The Face of the Waters

by Robert Silverberg

  The light coming from the power plant was cool, greenish, faintly mocking. The Gillies had a technology of sorts, which had reached an eighteenth or nineteenth-century Earth-equivalent level, and they had invented a kind of light bulb, using filaments made from the fibres of the exceedingly versatile sea-bamboo plant. The bulbs were costly and difficult to make, and the big voltaic pile that had been the island's main source of power was clumsy and recalcitrant, producing electricity only in a sluggish, intermittent fashion and constantly breaking down. But now-after how many years of work? Five? Ten?-the island's bulbs were being lit from a new and inexhaustible source, power from the sea, warm water from the surface converted to steam, steam making the generator's turbines turn, electricity streaming forth from the generator to light the lamps of Sorve Island.

  The Gillies had agreed to let the humans at the other end of the island draw off some of the new power in return for labour-Sweyner would make light bulbs for them, Dann Henders would help with the stringing of cable, and so forth. Lawler had been instrumental in setting up that arrangement, along with Delagard, Nicko Thalheim and one or two others. That was the one little triumph of inter-species cooperation that the humans had been able to manage in recent years. It had taken about six months of slow and painstaking negotiation.

  Only this morning, Lawler remembered, he had hoped to work out another such cooperative enterprise with them entirely by himself. That seemed a million years ago. And here they were at nightfall, setting forth to beg just to be allowed to continue living on the island at all.

  Delagard said, "We'll go straight to the honcho cabin, okay? No sense not starting at the top for this one."

  Lawler shrugged. "Whatever you say."

  They walked around the power plant and headed into Gillie territory, still following the shore of the bay. The island widened rapidly here, rising from the low bayfront levels behind the sea-wall to a broad circular plateau that contained most of the Gillie settlement. On the far side of the plateau there was a steep drop where the island's thick wooden sea-bulwark descended in a straight sheer line to the dark ocean far below.

  The Gillie village was arrayed in an irregular circle, the most important buildings in the centre, the others strung raggedly along the periphery. The main difference between the inner buildings and the outer ones seemed to be one of permanence: the inner ones, which appeared to have ceremonial uses, were constructed of the same wood-kelp timber that the island itself was built from, and the outer ones, in which the Gillies lived, were slapdash tent-like things made of moist green seaweed wrapped loosely over sea-bamboo poles. They gave off a ghastly odour of rot as the sun baked them, and when they reached a certain degree of dryness the seaweed coverings were stripped away and replaced with fresh ones. What appeared to be a special caste of Gillies was constantly at work tearing down the huts and building new ones.

  It would take about half a day to walk completely across the Gillie end of the island. By the time Lawler and Delagard had entered the inner circle of the village, Sunrise had set and the Hydros Cross was bright in the sky.

  "Here they come," Delagard said. "Let me do the talking, first. If they start getting snotty with me, you take over. I don't mind if you tell them what a shit you think I am. Whatever works."

  "Do you really think anything's going to work?"

  "Shh. I don't want to hear you talking like that."

  Half a dozen Gillies-males, Lawler guessed-were approaching them from the innermost part of the village. When they were ten or twelve metres away they halted and arranged themselves in front of the two humans in a straight line.

  Delagard raised his hands in the gesture that meant, "We come in peace." It was the universal humans-to-Gillies greeting. No conversation ever began without it.

  The Gillies now were supposed to reply with the funereal wheezing sounds that meant, "We accept you as peaceful and we await your words." But they didn't say a thing. They simply stood there and stared.

  "I don't have a good feeling about this, do you?" Lawler said quietly.

  "Wait. Wait."

  Delagard made the peace gesture again. He went on to make the hand-signals that meant, "We are your friends and regard you with the highest respect."

  One of the Gillies emitted what sounded like a fart.

  Their glittering little yellow eyes, set close together at the base of their small heads, studied the two humans in what seemed like an icy and indifferent way.

  "Let me try," Lawler murmured.

  He stepped forward. The wind was blowing from behind the Gillies: it brought him their damp heavy musky smell, mingled with the sharp reek of rotting seaweed from their ramshackle huts.

