The Face of the Waters Read online

  Lawler wasn't amused.

  "Piss off, why don't you, Nid?"

  Delagard rubbed a little patch of hagfish slime off his boot.

  "Hey," he said. "Just trying to have a little friendly conversation."

  * * *

  Lawler went below and made his way toward his cabin in the stern. A narrow musty passage lit by the greasy, sputtering light of fish-oil lamps mounted in bone sconces ran the length of the ship on this level. The thick smoky air caused his eyes to sting. He could hear the thud of surface swells lapping against the hull, echoing through the ship's ribs in a distorted, resonant way. From overhead came the heavy sound of the masts creaking in their sockets.

  As ship's doctor Lawler was entitled to one of the three small private cabins near the stern. Struvin had the cabin next to his on the port side. Delagard and Lis Niklaus shared the biggest of the three cabins, farther over against the starboard bulkhead. Everyone else lived in the forecastle, jammed together in two long compartments that were usually used to house passengers when the ship was serving as an inter-island ferry. The first watch had been given the port compartment, the second watch parked their gear on the starboard side.

  Kinverson and Sundira had landed in different watches, and therefore bunked in different compartments. Lawler was surprised at that. Not that it mattered much who slept where, really: there was so little privacy in those crowded bunks that anybody interested in a bit of screwing around would have to go creeping down into the cargo hold on the next level below and do their coupling sandwiched between the crates. But were they a couple, as Delagard had said, or not? Apparently not, Lawler was beginning to realize. Or if they were, they were a damned loose-knit one. They had hardly even seemed to notice each other since the start of the voyage. Perhaps whatever had happened between them on Sorve, if anything had, had been nothing more than a quick meaningless fling, a random casual meeting of bodies, a way of passing the time.

  He pushed open the door of his cabin with his shoulder and went inside. The cabin wasn't much bigger than a closet. It held a bunk, a basin, and a little wooden chest in which Lawler kept the few personal possessions he had brought with him from Sorve. Delagard hadn't let them bring much. Lawler had taken a few articles of clothing, his fishing gear, some pots and pans and plates, a mirror. The artifacts from Earth had come with him, too, of course. He kept them on a shelf opposite his bunk.

  The rest of his things, such as they were, his modest furniture and his lamps and some ornaments that he had fashioned out of pretty sea-drift, he had bequeathed to the Gillies. His medical equipment and most of his supplies and his meagre library of handwritten medical texts were up front, off the galley, in a cabin that was serving as the ship's infirmary. The main medical stores were below, in the cargo hold.

  He lit a taper and examined his cheek in the mirror. It was a rough, lumpy piece of sea-glass that Sweyner had made for him years ago, and it provided a rough, lumpy reflection, cloudy and indistinct. Glass of high quality was a rarity on Hydros, where the only source of silica was the heaped-up shells of diatoms from the bottom of the bay. But Lawler was fond of the mirror, bubbled and murky though it was.

  The collision with the hagfish didn't seem to have done any serious damage. There was a little abraded patch just above his left cheekbone, mildly sore where a few of the reddish bristles had broken off in his skin, and that was all. Lawler swabbed it down with a little of Delagard's grapeweed brandy to protect himself against infection. His medical sixth sense told him that there was nothing to worry about.

  The numbweed flask stood next to the brandy. He pondered it for a moment or two.

  He had had his usual ration of it already today, before breakfast. He didn't need any more just now.

  But what the hell, he thought. What the hell.

  * * *

  Later Lawler found himself wandering up to the crew compartments, looking for companionship, he wasn't sure whose.

  The shift had changed again. The second watch was on duty now, and the starboard compartment was empty. Lawler peered into the other compartment and saw Kinverson asleep on his bunk, Natim Gharkid sitting up crosslegged with his eyes closed as though in some kind of meditation, and Leo Martello scribbling away, writing by feeble lamplight with his pages spread out on a low wooden chest. Working on his interminable epic poem, Lawler supposed.

