The Face of the Waters Read online

  He took a small dry storage gourd from his cabinet, poured a couple of centilitres of the pink fluid into it, and capped it with a twist of sea-plastic.

  "This is a drug I derived myself from numbweed, which is one of the algae that grows in the lagoon. Give yourself five or six drops of it every morning, no more, in a glass of water. It's strong stuff." He studied her with a close, searching look. "The plant is full of potent alkaloids that could knock you for a loop. Just nibble one little frond of it and you'd be unconscious for a week. Or maybe forever. This is a highly diluted extract, but be careful with it anyway."

  "You had a little of it yourself, didn't you, when we first came in here?"

  So she'd been paying attention after all. Quick eyes, a sharp observer. Interesting.

  "I get nervous too now and then," Lawler said.

  "Do I make you nervous?"

  "All my patients do. I don't really know much about medicine, and I'd hate them to find that out." He forced a laugh. "No, that isn't true. I don't know as much about medicine as I should, but I know enough to manage. But I find that the drug calms me when I'm not having a good morning, and today didn't start off particularly well for me. It had nothing to do with you. Here, you might as well take your first dose right now."

  He measured it out for her. She sipped carefully, uneasily, and made a wry face as the curious sweet taste of the alkaloids registered on her.

  "You feel the effect?" Lawler asked.

  "Right away! Hey, good stuff!"

  "Too good, maybe. A little insidious." He made notes on her dossier. "Five drops in a glass of water every morning, no more, and you don't get a refill until the first of the month."

  "Aye, aye, sir!"

  Her entire facial expression had changed; she looked much more relaxed now, the cool grey eyes warmer, almost twinkling, the lips not so tightly pursed, the tense cheek muscles allowed a little slack. She looked younger. She looked prettier. Lawler had never had a chance before to observe the effects of numbweed on anyone else. They were unexpectedly dramatic.

  She said, "How did you discover this drug?"

  "The Gillies use numbweed as a muscle relaxant when they're hunting meatfish in the bay."

  "The Dwellers, you mean?"

  The prissy correction caught Lawler by surprise. "Dwellers" was what the dominant native life-forms of Hydros called themselves. But "Gillies" was what anyone who had been on Hydros more than a few months called them, at least around here. Maybe the usage was different on the island where she was from, he thought, off in the Azure Sea. Or perhaps it was what the younger people were saying now. Usages changed. He reminded himself that he was ten years older than she was. But most likely she used the formal term out of respect, because she fancied herself as a student of Gillie culture. What the hell: whichever way she liked it, he'd try to be accommodating.

  "The Dwellers, yes," he said. "They tear off a couple of strands and wrap them around a chunk of bait and toss it to the meatfish, and when the meatfish swallow them they go limp and float helplessly to the surface. Then the Dwellers move in and harvest them without having to worry about those knifeblade-tipped tentacles. An old sailor named Jolly told me about it, when I was a boy. Later on I remembered it and went out to the harbour and watched them doing it. And collected some of the weed and experimented with it. I thought I might be able to use it as an anaesthetic."

  "And could you?"

  "For meatfish, yes. I don't do much surgery on meatfish, though. What I found when I used it on humans was that any dose that was strong enough to be any good as an anaesthetic also turned out to be lethal." Lawler smiled grimly. "My trial-and-error period as a surgeon. Mostly error. But I eventually discovered that an extremely dilute tincture was an extremely potent tranquillizer. As you now see. It's terrific stuff. We could market it throughout the galaxy, if we had any way of shipping anything anywhere."

  "And nobody knows about this drug but you?"

  "And the Gillies," he said. "Pardon me. The Dwellers. And now you. I don't get much call for tranquillizers here." Lawler chuckled. "You know, I woke up this morning with some wild notion of trying to talk the Dwellers into letting us tack water-desalinization equipment onto their new power plant, if they ever get it going. Giving them a long heartfelt number about inter-species collaboration. It was a dumb idea, the sort of thing that comes to you in the night and goes away like mist when the sun rises. They'd never have gone for it. But what I really ought to do is mix up a big batch of numbweed and get them good and plastered on it. They'll let us do anything we want then, I bet."