  He made the We-come-in-peace sign. That produced no response, nor did the cognate We-are-your-friends one. After an appropriate pause he proceeded to make the signal that meant, "We seek an audience with the powers that reign."

  From one of the Gillies came the farting sound again. Lawler wondered if it was the same Gillie that had rumbled and snorted at him so menacingly in the early hours of the day, down by the power plant.

  Delagard offered I-ask-forgiveness-for-an-unintended-transgression. Silence: cold indifferent eyes remotely watching.

  Lawler tried How-may-we-atone-for-departure-from-right-conduct. He got nothing back.

  "The lousy fuckers," Delagard muttered. "I'd like to put a spear right through their fat bellies."

  "They know that," Lawler said. "That's why they don't want to dicker with you."

  "I'll go away. You talk to them by yourself."

  "If you think it's worth trying."

  "You have a clean record with them. Remind them who you are. Who your father was and what he did for them."

  "Any other suggestions?" Lawler asked.

  "Look, I'm just trying to be helpful. But go on, do it any way you like. I'll be at the shipyard. Stop off there when you get back and let me know how it goes."

  Delagard slipped off into the darkness.

  Lawler took a few steps closer to the six Gillies and began again with the initiating gesture. Next he identified himself: Valben Lawler, doctor, son of Bernat Lawler the doctor. The great healer whom they surely remembered, the man who had freed their young ones from the menace of fin-rot.

  He felt the strong irony of it: this was the opening of the speech he had spent half the night rehearsing in his sleepless mind. He was getting a chance to deliver it after all. In the context of a very different situation, though.

  They looked at him without responding.

  At least they didn't fart this time, Lawler thought.

  He signalled, "We are ordered to leave the island. Is this so?"

  From the Gillie on the left came the deep soughing tone that meant an affirmative.

  "This brings us great sorrow. Is there any way that we can cause this order to be withdrawn?"

  Negative, boomed the Gillie on the right.

  Lawler stared at them hopelessly. The wind picked up, flinging their heavy odour into his face by the bucketful, and he fought back nausea. Gillies had never seemed other than strange and mysterious to him, and a little repellent. He knew that he should take them for granted, simply one aspect of the world where he had always lived, like the ocean or the sky. But for all their familiarity they remained, to him, creatures of another creation. Star-things. Aliens: us and them, humans and aliens, no kinship. Why was that? he wondered. I'm as much a native of this world as they are.

  He held his ground and told them, "It was simply an unfortunate accident that those divers died. There was no malice involved."

  Boom. Wheeze. Hwsssh.

  Meaning: We are not interested in why it happened, only that it happened at all.

  Behind the six Gillies, bleak greenish lights flashed on and off, illuminating the curious structures-statues? machines? idols?-that occupied the open space at the centre of the village, strange lumps and knobs of metals that had been patiently extracted from the tissues of small sea-creatures and
assembled into random-looking, rust-caked heaps of junk.

  "Delagard promises never to use divers again," Lawler told the Gillies, cajoling them now, looking hopefully for an opening.

  Wheeze. Boom. Indifference.

  "Won't you tell us how we can make things good again? We regret what happened. We regret it intensely."

  No response. Cold yellow eyes, staring, aloof.

  This is idiocy, Lawler thought. It's like arguing with the wind.

  "Damn it, this is our home!" he cried, matching the words with furious equivalent gestures. "It always has been!"

  Three rumbling tones, descending in thirds.

  "Find another home?" Lawler asked. "But we love this place! I was born here. We've never done harm to you before, any of us. My father-you knew my father, he was helpful to you when-"

  The farting sound again.

  It meant exactly what it sounded like, Lawler thought.

  There was no sense in going on. He understood fully the futility of it. They were losing patience with him. Soon would come the rumbling, the snorting, the anger. And then anything might happen.

  With a wave of a flipper one of the Gillies indicated that the meeting was at its end. The dismissal was unmistakable.

