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 sunlight 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 we’ll 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 microcosm 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.
There was a discrepancy between the number of eggs on his list and the number of organisms he had been able to catch. It didn’t seem to bother him. He could hardly expect to catch every animal just by fishing blindly with a strainer. After he had caught the same fish three times he shrugged good-naturedly and abandoned his efforts. It showed an unusual tolerance for frustration on Desperandum’s part, and it surprised me. I had expected him to empty the whole tub through a net. Apparently he thought that might endanger the health of the specimens.
All in all he had caught sixteen specimens from twenty-eight eggs. On the next day he tried again. There were more nuggets of plankton now; their spores had been present when the dust was first added. Besides that, the other plankton, sensing the presence of water, had spawned. There were dozens of tiny nuggets, no larger than chips of glass. Some of the larger nuggets were missing. They had been eaten.
Desperandum added a little more water to promote the growth of the major food source, then began fishing again.’ He had more success this time; he caught twenty specimens. Oddly, he was unable to catch some of the earlier specimens, including the fish he had caught three times yesterday. It didn’t seem to bother him. After all, every creature there was entirely under his control.
I stopped my speculation. It was past my ability to fathom Desperandum’s mental states; like all old people, he had passed into a different orientation, as different from my own as childhood is from adulthood.
We killed a whale that day and dumped three eggs overboard.
On the next day Desperandum caught only fifteen specimens. One of them was a small predatory octopus, which accounted for the disappearance of a few of the fish. Desperandum pulled it out of the tank and dissected it.
Twelve specimens on the next day. Desperandum rid himself of three omnivorous fish, assuming that they were the culprits. On his checklist he had correlated twenty-seven of the twenty-eight eggs. The shiny, spiny, black one remained unidentified.
When he found only four specimens on the day after that Desperandum grew annoyed. He emptied out the jar. Dust rustled sluggishly across the deck and flowed under the rail into the sea. Desperandum quickly rescued the specimens that lay struggling or scuttling on the deck; three crabs, a small vegetarian octopus, and the larva of a dust strider. He frowned. All of his captives ate nothing but plankton or, when they could get it, the long linked ropes of kelp common in this part of the crater.
Then he turned to the jar. There, stuck to the side of the glass with a dust-colored suction disk, was a small Nullaquan anemone.
“Astonishing!” Desperandum said aloud. “An anemone. What a stroke of luck.”
The anemone looked quite healthy, as might be expected when it need only reach out one of its thorny arms for prey. It had eight arms, long, supple, pale brown tentacles studded with nastily sharp black thorns, like the branches of a rosebush. Each thorn was hollow, as were the turns; each thorn was a sucking, vampirish beak. The arms sprouted from a short, thick trunk; at the bottom of the trunk was a snaillike suction foot. At the junction of the arms was a complicated pink arrangement of layers, not unlike the petals of a flower. Like a flower, it was a genital organ. The anemone was quite strong for a creature of its size. It’s foot-long tentacles waved freely even without the support of the dust. It breathed through the siphonlike tips of its arms; they were thin, so it was not surprising that they had never been noticed.
The anemone seemed disturbed by the loss of its dust. It waved its tentacles indecisively, and finally hooked one over the rim of the jar. Then it released its suction hold on the glass with a faint pop and began to pull itself slowly and laboriously up the side of the glass.
“Dust! Quickly!” Desperandum snap
ped, watching the anemone with all the concern of a devoted parent for a sick child. Soon a crewman arrived with a bucket, and Desperandum poured it slowly into the tub. “More, more,” Desperandum demanded impatiently. Soon the level of the dust swirled up to one of the anemone’s slowly threshing tentacles. The plantlike animal released its hold and slipped into the dust, almost gratefully, it seemed to me.
Desperandum noticed my attention. “They’re extremely rare,” he told me. “I’d heard that there was a last colony of them living in the bay northwest of here, but I’d never seen one. No wonder I couldn’t account for that last egg.” Desperandum laughed jovially. He was enjoying himself.
I hoped that his new pet wouldn’t bite him. The way it had tried to climb out of its jar struck me as ominous. I would hate to wake up some night and pry its barbs away from my throat.
