Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

“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, politely 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.