The Face of the Waters Read online

  The whole incident had taken perhaps a minute and a half.

  Delagard emerged now from the hatch. He came running toward them, looking annoyed and perturbed.

  "What the hell's going on? Why all the yelling and screaming?" He paused and gawked. "Where's Gospo?"

  Lawler, breathing hard, his throat parched, his heart pounding, could barely speak. He gestured toward the rail with a toss of his head.

  "Overboard?" Delagard said incredulously. "He fell in?"

  He rushed to the side and looked over. Lawler came up beside him. All was quiet down there. The jostling hordes of jiggling jellyfish were gone. The water was dark, smooth, silent. There was no sign at all of Struvin or of the net-creature that had taken him.

  "He didn't fall," Kinverson said. "He got pulled in. This thing's other half got him." He indicated the broken, ragged remains of the part of the net that he had stomped. It was nothing more now than a greenish smear on the yellow wood of the deck floor.

  Hoarsely Lawler said, "Just like an old fishnet, is what it looked like. Lying here on the deck, all crumpled up. Those jellyfish may have sent it up here to hunt for them. Struvin kicked at it and it caught him by the leg, and-"

  "What? What kind of bullshit is this?" Delagard glanced over the side again, then at Lawler's hands, then at the smear on the deck. "You're serious? Something that looked like a net came up out of the sea and caught hold of Gospo?"

  Lawler nodded.

  "It can't be. Someone must have pushed him over the side. Who was it? You, Lawler? Kinverson?" Delagard blinked, as if the implausibility of what he had just said was obvious even to him. Then he looked closely at Lawler and Kinverson and said, "A net? A live net that crawled up out of the sea and caught hold of Gospo?"

  Lawler nodded again, just the merest motion of his head. Slowly he opened and closed his hands. The stinging was very gradually abating, but he knew he'd feel it for hours. He was numb all over, stunned, shaken. The whole nightmarish scene was playing itself over and over in his head, Struvin noticing the net, kicking at it, becoming entangled in it, the net beginning to ooze its way up over the railing carrying Struvin with it…

  "No," Delagard muttered. "Jesus, I can't fucking believe it." He shook his head and peered down into the quiet waters. "Gospo!" he yelled. "Gospo." No reply came from below. "Fuck! Five days out to sea, and somebody gone already? Can you imagine it?" He turned away from the rail just as the rest of the ship's complement began to appear, Leo Martello in the lead, then Father Quillan and Onyos Felk, and the others close behind. Delagard clamped his lips together. His cheeks ballooned. His face was red with amazement and fury and shock. Lawler was surprised by the power of Delagard's grief. Struvin had died in an ugly way, but there were few good ways to die. And Lawler had never thought Delagard gave a shit for anyone or anything but himself.

  The ship-owner turned toward Kinverson and said, "You ever hear of any such thing before?"

  "Never. Never ever."

  "A thing that looked like an ordinary net," Delagard said again. "A dirty old net that jumps up and grabs you. God, what a place this is! What a place!" He kept shaking his head, again and again, as if he could shake Struvin back up out of the water if only he shook it long and hard enough.

  Then he swung around toward the priest. "Father Quillan! Give us a prayer, will you?"

  The priest looked baffled. "What? What?"

  "Haven't you heard? We've had a casualty. Struvin's gone. Something crawled up on board and hauled him over the side."

  Quillan was silent. He held his palms outward as though indicating that things that crawled up out of the ocean were beyond his level of ecclesiastical responsibility.

  "My God, say some words, won't you? Say something!"

  Still Quillan hesitated. A voice from the back of the group whispered uncertainly, "Our father, which art in heaven-hallowed be thy name-"

  "No," the priest said. He might almost have been awakening slowly from sleep. "Not that one." He moistened his lips and said, looking very self-conscious, "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me." Quillan hesitated, moistening his lips, apparently searching for words. "Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies… Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life."

  Pilya Braun came up to Lawler and took him by the elbows, turning his hands up so that she could see the fiery marks on them. "Come," she said quietly. "Let's go below, and you show me which salve to put on them."

