Брюс Стерлинг - Involution Ocean

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.

“I’ve been saving up,” he said. “YVant a quick Mast?”

“Why not?” I said. Calothrick pulled his eyedropper out of his belt.

“I’ve been meaning to come down here and talk,”,he said. “You’ve got it pretty soft down here. You don’t have to associate with that stinking crowd of sailors. What a bunch of stooges! I don’t think they know how to talk. I mean, like you or me.” He handed me the eyedropper. “Here, you can go first.”

I looked at the massive dose of syncophine he had given me through a misplaced sense of generosity. “I’d better sit down for this,” I said.

Calothrick winked. “Been a while, huh? Boy, the days sure crawl by without it.”

I opened my mouth and squeezed five drops of Flare out onto my tongue. A metallic-tasting numbness spread through my mouth. My eyes began to water. I handed the dropper back to Calothrick. He shook his bag a few times, thai sucked out an even larger dose than he had given me. Suddenly my vision blurred. I closed my eyes.

“Here’s greasy luck,” said Calothrick cheerfully, giving the dustwhaler’s traditional toast His voice sounded unnat­urally loud. Unconsciously I gripped the seat of my stool.

There was a sudden icy tingling at the base of my spine. Abruptly an overwhelming rush like channelized lightning rocketed up my spine to burst inside my skull. I felt it distinctly. The top of my skull lifted neatly off, and a cold blue flame shot through the center of my head. My eyes shocked open and the flame settled down to an even, steady burning, like the flare of a. welding torch. The stove, the unwashed utensils, Calothrick’s ecstatic face, everything had an unnatural shininess to it as if every object were suddenly venting energy from some internal reservoir. Electric blue dots and lozenges floated at the edges of my vision. I looked at my hands. I, too, was glowing.

“How long?” Calothrick said suddenly.

“How long till what?”

“How long till you can distill some Flare that’s fit to do up?”

“I don’t know,” I said with difficulty. “I can finish distill­ing by tomorrow night if I work at it But I don’t know how good ftll be. I won’t know its strength.”

“Oh, I’m not afraid of its being too strong,” said Calo­thrick. He giggled.

I thought about the potful of whale intestine slowly grow­ing cold In the unlit oven. I felt disinclined to get up and put it back on the stove. It seemed like an immense effort, obviously beyond my capabilities.

“What were we talking about?” Calothrick asked.

I hesitated. “About how strong It was.”

“Yeah, yeah, I remember.”

“One of us will have to try it out first,” I said. “There might be impurities. Maybe dangerous. You want to draw straws?”

“Dangerous,” muttered Calothrick. He seemed troubled. Then he smiled. “Did I tell you about that man, the one who’s been pestering me all the time?”

“No. Are you being mistreated? Have you told the mates about it?”

“No, it’s not that, it’s this kid named Murphig. A Nullaquan. It’s his first time out and he keeps asking me questions, you know, about where I’m from and what I’m doing out here. A real nuisance. I mean, I’m not too good at lying.”

An odd statement, that last one, I thought. If it were a lie, it was very much a lie, because he had told it with an aura of perfect innocence and truth.

“So?” I said.

“So, he’s about your build, you know? You’ve seen him, the one with green and white target shapes on his cheeks?”

“Yes.”

“Well, why not try it out on him?”

I thought it over. “You want me to put Flare in his food?”

“Why notr Calothrick demanded. “I’ll do it if you don’t have the—if you don’t want to.”

The Flare was beginning to wear off. “Yeah, you do it,” I said. I rubbed my left eye, the one with the grayish dead spot; it was beginning to ache. I got up off the stool, took the pot out of the oven, and put it back on the range. I turned on the heat.

“Pump that primer a few times, will you Dumonty,” I said tiredly.

“Monty,” he corrected, pumping. “Say, you got lots in there. That’ll keep ’em happy back in the Highisle, huh?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. But my erstwhile roommates on Piety Street had burned me, maneuvered me, made me their pawn. I was not interested in vengeance of course; that was beneath me. Only simple justice. There would in­deed be a large quantity of syncophine, even after I had finished the distilling process. But they would never see any of it. I had already settled that.

Calothrick might object But I would deal with him later.

“Tell me about Earth,” Dalusa said.

“All right.” How many times had I told the lie and to how many women? I had lost count. Over twenty years ago the inspired falsehood had sprung like a full-blown rose into my mind, watered by panic, fertilized by youthful ro­manticism. I had feigned reluctance countless times; count­less times my youthful brow was knit with a counterfeit pain from counterfeit memories. But for Dalusa it was dif­ferent, Dalusa deserved better. I resolved to lie my hardest for her.

“I can’t tell you of the whole planet,” I said, picking my words with care. “Only the few acres, here and there, that chance allowed me to know. Thirty-four years ago I was born in Venice, an ancient city, once a nation. It was built on an island, and called the Bride of the Sea. Venice was surrounded by an arm of the World Ocean, a great salt sea called the Middle of the World. As a child I would watch the sea, watch foamy waves batter the shore, and tease my eyes with the scattered gleaming of the sun on the water’s choppy surface. It seemed that the ocean went on forever, engulfing the planet like a second atmosphere. There is enough water in Earth’s blue and bitter seas to drown the Sea of Dust some thirty times over. v“But about Venice. Imagine a glorious golden city, so old that it is betrayed by the very rocks beneath it A city once marvellous and proud, glittering, beautiful, holding the slowly gathered loot of the seven seas. There was no navy like the Venetian Navy, no art like her art, no rulers like her doges. Venice was queen among ttie cities of Italia and Bohemia, like a great diamond among sapphires. Of Earth’s cities Venice was the first to reach for the stars. Of course, Venice was founded long before man knew flight, but Venetian genius turned the long dream into reality. Wooden birds, hatched from the brain of the immortal Leonardo da Venice, sculled through the Venetian skies, carrying the city’s red and silver banners. ...