Involution Ocean Page 6

  She threw her arms convulsively around my neck and dust gritted against my skin. I was completely coated with the floury stuff; it adhered tenaciously to the thin layer of human oils and greases on my skin. No chance of contamination now.

  Then the wind rose to a howl and the sky was completely obscured. It was as black as pitch underneath the Lunglance. Dalusa’s long arms had a startling panic strength; it was obvious that she had no idea of how to swim. I tried to give her a reassuring pat on the back, but her wings were in the way. At last I reached clumsily over her arms—a difficult task, since her velvety but tough wings almost completely enshrouded me—and patted her between the shoulder blades. Her grip loosened a fraction.

  The wind was beginning to push the Lunglance slowly through the dust. That was bad. If the ship ever turned her stem or her bow to face the wind, the gale would sweep along between the hulls and kill us.

  I stopped treading dust and trudgeon kicked twice in order to float on my back. I braced both feet against the center hull, holding Dalusa almost completely out of the dust. She let go of my neck, lying quietly at full length on top of me. The buoyancy of the dust was enough to hold the round breathing filter of my mask out into the air, but the rest of my head was submerged. Most of Dalusa’s weight was concentrated in her massive flying muscles.

  Then she slid grittily downward along my torso and rested her masked cheek against my chest. My face floated up out of the dust. Some of Dalusa’s body heat was beginning to conduct itself through the layers of dust that separated us. If I started to sweat at the areas of contact she would contract a severe rash. I exhaled sharply and sank a little under her so that fresh dust could adhere to me.

  Feeling me sink, Dalusa linked her arms loosely around my waist. It was still pitch black. I knew her position only by touch. There was no sound but the hollow roar of the wind and the gritty sandpaper sound that the dust made as it rasped at the Lunglance above us.

  But we were safe, at least for the moment. My heartbeat had slowed now and I became aware of the definite eroticism of the situation. I lifted my dustcaked arms and put my hands over Dalusa’s shoulder blades. The muscles under my fingers grew stiff, then relaxed and moved. Her cheek still rested on my chest, but, suddenly, I became aware that she had reached down and was caressing the backs of my calves. Her arms were longer than I had realized; I felt a sudden chill, not unmixed with lust, at the realization of Dalusa’s essential alienness.

  She continued to stroke the backs of my legs. It was not a particularly sensual feeling in itself; the dust was gritty on ‘my skin, and my loose sailor’s bellbottoms were bunched uncomfortably around my knees. But the idea of it was startlingly provocative. So abstracted was the relationship between us that any physical contact, however minor, assumed fantastic, grotesque importance. I stroked Dalusa’s back with my dry, gritty hands. I hesitated about embracing her. The sensation of having her wings pinioned might make her panic.

  We lay there for several minutes, listening to the wind moan and savoring our comfortless contact. I could feel Dalusa’s heart beating with amphetaminelike speed against my chest. Then, amazingly, her hands began to creep upward along the insides of my legs, inside my baggy trousers. Inch by inch they slid across my skin, triggering reactions that were frightening in their intensity. There was an almost sinister quality to it, afloat in the dust on my back in the dark, while Dalusa’s feverishly hot fingers grittily caressed the insides of my thighs. My own heart was thudding now, and my hands were limp on Dalusa’s back.

  Then Dalusa’s hands stopped and squeezed. Suddenly a series of quick spasms went through me, so bewildering in their intensity that I had difficulty identifying them as sexual. At the same time Dalusa shuddered against me. Drained, we relaxed against each other. I think I slept.

  At any rate, I suddenly became aware of the glare of the sun on the dust outside. Dalusa lay unmoving on my chest Pushing off gently from the central hull, I began to backstroke out from the Lunglance’s shadow.

