Still nothing. I did not allow the silence to become uncomfortable.
“I feel that we have something here, a relationship, that could be very strong, very long lasting,” I said. “I don’t know why, but I do love you, I love you very much. So”— I reached under the blanket and pulled out a ring, one of the few that I had brought with me on my voyage. I think I mentioned that I have a fondness for rings. This was dne of my favorites, a small Terran amphibious quadruped wrought in silver, one of its long powerful legs stretched in a circlet and touching its chin. I wore it on my little finger.—“I brought you this ring. There is an ancient Terran custom I want to observe that involves it. It’s called betrothal. If you wear it, it symbolizes our emotional dedication to one another and to no other persons.”
“The ring is very beautiful,” Dalusa said hoarsely. I looked up at her, tears glistened dimly on her face. I was touched, having always thought that “weeping for joy” was only an expression.
“Don’t put it on yet,” I said hastily. “I haven’t sterilized it.”
“And when I do put it on, then we will be formally betrayed?”
“Betrothed,” I corrected.
Dalusa began to weep aloud. Tm afraid,” she said. Tm afraid you’ll hate me, want to cast me out. I think youll look at me and wonder how you ever could have wanted me. What will I do when I lose you?”
“But you won’t,” I said. “I'll love you as long as tins personality exists; I’m sure of that. God knows we’ll change; we’ll both change. But there are decades, centuries ahead-of us both. When the time comes, you can decide what you want to do.”
“I’m afraid—"
“I’ll protect you. It’s a promise.” I stirred. “Come on, let’s boil the ring. Then you can put it on.”
Dalusa stood up and wiped her eyes with one hand. “Where will we go when the voyage is over?”
’To Reverie. You’ll like it there. It still has wilderness; population control is strict; the climate is very agreeable. I lived there before I came to Nullaqua. I still have friends there.”
“What if they don’t approve of us?”
“Then they won’t be my friends any more. I ... we don’t need them.” I put a pot on the stove, poured a few ounces of water into it, and set it to boil. I dropped in the ring.
“Don’t look so downhearted, Dalusa,” I said. “Give me a smile. There’s a good girl. Think of it, Maybe we can arrange an actual Terran marriage, a traditional one. I doubt if there are any Terran religious sects on Reverne, but we can probably find a monotheist of some sort who’d be willing to preside. And after the operations we can live together in a way that approaches normality ... except of course that few men are privileged to have a wife so beautiful.”
She smiled for the first time.
“Neither one of us can be strictly called normal,” I said, checking the ring in the boiling water. “But that doesn’t mean we have to be miserable. We have as great a right to a life without misery ana suffering as anyone else. No more pain, no more blisters or blood—"
I fished the ring out of the boiling water with a pair of pincers and waved it in the air to cool.
“Maybe we should wait,” Dalusa said finally, her dark eyes following the movements of the ring. “Maybe after we are on land again, when you have a chance to see normal women, maybe you won’t love me any more.” She seemed almost desperate.
My face didn’t move but I frowned internally. “I know my own mind. I think the ring’s cool now. Do you want it?”
She took it.
Chapter 12
Anemones
Once we were past the Cliffs, Desperandum threw his nets overboard again and tugged them sluggishly behind the ship. I wondered what he was after. Plankton was sparse here.
While he waited, Desperandum went below into the storeroom. He soon emerged with a folding table Under one arm and a huge glass jar or urn in his other hand. It was one of the largest glass containers I had ever seen. I could have curled up inside of it. It was cylindrical, as wide as it was tall, and it had no lid.
Desperandum lumbered over by the mainmast and set the jar down with a clink. Then he opened the folding table with precise snaps, straightening its legs. From a large cloth pocket on the bottom of the table he pulled out four large suction cups, plastic ones as large as dinner plates. Rubbery knobs on the tops screwed neatly into the bottoms of the table legs. Desperandum fitted on the cups, turned the table right side up, and set it on the deck. He put a little of his massive weight on the table and the suction cups flattened instantly. It would have taken at least five men to tear that table loose.
I noticed that the tabletop had a wide circular indentation in it, just the size of the bottom of the glass jar. Sure enough, Desperandum picked up the jar and set it neatly into the hole. He stepped back to admire his work.
“Mr. Bogunheim!” Desperandum rumbled.
“Yes, sir?” said the third mate.
“Have this jar filled up with dust About three-quarters of the way to the top will do.”
Soon Calothrick and a scrawny Nullaquan deckhand were busy carrying buckets. Desperandum retired to his cabin.
There were odd convection currents in that tubful of dust. Particles heated by sunlght through the wall of the jar crept upwards along the side of the glass and diverged across the surface. Cooler dust flowed sluggishly to replace it. The patterns of circulation would change as the sun slid across the sky.
Day was evenly divided here at the center of the crater. Morning lasted five hours. There was no waiting for morning in the dry.shadow of the eastern cliffs as we had in Arnar. In the Highisle dusk came early. It came at the same time every day, and the sun rose at the same spot. Nullaqua had an axial tilt of less than a degree. There were no seasons, no weather to speak of, only sameness, constancy, stasis both physical and cultural, forever and ever, amen.
After the last meal of the day Desperandum retrieved his net. He spread it gently on the deck. There were dozens of hard little nuggets in it: three or four hundred pebbles of green-faceted plankton, small white pearls of fish eggs, wormlike coiled cylinders, greenish-speckled ovoids, flattened spheres marked with broken brown lines against cream white. There was even a spiny, shiny black egg as large as my fist.
Desperandum kneeled and began to sort his catch, making quick notes in an open booklet. Then the selected eggs and some of the plankton went into the tub of dust. Desperandum sent a crewman down to the kitchen for water; when the man returned, Desperandum sprinkled a few ounces over the dust.
“They’ll hatch soon,” Desperandum told me. “Then well see what we’ve got.”
I’ nodded; Desperandum left. It was getting colder now that the sun had set. The dust was flowing in a different way; it cooled at the surface and slid away down the sides of the jar. Carried by the tiny current, the plankton clustered against the edge of the glass.
In a way the jar was a microcosim of the crater. Too round of course, and it needed the rocky jutting of islands and cities here and here and here and here. The Highisle, Arnar, Brokenfoot, and shadowy Perseverance. The Lunglance would be about here, creeping slowly along the northern margin of the crater; aboard it, the tiny fleck of protoplasm that was John Newhouse, visible only with a microscope. A quaint conceit, I told myself. I went below and fell asleep. The ship sailed on.
Next morning there were faint stirrings in the dust. Desperandum was soon up, fishing delicately in the jar with a long-handled strainer made of woven string. Every few minutes he would pull out a twitching minnow or crablike anthropod and check off an egg on his list. Tinny bass humming came from his mask speaker. He was enjoying himself. I didn’t like the look of the black webwork of stitches on his injured arm. The slash on his neck had healed well, but his arm was puffy and inflamed. I hoped he was taking antibiotics.