  * * *

  In his little cabin, among his powders and potions, Lawler said, "That's it. That flask there."

  "This?" Pilya said. She looked suspicious. "This isn't a salve."

  "I know. Put a few drops of it in a little water and hand it to me, first. Then the salve."

  "What is it? A pain-killer?"

  "A pain-killer, yes."

  Pilya busied herself mixing the drug for him. She was about twenty-five, golden-haired, brown-eyed, broad-shouldered, thick-featured, deep-chested, with lustrous olive skin-a good-looking, strong-bodied woman, a hard worker, according to Delagard. Certainly she knew her way around the rigging of a ship. Lawler had never had much to do with her on Sorve, but he had slept with her mother Anya a couple of times twenty years ago, when he had been about as old as Pilya was now and her mother was a sleek thirty-five. It had been a stupid thing to do. Lawler doubted that Pilya knew anything about it. Pilya's mother was dead now, carried away by a fever from some bad oysters three winters before. Lawler had been a big man with the ladies at the time he was involved with her-it had been soon after the collapse of his one brief ill-starred marriage-but he hadn't been one for some time now, and he wished Pilya would stop staring at him in that eager, hopeful way, as though he were everything she might need in a man. He wasn't. But he was too courteous, or too indifferent, to tell her that, he wasn't sure which.

  She offered him the glass, brimming with pink liquid. Lawler's hands felt like clubs. His fingers were as stiff as wooden rods. She had to help him as he drank. But the numbweed tincture went to work instantly, easing his spirit in its usual comforting way, nibbling away the shock of the sudden monstrous event on deck. Pilya took the empty glass from him and set it down on the shelf opposite his bunk.

  Lawler kept his artifacts from Earth on that shelf, his six little fragments of the world that once had been. Pilya paused and peered at them, the coin, the bronze statuette, the potsherd, the map, the gun, the chunk of stone. She touched the statuette delicately with the tip of her finger, as if she expected it to burn her.

  "What's this?"

  "A little figure of a god, from a place called Egypt. That was on Earth."

  "Earth? You have things from Earth?"

  "Family treasures. That one is four thousand years old."

  "Four thousand years. And this?" She picked up the coin. "What do these words say, on this little piece of white metal?"

  " 'In God We Trust,' is what it says, on the side that has the woman's face. And on the other side, where the bird is, it says, 'United States of America' up here, and 'Quarter Dollar' down below."

  "What does that mean, 'Quarter Dollar'?" Pilya asked.

  "It was a kind of money, on Earth."

  "And 'United States of America'?"

  "A place."

  "An island, you mean?"

  "I don't know," he said. "I don't think so. Earth didn't have islands of the kind we have."

  "And this animal, the one with these wings? There isn't any such animal."

  "There was on Earth," Lawler said. "It was called an eagle. A kind of bird."

  "What is a bird?"

  He hesitated. "Something that flies in the air."

  "Like an air-skimmer," she said.

  "Something like that. I don't really know."

  Pilya poked thoughtfully at the other artifacts. "Earth," she said, very quietly. "So there truly was such a place."

  "Of course there was!"r />
  "I have never been sure. Maybe it was only just a story." She turned to him, grinning coquettishly, and held out the coin. "Will you give this to me, doctor? I like it. I want to have an Earth thing to keep."

  "I can't do that, Pilya."

  "Please? Would you, please? It's so beautiful!"

  "But it's been in my family for hundreds of years. I can't give it away."

  "I'll let you see it whenever you like."

  "No," he said. He wondered who he was saving it for. "I'm sorry. I wish I could let you have it, but I can't. Not those things."

  She nodded, making no attempt to hide her disappointment. "Earth," she said again, savouring the mysterious name. "Earth!" She put the coin back on the shelf and said, "You will tell me what the other Earth things are, another time. But we have work to do on you and we are forgetting. The salve for your hands. Where is the salve?"

  He pointed it out to her. She found it and squeezed a little from the tube. Then, turning his hands upward as she had on deck, she shook her head sadly. "Look at them. You'll have scars."