  Martello was about thirty, strongly built, full of energy, usually jigging around as if on springs. He had large brown eyes and a lively, open face, and liked to keep his head shaved. His father had come voluntarily to Hydros, a self-exiled drop-capsule man. He had turned up on Sorve when Lawler was a boy and had married Jinna Sawtelle, Damis' elder sister. They were both gone now, swept away by the Wave while out in a small boat at the wrong time.

  Since he was fourteen or so Martello had worked in Delagard's shipyard, but his chief claim to distinction was the immense poem he claimed to be writing, a retelling of the great migration from doomed Earth to the worlds of the galaxy. He had been busy with it for years, so he said. No one had ever seen more than a few lines of it.

  Lawler stood in the doorway, not wanting to disturb him.

  "Doctor," Martello said. "Just the man I want to see. I need some sunburn medicine. I did a really good job on myself today."

  "Let's have a peek at it."

  Martello shrugged out of his shirt. Though deeply tanned, he was reddened now beneath the tan. Hydros' sun was stronger than the one under which the ancestral race of humans had evolved. Lawler was kept busy all the time treating skin cancers, sun poisoning, all sorts of dermatological miseries.

  "Doesn't look so terrible," Lawler told him. "Come around to my cabin in the morning and I'll take care of it, all right? If you think you'll have trouble sleeping, I can give you something now."

  "I'll be okay. I'll sleep on my belly."

  Lawler nodded. "How's the famous poem going?"

  "Slowly. I've been rewriting Canto Five."

  A little to his own surprise Lawler heard himself say, "Can I have a look?"

  Martello seemed surprised too. But he pushed one of the curling algae-paper sheets toward him. Lawler held it open with both hands to read it. Martello's handwriting was boyish and crude, all great looping whorls and swirls.

  Now speared the long ships outward

  Into the dark of darks

  Golden worlds gleaming, calling

  As our fathers went forth

  "And our mothers too," Lawler pointed out.

  "Them too," Martello said, looking a little annoyed. "They get a canto of their own a little farther on."

  "Right," Lawler said. "It's very powerful poetry. Of course, I'm no real judge. You don't like poems that rhyme?"

  "Rhyme's been obsolete for hundreds of years, doctor."

  "Has it? I didn't know that. My father used to recite poems sometimes, ones from Earth. They liked using rhymes back then.

  It is an ancient Mariner

  And he stoppeth one of three.

  By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,

  Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?"

  "What poem was that?" Martello asked.

  "It's called 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.' It's about a sea voyage-a very troubled voyage.

  The very deep did rot: O Christ!

  That ever this should be!

  Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs

  Upon the slimy sea."

  "Powerful stuff. Do you know the rest of it?"

  "Just stray fragments here and there," Lawler said.

  "We ought to get together and talk about poetry some time, doctor. I didn't realize you knew any." Martello's sunny expression darkened for a moment. "My father loved the old poems too. He brought a book of Earth poetry with him from the planet where he lived before he came here. Did you know that?"

  "No," Lawler said, excited. "Where is it?"

  "Gone. It was with him when he and my mother drowned."

  "I would have wanted to see it," said
Lawler sadly.

  "There are times I think I miss that book as much as I do my mother and father," Martello said. He added ingenuously, "Is that a horrible thing to say, doctor?"

  "I don't think so, I think I understand what you mean." Water, water, everywhere, Lawler thought. And all the boards did shrink. "Listen, come around to see me first thing after your morning shift, will you, Leo? I'll fix up that sunburned back of yours then."

  Water, water, everywhere

  Nor any drop to drink.

  * * *

  Still later Lawler found himself alone on deck again, under the night sky, throbbing blackness above him, a cool steady breeze blowing out of the north. It was past midnight. Delagard, Henders and Sundira were in the rigging, calling arcane cryptic things to one another. The Cross was perfectly centred overhead.

  Lawler looked up at it, neatly arranged there in its crisscross way, thousands of unthinkably huge balls of exploding hydrogen lined up so very cleanly in the sky, one row this way and one row that. Martello's unskilful verses were still in his mind.

  Now speared the long ships outward

  Into the dark of darks.

