The Face of the Waters

by Robert Silverberg

  He began to head upslope.

  Farther inland on the island, people were up, people were moving around.

  Nobody slept much past dawn here. The night was for sleeping, the day for working. In the course of making his way back toward his vaargh to wait for the morning batch of genuine sufferers and chronic complainers to start showing up, Lawler encountered and greeted a significant percentage of the island's entire human population. Here at the narrow end where the humans lived, everyone was on top of everyone else all the time.

  Most of those to whom he nodded as he walked up the easy slope of the hard, bright yellow wickerwork path were people he had known for decades. Practically all the population of Sorve was Hydros-born, and more than half of those had been born and raised right here on this island, like Lawler himself. And so most of them were people who had never specifically chosen to spend their entire lives on this alien ball of water, but were doing it anyway, because they hadn't been given any choice. The lottery of life had simply handed them a ticket to Hydros at birth; and once you found yourself on Hydros you couldn't ever get off, because there were no spaceports here, there was no way of leaving the planet except by dying. It was a life sentence, being born here. That was strange, in a galaxy full of habitable and inhabited worlds, not to have had any choice about where you live. But then there were the others, the ones who had come plummeting in from outside via drop-capsule, who had had a choice, who could have gone anywhere in the universe and had chosen to come here, knowing that there was no going away again. That was even stranger.

  Dag Tharp, who ran the radio unit and did dental work on the side and sometimes served as Lawler's anaesthetist, was the first to go by, a tiny angular man, red-faced and fragile-looking, with a scraggy neck and a big, sharply hooked nose emerging between little eyes and practically fleshless lips. Behind him down the path came Sweyner, the toolmaker and glassblower, a little old fellow, knotted and gnarled, and his knotted, gnarled wife, who looked like his twin sister. Some of the newer settlers suspected that she was, but Lawler knew better. Sweyner's wife was Lawler's second cousin, and Sweyner was no kin to him-or her-at all. The Sweyners, like Tharp, were both Hydros-born, and native to Sorve. It was a little irregular to marry a woman from your own island, as Sweyner had done, and that-along with their physical resemblance-accounted for the rumours.

  Lawler was near the high spine of the island now, the main terrace. A wide wooden ramp led to it. There were no staircases on Sorve: the stubby inefficient legs of the Gillies weren't well designed for using stairs. Lawler took the ramp at a quick pace and stepped out onto the terrace, a flat stretch of stiff, hard, tightly bound yellow sea-bamboo fibres fifty metres wide, varnished and laminated with seppeltane sap and supported by a trellis of heavy black kelp-timber beams. The island's long, narrow central road cut across it. A left turn took you to the part of the island where the Gillies lived, a right turn led into the shantytown of the humans. He turned right.

  "Good morning, doctor-sir," Natim Gharkid murmured, twenty paces or so down the road, moving aside to let Lawler go by.

  Gharkid had come to Sorve four or five years ago from some other island: a soft-eyed soft-faced man with dark smooth skin, who had not yet managed to fit himself into the life of the community in any very significant way. He was an algae farmer, who was going down to spend his day harvesting seaweeds in the shallows. That was all that he did. Most of the humans on Hydros followed a variety of occupations: in such a small population, it was necessary for people to attempt to master several skills. But Gharkid didn't seem concerned about that. Lawler was not only the island's doctor but also the pharmacist, the meteorologist, the undertaker, and-so Delagard apparently thought-the veterinarian. Gharkid, though, was an algae-farmer and nothing else. Lawler thought he was probably Hydros-born, but he wasn't certain of it, so rarely did the man reveal anything at all about himself. Gharkid was the most self-effacing person Lawler had ever known, quiet and patient and diligent, amiable but unfathomable, a vague silent presence and not much more.

  They exchanged automatic smiles as they passed each other now.