  When the sunlight hit us, Dalusa stirred. Flexing her wings, she knelt on my torso and flapped into the air, shaking dust from the fur on her wings and from her streaming hair. I swam to the ship’s port side, and, kicking violently, was just able to reach up and grab the edge of the deck. It was metal smooth; all the plastic had been blasted off by the storm. Hoisting myself up, I grabbed the bottom rung of the guard rail. It screeched in protest at my weight. The upper rail had been weakened by the wind. When I grabbed it it broke in my hand and cut the edge of my palm. Dust soaked up the blood that trickled down my wrist As soon as I recovered my breath, for the sudden fall had slammed me bruisingly into the Lunglance‘s hull, I pulled myself up with a mask-muffled groan and slid under the railing. I found a new ship. She was clean, incredibly clean, as clean as a picked bone. Several braces had snapped, eaten in two by the awful friction of the wind. The masts gleamed. Every surface was smooth and shiny; I could see my masked reflection on the deck where the sand had eaten down into the bare metal. I looked like the ghost of some humanoid alien, so completely was I covered with the pallid dust. It shook itself loose from my clothing with every step. The plastic had been completely stripped from the deck, except in the thin shadow zones behind the masts, try-pots, and starboard railing. When the sun came fully overhead, the glare would be blinding.

  The hatch to the kitchen creaked open; I froze. The first mate, Mr. Flack, came cautiously out and looked at the clear skies. Then he looked back down the hatch and nodded.

  Turning, he saw me standing completely still in the middle of the barren metal deck. He, too, froze. I envisioned the thoughts going through his head: Good Lord! Look at the poor bastard. His skin’s been completely stripped off and replaced with dust, he’s been mummified alive. I hope he didn’t suffer much.

  Then he said, “Get below and clean up, Newhouse. The men’ll be eating soon.”

  I stood by the hatch while the crew tramped past me up the stairs. Calothrick was last; when he emerged, he gave me an overly jovial whack on the shoulder that raised a cloud of dust.

  I went through the electrostatic field inside the hatch and it ripped a great sheet of dust off my skin and a cloud out of my hair. As I walked down the stairs a torrent of loosened dust poured out of the bottom of my trousers and out from under my shirt. Still wearing the dustmask, I stripped and whacked my clothing against the counter top. Dust flew. I took off the mask, sneezed, and put it back on. I would have to wait for the stuff to settle before I tried to clean it up. I went to the cistern, twisted the tap, and soaked up a spongeful of water. Its contact against my skin was sybaritic in its luxury.

  I pulled a change of clothes out of my duffel bag and took the broom out of its closet. The dust was so light and frictionless that it was almost impossible to pick up, and my energetic attempts only reopened the cut on the side of my hand. A drop of blood slid slowly down the edge of my wrist.

  Then Dalusa came down the hatch.

  “How are you? Are you all right?” she said. I smiled at her show of anxiety.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “A few abrasions, and I bruised myself getting back on board. Oh, and I cut my hand a little.” I held up the injury.

  “Au ” Dalusa said, stepping closer to me. “You’re bleeding.”

  “It’s nothing,” I said. She was staring at the small wound with all the rapt fascination that a mantis shows at the appearance of a fly. “How are you?” I asked lamely.

  “Fine. I was flying at the same speed as the dust, it wasn’t able to hurt me. But it ruined my dress. See?”

  It was true. The thin white film had grown dingy; millions of microscopic particles had somehow imbedded themselves in its polymerized surface.

  “Maybe you can wash it,” I said.

  “Oh, no need. I have yards and yards of material. I’ll make another one.”

  An uncomfortable silence fell. I put down the broom and dabbed at the cut with my sponge. It would clot soon.

  “When we were u
nder the ship, John …”

  “Yes.”

  “I liked what we did.”

  Our eyes met. Perhaps, if she had been a normal woman, and I a normal man, we would have understood one another then. Poets say that souls meet and touch with the eyes as their medium. But even within the same species, what man can claim to really know a woman’s mind? Her next words were barely audible.

  “Did you?”

  “Very much.”

  “I want you to kiss me, John.” She stepped closer yet, so close that I could feel the radiant heat of her body.

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  She closed her eyes and tilted her chin upward. I put my hands behind my back. “It’ll hurt you,” I said, weakening. Her perfectly sculptured lips parted a fraction of an inch.

