The Face of the Waters

by Robert Silverberg

  "I'm trying, though. I want to."

  This was the moment to reach out to her, Lawler thought. Pull her close, caress her, do this and that, hands, lips, make things happen. She wants to understand you, he told himself. Give her her chance.

  And then he heard Delagard's voice in his head, saying, And also she's Kinverson's woman, isn't she? If she's useful, and they're a couple besides, why separate them?

  "Yes," he said, his tone suddenly short. "Lots of questions, not many answers. Isn't it always that way?" Abruptly he wanted to be alone. He tapped the flask of numbweed tincture. "This supply should last you another couple of weeks, right up to the time we leave. If the cough doesn't clear up again, let me know."

  She looked a little startled at the brusque dismissal. But then she smiled and thanked him and went out.

  Shit, he thought. Shit. Shit. Shit.

  * * *

  Delagard said, "The ships are just about in shape, and we've still got a week. My people have really been breaking their balls getting them ready."

  Lawler, at the shipyard, glanced out toward the water, where the entire Delagard fleet was at anchor in the harbour except for one ship that was up in drydock having its hull patched. Two carpenters were busy at it. Three men and four women were at work aboard the two nearest seaborne vessels, hammering and planing. "I assume you mean that figuratively, of course."

  "What? Oh. Oh. Very funny, doc. Listen, everybody who works for me has balls, even the women. It's just my vulgar way of speaking. Or one of my quaint little figures of speech, whichever you prefer. Do you want to see what we've been doing?"

  "I've never been aboard a ship, you know? Only little fishing boats, coracles, things like that."

  "There's always a first time. Come on. I'll show you the flagship."

  It looked smaller, once Lawler was aboard, than Delagard's ships seemed when riding at anchor in the bay. Still, it looked big enough. It was almost like a miniature island. Lawler could feel it rolling lightly beneath his feet, even here in the shallows. Its keel was made of the same tough hard yellow wood-kelp timber as the island itself, long sturdy fibres tightly lashed together and caulked with pitch. The exterior of the hull had a different sort of caulking. Just as the island's bulwarks wore a covering mesh of live sea-finger weed that constantly repaired and rewove itself as the ocean battered against the island wall, just as the wooden timbers of the bay floor were reinforced by a layer of protective algae, so too did a dense green network of sea-finger festoon the sides of the hull, coming clear up almost to the railing. The stubby little blue-green tubules of the weed, which had always looked more like tiny bottles than fingers to Lawler, gave the ship a thick bristling coating, jutting out in intricate tangles just below the water-line. The deck was a flat, tight expanse of some lighter wood, carefully sealed to keep the interior of the ship dry when waves came over the bow. Two masts rose at mid-deck. Hatches fore and aft led to mysterious deeper regions.

  Delagard said, "What we've been doing is resealing the deck and resurfacing the hull. We want to be water-tight all around. We may see some ugly storms and we'll sure as hell be run down by the Wave somewhere out there. On an inter-island voyage we can try to steer around lousy weather, and if things go the right way for us we can hope to avoid the worst of the Wave, but we may not have it so easy on this trip."

  "Isn't this an inter-island voyage?" Lawler asked.

  "It may not be inter the islands we'd prefer. Sometimes, a voyage like this, you have to take the long way around."

  Lawler didn't quite follow that, but Delagard didn't amplify and he let the point go by. Delagard hauled him briskly around the ship, reeling off technical terms: this is the cabinhouse, this the deckhouse, the bridge, the forecastle, the quarterdeck, the bowsprit, the windlass, the water-strider, the gantry and reel. These are gaffing rods, this is the wheel-box, that's the binnacle. Down below we have the crew quarters here, the hold, the magnetron room, the radio room, the carpenter's shop, the this, the that. Lawler was scarcely listening. Most of the terms meant nothing to him. What struck him mainly was how everything below was so incredibly close together, one thing jammed up against another. He was accustomed to the privacy and solitude of his vaargh. They would all be in each other's pockets here. He was trying to imagine himself living on this crowded boat for two, three, four weeks, out there on the open ocean with no land anywhere in sight.