  Was one of the suns in that formidable constellation the sun of Earth? No. No. They said you couldn't see that star from Hydros. These were other stars, the ones that made up the Cross. But somewhere farther out in the darkness, hidden from his view by the great right-angled blast of light that was the Cross, lay that smallish yellow sun under whose mild rays the whole human saga had begun.

  Golden worlds gleaming, calling

  As our fathers went forth.

  And our mothers, yes. That sun whose swift unexpected ferocity, in a few minutes of cosmic cruelty, had cancelled out that earlier gift of life. Turning ultimately against its own creations, sending implacable gusts of hard radiation, instantly transforming humanity's mother world to a blackened crisp.

  He had dreamed about Earth all his life, ever since his grandfather first had told him tales of the ancestral world, and yet it was still a mystery to him. And always would be, he knew. Hydros was too isolated, too backward, too remote from whatever centres of scholarship might still exist. There was no one here to teach him what Earth had been like. He understood hardly anything about it, its music, its books, its art, its history. Only dribbets and drabbets of data had come down to him, usually only the container, not the thing contained. Lawler knew that there had been a thing called opera, but it was impossible for him to visualize what it had been like. People singing a story? With a hundred musicians playing at the same time? He had never seen a hundred human beings in one place all at once, ever. Cathedrals? Symphonies? Suspension bridges? Highways? He had heard the names of those things; the things themselves were unknown to him. Mysteries, all mysteries. The lost mysteries of Earth.

  That little ball-significantly smaller than Hydros, so they said-which had spawned empires and dynasties, kings and generals, heroes and villains, fables and myths, poets, singers, great masters of the arts and the sciences, temples and towers, statues and walled cities. All those glorious mysterious things whose nature he could barely imagine, living as he had all his life on pitiful impoverished watery Hydros. Earth which had spawned us and had sent us forth after centuries of striving into the dark of darks, toward the remote worlds of the indifferent galaxy. And then the door had been slammed shut behind us in one blast of furious radiation. Leaving us stranded out here, lost among the stars.

  Golden worlds gleaming, calling-

  And here we are now, aboard a little wandering white speck in the great sea, on a planet which itself is no more than a speck in the larger black sea that engulfs us all.

  Alone, alone, all, all alone,

  Alone on a wide wide sea!

  Lawler couldn't remember the next line. Just as well, he suspected.

  He went belowdecks to see about getting some sleep.

  * * *

  A new dream came to him, an Earth-dream but not one like the ones he had had for so many years. This time he dreamed not of the death of Earth but of the leaving of it, the great diaspora, the flight to the stars. Once again he hovered above the familiar blue-green globe of his dream; and as he looked down he saw a thousand slender shining needles rising from it, or perhaps a million, too many for him to begin to count, all of them climbing toward him, surging outward, outward, streaming into space, a steady outward flow of them, a myriad tiny points of light penetrating the blackness that surrounded the blue-green planet. They were the ships of the spacefarers, he knew, the ones who had chosen to leave Earth, the explorers, the wanderers, the settlers, going forth into the great unknown, making their way outward from the mother world to the innumerable stars of the galaxy. He followed their courses across the heavens, tracking them to their destinations, to the many worlds whose names he had heard, worlds as mysterious and magical and unattainable to him as Earth itself: Nabomba Zom where the sea is scarlet and the sun is blue, and Alta Hannalanna where the great sluggish worms with nuggets of precious yellow jade in their foreheads tunnel through the spongy ground, and Galgala the golden, and Xamur where the air is perfume and the electrified atmosphere shimmers and crackles with beauty, and Marajo of the sparkling sands, and Iriarte, and Mentiroso, and Mulano of the double suns, and Ragnarok, and Olympus, and Malebolge, and Ensalada Verde, and Sunrise…

  And even Hydros, the dead-end world, from which there was no returning…

  The starships pouring outward from Earth went everywhere that there was to go. And somewhere along the way the light that was Earth winked out behind them. Lawler, tossing in turbulent sleep, saw yet again that terrible last blaze of fire, and after it the final blackness closing in, and he sighed for the world that had been. But no one else seemed to notice its passing: they were too busy moving outward, outward, outward.