Next day I climbed up on deck after leaving the breakfast dishes for Dalusa. I found Desperandum standing beside the glass urn, holding a wiggling spratling over the dust. Hesitantly, a brown, barbed arm lifted from the opacity and wrapped itself around the fish. The fish flapped weakly a few times and then stiffened. Testing the anemone’s strength, Desperandum kept a firm grip on the fish’s dry gray tail. Soon another tentacle snaked upward out of the dust; Desperandum snatched his fingers back just before the second tentacle lashed out at his hand. The fish disappeared under the surface.
“Strong little monster!” Desperandum said admiringly. “They were all over the crater before it was settled, you know. They kept attacking’ ships, innocently enough, and poisoned themselves. One sip of human blood through one ‘of those thorn-beaks killed them almost instantly. I’d even heard that they were extinct. No one would visit their last stronghold up north for fear of mutual destruction. Perhaps they’re making a comeback.”
Wonderful, I thought. A few hundred camouflaged killers would add spice to the Nullaquan existence. I wondered how large the creatures grew. Ten feet? Perhaps as much as twenty? There appeared the image of a venomous monster as big as a sequoia, biding its time in the dry black darkness beneath the ship. One massive barbed tentacle wrapped around the Lunglance, a negligent tug, and there would be another quick addition to the mysteries of the sea. Hunger would be too strong a motive; why, mere curiosity would be abundantly fatal.
Dalusa spotted a pod of dustwhales that day, but by the time the Lunglance reached the spot they had vanished.
The anemone continued to grow. Desperandum prudently put a weighted iron grating on top of the urn. The crewman gave the jar a wide berth whenever possible, especially when the creature would stick its barbed appendages out into the open air and wiggle them energetically. As it grew, the anemone was growing darker; now its arms were the color of dried blood.
When young Meggle came in for the officers’ lunch at noon, he told me sullenly that the captain wanted to see me. I reported to the cabin after a suitable lapse of time. Desperandum was just finishing his meal.
We went to the cabin; Desperandum ostentatiously shut the door. “I suppose you must have heard the rumor that I’m thinking of heading the ship for Glimmer Bay.”
That was the reputed home of the last anemones. “Yes, I’ve heard it,” I lied decisively.
“What do you think of it?” he said.
I felt that his frankness called for an evasion on my part “I’d like to hear your reasons for going first.”
“Very well. It concerns the specimen, of course. I’d like to keep it on board and study its habits, perhaps donate it later to the Church Zoo in the Highisle. On the other hand, it would be unethical to deprive an endangered species of a potential member of its gene pool. I’d have to see the situation for myself, take a census of the anemone population. Of course, that could be inconvenient.”
The captain did not seem inclined to go further. He leaned back in his swivel chair and steepled his blunt broad fingers.
“Let’s count up the advantages and disadvantages of each course of action,” I said at last. “First the case against going. It’s out of our way and will lengthen the voyage. It’s a voyage into essentially unexplored territory, with danger from shoals and currents. And the Lunglance might be attacked by anemones.”
“There’s not really much danger in that,” Desperandum interrupted mildly. “Even at their heyday the largest known anemone was only thirty feet long. Not large enough to menace the ship as a whole.”
“We might lose a crew member, though.”
“Possible. And you’ve left out a hazard. Glimmer is a very small bay, almost completely landlocked. The sun shines there for only about an hour a day. The gloominess and the walls are said to cause acute depression, melancholia, claustrophobia, even for the native Nullaquan.”
I lifted my brows.
“Oh, it’s quite plausible,” Desperandum said. “Have you ever visited Perseverance?”
“No, sir.”
“I have, of course. It’s quite depressing there, too; it’s built half a mile up the cliff on the western side of a narrow bay, with an unpleasant climate and an overwhelming sense of the presence of thousands of miles of solid rock. I have little doubt that the choice of that site as a center of religion and government has had a profound effect on the Nullaquan character.” Desperandum sighed and folded his hands over his stomach.
