that doubled and trebled as I heard her explanation.

She refurled her wings so that they hung in neat togalike folds, and drew herself stiffly to her full height. “I know that when a man and woman touch each other it leads to other things. Those things would kill me.”

Thte sickness spread. I felt a little weak. I had felt no real attraction to the bat-woman when I first saw her, but at the news of her inaccessibility I felt a sudden lurch of desire.

“I understand,” I said.

“I had to tell you that, John, but I hope well be good friends, anyway.”

“I see no obstacles to that,” I said carefully.

She Smiled. Then she picked a slice of meat from her plate with her red-lacquered fingernails and, daintily, ate it.