  She didn't look amused.

  "You're joking, aren't you?"

  "I suppose I am."

  "If you aren't, don't even think of trying it, because you won't get anywhere. This is no time for asking the Dwellers for favours. They're pretty seriously annoyed with us."

  "What about?" Lawler asked.

  "I don't know. But something's definitely making them itchy. I went down to their end of the island last night and they were having a big conference. When they saw me they weren't at all friendly."

  "Are they ever?"

  "With me they are. But they wouldn't even talk with me last night. They wouldn't let me near them. And they were holding themselves in the posture of displeasure. You know anything about Dweller body-language? They were stiff as boards."

  The divers, he thought. They must know about the divers. That has to be it. But it wasn't something that Lawler wanted to discuss right now, not with her, not with anyone.

  "The thing about aliens," he said, "is that they're alien. Even when we think we understand them, we really don't understand a damned thing. And I don't see any way around that problem. Listen, if the cough doesn't go away in two or three days, come back here and I'll run some more tests. But stop fretting about killer fungus in your lungs, okay? Whatever it is, it isn't that."

  "That's good to hear," she said. She went over to the shelf of artifacts again. "Are all these little things from Earth?"

  "Yes. My great-great-grandfather collected them."

  "Really? Actual Earth things?" Gingerly she touched the Egyptian statuette and the bit of stone that had come from some important wall, Lawler forgot where. "Actual things that came from Earth. I've never seen any before. Earth doesn't even seem real to me, you know? It never has."

  "It does to me," Lawler said. "But I know a lot of people who feel the way you do. Let me know about that cough, okay?"

  She thanked him and went out.

  And now for breakfast, Lawler told himself. Finally. A nice whipfish fillet, and algae toast, and some freshly squeezed managordo juice.

  But he had waited too long. He didn't have much appetite, and he simply nibbled at his meal.

  A little while later a second patient appeared outside the vaargh. Brondo Katzin, who ran the island's fish market, had picked up a not-quite-dead arrowfish the wrong way and had a thick, glossy black spine five centimetres long sticking right through the middle of his left hand from one side to the other. "Imagine, being so dumb," the barrel-chested, slow-witted Katzin kept saying. "Imagine." His eyes were bugging with pain and his hand, swollen and glossy, looked twice its normal size. Lawler cut the spine loose, swabbed the wound all the way through to get the poison and other irritants out, and gave the fish-market man some gemberweed pills to ease the pain. Katzin stared at his puffed-up hand, ruefully shaking his head. "So dumb," he said again.

  Lawler hoped that he had cleaned out enough of the trichomes to keep the wound from getting infected. If he hadn't, there was a good chance Katzin would lose the hand, or the whole arm. Practising medicine was probably easier, Lawler thought, on a planet that had some land surface, and a spaceport, and something in the way of contemporary technology. But he did his best with what he had. Heigh-ho! The day was under way.

  4

  At midday Lawler came out of his vaargh to take a little break from his work. This had been his busiest morning in months. On an island with a
total human population of just seventy-eight, most of them pretty healthy, Lawler sometimes went through whole days, or even longer, without seeing a single patient. On such days he might spend the morning wading in the bay, collecting algae of medicinal value. Natim Gharkid often helped him, pointing out this or that useful plant. Or sometimes he did nothing at all, strolled or swam or went out on the bay in a fishing boat or sat quietly watching the sea. But this wasn't one of those days. First there was Dana Sawtelle's little boy with a fever, then Marya Hain with cramps after eating too many crawlie-oysters last night, Nimber Tanimind suffering from a recurrence of his usual tremors and megrims, young Bard Thalheim with a badly sprained ankle as a result of some unwise hijinks on the slippery side of the sea-wall. Lawler uttered the appropriate spells and applied the most likely ointments and sent them all away with the customary reassurances and prognostications. Most likely they'd feel better in a day or so. The current Dr Lawler might not be much of a practitioner, but Dr Placebo, his invisible assistant, generally managed to take care of the patients' problems sooner or later.