  * * *

  The next day was the day when Gospo Struvin, making his way along the deck, kicked at an untidy pile of what looked like damp yellow rope and said, "Hey, who left this net here?"

  "I told you," Kinverson said afterward, a dozen times that day. "I don't trust an easy sea."

  And Father Quillan said, " 'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.' "

  2

  Struvin's death had been too sudden, and it had come too soon in the voyage, for it to be in any way acceptable or even comprehensible. On Sorve death had always been a possibility: you took a fishing-boat too far out into the bay and a storm came out of nowhere, or you were strolling along the waterfront rampart of the island and the Wave rose up without warning and got you, or you found some nice tasty-looking shellfish growing in the shallows and they turned out not to be so nice after all. The ship, though, had seemed to offer a little zone of invulnerability. Perhaps because it was so vulnerable, perhaps because it was nothing more than a tiny hollow wooden shell, a mere speck floating in the midst of an unthinkable immensity, they had all perversely come to believe they were safe aboard it. Lawler had expected that there would be difficulties, and strain and privation, and a serious injury or two somewhere along the way to Grayvard, a challenge to his sometimes tenuous medical skills. But a death? Here in these calm waters? The death of the captain? And only five days out of Sorve. Just as the eerie tranquillity of the first few days had been troublesome and suspicious, Struvin's death seemed ominous, a terrible foretaste of more calamities inescapably to come.

  The voyagers closed around it the way pink new skin closes around a wound. Everyone became resolutely positive-minded, studiedly hopeful, ostentatiously considerate of the boundaries of everybody else's overstressed psyche. Delagard announced that he would take command of the ship himself. To even out the shifts, Onyos Felk was moved to the first watch: he would direct the Martello-Kinverson-Braun team in the rigging, and Delagard would direct the new team of Golghoz-Henders-Thane.

  After that first lapse of control upon hearing of Struvin's death, Delagard presented now a facade of cool competence, utter undauntedness. He stood
staunch and upright on the bridge, looking on as the watch of the day mounted the rigging. The wind stood fair from the east. The voyages continued onward.

  * * *

  Four days later the palms of Lawler's hands were still smarting from the sting of the net-creature, and his fingers continued to be very stiff. The elaborate pattern of red lines had faded to a dull brown now, but perhaps Pilya was right that he'd have scars after all. That part didn't bother him much: there were scars aplenty on him already, from this bit of carelessness or that over the years. But the stiffness troubled him. He needed delicacy in his fingers, not only for the surgery that he was occasionally required to perform, but because of the judicious probing and palpating of his patients' flesh that was an inherent part of the process of diagnosis. He couldn't read the messages of their bodies with fingers that were like sticks.

  Pilya seemed worried about Lawler's hands also. As she came up on deck for her turn in the rigging she saw him and took them gently in hers, as she had in the moments after Gospo Struvin's death.

  "They don't look good," she said. "Are you putting on your salve?"

  "Faithfully. Although they're healed beyond the point where the salve can do much good."

  "And the other medicine, the pink drops? The painkiller?"

  "Oh, yes. Yes. I wouldn't think of being without it."

  She rubbed her fingers lightly over his. "You are such a good man, such a serious man. If anything happened to you it would break my heart. I was frightened for you when I saw you fighting with that thing that killed the captain. And when I knew that your hands were hurt."

  A look of purest devotion spread like a sunrise over her sharp-planed snub-nosed face. Pilya's features were coarse and unbeautiful, but her eyes were warm and shining. The contrast between her golden hair and her sleek olive-toned skin was very appealing. She was a strong, uncomplicated girl, and the emotion she was projecting now was the strong and uncomplicated one of unconditional love. Warily, not wanting to rebuff her too cruelly, Lawler withdrew his hands from her grasp while at the same time giving her a benevolent, noncommittal smile. It would have been easy enough to accept what she was offering, find some secluded nook in the cargo hold, enjoy the simple pleasures that he had denied himself so long. He was no priest, he reminded himself. He had taken no vow of celibacy. But he had lost faith somehow in his own emotions. He was unwilling to trust himself even in so unthreatening an adventure as this one would probably turn out to be.