  Then came three women in a row, all of them in loose green robes: Sisters Halla, Mariam and Thecla, who a couple of years ago had formed some sort of convent down at the tip of the island, past the ashmasters' yard, where bone of all sorts was stored to be processed into lime and then into soap, ink, paint and chemicals of a hundred uses. No one but ashmasters went there, ordinarily; the Sisters, living beyond the boneyard, were safe from all disturbance. It was an odd place to choose to live, all the same. Since setting up their convent the Sisters had had as little to do with men as they could manage. There were eleven of them altogether by now, nearly a third of all the human women on Sorve: a curious development, unique in the island's short history. Delagard was full of lewd speculations about what went on down there. Very likely he was right.

  "Sister Halla," he said, saluting. "Sister Mariam. Sister Thecla."

  They looked at him the way they might have done if he had said something filthy. Lawler shrugged and went on.

  The main reservoir was just up ahead, a covered circular tank three metres high and fifty metres across, constructed of varnished poles of sea-bamboo bound together with bright orange hoops of algae fronds and caulked within with the red pitch that was made from water-cucumbers. A berserk maze of wooden pipes emerged from it and fanned out toward the vaarghs that began just beyond it. The reservoir was probably the most important structure in the settlement. The first humans to get here had built it, five generations ago in the early twenty-fourth century when Hydros was still being used as a penal colony, and it required constant maintenance, endless patching and caulking and rehooping. There had been talk for at least ten years of replacing it with something more elegantly made, but nothing had ever been done about it, and Lawler doubted that anything ever would. It served its purpose well enough.

  As Lawler approached the great wooden tank he saw the priest who had lately come to live on Hydros, Father Quillan of the Church of All Worlds, edging slowly around it from the far side, doing something extremely strange. Every ten paces or thereabouts Quillan would halt, face the reservoir wall, and stretch his arms out against it in a sort of hug, pressing his fingertips thoughtfully against the wall here and there as though probing for leaks.

  "Afraid that the wall's going to pop?" Lawler called to him. The priest was an offworlder, a newcomer. He had been on Hydros less than a year and had arrived on Sorve Island only a few weeks before. "You don't need to worry about that."

  Quillan looked quickly around, visibly embarrassed. He took his hands away from the side of the reservoir.

  "Hello, Lawler."

  The priest was a compact, austere-looking man, balding and clean-shaven, who might have been any age at all between forty-five and sixty. He was thin, as if all the flesh had been sweated off him, with a long oval face and a strong, bony nose. His eyes, set deep in their sockets, were a chilly light blue and his skin was very pale, almost bleached-looking, though a steady diet of the maritime-derived things that people ate on Hydros was starting to give him the dusky sea-tinged complexion that the old-time settlers had: the algae cropping out in the skin, so to speak.

  Lawler said, "The reservoir's extremely sturdy. Believe me, Father. I've lived here all my life and that reservoir hasn't burst its walls even once. We couldn't afford to let that happen."

  Quillan laughed self-consciously. "That isn't what I was doing actually. I was embracing its strength, as a matter of fact."

  "I see."

  "Feeling all that contained power. Experiencing a sense of great force under restraint-tons of water held back by nothing more than human will and determination."

  "And a lot of sea-bamboo and hooping, Father. Not to mention God's grace."

  "That too," Quillan said.

  Very peculiar, hugging the reservoir because you wanted to experience its strength. But Quillan was always doing curious things like that. T
here seemed to be some kind of desperate hunger in the man: for grace, for mercy, for surrender to something larger than himself. For faith itself, perhaps. It seemed odd to Lawler that a man who claimed to be a priest would be so needy of spirit.

  He said, "My great-great-grandfather designed it, you know. Harry Lawler, one of the Founders. He could do anything he put his mind to, my grandfather used to say. Take out your appendix, sail a ship from one island to another, design a reservoir." Lawler paused. "He was sent here for murder, old Harry was. Manslaughter, I should say."

  "I didn't know. So your family has always lived on Sorve?"

  "Since the beginning. I was born here. Just about a hundred and eighty metres from where we're standing, actually." Lawler slapped the side of the reservoir affectionately. "Good old Harry. We'd be in real trouble here without this. You see how dry our climate is."