  Now, though, there was no one else waiting to see him and a little fresh air seemed like a good prescription for the doctor himself. Lawler stepped out into the bright noontime sun, stretched, did a few pinwheels with his extended arms. He peered downslope toward the waterfront. There was the bay, friendly and familiar, its calm enclosed waters rippling gently. It looked wonderfully beautiful just now: a glassy sheet of luminous gold, a glowing mirror. The dark fronds of the varied sea-flora waved lazily in the shallows. Farther out, occasional shining fins breached the glistening surface. A couple of Delagard's ships lolled by the shipyard pier, swaying gently to the rhythm of the easy tide. Lawler felt as though this moment of summer noon could go on forever, that night and winter would never come again. An unexpected feeling of peace and well-being infiltrated his soul: a gift, a bit of serendipitous joy.

  "Lawler," a voice said from his left.

  A dry frayed croak of a voice, a boneyard voice, a voice that was all ashes and rubble. It was a dismal burned-out unrecognizable wreck of a voice that Lawler recognized, somehow, as that of Nid Delagard.

  He had come up along the southern path from the water-front and was standing between Lawler's vaargh and the little tank where Lawler kept his current stock of freshly picked medicinal algae. He was flushed and rumpled and sweaty and his eyes looked strangely glassy, as though he had had a stroke.

  "What the hell has happened now?" Lawler asked, exasperated.

  Delagard made a wordless gaping movement with his mouth, like a fish out of water, and said nothing.

  Lawler dug his fingers into the man's thick, meaty arm. "Can you speak? Come on, damn you. Tell me what's happened."

  "Yeah. Yeah." Delagard moved his head from side to side in a slow, ponderous, pole-axed way. "It's very bad. It's worse than I ever imagined."

  "What is?"

  "Those fucking divers. The Gillies are really furious about them. And they're going to come down on us very hard. Very very very hard. It's what I was trying to tell you about this morning in the shed, when you walked out on me."

  Lawler blinked a couple of times. "What in God's name are you talking about?"

  "Give me some brandy first."

  "Yeah. Yeah. Come inside."

  He poured a strong jolt of the thick sea-coloured liquor for Delagard, and, after a moment's consideration, a smaller drink for himself. Delagard put his away in a single gulp and held out the cup. Lawler poured again.

  After a little while Delagard said, picking his way warily through his words as if struggling with some speech impediment, "The Gillies came to visit me just now, about a dozen of them. Walked right up out of the water down at the shipyard and asked my men to call me out for a talk."

  Gillies? At the human end of the island? That hadn't happened in decades. Gillies never went farther south than the promontory where they had built their power plant. Never.

  Delagard gave him a tortured look. " 'What do you want?' I said. Using the politest gestures, Lawler, everything very very courteous. I think the ones that were there were the big Gillie honchos, but how can you be sure? Who can tell one of them from the next? They looked important, anyway. They said, 'Are you Nid Delagard?' as if they didn't know. And I said I was, and then they grabbed me."

  "Grabbed you?"

  "I mean, physically grabbed me. Put their little funny flippers on me. Pushed me up against the wall of my own building and restrained me."

  "You're lucky you're still around to talk about it."

  "No kidding. I tell you, doc, I was scared shitless. I thought they were going to gut me and fillet me right there. Look, look here, the marks of their claws on my arm." He showed fading reddish spots. "My face is swollen, isn't it? I tried to pull my head away and one of them bumped me, maybe by accident, but look. Look. Two of them held me and a third one put his nose in my face and started telling me things, and I mean telling me, big booming noises, oom whang hoooof theeeezt, ooom whang hooof theeezt. At the beginning I was so shaken up I couldn't understand any of it. But then it came clear. They said it again and again until they made sure I understood. An ultimatum, it was." Delagard's voice dropped into a lower register. "We've been thrown off the island. We have thirty days to clean ourselves out of here. Every last one of us."

  Abruptly Lawler felt the ground disappearing beneath his feet.

  "What?"