  "Probably not."

  "That thing could have pulled you over the side too."

  "No," Lawler said. "It couldn't. It didn't. Gospo was close to the side to begin with, and it got him before he knew what was happening to him. I was in a better position to resist."

  He saw the fear in her lovely gold-flecked eyes.

  "If not this time, it'll get us the next. We'll all die before we reach wherever it is we're going," she said.

  "No. No, we'll be all right."

  Pilya laughed. "You always see a good side to things. This is going to be a sorrowful deadly trip all the same. If we could turn around and go back to Sorve, doctor, wouldn't you want to do that?"

  "But we can't go back, Pilya. You know that. You might just as well talk about turning around and going back to Earth. There's no way we're ever going to see Sorve again."

  ONE

  Sorve Island

  1

  In the night had come the pure, simple conviction that he was the man of destiny, the one who could turn the trick that would make everything ever so much simpler and better for the seventy-eight humans who lived on the artificial island of Sorve on the watery world called Hydros.

  It was a cockeyed idea and Lawler knew it. But it had wrecked his sleep, and none of his usual methods seemed to work to fix that, not meditation, not multiplication tables, not even a few pink drops of the algae-derived tranquillizer on which he was perhaps becoming a little too dependent. From a little after midnight until somewhere close to dawn he lay awake, possessed by his brilliant, heroic, cockeyed idea. And then at last, in the small hours of the morning when the sky was still dark, before any patients could show up to complicate his day and ruin the purity of his sudden new vision, Lawler left the vaargh near the middle of the island where he lived by himself and went down to the sea-wall to see whether the Gillies really had managed to start up their new power plant during the night.

  He would congratulate them profusely if they had. He would call forth his whole vocabulary of sign-language gestures to tell them how impressed he was with their awesome technological prowess. He would praise them for having transformed the entire quality of life on Hydros-not just on Sorve, but on the whole planet-in a single masterly stroke.

  And then he would say, "My father, the great Dr Bernat Lawler whom you all remember so well, saw this moment coming. 'One day,' he would often remark to me when I was a boy, 'our friends the Dwellers will achieve the dependable production of a steady supply of electricity. And then a new age will dawn here, when Dweller and human will work side by side in heartfelt cooperation…' "

  And so on and so on and so on. Subtly intertwining his congratulations with an expression of the need for harmony between the two races. Eventually working his way around to the explicit proposition that Hydran and human should put aside all past coolness and at last begin to toil together in the name of further technological progress. Evoking the sacred name of the late beloved Dr Bernat Lawler as often as he could, reminding them how in his day he had laboured to the full extent of his formidable medical skills on behalf of Dweller and human alike, performing many a miracle of healing, devoting himself unselfishly to the needs of both island communities-laying it on thicker and thicker, making the air throb with emotion, until the Gillies, teary-eyed with newfound interspecies affection, yielded gladly to his casual suggestion that a good way to start the new era off would be to allow the humans to adapt the power plant so that it could produce a supply of fresh water as well as electricity. And then his underlying proposal: the humans would design and build the desalinization unit by themselves, the condenser, the conveyer pipes, the complete item, and hand it over to the Gillies. Here: just plug it in. It costs you nothing and we won't be dependent on rain catch for our fresh water supply any longer. And we will all be the best of friends forever, you Dwellers and we humans.

  That was the fantasy that had pulled Lawler from his sleep. He wasn't usually given to entangling himself in such far-fetched enterprises as this one. His years as a doctor-not the medical genius that his father had been, but a hard-working and reasonably effective physician, who did a pretty good job, considering the difficulties-had led him to be realistic and practical about most things. But somehow he had convinced himself this night that he was the only person on the island who might actually be able to talk the Gillies into letting water-desalinization equipment be tacked onto their power plant. Yes. He would succeed where all others had failed.

  A fat chance, Lawler knew. But in the small hours of the night chances sometimes tend to look fatter than they do in the clear light of morning.