  Lawler made a gesture of disappointment. He signalled sadness, anguish, dismay.

  To which one of the Gillies replied, surprisingly, with a quick rolling phrase that might almost have been one of sympathy. Or was that only his optimistic imagination? Lawler couldn't be sure. And then, to his amazement, the creature stepped out of the line and came shuffling toward him with unexpected speed, its flipper-arms extended. Lawler was too startled to move. What was this? The Gillie loomed over him like a wall. Here it comes, he thought, the onslaught, the casual lethal outburst of irritation. He stood as though rooted. Some frantic impulse toward self-preservation shrieked within him, but he couldn't find the will to try to flee. The Gillie caught him by one arm and pulled him close and enfolded him with its flippers in a tight, smothering embrace. Lawler felt the sharp curved claws lightly digging into his flesh, gripping him with strange, mystifying delicacy. He remembered the red marks Delagard had shown him.

  All right. Do whatever you want. I don't give a damn. Lawler had never been this close to a Gillie before. His head was pressed against the Gillie's huge chest. He heard the Gillie heart beating in there, not the familiar human lub-dub but more of a thum-thum-thum, thum-thum-thum. A baffling Gillie brain was only a few centimetres from his cheek. Gillie reek flooded his lungs. He felt dizzy and sick-but, weirdly, not at all frightened. There was something so overpowering about having been swept into this bizarre Gillie-hug that there was no room in him for fear just now. The alien's nearness stirred some kind of whirling in his mind. A sensation as powerful as a winter storm, as powerful as the Wave itself, came raging up through the roots of his soul. The taste of seaweed was in his mouth. The salt sea was coursing through his veins.

  The Gillie held him for a time, as if communicating something-something-that couldn't be expressed in words. The embrace was neither friendly nor unfriendly. It was beyond Lawler's understanding entirely. The grip of the strong arms was tight and rough, but apparently not meant to injure him. Lawler felt like a small child being hugged by some ugly, strange, unloving foster mother. Or like a doll clasped to the great beast's bosom.

  Then the Gillie released him, pushing him away with a brusque little shove, and went shuffling back to rejoin the others. Lawler stood frozen, trembling. He watched as the Gillies, taking no further notice of him, swung ponderously about, moved away, set out on their return to their village. He stood looking after them for a long while, understanding nothing. The rank sea smell of the Gillie still clung to him. It seemed to him just then that the odour would stay with him forever.

  They must have been saying goodbye, he decided finally. That's it, yes. A Gillie farewell, a tender parting hug. Or not so tender, but a kiss-off, all the same. Does that make sense? No, not really. But neither does anything else. Let's call it a gesture of farewell, Lawler thought. And leave it at that.

  The night was far along. Slowly Lawler picked his way back along the shore, past the power plant once again, down to the shipyard, toward the rickety little wooden house where Delagard lived. Delagard disdained living in vaarghs. He liked to be close to the yard at all times, he said.

  Lawler found him alone, awake, drinking grapeweed brandy by the fitful light of a smoky fire. The room was small, cluttered, full of hooks and line, netting, oars, anchors, stacked rugfish hides, cases of brandy. It looked like a storeroom, not a dwelling. The house of the richest man on the island, this was.

  Delagard sniffed. "You stink like a Gillie. What were you doing, letting them fuck you?"

  "You guessed it. You ought to try it. You might learn a thing or two."

  "Very funny. But you do stink of Gillie, you know. Did they try to rough you up?"

  "One of them brushed against me as I was leaving," Lawler said. "I think it was an accident."

  Shrugging, Delagard said, "All right. You get anywhere with them?"

  "No. Did you really think I would?"

  "There's always hope. A gloomy guy like you may not think so, but there always is. We've got a month to make them come around. You want a drink, doc?"

  Delagard was already pouring. Lawler took the cup and drank it off quickly.

  "It's time to knock off the bullshit, Nid. Time to dump this fantasy of yours about making them come around."

  Delagard glanced upward. By the pallid flickering light his round face seemed heavier than it actually was, the shadows high-lighting rolls of flesh around his throat, turning his tanned, leathery-looking cheeks to sagging jowls. His eyes seemed small and beady and weary.

