The Face of the Waters Read online

  "Do you think we will live?" she asked him suddenly.

  "Live? Of course we'll live."

  "No," she said. "I still am afraid that we will die at sea, all of us. Gospo was only the first."

  "We'll be all right," said Lawler. "I told you that the other day and I'll tell you again. Gospo had bad luck, that's all. There's always someone whose luck is bad."

  "I want to live. I want to get to Grayvard. There will be a husband waiting for me on Grayvard. Sister Thecla told me that, when she read my future, before we left. She said that when I come to the end of the voyage I will find my husband."

  "Sister Thecla told a lot of people a lot of crazy things about what was going to happen to us at the end of the voyage. You mustn't pay any attention to fortune-tellers. But if a husband is what you want, Pilya, I hope that Sister Thecla told the truth for you."

  "An older man is what I want. Someone wise and strong, who will teach me things as well as love me. No one ever taught me anything, you know. Except how to work on a ship, and so I have worked on ships, and sailed here and there and here and there for Delagard, and I have never had a husband. But now I want one. It is my time. I am nice to look at, is that not so?"

  "Very nice," Lawler said.

  Poor Pilya, he thought. He felt guilty for not loving her.

  She turned away from him, as if recognizing that they were not heading in the direction she wanted this conversation to go. After a moment she said, "I was thinking about the little things from Earth that you showed me, the things you have in the cabin. The beautiful little things. How pretty they were! I told you I wanted one, and you said no, you couldn't give me one, but now I have changed my mind anyway. I don't want one. They are the past. I want only the future. You live in the past too much, doctor."

  "It's a bigger place than the future, for me. There's more room to look around."

  "No. No. The future is very big. The future goes on forever and ever. You wait and see if I am not right. You should throw those old things away. I know that you will never do it, but you should." She gave him a shy, tender smile. "I need to go aloft now," she said. "You are a very fine man. I thought I should tell you that. I just want you to know that you have a friend if you want one." And then she turned and darted away.

  Lawler watched her climb the rigging. Poor Pilya, he thought again. What a sweet girl you are. I could never love you, not in the way I would need to love you. But in your own way you are very fine.

  She climbed lithely and swiftly, and in a moment she was high overhead. She climbed like one of the monkeys he remembered from his childhood storybooks, those books so full of tales of the incomprehensible land-world that Earth had been, that place of jungles, deserts, glaciers, monkeys and tigers, camels and swift horses, polar bears, walruses, goats that skipped from crag to crag. What were crags? What were goats? He had had to invent them for himself, from the sketchy hints in the stories. Goats were shaggy and lanky, with enormously long legs that had the spring of steel in them. Crags were rough upturned slabs of rock, which was something like wood-kelp timber only unimaginably harder. Monkeys were like ugly little men, brown and hairy and sly, and scrambled through the treetops, screeching and chattering. Well, Pilya was nothing at all like that. But she moved about up there as though it were her natural element.

  It struck Lawler then that he wasn't able to remember what it had been like making love to Pilya's mother Anya, back there twenty years in the past. He recalled only that he had. But all the rest, the sounds Anya made, the way she moved, the shape of her breasts-gone. As gone as Earth itself, those sounds of hers. As though nothing had ever happened between them. Anya had had the same golden hair and dark smooth skin as Pilya, he recalled, but it seemed to him that her eyes had been blue. Lawler had been miserable, then, bleeding from a thousand wounds after Mireyl's disappearance, and Anya had wandered along and offered a little comfort. Like mother, like daughter. Did mothers and daughters make love the same way also, driven unconsciously by some power of the genes? Would Pilya, in his arms, shift and blur and transform herself in his eyes into her mother? If he embraced Pilya, would he recapture his lost memories of Anya? Lawler pondered that, wondering if it was worth making the experiment to find out. No, he decided. No.

  "Studying the water-flowers, doctor?" Father Quillan said, just at his side.