  The other man's hard little brown eyes had taken on a frantic glitter. He signalled for more brandy. Lawler poured without even looking at the cup. "Any human remaining on Sorve when the time's up will be tossed into the lagoon and not allowed back up on shore. Any structures we've erected here will be demolished. The reservoir, the shipyard, these buildings here in the plaza, everything. Things we leave behind in the vaarghs go into the sea. Any ocean-going vessels we leave in the harbour will be sunk. We are terminated, doc. We are ex-residents of Sorve Island. Finished, done for, gone."

  Lawler stared, incredulous. A quick cycle of turbulent emotions ran through him: disorientation, depression, despair. Confusion assailed him. Leave Sorve? Leave Sorve?

  He began to tremble. With an effort he got himself under control, fighting his way back to inner equilibrium.

  Tightly he said, "Killing some divers in an industrial accident is definitely not a good thing to have done. But this is too much of an overreaction. You must have misunderstood what they were saying."

  "Like shit I did. Not a chance. They made themselves very very clear."

  "We all have to go?"

  "We all have to go, yes. Thirty days."

  Am I hearing him correctly, Lawler wondered? Is any of this really happening?

  "And did they give a reason?" he asked. "Was it the divers?"

  "Of course it was," Delagard said in a low husky voice clotted by shame. "It was just like you said this morning. The Gillies always know everything that we do."

  "Christ. Christ." Anger was beginning to take the place of shock. Delagard had casually gambled with the lives of everyone on the island, and he had lost. The Gillies had warned him: Don't ever do that again, or we'll throw you out of here. And he had done it again anyway. "What a contemptible bastard you are, Delagard!"

  "I don't know how they found out. I took precautions. We brought them in by night, we kept them covered until they were in the shed, the shed itself was locked-"

  "But they knew."

  "They knew," Delagard said. "They know everything, the Gillies. You screw somebody else's wife, the Gillies know about it. But they don't care. Not about that. You kill a couple of divers and they care like crazy."

  "What did they tell you, the last time you had an accident with divers? When they warned you not to use divers again in your work, what did they say they'd do if they caught you?"

  Delagard was silent.

  "What did they tell you?" Lawler said again, pressing harder.

  Delagard licked his lips. "That they'd make us leave Sorve," he m
uttered, once again looking down at his feet like a schoolboy being reprimanded.

  "And you did it anyway. You did it anyway."

  "Who would believe them? Jesus, Lawler, we've lived here for a hundred and fifty years! Did they mind when we moved in? We dropped out of space and squatted right down on their fucking islands and did they say, 'Go away, hideous repellent four-limbed hairy alien beings?' No. No. They didn't give a crap."

  "There was Shalikomo," Lawler said.

  "A long time ago, that was. Before either of us was born."

  "The Gillies killed a lot of people on Shalikomo. Innocent people."

  "Different Gillies. Different situation."

  Delagard pressed his knuckles together and made a little popping sound with them. His voice began to rise in pitch and volume. He seemed very swiftly to be casting off the guilt and the shame that had engulfed him. That was a knack he had, Lawler thought, the rapid restoration of his own self-esteem. "Shalikomo's an exception," he said. The Gillies had thought there were far too many humans on Shalikomo, which was a very small island, and had told some of them to go; but the humans of Shalikomo had been unable to agree on who should go and who could stay, and hardly anyone left the island, and in the end the Gillies decided how many humans they would allow to live there among themselves and killed the rest. "It's ancient history," Delagard said.

  "It was a long time ago, yes," said Lawler. "But what makes you think it can't all happen again?"

  Delagard said, "The Gillies have never been particularly hostile anywhere else. They don't like us, but they don't stop us from doing whatever we want to do, so long as we stay down at our end of the island and don't get too numerous. We harvest kelp, we fish as much as we like, we build buildings, we hunt for meatfish, we do all sorts of things that aliens might be expected to resent, and not a word out of them. So if I was able to train a few divers to help me in oceanfloor metals recovery, which could only benefit the Gillies as well as us, why do you suppose I would think that they'd become so exercised over the death of a few animals in the line of work that they… they would…"