  "I'm starting to find out," said the priest. "Doesn't it ever rain here at all?"

  "Certain times of the year," Lawler said. "This isn't one of the times. You won't see any rain around here for another nine, ten months. That's why we took care to build our reservoirs so that they wouldn't spring any leaks."

  Water was scarce on Sorve: the kind of water that humans could use, at any rate. The island travelled through arid territory most of the year. That was the work of the inexorable currents. The floating islands of Hydros, though they drifted more or less freely in the sea, were nevertheless penned for decades at a time within clearly defined longitudinal belts by powerful ocean currents, strong as great rivers. Every year each island carried out a rigidly defined migration from one pole to the other and back again; each pole was surrounded by a vortex of swift water that seized the incoming islands, swung them around, and sent them off toward the opposite end of the planet. But though the islands passed through every latitudinal belt in their annual north-south migrations, east-west fluctuations were minimal because of the force of the prevailing currents. Sorve, in its endless travelling up and down the world, had stayed between the fortieth and sixtieth degrees of west longitude as long as Lawler could remember. That seemed basically to be an arid belt in most latitudes. Rain was infrequent except when the island was moving through the polar zones, where heavy downfalls were the rule.

  The almost perpetual droughts were no problem for the Gillies, who were constructed for drinking sea-water anyway. But they made existence complicated for the humans. Water rationing was a routine fact of life on Sorve. There had been two years-when Lawler was twelve, and again when he was twenty, the dark year of his father's death-when freakish rainfall had pelted the island for weeks without ceasing, so that the reservoirs had overflowed and the rationing had been abandoned. That had been an interesting novelty for the first week or so, each time, and then the unending downpours, the grey days and the rank smell of mildew, had become a bore. On the whole Lawler preferred drought: he was accustomed to it, at least.

  Quillan said, "This place fascinates me. It's the strangest world I've ever known."

  "I could say the same thing, I suppose."

  "Have you travelled much? Around Hydros, I mean."

  "I was on Thibeire Island once," Lawler said. "It came very close, floated up right out there in the harbour, and a bunch of us took a coracle over to it and spent the whole day there. I was fifteen, then. That's the only time I've been anywhere else." He gave Quillan a wary glance. "But you're a real traveller, I understand. They tell me you've seen quite a chunk of the galaxy in your day."

  "Some," Quillan said. "Not all that much. I've been to seven worlds altogether. Eight, counting this one."

  "That's seven more than I'll ever see."

  "But now I've reached the end of the line."

  "Yes," Lawler said. "That you certainly have."

  Offworlders who came to live on Hydros were beyond Lawler's comprehension. Why did they do it? To let yourself be stuffed into a drop-capsule on Sunrise, next door in the sky just a dozen or so million kilometres away, and be flipped out into a landing orbit that would dump you down in the sea near one of the floating islands-knowing that you could never leave Hydros again? Since the Gillies refused to countenance the building of a spaceport anywhere on Hydros, coming here was strictly a one-way journey, and everyone out there understood that. But still they came-not many, but a steady trickle of them, choosing to live forever after as castaways on a shoreless shore, on a world without trees or flowers, birds or insects or green fields of grass, without furry animals or hooved ones-without ease, without comfort, without any of the benefits of modern technology, awash on the ceaseless tides, drifting from pole to pole and back again aboard islands made of wickerwork on a world fit only for creatures with fins or flippers.

  Lawler had no idea why Quillan had wanted to come to Hydros, but it wasn't the thing you asked someone. A kind of penance, perhaps. An act of self-abnegation. Certainly it wasn't to perform church functions. The Church of All Worlds was a schismatic post-Papal Catholic sect without any adherents, so far as Lawler knew, anywhere on the planet. Nor did the priest seem to be here as a missionary. He had made no attempts to make converts since his arrival on Sorve, which was just as well, for religion had never been a matter of much interest among the islanders. "God is very far away from us on Sorve Island," Lawler's father had liked to say.