  Lawler glanced around. Quillan had an odd slithery way of approaching: he would materialize out of the air as though he were a thing of ectoplasm and move up the rail toward you without seeming to move at all. And then he was there beside you, shimmering with metaphysical uneasiness.

  "Water-flowers?" Lawler said abstractedly, half amused at having been caught in the midst of such lascivious speculations. "Oh. There. Yes, I see."

  How could he not have seen? On this brilliant sunny morning bobbing water-flowers were strewn everywhere on the bosom of the ocean. They were erect fleshy stalks about a metre high with bright fist-sized sporing structures at their top ends, very gaudily coloured, bright scarlet with yellow petals striped with green, and curious swollen black air-bladders below. The air-bladders hung just below the surface, keeping the water-flowers afloat. Even when slapped by a passing high swell the plants would pop up immediately, back into the perpendicular like tireless clowns that could be knocked down again and again without ever failing to rebound.

  "A miracle of resilience," Quillan said.

  "A lesson to us all, yes," said Lawler, suddenly inspired to a sermon. "We must try at all times to emulate them. In this life we get hit and hit and hit and each time we have to bounce right back. The water-flower should be our model: invulnerable to everything, completely resistant, capable of enduring all blows. But in fact we aren't as bouncy as water-flowers, are we, Father?"

  "I'd say that you are, doctor."

  "Am I?"

  "You're very highly regarded, do you know that? Everyone I've spoken to has great praise for your patience, your endurance, your wisdom, your strength of character. Especially your strength of character. They tell me that you're one of the toughest and strongest and most resilient people in the community."

  It sounded like a description of someone else entirely, someone far less brittle and inflexible than Valben Lawler. Lawler chuckled. "I may seem that way from the outside, I suppose. How wrong they all are."

  "I've always believed that a person is what he seems to others to be," the priest said. "What you happen to think about yourself is completely unreliable and irrelevant. Only in the estimation of others can your true worth be validly determined."

  Lawler flicked an astonished glance at him. His long, austere face looked absolutely serious.

  "Is that what you believe?" Lawler asked. He noticed that a note of irritation had crept into his voice. "I haven't heard anything quite so crazy in a long time. But no, no, you're just playing games with me, aren't you? You like playing games of that sort."

  The priest offered no response. They fell silent, side by side in the cool morning sunlight. Lawler stared into the emptiness beyond. It lost focus and became a great blur of bobbing colours, an aimless ballet of water-flowers.

  Then after a few moments he looked more closely at what was going on out there.

  "I guess even the water-flowers aren't completely invulnerable, eh?" he said, pointing out across the water. Some huge submerged creature's mouth was visible on the far side of the field of flowers now, moving slowly among them just below the surface, creating a gaping dark cavern into which the bright-hued plants were tumbling by the dozens. "You can be as resilient as you like, but there's always something coming along eventually to gobble you up. Isn't that so, Father Quillan?"

  Quillan's reply was lost in a sudden gusting breeze.

  There was another long cool silence. Lawler could still hear Quillan saying, "A person is what he seems to others to be. What you happen to think about yourself is completely unreliable and irrelevant." Total nonsense, wasn't it? Wasn't it? Of course it was.

  And t
hen Lawler heard his own voice saying, without giving him any warning, "Father Quillan, why did you decide to come to Hydros in the first place?"

  "Why?"

  "Yes, why? This is a damned inhospitable planet, if you happen to be human. It wasn't designed for us and we manage to live here only in uncomfortable circumstances and it isn't possible to leave once you get here. Why would you want to maroon yourself forever on a world like that?"

  Quillan's eyes became curiously animated. With some fervour he said, "I came here because I found Hydros irresistibly attractive."

  "That's not really an answer."

  "Well, then…" There was a new edge on the priest's voice, as though he felt that Lawler was pushing him into saying things he would just as soon not say. "Let's put it that I came because it's a place where all galactic refuse ultimately winds up. It's a world populated entirely by discards, rejects, the odds and ends of the cosmos. That's what it is, isn't it?"