  Not a boat, he told himself. A ship. An ocean-going sailing ship.

  * * *

  "What's the latest word from Salimil?" Lawler asked, when Delagard finally led him up from the claustrophobic depths.

  "Dag's talking to them right now. They were supposed to have the council meeting this morning. My guess is we're in like a breeze. They've got plenty of room there. My son Rylie called me from Salimil last week and told me that four members of the council are definitely for us and two more are leaning our way."

  "Out of how many?"

  "Nine."

  "Sounds good," Lawler said. So they would go to Salimil, then. All right. All right. So be it. He summoned an image of Salimil Island as he imagined it to be-much like Sorve, of course, but somehow bigger, grander, more lavish-and pictured himself arranging his medical equipment in a vaargh by the Salimil shore that his colleague, Dr Nikitin of Salimil, had made ready for him. Lawler had spoken with Nitikin many times by radio. He wondered what the man actually looked like. Salimil, yes. Lawler wanted to believe that Rylie Delagard knew what he was talking about, that Salimil was going to take them in. But Lawler remembered that Delagard's other son Kendry, who lived on Velmise, had been just as confident that Velmise would accept the refugees from Sorve.

  Sidero Volkin came limping up on deck and said to Delagard, "Dag Tharp's here. He's in your office."

  Delagard grinned. "Here's our answer. Let's go ashore."

  * * *

  But Tharp was already on his way down to the edge of the water to meet them as they clambered off the ship, and the moment Lawler saw the stricken look on the little radio operator's red sharp-featured face he knew what the answer from Salimil had been.

  "Well?" Delagard asked, all the same.

  "Turned us down. Five to four vote. They're low on water, they said. Because the summer's been so dry. Offered to take six people, though."

  "The bastards. Well, fuck them."

  "That what you want me to tell them?" Tharp asked.

  "Don't tell them anything. I wouldn't waste the time on them. We aren't going to send them six. It's all or none, wherever we go." He looked at Lawler.

  "What's next?" Lawler asked. "Shaktan? Kaggeram?" The island names came easily to his lips. But he had no idea where they were, or what they might be like.

  "They'll give us the same crap," Delagard said.

  "I could try Kaggeram anyway," said Tharp. "They're pretty decent over there, I remember. I was there about ten years ago, when-"

  "Fuck Kaggeram," Delagard said. "They've got one of those council deals too. They'll need a week to debate it, and then a public meeting, and a vote, and all that. We don't have that much more time." Delagard seemed to disappear into thought. He might have been a world away. He had the look of someone who was making abstruse calculations with the most intense mental effort. Delagard's eyes were half shut, his thick black brows were close together. A heavy shell of silence surrounded him. "Grayvard," he said finally.

  "But Grayvard's eight weeks from here," said Lawler.

  "Grayvard?" Tharp said, looking startled. "You want me to call Grayvard?"

  "Not you. Me. I'll make the call myself, right from this ship." Delagard was silent again a moment. Once more he seemed very distant, working out mental sums. Then he nodded as if satisfied with his answer and said, "I've got cousins on Grayvard. I know how to bargain with my own cousins, for Christ's sake. What to offer. They'll take us. You can be damn sure of that. There won't be any problem. Grayvard it is!"

  Lawler stood watching as Delagard went striding back toward the s
hip.

  Grayvard? Grayvard?

  He knew almost nothing about it: an island at the far edge of the island group in which Sorve moved, an island which spent as much time in the adjacent Red Sea as it did in Home Sea. It was about as distant as an island could be and still have any sort of real relationship with Sorve.

  Lawler had been taught in school that forty of the islands of Hydros had human settlements on them. Maybe the official number was up to fifty or sixty by now: he didn't know. The true total was probably a good deal higher than that, since everyone lived in the shadow of the Shalikomo massacre that had happened in the time of the third generation, and whenever an island's population began to grow too large, ten or twenty people would leave to seek a new life somewhere else. The settlers who moved to those new islands didn't necessarily have the means to establish radio contact with the rest of Hydros. So it was easy to lose count. Say, eighty islands with humans, by this time, or even a hundred. Scattered over an entire planet, a planet said to be bigger than Earth itself had been. Communication between the islands was spotty and difficult beyond one's own little island group. Hazy inter-island alliances formed and dissolved as the islands travelled around the world.