  I leaned forward and, with the care of a biologist dissecting a unique specimen, touched my mouth to hers. She responded with dreamy hunger, and the whole situation took on an aspect of glazed unreality. A chill swept through me. The silken, almost molten fusion of textures and pressures was like the culmination of a murder. Tears came to my eyes as her tongue slid across the atrociously sensitive ridges of my upper palate, just behind my teeth. I responded. Her own teeth were abnormally sharp, and there was a subtle alien tang in the taste of her mouth, unlike any human woman’s. Breath hissed from her nostrils and warmed my cheek.

  At last we broke. Already her lips were puffing, swelling, growing sticky and inflamed before my eyes. The seconds seemed to ooze by, moving as slowly as bubbles rising upward through sludge. Dalusa said nothing, but tears welled from the corners of her eyes and slid thinly down her cheeks and across her swollen mouth.

  I raised my injured hand and held it before her face. Then I clenched my fist and squeezed. The half-formed scab parted stickily and a fresh drop of blood oozed slowly down my wrist. We stood unmoving there and watched each other hurt.

  Chapter 7

  Arnar

  The Lunglance needed docking and repair. Captain Desperandum set sail for the Pentacle Islands. Nullaqua’s third-largest settlement, Arnar, was built on the largest of these islands.

  It took us three days to limp into harbor. After telephoning several shipbuilding companies and arranging things to his satisfaction, Desperandum assembled the crew and granted shore leave to the lot of us. He himself stayed on board.

  The men tramped down the gangplank and across the dented metal docks to one of the massive elevators on the Arnar cliffside. The huge cubicle ran on charged metal rails to the city above us. The men filed glumly into the elevator and shut the guard railing behind them. I was with them; so was Calothrick. Dalusa was nowhere in sight; probably, she was riding the thermals upward to the city. I had not talked to Dalusa in the past three days. She had moved some of her concentrated food out of the kitchen and retired to her tent on deck. I had gone to speak to her, but she had kept her mask on when I walked into her tent. It was impossible to carry on even a onesided conversation when she faced me with the china white mask, its one blood red teardrop under the right eye providing a grotesque counterpoint. Perhaps she was regretting her action, perhaps she was ill from the aftereffects of the kiss, probably both. I refused to bother her.

  The second mate punched the activating button and the elevator began to climb sluggishly up the side of the cliff.

  The docks, whalers, and merchant vessels below us shrank slowly, the air was gradually clearing, so that from my position at. the rail I could look down on a thin grayish haze blanketing the surface of the Sea of Dust. The opposite rim of the Nullaqua Crater shone in the distance, as small as I had ever seen it, but more sharply delineated now that we were above the haze. It eclipsed only six degrees of the western horizon. It was hard to realize that the rim was a sloping series of cliffs, seventy miles high; it looked more like an encroaching storm front, gray thunderheads looming across the sky. Still, that was enough to give one the gnawing feeling that one was living in a bowl. To the east, behind us, the cliffs of the eastern rim covered almost half the sky. Morning came at noon at the base of the cliffs. It was the gleam of the western cliffs, towering out of the atmosphere and reflecting the raw sunlight with moonlike intensity, that lit the early part of the day.

  The air was still clearing, taking on the merciless cloudless clarity of all Nullaqua’s island cities. I dared to take off my mask and sniff at the air. It was clean. I took in a deep lungful and turned to speak to Calothrick.

  All the sailors were staring at me, standing stolid, sullen, and forbidding, as if I had committed some breach of etiquette. I put my mask back on.

  At last the elevator reached the top of the cliff and clicked to a stop in front of a broad metal aisle, fenced on the cliffside with a woven-wire fence seven feet high. This assured that not even the drunkest Nullaquan sailor could stumble off the cliff and squander his bodily fluids on the rocks far below. The second mate grabbed the elevator guardrail and swung it open with a creak. I got ready to step off the elevator.

  Suddenly the sailors rushed forward in a body, surprising me and bouncing me off the woven-wire fence with a rattle.

  I stumbled after them and found that we were on Star-‘ cross Street, the heart of Arnar’s red-light district. Both sides of the broad avenue were lined with bars, nightclubs, wrestling auditoriums, mechanized amusement parlors, and houses of ill repute.