  "Of course not."

  "All of you are the descendants of criminals. There aren't any criminals in the rest of the galaxy any more. On the other worlds everyone is sane now."

  "I doubt that very much." Lawler couldn't believe that Quillan was serious. "We're the descendants of criminals, yes, some of us. That isn't any secret. People who were said to be criminals, at any rate. My great-great-grandfather, for instance, was sent here because he had some bad luck, that was all. He accidentally killed a man. But let's say that you're right, that we're merely so much debris and the descendants of debris. Why would you want to live amongst us, then?"

  The priest's chilly blue eyes gleamed. "Isn't it obvious? This is where I belong."

  "So you could do your holy work among us, and lead us to grace?"

  "Not in the slightest. I came here for my needs, not yours."

  "Ah. So you came out of pure masochism, some kind of need to punish yourself. Is that it, Father Quillan?" Quillan was silent. But Lawler knew that he must be right. "Punishment for what? A crime? You just told me there aren't any more criminals."

  "My crimes have been directed against God. Which makes me one of you fundamentally. An outcast, an exile by my inherent nature."

  "Crimes against God," Lawler said, musing. God was as remote and mysterious a concept to him as monkeys and jungles, crags and goats. "What kind of crime could you possibly commit against God? If he's omnipotent, presumably he's invulnerable, and if he isn't omnipotent how can he be God? Anyway, you told me only a week or two ago that you didn't even know whether or not you believed in God."

  "Which in itself is a crime against Him."

  "Only if you believe in him. If he doesn't exist, you certainly can't do him any injury."

  "You have a priest's way with a sneaky argument," Quillan said approvingly.

  "Were you serious, that other time, when you said you weren't sure of your faith?"

  "Yes."

  "Not playing verbal games with me? Not just offering me a little dollop of quick cheap cynicism for the sake of a moment's quick amusement?"

  "No. Not at all. I swear it." Quillan reached out and put his hand across Lawler's wrist, an oddly intimate, confiding sort of gesture which at another time Lawler might have regarded as an unacceptable encroachment but which now seemed almost endearing. In a low, clear voice he said, "I dedicated myself to the service of God when I was still a very young man. That sounds pretty pompous, I know. But in practice what it's meant has been a lot of hard and disagreeable work, not just long sessions of prayer in cold draughty rooms at unlikely hours of the morning and night, but also the doing of chores so nasty that only a doctor, I suppose, would understand. The washing of the feet of the poor, so to speak. All right, so be it. I knew that that was what I was volunteering for, and I don't want any medals for it. But what I didn't know, Lawler, what I never remotely imagined at the outset, was that the deeper I got into serving God through serving suffering humanity, the more vulnerable I'd become to periods of absolute spiritual deadness. To long stretches when I felt cut off from all connection with the universe about me, when human beings became as alien to me as aliens are, when I didn't have the slightest shred of belief in the higher Power to which I had pledged to devote my life. When I felt so completely alone that I can't even begin to describe it to you. The harder I worked, the more pointless it all became. A very cruel joke: I was hoping to earn God's grace, I suppose, and instead He's given me some good stiff doses of His absence. Are you following me, Lawler?"

  "And what causes this deadness in you, do you think?"

  "That's what I came here to find out."

  "Why here, though?"

  "Because there's no Church here. Because there are only the most fragmentary human communities. Because the planet itself is hostile to us. And because it's a place of no return, like life itself." Something beyond Lawler's comprehension was dancing in Quillan's eyes now, something as baffling as a candle flame that burned downward instead of up. He seemed to be staring at Lawler out of some deep annihilating eternity from which he knew he had come and to which he yearned to return. "I wanted to lose myself here, do you see? And in that way maybe to find myself. Or at least to find God."

  "God? Where? Someplace down there at the bottom of this enormous ocean?"

  "Why not? He doesn't seem to be anywhere else, does He?"