  Such electricity as the island had now came from clumsy, inefficient chemical batteries, piles of zinc and copper discs separated by strips of crawlweed paper soaked in brine. The Gillies-the Hydrans, the Dwellers, the dominant beings of the island and of the world where Lawler had spent his entire life-had been working on a better means of electrical generation as long as Lawler could remember, and by now, so the scuttlebutt in town had it, the new power plant was almost ready to go on line-today, tomorrow, next week for sure. If the Gillies actually could manage to achieve that, it would be a tremendous thing for both species. They had already agreed, not very graciously, to let the humans make use of some of the new electricity, which everyone admitted was altogether terrific of them. But it would be even more terrific for the seventy-eight humans who scratched out narrow little subsistence-level lives on the hard narrow little place that was Sorve if the Gillies would relent and let the plant be used for water desalinization also, so that the humans wouldn't have to depend on the random and infrequent mercies of Sorve rainfall patterns for their fresh water. It must have been obvious even to the Gillies that life would become ever so much easier for their human neighbours if they could count on a reliable and unlimited supply of water.

  But of course the Gillies had given no indication so far that they cared about that. They had never shown any particular interest in making anything easier for the handful of humans who lived in their midst. Fresh water might be vital to human needs, but it didn't matter a damn to the Gillies. What the humans might need, or want, or hope to have, was no concern of the Gillies. And it was the vision of changing all that by single-handed persuasion that had cost Lawler his sleep this night.

  What the hell: nothing ventured, nothing gained.

  On this tropical night Lawler was barefoot and wore only a twist of yellow cloth made from water-lettuce fronds around his waist. The air was warm and heavy and the sea was calm. The island, that webwork of living and semi-living and formerly living tissue drifting on the breast of the vast world-spanning ocean, swayed almost imperceptibly beneath his feet. Like all the inhabited islands of Hydros, Sorve was rootless, a free-floating wanderer, moving wherever the currents and winds and the occasional tidal surge cared to carry it. Lawler was able to feel the tightly woven withes of the flooring giving and spreadi
ng as he walked, and he heard the sea lapping at them just a couple of metres below. But he moved easily, lightly, his long lean body attuning itself automatically to the rhythms of the island's movements. They were the most natural thing in the world to him.

  The softness of the night was deceptive. Most times of the year Sorve was something other than a soft place to live. Its climate alternated between periods of hot-and-dry and cold-and-wet, with only the sweet little summer interlude when Sorve was drifting in mild, humid equatorial latitudes to provide a brief illusion of comfort and ease. This was the good time of the year, now. Food was abundant and the air was sweet. The islanders rejoiced in it. The rest of the year life was much more of a struggle.

  Unhurriedly Lawler made his way around the reservoir and down the ramp to the lower terrace. It was a gentle slope from here to the island's rim. He went past the scattered buildings of the shipyard from which Nid Delagard ran his maritime empire and the indistinct domed shapes that were the waterfront factories, in which metals-nickel, iron, cobalt, vanadium, tin-were extracted from the tissues of low-phylum sea-creatures by slow, inefficient processes. It was hard to make out anything clearly, but after some forty years of living on this one small island Lawler had no trouble getting around any part of the place in the dark.

  The big two-storey shed that housed the power plant was just to his right and a little way ahead, down at the water's edge. He headed toward it.

  There was no hint of morning yet. The sky was a deep black. Some nights Sunrise, the sister planet of Hydros, gleamed in the heavens like a great blue-green eye, but tonight Sunrise was absent on the other side of the world, casting its bright glow on the mysterious waters of the unexplored far hemisphere. One of the three moons was visible, though, a tiny point of hard white light off to the east, close to the horizon. And stars shimmered everywhere, cascades of glittering silver powder scattered across the blackness, a ubiquitous dusting of brightnesses. That infinite horde of distant suns formed a dazzling backdrop for the one mighty foreground constellation, the brilliant Hydros Cross-two blazing rows of stars that arched across the sky at right angles to each other like a double cincture, one spanning the world from pole to pole, the other marching steadfastly along above the equator.