“Well, then, sir, considering the advantages of this side trip,” I said, when an uncomfortable silence had hobbled by on crippled feet “I can only think of two. First knowledge about the anemone population; second, a decision as to what to do with your little specimen! Now, as I see it, the first one involves danger to both the crew and the wildlife. And as for the second, well, it depends on the rarity of the specimens. And since you caught one in a single day, with a single net, I can hardly believe that they are really very rare.
“And one last thing. We’re approaching Perseverance now. It would be simple to stop there and consult the Church about mounting a special expedition.”
Desperandum looked at me stonily. “I tried that four years ago. They listened politely and then asked me for my Academy diploma.”
I thought about apologizing and decided against it. It would have only have heightened the captain’s sense of inferiority, his resentment at his lack of legitimate status. “Your arguments are good, but I’m not convinced,” Desperandum said. “We will explore the bay.”
I had expected as much.
The crew showed no surprise when ordered to sail north, tacking against the wind. Theirs was not to reason why. Besides, by this time they were probably incapable of it Later, I leaned on the starboard rail and looked at the tier after tier of ridged and battered rock that rose and rose in ragged rows to the planet’s surface. It was a dry, bright morning, like all Nullaquan mornings. The monotony irritated me. A blast of freezing wind, a thick fog, or a savage hailstorm would have beat a relief. My sinuses were giving me trouble; my chapped and itchy hands were slick with some unpleasant lotion that the first mate had given me. I didn’t like the lotion much. Below in the kitchen, where I could remove my mask, it stank.
I heard the rasp of thorns on an iron grating. The anemone had been growing quickly on Desperandum’s pampering diet, as if it were only too eager to reach breeding age and help in its species’ promised comeback. It seemed cramped in its jar and pulled repeatedly on its grating, as if ‘building up its strength.
Dalusa was out on patrol, trying to locate the narrow inlet into Glimmer Bay. Desperandum navigated using aerial maps of the crater, made by the original colony ship. They were five hundred years old. Glimmer Bay had not even existed then.
I saw Dalusa come winging in from the north-northwest. She alighted neatly in the crow’s nest, honked her horn to alert the crew, and then leapt into space. She fell in a neat parabola, opening her wings and with a snap just before breaking her ribs on the rail. She enjoyed that.
Dalusa flew swiftly away until she was a white speck against the dark background of cliff. There she caught a thermal and circled
as the Lunglance tacked sluggishly after her.
When we reached an immense promontory of fallen rock, Dalusa swept gracefully around it, out to sea. Suddenly she shot southwards, flapping energetically but making no more headway than a swimmer in a rip tide. It was a wind, a strong one. Dalusa wheeled to face it. She still made no headway, but began to gain height. The ship sailed nearer. I was able to see a thin, sleeting fog now, at the dust-air interface. There were no waves.
Dalusa seemed to be tiring. She kept gaining height, but now she was losing ground out to sea.
Suddenly she entered an area of calm. She slowed her climb, but was then caught by another wind, equally powerful but blowing in the opposite direction. She backed against it, tried to turn, looped sickeningly when she hit a patch of turbulence. Wind tore at the loose dress that was all she wore.
Recovering, Dalusa shut her wings and dropped. She gained speed, corrected her trajectory slightly in mid-fall, then opened her wings and swooped toward the ship. She had judged the windspeed beautifully. She faced the edge of the promontory. She faced it—there had always been something a little odd about the structure of her neck. The two vectors, correcting one another, sent her gliding toward the ship. She made it, soared gracefully over the port rail, and collapsed silently on the deck in a wing-shrouded heap.
Mr. Flack was at her side in an instant. He extended a hand to touch her shoulder, remembered in time, and drew back. Dalusa’s long thin arms trembled with fatigue. She had hidden her face—her mask, actually—under one wing. Flack could do nothing for her. His medical knowledge did not extend to nonhumans.
“Get the lady a pallet” Flack said harshly. “Water. Rest.”
The doctor’s panacea for those beyond Us comprehension. I took a blanket from our harpooneer, Blackburn, wrapped it carefully around Dalusa, and lifted her effortlessly. She weighed perhaps forty pounds, that was mostly muscle. Dalusa’s pale shapely legs were mostly decoration. They had the texture of human flesh—-more or less— but they were no denser than cork.
Involution Ocean Page 11