Robert Silverberg: A Sea of Faces

A bewildering day. The dawn was red stained with purple veins— a swollen, grotesque, traumatic sky. Then came high winds; the palms rippled and swayed and great fronds were torn loose. A lull followed. I feared toppling trees and tidal waves, and pressed inland for half an hour, settling finally in a kind of natural amphitheater of dead old coral, a weathered bowl thrust up from the sea millennia ago. Here I waited out the morning. Toward noon thick dark clouds obscured the heavens. I felt a sense of menace, of irresistible powers gathering their strength, such as I sometimes feel when I hear that tense little orchestral passage late in the Agnus Dei of the Missa Solemnis, and instants later there descended on me hail, rain, sleet, high wind, furious heat, even snow, all weathers at once. I thought the earth would crack open and pour forth magma upon me. It was all over in five minutes, and every trace of the storm vanished. The clouds parted; the sun emerged, looking gentle and innocent; birds of many plumages wheeled in the air, warbling sweetly. The faces of Irene and April, infinitely reduplicated, blinked on and off against the backdrop of the sky. The mountainous shore hung fixed on the horizon, growing no nearer, getting no farther away, as though the day’s turmoils had caused the frightened island to put down roots.

Rain during the night, warm and steamy. Clouds of gnats. An evil humming sound, greasily resonant, pervading everything. I slept, finally, and was awakened by a sound like a mighty thunderclap, and saw an enormous distorted sun rising slowly in the west.

We sat by the redwood table on Donald’s patio: Irene, Donald, Erik, Paul, Anna, Leonie, me. Paul and Erik drank bourbon, and the rest of us sipped Shine, the new drink, essence of cannabis mixed with (I think) ginger beer and strawberry syrup. We were very high. “There’s no reason,” I said, “why we shouldn’t avail ourselves of the latest technological developments. Here’s this unfortunate girl suffering from an undeterminable but crippling psychological malady, and the chance exists for me to enter her soul and—”

“Enter her what?” Donald asked.

“Her consciousness, her anima, her spirit, her mind, her whatever you want to call it”

“Don’t interrupt him,” Leonie said to Donald.

Irene said, “Will you bring her to Erik for an impartial opinion first, at least?”

“What makes you think Erik is impartial?” Anna asked.

“He tries to be,” said Erik coolly. “Yes, bring her to me, Dr. Bjornstrand.”

“I know what you’ll tell me.”

“Still. Even so.”

“Isn’t this terribly dangerous?” Leonie asked. “I mean, suppose your mind became stuck inside hers, Richard?”

“Stuck?”

“Isn’t that possible? I don’t actually know anything about the process, but—”

“I’ll be entering her only in the most metaphorical sense,” I said.

Irene laughed. Anna said, “Do you actually believe that?” and gave Irene a sly look.

Irene merely shook her head. “I don’t worry about Richard’s fidelity,” she said, drawling her words.

Her face fills the sky today.

April. Irene. Whoever she is. She eclipses the sun, and lights the day with her own supernal radiance.

The course of the island has been reversed, and now it drifts out to sea. For three days I have watched the mountains of the mainland growing smaller. Evidently the currents have changed; or perhaps there are zones of resistance close to the shore, designed to keep at bay such wandering islands as mine. I must find a way to deal with this. I am convinced that I can do nothing for April unless I reach the mainland.

I have entered a calm place where the sea is a mirror and the sweltering air reflects the reflected images in an infinitely baffling regression. I see no face but my own, now, and I see it everywhere. A million versions of myself dance in the steamy haze. My jaws are stubbled and there is a bright-red band of sunburn across my nose and upper cheeks. I grin and the multitudinous images grin at me. I reach toward them and they reach toward me. No land is in sight, no other islands, nothing, in fact, but this wall of reflections. I feel as though I am penned inside a box of polished metal. My shining image infests the burning atmosphere. I have a constant choking sensation; a terrible languor is coming over me; I pray for hurricanes, waterspouts, convulsions of the ocean bed, any sort of upheaval that will break the savage claustrophobic tension.

Is Irene my wife? My lover? My companion? My friend? My sister?

I am within April’s consciousness and Irene is a figment.

It has begun to occur to me that this may be my therapy rather than April’s.

I have set to work creating machinery to bring me back to the mainland. All this week I have painstakingly felled palm trees, using a series of blunt, soft hand-axes chipped from slabs of dead coral. Hauling the trees to a promontory on the island’s southern face, I lashed them loosely together with vines, setting them in the water so that they projected from both sides of the headland like the oars of a galley. By tugging at an unusually thick vine that runs down the spine of the whole construction, I am indeed able to make them operate like oars; and I have tied that master vine to an unusually massive palm that sprouts from the central ridge of the promontory. What I have built, in fact, is a kind of reciprocating engine; the currents, stirring the leafy crowns of my felled palms, impart a tension to the vines that link them, and the resistance of the huge central tree to the tug of the master vine causes the felled trees to sweep the water, driving the entire island shoreward. Through purposeful activity, said Goethe, we justify our existence in the eyes of God.

The “oars” work well. I’m heading toward the mainland once again.

Heading toward the mainland very rapidly. Too rapidly, it seems. I think I may be caught in a powerful current.

The current definitely has seized my island and I’m being swept swiftly along, willy-nilly. I am approaching the isle where Scylla waits. That surely is Scylla, that creature just ahead. There is no avoiding her; the force of the water is inexorable and my helpless oars dangle limply. The many-necked monster sits in plain sight on a barren rock, coiled into herself, waiting. Where shall I hide? Shall I scramble into the underbrush and huddle there until I am past her? Look, there: six heads, each with three rows of pointed teeth, and twelve snaky limbs. I suppose I could hide, but how cowardly, how useless. I will show myself to her. I stand exposed on the shore. I listen to her dread barking. How may I guard myself against Scylla’s fangs? Irene smiles out of the low fleecy clouds. There’s a way, she seems to be saying. I gather a cloud and fashion it into a simulacrum of myself. See: another Bjornstrand stands here, sunburned, half naked. I make a second replica, a third, complete to the stubble, complete to the blemishes. A dozen of them. Passive, empty, soulless. Will they deceive her? We’ll see. The barking is ferocious now. She’s close. My island whips through the channel. Strike, Scylla! Strike! The long necks rise and fall, rise and fall. I hear the screams of my other selves; I see their arms and legs thrashing as she seizes them and lifts them. Them she devours. Me she spares. I float safely past the hideous beast. April’s face, reduplicated infinitely in the blue vault above me, is smiling. I have gained power by this encounter. I need have no further fears: I have become invulnerable. Do your worst, ocean! Bring me to Charybdis. I’m ready. Yes. Bring me to Charybdis.