  Once, long ago, some humans had attempted to build an island of their own, so they wouldn't have to live all the time under the eyes of Gillie neighbours. They had figured out how it was done and had begun weaving the fibres, but before they got very far the island was attacked by huge sea creatures and destroyed. Dozens of lives were lost. Everyone assumed the monsters had been sent by the Gillies, who obviously hadn't liked the idea of humans setting up a little independent domain of their own. No one had ever tried it again.

  Grayvard, Lawler thought. Well, well, well.

  One island is as good as another, he told himself. He'd manage to adapt, somehow, wherever they landed. But would they be really welcome on Grayvard? Would they even be able to find it, somewhere out there between Home Sea and the Red Sea? What the hell. Let Delagard worry about it. Why should he care? It was all out of his hands.

  * * *

  Gharkid's voice, thin and husky and piping, came to Lawler as he was walking slowly back up to his vaargh.

  "Doctor? Doctor-sir?"

  He was heavily laden, staggering under the weight of two immense dripping baskets stuffed with algae that he carried in a shoulder-harness. Lawler halted to wait for him. Gharkid came lurching toward him and let the baskets slide from his shoulders practically at Lawler's feet.

  Gharkid was a small wiry man, so much shorter than Lawler that he had to crane his head far back in order to look at him straight on. He smiled, showing brilliant white teeth against the dusky backdrop of his face. There was something earnest and very appealing about him. But the childlike simplicity that the man affected, that cheerful peasant innocence, could be a little cloying sometimes.

  "What's all this?" Lawler asked, looking down at the tangle of weeds spilling out of the baskets, green ones and red ones and yellow ones streaked with gaudy purple veins.

  "For you, doctor-sir. Medicines. For when we leave, to take with us."

  Gharkid grinned. He seemed very pleased with himself.

  Lawler, kneeling, poked through the sopping mess. He was able to recognize some of the seaweeds. This bluish one was the painkiller, and this with the dark strap-shaped lateral leaves yielded the better of the two antiseptics, and this one-yes, this one was numbweed. Unquestionably numbweed. Good old Gharkid. Lawler looked up and as his gaze met Gharkid's there was for just a moment a flash of something not all that naive and childlike in Gharkid's dark eyes.

  "To take with us on the ship," Gharkid said, as though Lawler hadn't comprehended before. "These are the good ones, for the drugs. I thought you'd want them, some extras."

  "You've done very well," Lawler said. "Here. Let's carry this stuff up to my vaargh."

  It was a rich haul. The man had gathered some of everything that had any medicinal use. Lawler had been putting it off and putting it off and at last Gharkid had simply gone out into the bay and loaded up on the whole pharmacopoeia. Well done indeed, Lawler thought. Especially the numbweed. There'd be just enough time to process all this before they sailed, get it all refined down into powders and salves and ointments and tinctures. And then the ship would be nicely stocked with medicines for the long pull to Grayvard. He knew his algae, Gharkid did. Once again Lawler wondered if Gharkid was really as much of a simpleton as he seemed, or if that was merely some sort of defensive pose. Gharkid often seemed like a blank soul, a tabula rasa on which anyone was free to write anything at all. There had to be more to him than that, somewhere inside. But where?

  * * *

  The final days before sailing were bad ones. Everyone admitted the necessity to go, but not everybody had believed it would really happen, and now reality was closing in with terrible force. Lawler saw old women making piles of their possessions outside their vaarghs, staring blankly at them, rearranging them, carrying things inside and bringing other things out. Some of the women and a few of the men cried all the time, some of them quietly, some not so quietly. The sounds of hysterical sobbing could be heard all through the night. Lawler treated the worst cases with numbweed tincture. "Easy, there," he kept saying. "Easy, easy." Thorn Lyonides was drunk three days straight, roaring and singing, and then he started a fight with Bamber Cadrell, saying that nobody was going to make him get on board one of those ships. Delagard came by with Gospo Struvin and said, "What the fuck is this," and Lyonides jumped at him, snarling and screeching like a lunatic. Delagard hit him in the face, and Struvin caught him around the throat and throttled him until he calmed down. "Put him on his ship," Delagard said to Cadrell. "Make sure he stays there until we sail."