  Suddenly Flack ripped off his checkered mask and emitted an ear-splitting whoop. As if on signal, the rest of the sailors pulled off their masks and clipped them onto rings on the sides of their belts. Meanwhile Flack had launched into an elaborate spiel, delivered at the top of his lungs:

  “I’m Flack, the first mate of the Lunglance, the finest ship in the fleet!”

  The rest of the sailors whooped in agreement.

  “I’m tough as spring steel and as tall as the mainmast! I leave footsteps in concrete and crack rocks with my fists! I can kill a flying fish by looking at it and bite a shark to death in a fair fight! Harpoons are my toothpicks and I clean my nails with jackhammers!”

  Flack put his hands on his hips and did a quick jig step, then leapt into the air and clicked his heels together three times before landing. The Lunglance‘s crew burst into frenzied applause. Already a crowd was gathering, mostly garishly dressed Nullaquan “daisies” and their pimps. There were also upwards of a dozen hairy-nosed Nullaquan urchins and several rival sailors, easily spotted by their tanned arms and pale faces.

  Now Grent was starting his speech. “Stand back, stand back, give me room to strut, or I’ll make room over your massacred bodies! Don’t tangle with me, I’m way out of your league! I can stick my arm in the ocean and fish pebbles off the bottom! Don’t try me, don’t try me or I’ll kick down the Nullaqua Wall and spill out all your air! I can tie a knot in a mainmast with one hand, my breath melts sheet steel….”

  Seeing that this was likely to go on for some time, I tugged on Calothrick’s sleeve and we slipped unobtrusively out of the crowd and up the street.

  “Hey, wow, you want a quick blast? Let’s go up that alley,” Calothrick said, pulling his eyedropper out of his belt. I followed him into the dim shade cast by the wall of a tattoo parlor. With a grin, Calothrick pulled his plastic packet out of his shirt and slurped up a frightening dose of Flare. He handed me the eyedropper.

  “Monty, I can’t use this much,” I said.

  “Aw, death, John, that’s no dose for a red-blooded man like yourself,” Calothrick protested. He took the dropper out of my fingers, tilted his head back, and squirted the entire dose down his throat. “See?” He put his dropper back into the packet and slurped up another massive overdose.

  “I’m cutting down.” I said. “We have to save all we can for the folks back at the New House.”

  “Aw, there’ll be plenty. How many more whales are we going to kill, anyway? Twenty? Thirty? You could have gallons of the stuff by the time we get back. Sure you don’t want a shot?”

  “Not one that size.”


  “Suit yourself,” Calothrick shrugged, and swallowed a second massive dose.

  “You must have diluted it,” I concluded suddenly. Taking the packet out of his limp fingers, I helped myself to a quarter of a dropperful. “Here’s to Ericald Svobold,” I said. “May he rest in the peace he deserves.”

  “Who?”

  “Ericald Svobold. He was the discoverer of Flare. That’s what they tell me anyway.”

  I swallowed the dose. The reaction was instant and powerful; a blue electric rush leapt up my spine and turned my carefully organized neuronic circuitry into a random, chaotic mass of sparkings and fusings. Like Calothrick, I leaned against the wall, grinning helplessly.

  A voice sounded close to my ear. “Are you good-natured, darlin’?”

  I quickly slipped the Flare packet inside my shirt and attempted to rally my scattered faculties. “What?”

  A middle-aged Nullaquan daisy, her face decorated with a thin scattering of multicolored powder on her cheekbones, had appeared in the alley during my incapacitation. “You lookin’ for a good time, sailor?”

  “I, uh, I don’t …”

  “I think I need to lie down,” Calothrick mumbled, slumped against the wall.

  The daisy helped him to his feet. “Come along, darlin’. I know just the place for you.” She pulled his arm over her hefty shoulders, reaching behind him to pat his wallet with maternal fingers. She winked at me; to my Flare-scorched mind her face seemed glazed and intolerably bright “Goodbye and greasy luck, whaler. Drop by Madam Annie’s some time. Ask for Melda.”

  It was an enormous relief to have them both gone. I leaned against the wall and drew in a long, cool breath. Things seemed to sort themselves out, and a buried memory gnawed at my subconscious. An errand … oh yes, the brandy.