Брюс Стерлинг - Involution Ocean

I knew all this intellectually, but to the eye, it was only a cliff with a white band and a green band.

I saw a sudden green flash of wings in the distance. The sharks were coming.

I sensed someone looming at my right shoulder. I turned.

Suddenly I was staring directly into a pair of eyes, dark eyes, much like my own, eyes framed by the plastic lenses of a dustmask that was decorated with green and white tar­get shapes. The man, Murphig, was exactly my height. The whole contact lasted only a second. Then, uncomfortably, we both turned to watch the advance of the sharks. They were closing rapidly. I shuddered. I was not sure why; it wasn’t the sharks.

Surprisingly, the sharks and their winged comrades de­clined to attack the crew. Instead they slashed sullenly at the floating, dust-caked intestines that we had thrown over­board. With more-than-beastlike sagacity, they knew that the whale had already been processed. There could be no profit in aggression. Still, they stayed out of range of our whaling spades.

I returned to the kitchen and began to run my brew through a crude but efficient still I had jury-rigged out of some loose copper tubing. At lunch I explained plausibly to Dalusa that it was a still and I planned to make brandy. She immediately lost interest; alcohol had no appeal for her.

I finished before supper with a little less than an ounce of watery black fluid. The black-market Flare I had refined from pure Nullaquan gut oil was almost transparent. I wondered if I should try straining the new brew.

Supper was uneventful. I piled the unbreakable dishes into a large coarse-woven sack and carried them into the kitchen. I found Dalusa there. Spread on the cabinet before her was a large Nullaquan seagull, dead. Pale purple fluid leaked from a triple puncture in its breast Dalusa was star­ing at the dead bird in rapt fascination, her own wings furled, her hands clasped before her breast.

I walked heavily down the stairs, but she showed no sign of realizing my presence. I looked at the bird. It had a wingspan of about four feet; its yellow eyes, glazed and dead, Were half veiled by lids that moved from the bottom of the eye upward. Its beak was lined with tiny conical teeth.

Its feet were strangest, long black weblike nets, weighted at the bottom with nodules of bone. Obviously its fishing pattern was to swoop above the opaque dust and net blindly for whatever might be below the surface.

I loomed at Dalusa’s shoulder. She did not look up, but continued to stare at the bird. A thick drop of lavender blood oozed slowly across one of its breast feathers and dripped onto the cabinet top. There was no remorse in the lookout’s face, only absorption, mixed with an emotion I could not name. Perhaps no human could.

“Dalusa,” I said softly.

She jumped, half unfurling her wings; it was the inborn reflex of any flying creature. Her feet clicked when they touched the deck again. I looked down. She was wearing a whalehide sandal arrangement on each foot; straps crossed her instep and looped around the outside of her heel. Curl­ing upward from the base of the toes on each foot were three stainless steel hooks, six inches long and barbed. Arti­ficial claws.

“You’ve been hunting,” I observed.

“Yes.”

“And you caught this bird.”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to eat it?”

“Eat it?” she repeated blankly. She looked at me in con­fusion. She was adorable. I felt a sudden strong sadistic urge to kiss her.

I restrained myself. “You’re wearing claws,” I said.

“Yes!” she said, almost defiantly. “We all had than, in the old days.” Silence. “Did you know, did I tell you, I was there when your people met mine for the first time?”

I blinked. “A scientific expedition?”

“Yes, they said so.”

“Sponsored by the Academy, no doubt,” I told myself aloud.

“What?”

“Nothing. What happened then?”

“They talked to us,” Dalusa said. She ran one pale fin­gertip along the wing of the bird, slowly. “How beautifully they spoke. From my place in the shadows my heart went out to them. How wise they were. How graceful in the way they walked, always touching the ground. They were so solid and stable. But the elders listened and were angry. They swooped on them from above and tore the humans, ripped them to tatters with their claws. I could do nothing, me, only a child and not kikiye’. I could only love them and cry by myself in the darkness. But even their blood was beautiful, rich and red, like flower petals. Not like this thing’s . . .”

There was a triple rap on the hatch. Calothrick. “Come in,” I shouted, and Calothrick entered, pulling off his mask. He stopped dead when he saw Dalusa.

“You have things to discuss,” she said suddenly. She pulled open the oven, snatched a pair of insulated potholders off two hooks on the side of a cupboard, and pulled out a covered dish. “I will go eat with the sailors.”

“No, stay,” I said. She stopped for a second, then glanced at me with such an intensity of emotion that I was taken aback. “We will talk later tonight.” She picked up her mask from the table, a china white mask with a single blood red teardrop from the corner of the right eye. She started up the stairs; Calothrick, coming down, gave her a wide berth. She left; the hatch snapped shut.

“Weird,” opined Calothrick, shaking his head. Wisps of tangled blond hair fell over his eyes. He brushed them aside with one hand. IBs fingernails were dirty. “Say . . . you’re not carrying on with that um—" he searched for a noun and couldn’t find it “—with her, are you?”

“Yes and no,” I said. “I might if there were any point to it. But there isn’t.”

“With that?” said Calothrick incredulously. He seemed more shrill than usual. I looked at him closely. Sure enough, the whites of his eyes were tinged slightly yellow with Flare withdrawal. He was suffering. “What about Millicent?”

“Yes, of course, there’s always her,” I lied smooth!”

After the way she betrayed me I wouldn’t have touched her with an electric prod. “But after all, what is love but an emotional obsession ...”

“Caused by sexual deprivation, yeah, I know that one,** Calothrick said. “But that bat-woman gives me the creeps. She looks all right, but it’s all surgery, y’know? I mean, if it weren’t for the scalpel she’d have big ears and claws and fangs. She has her own tent, y’know. The men say she sleeps upside down. Hangs by her toes from the ridgepole.”

I was annoyed. “Mmm,” I said. I changed the subject. “What do you think of the behavior of those sharks?”

“Sharks? I dunno. Murphig was talking to me about diem just a while back. He spends a lot of his time watch­ing things, just sort of looking at them. He says they can smell death at a distance. Maybe, he says, smell it before it happens. The kid’s as nuts as Desperandum. Yeah, and. speaking of Murphig . . . how’s the stuff coming?” . I swung open a cabinet door and took out a metal bottle. In the bottom was a thin scum of syncophine. “Terrific,” said Calothrick, sniffing the bottle. He pulled his plastic packet out of his shirt and poured in a thin rivulet of the brew. “Ugh. It’s black,” he commented, sealing the bag. “First thing tomorrow, then, Murphig gets it.”

“Not too much,” I said. “It could be extremely powerful stuff.”

“Yeah, yeah, right, IH be careful,” Calothrick said impa­tiently. “Oh, by the way, d’you see that plankton out there tonight? Quite a sight.” He strapped his mask back on, slipped the Flare inside his shirt and went up through the hatch.

I sat down on the kitchen stool and began to clean out the still, meticulously. Sooner or later I would have to brew some spirits with it, if only to divert any possible suspicions of Dalusa’s. I wondered about my attraction to the woman. There were mixed motives, I decided.