But it was his brain.
The Lunglance left at dawn, with a full company. After the two-day debauchery, the crew was more dour than ever. Not a word was exchanged at breakfast; the crew ate like sullen machines.
We sailed northeast After two weeks we left the Pentacles behind. This part of the Sea of Dust was monopolized by a peculiar life form known as the lilypad. There were hundreds of acres of these strange plants. Their photosynthetic organ was a single round leaf, yards in diameter but less than an inch thick. It floated on the surface, spreading itself in order to absorb as much sunlight as possible. The gray sea was greenly polka-dotted with thousands of the plants; they were free floating and strangely sensitive. When disturbed, the leaf curled inwards, wrinkling over its entire surface and withdrawing completely into its root, a thick, round bulb. This immediately sank into the opaque depths, away from the reach of herbivores.
Many creatures lived in symbiosis or parasitism with the lilypad. Desperandum, who made a detailed study of the plant, isolated 257 separate species of associate organisms, including leaf nibblers, leaf miners, stem borers, leaf suckers, root feeders, and gall makers. Besides these there woe twenty-six species of predators, fifty-five species of primary parasites, nine secondary parasites, and three tertiary parasites. Among all these creatures was a small six-legged crab that made a fine chowder. When our prows touched the lilypads they immediately shrank and sank, leaving their crabby passengers swimming frantically. Desperandum caught hundreds of the creatures simply by dragging a net after the ship.
Some of the lilypads were in bloom; they had a long straight stalk and a puffy white flower like a head of grain. Armored bees whined from stalk to stalk, scattering pollen. They were stingless, but inedible.
Everyone wanted chowder. Eventually I found a pair of crabcrackers in a bottom drawer, rattly geared objects with rusty hinges and sharp metal beaks, difficult to describe. One fitted a crab into a skeletal framework and pushed down on a worn plastic lever, neatly splitting its carapace and its legs.
The cook was expected to kill the crabs by dipping them in a dilute solution of his own blood. Nullaquans had a remarkably casual attitude toward bleeding. Besides, Dalusa, whose mouth had now healed so that only a few small black scabs were left on the edges of her lips, would be unable to help me as she had offered to do, if the crabs were contaminated with human blood. So I found a use for the whiskey after all. The alcohol seemed to act like a nerve poison on fhe crabs, producing a brief epileptifc flurry followed by rapid death.
I cracked the poisoned crabs while Dalusa extraced their meat with her long, sharp-nailed fingers.
I still had my gloves. Our attempts to use them had resulted in failure. As soon as my gloved hands began to slide over her body, she burst into tears and hid her face in her wings. Perhaps, I thought, it was her inability to reciprocate that bothered her. She was unable to use the gloves once I had, because my palms were sweaty, understandably, and the insides of the gloves would have given her a rash. Logically, I boiled one of the gloves to remove contaminants, not realizing that its slick unstable plastics were vulnerable to heat. It melted.
But I still had one glove left. I have always had a vivid imagination and I was able to think of no less than five ways of using the glove to obtain mutual satisfaction. But Dalusa would have none of it. At the very sight of the glove she burst into tears and left the kitchen. It was disappointing, to say the least I was able to see that there was a possible sordidness about the situation, but desperate times call for desperate action.
As a sort of compensation, Dalusa spent more and more time with me in the kitchen, malting obviously false attempts at cheerfulness. She tried in her clumsy, artistically mutilated way to help with the cooking. I was touched by her attempt so touched that I did not throw her out of the kitchen, although I could have done the work myself twice as quickly.
So we cracked crabs together.
After we had cleared the lily fields, Desperandum decided to do a sounding. He had come well prepared; he brought out another mile or so of superceramic fishing line and an immense lump of lead with a metal loop on top. Tying the line securely he heaved the lump overboard and then began to pay out line on a small winch.
In the shadow of the mainmast, Murphig was watching. He saw me watching him watch Desperandum, so he watched me for a while. It was an uncomfortable situation.
Desperandum got a depth of seventy-five feet. With a smile he set the figures down in a small black logbook. Then doubt crossed his bearded features. He walked to the other side of the ship and paid out the line again. He got a depth of almost half a mile.
Apparently we were floating above the edge of a very steep plateau. Another would have shrugged and gone on. But Desperandum had the skepticism of the true scientist. He did the first sounding again and got a depth of a little less than six thousand feet.
The second sounding repeated got eight hundred feet.
Desperandum frowned belligerently and did the first sounding once more. He paid out all the line he had, two and a half miles, and still did not reach bottom. He hauled all the line back in, a process that took a full hour. He sat and thought for a while, then decided to do the second sounding again.
He reached a depth of nine thousand feet and then the line went limp. Desperandum reeled it back in. Something seven thousand feet down had neatly sliced the line.
Desperandum’s face did not change at the sight of the sliced line, but hard knots of muscle appeared on the sides of his jaws, making his dustmask bulge.
I went back down to the kitchen. Dalusa was out on patrol. Soon I would have to start work on the third meal of the day, traditionally eaten by clifHight.
I always planned my menus a week in advance. I was looking up my reference for the night when the hatch creaked open and in came Murphig.
I looked up and tried to relax the muscles that had instantly tightened at the sight of him. I had never learned how much he knew about our syncophine operation, and I had been unable to think of a way of plumbing his knowledge without revealing yet more.
“What can I do for you?” I said.
“I’ve been meaning to come down and talk,” Murphig said, pulling off his targeted dustmask. “I got the message you sent in Arnar. The one through the daisy.”
I cast my mind back two weeks. I had indeed sent a message. I had assumed that my memory of the action was a fever dream of some kind. I had apologized to Murphig, as I recalled.
“Yes,” I said. “I was sorry to have broken in on your discussion with the captain.”
“What did you think of it?” Murphig said, looking at me sharply.
“I thought he gave your ideas rather short shrift.”
“Decent of you to notice that,” Murphig said almost airily. His eyes were dark, like chips of brown glass, and his nostril hair, I noticed, had been clipped into neat globes rather than the traditional wiry bush. His accent was lighter than a Nullaquan’s, too; it was almost galactic. It was obvious that he came from an upper-class family; perhaps his parents were bureaucrat/clergy.
“You saw the results of the sounding. What did you think?”
“Puzzling.”
“It fits in well with my theories. I’ve been thinking about the crater lately. About the air. Suppose that at one time Nullaqua had an atmosphere. Then the sun flared and blew it away. But suppose that an intelligent race had already evolved, a race that could see it coming. They would dig a shelter, a vast shelter with room enough for a whole civilization. A giant shelter with seventy-mile-high walls and a layer of dust to insulate them from the radiation. Then, after the catastrophe, the traces of air would leak back in. Eventually the Old People would get used to the dust down there; they would be unable to live without it, perhaps even change their physiques to live without air. . . .