  Quillan looked sombre for a moment, as though contemplating the realities of his having stranded himself on Hydros for the rest of his days. Then he said, "You don't mind always staying in the same place? You don't ever get restless? Curious about the other islands?"

  "Not really," Lawler said. "Thibeire was pretty much like Sorve, I thought. The same general layout, the same general feel. Only there was nobody there that I knew. If one place is just like another, why not stay in the place you know, among the people you've always lived with?" His eyes narrowed. "It's the other worlds I wonder about. The dry-land ones. Actual solid planets. I wonder what it's like to go and go for days and never see open water even once, to be on a hard surface all the time, not just an island but a whole huge continent where you can't see right across from one end of the place where you live to the other, an enormous land mass that has cities and mountains and rivers on it. Those are just empty words to me. Cities. Mountains. I'd like to know what trees are like, and birds, and plants that have flowers. I wonder about Earth, you know? I dream sometimes that it still exists, that I'm actually on it, breathing its air, feeling its soil under my feet. Getting it under my fingernails. There's no soil anywhere on Hydros, do you realize that? Only the sand of the sea bottom."

  Lawler glanced quickly at the priest's hands, at his fingernails, as though they might still have the black dirt of Sunrise under them. Quillan's eyes followed Lawler's, and he smiled but said nothing.

  Lawler said, "I overheard you talking last week with Delagard at the community centre, about the planet you lived on before you came here, and I still remember every word of what you said. How the land there seems to go on forever, first grassland and then a forest and then mountains and a desert on the far side of the mountains. And the whole time I sat there trying to imagine what all those things really looked like. But of course I'll never know. We can't get to other worlds from here, eh? For us they might just as well not exist. And since every place on Hydros is the same as every other place, I'm not inclined to go roaming."

  "Indeed," said Quillan gravely. After a moment he added, "That isn't typical, is it, though?"

  "Typical of whom?"

  "The people who live on Hydros. Never travelling anywhere, I mean."

  "A few of us are wanderers. They like to change islands every five or six years. Some aren't like that. Most aren't, I'd say. At any rate I'm one of the ones who isn't."

  Quillan considered that.

  "Indeed," he said again, as though processing some intricate datum. He appeared to have exhausted his run of questions for the moment. Some weighty conclusion seemed about to come forth.

  Lawler watched him without great interest, poli
tely waiting to hear what else Quillan might have to say.

  But a long moment passed and Quillan still was silent. Evidently he had nothing further to say after all.

  "Well," Lawler said, "time to open the shop, I guess."

  He began to walk up the path toward the vaarghs.

  "Wait," said Quillan.

  Lawler turned and looked back at him. "Yes?"

  "Are you all right, doctor?"

  "Why? Do I look sick to you?"

  "You look upset about something," Quillan said. "You don't often look that way. When I first met you you struck me as a man who just lives his life, day by day, hour by hour, taking whatever comes in his stride. But somehow you look different this morning. That outburst of yours about other worlds-I don't know. It didn't seem like you. Of course I can't say that I actually know you."

  Lawler gave the priest a guarded stare. He didn't feel like telling him about the three dead divers in the shed on Jolly's Pier.

  "There were a few things on my mind last night. I didn't get much sleep. But I didn't realize it was so obvious."

  "I'm good at seeing such things," said Quillan, smiling. His pale blue eyes, usually remote and even veiled, seemed unusually penetrating just then. "It doesn't take much. Listen, Lawler, if you'd like to talk to me about anything-anything at all, any time, just get things off your chest-"

  Lawler grinned and indicated his chest, which was bare.

  "Plainly there's nothing on it, is there?"

  "You know what I mean," Quillan said.

  For a moment something seemed to be passing between them, a crackling sort of tension, a linkage that Lawler neither desired nor enjoyed. Then the priest smiled again, genially, too genially, a deliberately bland, vague, benign smile obviously intended to create distance between them. He held up one hand in what might have been a blessing or perhaps a dismissal, and nodded, and turned and walked away.