Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

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. There 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.”