  "You think?"

  "No question of it. They really want to be rid of us. Nothing we could say or do will change that."

  "They tell you that, did they?"

  "They didn't need to. I've been on this island long enough to understand that they mean what they say. So have you."

  "Yes," Delagard said thoughtfully. "I have."

  "It's time to face reality. There's not a chance in hell that we can talk them into taking back their decree. What do you think, Delagard? Is there? For Christ's sake, is there?"

  "No. I don't suppose there is."

  "Then when are you going to stop pretending there is? Do I have to remind you what they did on Shalikomo when they said to go and people didn't go?"

  "That was Shalikomo, long ago. This is Sorve, now."

  "And Gillies are Gillies. You want another Shalikomo here?"

  "You know the answer to that, doc."

  "All right, then. You knew from the first that there wasn't any hope of changing their minds. You were just going through the motions, weren't you? For the sake of showing everybody how concerned you were about the mess that you had single-handedly created for us."

  "You think I've been bullshitting you?"

  "I do."

  "Well, it isn't so. Do you understand what I feel like, having brought all this down on us? I feel like garbage, Lawler. What do you think I am, anyway? Just a heartless bloodsucking animal? You think I can just shrug and tell the town, 'Tough tittie, folks, I had a good thing going there for a while with those divers and then it just didn't work out, so we have to move, sorry for the inconvenience, so long, see you around'? Sorve is my home community, doc. I felt I had to show that I'd at least try to undo the damage I caused."

  "Okay. You tried. We both tried. And got nowhere, as we both expected all along. Now what are you going to do?"

  "What do you want me to do?"

  "I told you before. No more windy talk about kissing the Gillies' flippers and begging them to forgive. We have to begin figuring out how we're going to get away from here and where we're going to go. Start making plans for the evacuation, Delagard. It's your baby. You caused all this. Now you have to fix it."

  "As a matter of fact," Delagard said slowly, "I've
already been working on doing just that. Tonight while you were parleying with the Gillies I sent word to the three ships of mine that are currently making ferry trips that they should turn around and get back here right away to serve as transport vessels for us."

  "Transporting us where?"

  "Here, have another drink." Delagard filled Lawler's glass again without waiting for a response. "Let me show you something."

  He opened a cabinet and took a sea-chart from it. The chart was a laminated plastic globe about sixty centimetres in diameter, made of dozens of individual strips of varying colours fitted together by some master craftsman's hand. From within it came the ticking sound of a clockwork mechanism. Lawler leaned toward it. Sea-charts were rare and precious things. He had rarely had a chance to see one at such close range.

  "Onyos Felk's father Dismas made this, fifty years ago," Delagard said. "My grandfather bought it from him when old Felk thought he wanted to go into the shipping trade and needed money for building ships. You remember the Felk fleet? Three ships. The Wave sank them all. Hell of a thing, pay for your ships by selling your sea-chart, then lose the ships. Especially when it's the best chart ever made. Onyos would give his left ball to have it, but why should I sell? I let him consult it once in a while."

  Circular purple medallions the size of a thumbnail were moving slowly up and down along the chart, some thirty or forty of them, perhaps even more, driven by the mechanism within. Most went in a straight line, heading from one pole toward the other, but occasionally one would glide almost imperceptibly into an adjacent longitudinal strip, the way an actual island might wander a little to the east or to the west while riding the main current carrying it toward the pole. Lawler marvelled at the thing's ingenuity.

  Delagard said, "You know how to read one of these? These here are the islands. This is Home Sea. This island here is Sorve."

  A little purple blotch, making its slow way upward near the equator of the globe against the green background of the strip on which it was travelling: an insignificant speck, a bit of moving colour, nothing more. Very small to be so dear, Lawler thought.

  "The whole world is shown here, at least as we understand it to be. These are the inhabited islands, in purple-inhabited by humans. This is the Black Sea, this is the Red Sea, this is the Yellow Sea over here."