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.
Thai 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 iii 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. IH 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 under 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. “ItH 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. Ntillaqua’s third-largest settlement, Arnar, was built on the largest of these islands.