  "I wouldn't know," Lawler began to say. But then from high overhead came a startling cry.

  "Land ho!" Pilya Braun sang out. She was in the foremast rigging, standing on the yard. "Island to the north! Island to the north!"

  There were no islands in these waters, neither to the north or south, nor to the east or west. If there were, everyone aboard would have been looking forward to the sighting for days. But no one had said a word about islands here.

  Onyos Felk, in the wheel-box, let loose a bellow of disbelief. Shaking his head, the mapkeeper came stumping toward Pilya on his short bandy legs. "What are you saying, girl? What island? What would an island be doing in this part of the sea?"

  "How would I know?" Pilya called. She held on to the ropes with one hand and swung herself far out over the deck. "did I put it there?"

  "There can't be an island."

  "Come up here and see for yourself, you dried-up old fish!"

  "What? What?"

  Lawler shaded his eyes and peered into the distance. All he saw were the bobbing water-flowers. But Quillan tugged eagerly at his arm. "There! Do you see?"

  Did he? Yes, yes, Lawler thought he saw something: a thin yellow-brown line, perhaps, on the northern horizon. An island, though? How could he tell?

  Everyone was on deck, now, milling around. In the midst of it all was Delagard, carrying the precious sea-chart globe cradled in one arm and a stubby spy-glass fashioned of a yellowish metal in the other. Onyos Felk went scurrying up to him and reached for the globe. Delagard gave him a poisonous look and shook him off with a hiss.

  "But I need to look at-"

  "Keep your hands away, will you?"

  "The girl says there's an island. I want to prove to her that that's impossible."

  "She sees something, doesn't she? Maybe it is one. You don't know everything, Onyos. You don't know anything." With furious demonic energy Delagard pushed his way past the gawping mapkeeper and began to mount the rigging, climbing with his elbows and his teeth, still cradling the globe in his right arm and gripping the spy-glass with the left. He reached the yard somehow, wedged himself in, put the glass to his eye. There was a tremendous silence below him on the deck. After an infinitely long time Delagard looked down and said, "Damned if there isn't!" The ship-owner handed the spy-glass to Pilya and feverishly pored over the globe, tracing the movements of neighbouring islands with exaggerated elbows-out excursions of his fingers. "Not Velmise, no. Not Salimil. Kaggeram? No. No. Kentrup?" He shook his head. Everyone was watching him. It was quite a performance, Lawler thought. Delagard passed the sea-chart to Pilya, took back the glass from her, gave her a little pat on the rump. He stared again. "God f
uck us all! A new one, that's what it is! They're building it right now! Look at that! The timbers! The scaffolding! God fuck us all!" He tossed the spy-glass toward the deck. Dann Henders caught it deftly before it struck and put it to his eye, while the others crowded around him. Delagard was on his way down from the rigging, muttering to himself. "God fuck us all! God fuck us all!"

  The spy-glass went from hand to hand. In a few minutes, though, the ship was close enough to the new island so that it could be seen without the aid of the glass. Lawler stared, fascinated and awed.

  It was a narrow structure, perhaps twenty or thirty metres wide and a hundred metres long. Its highest point rose just a couple of metres out of the water, a ridge that looked like the humped spine of some colossal sea-creature basking just below the surface. Gillies, about a dozen of them, were moving ponderously about on it, hauling logs into place, bracing them up, cutting notches with strange Gillie tools, wrapping fibrous bindings about them.

  The sea nearby was boiling with life and activity. Some of the creatures in it were Gillies, Lawler saw, Gillies by the score. The little domes of their heads were popping up and down in the tranquil waves like the tops of water-flowers. But he recognized also the long, sleek, shining forms of divers moving among them. They were fetching wood-kelp timbers up from the depths, it seemed, delivering them to the Gillies in the water, who were hewing them, squaring them off, passing them along an underwater chain to the shore of the new island, where other Gillie workers dragged them up into the air and set about preparing them for installation.