  On the next-to-last day, and the last day also, parties of Gillies came right down to the border between their territory and the human settlement and stood there watching in their inscrutable way, as if making sure the humans were making ready to clear out. Everyone on Sorve knew now that there would be no reprieve, no revocation of the order of expulsion. The last doubters, the last deniers, had had to cave in under the pressure of those fishy, staring, implacable eyes. Sorve was lost to them forever. Grayvard would be their new home. That much was settled.

  Just before the end, hours from departure, Lawler climbed the island to its rearmost point, on the side opposite the bay, where the high bulwark faced the ocean. It was noon, and the water was ablaze with reflected light.

  From his vantage point on the bulwark Lawler looked out across the open sea and imagined himself sailing on it, far from any shore. He wanted to find out if he still feared it, that endless world of water on which he would embark not very long from now.

  No. No. All the fear seemed to have gone from him that drunken night at Delagard's place. It hadn't returned. Lawler stared into the distance and saw nothing but ocean, and that was all right. There wasn't anything to fear. He would be exchanging the island for a ship, which was nothing more than a miniature island, really. What was the worst-case possibility, then? That his ship would sink in a storm, he supposed, or be smashed by the Wave, and he'd die. All right: he had to die sooner or later. That wasn't news. But ships weren't lost at sea all that often. The odds were that they would reach Grayvard safely. He would go ashore once again and begin a new life.

  What Lawler still felt, rather than fear of the voyage that lay ahead, was the occasional sharp stab of grief for all he would be leaving behind. The longing arose quickly and just as quickly went, unsatisfied.

  But now, strangely, the things he was leaving behind began to leave him. As Lawler stood with his back to the settlement, staring into the great dark expanse of the water, they all seemed to depart on the breeze that was blowing past him out to sea: his awesome father, his gentle elusive mother, his almost forgotten brothers. His whole childhood, his coming of age, his brief marriage, his years as the island doctor, as the Dr Lawler of his generation. Everything going away, suddenly. Everything. He felt w
eirdly light, as if he could simply mount the breeze and float through the air to Grayvard. All the shackles seemed to have broken. Everything that held him here had fallen from him in a moment. Everything.

  TWO

  To the Empty Sea

  1

  The first four days of the voyage had been placid, almost suspiciously so. "Real strange is what it is," said Gabe Kinverson, and solemnly shook his head. "You'd expect some troubles by now, this far out in the middle of nowhere," he said, looking out over the slow, calm blue-grey swells. The wind was steady. The sails were full. The ships stayed close together, moving serenely across a glassy sea on their route toward the northwest, toward Grayvard. A new home; a new life; for the seventy-eight voyagers, the castaways, the exiles, it was like a second birth. But should any birth, a first one or a second, be as easy as this? And how much longer would it be this easy?

  On the first day, when they were still crossing the bay, Lawler had found himself wandering astern again and again to look back at Sorve Island as it receded into invisibility.

  In those early hours of the voyage Sorve had risen behind them like a long tawny mound. It still seemed real and tangible then. He was able to make out the familiar central spine and the outcurving arms, the grey spires of the vaarghs, the power plant, the rambling buildings of Delagard's shipyard. He thought he could even see the sombre line of Gillies who had come down to the shore to watch the six vessels depart.

  Then the water began to change colour. The deep rich green of the shallow bay gave way to the ocean colour, which here was a dark blue tinged with grey. That was the true mark of cutting loose from shore, when you had left the bay behind. To Lawler it felt as if a trapdoor had been sprung, catapulting him into free fall. Now that the artificial bottom had dropped away beneath them Sorve began rapidly to shrink, becoming nothing but a dark line on the horizon, and then nothing at all.