Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

“Well,” Lawler said, “time to open the shop, I guess.”

He began to walk up the path toward the vaarghs.

“Wait,” said Quillan.

Lawler turned and looked back at him. “Yes?”

“Are you all right, doctor?”

“Why? Do I look sick to you?”

“You look upset about something,” Quillan said. “You don’t often look that way. When I first met you you struck me as a man who just lives his life, day by day, hour by hour, taking whatever comes in his stride. But somehow you look different this morning. That outburst of yours about other worlds—I don’t know. It didn’t seem like you. Of course I can’t say that I actually know you.”

Lawler gave the priest a guarded stare. He didn’t feel like telling him about the three dead divers in the shed on Jolly’s Pier.

There were a few things on my mind last night. I didn’t get much sleep. But I didn’t realize it was so obvious.”

“I’m good at seeing such things,” said Quillan, smiling. His pale blue eyes, usually remote and even veiled, seemed unusually penetrating just then. “It doesn’t take much. Listen, Lawler, if you’d like to talk to me about anything—anything at all, any time, just get things off your chest—”

Lawler grinned and indicated his chest, which was bare.

“Plainly there’s nothing on it, is there?”

“You know what I mean,” Quillan said.

For a moment something seemed to be passing between them, a crackling sort of tension, a linkage that Lawler neither desired nor enjoyed. Then the priest smiled again, genially, too genially, a deliberately bland, vague, benign smile obviously intended to create distance between them. He held up one hand in what might have been a blessing or perhaps a dismissal, and nodded, and turned and walked away.

As he drew near his vaargh Lawler saw that a woman with long, straight dark hair was waiting for him outside. A patient, he supposed. She was facing away from him and he wasn’t sure who she was. At least four women on Sorve had hair like that.

There were thirty vaarghs in the group where Lawler lived, and another sixty or so, not all of them inhabited, down near the tip of the island. They were irregular grey structures, asymmetrical but roughly pyramidal in shape, hollow within, twice the height of a tall man and tapering to a blunt drooping point. Near their summits they were pierced with window-like openings, angled outward so that rain would enter only in the most driving of storms, and then with difficulty. Some kind of thick, rugged cellulose, puckered and coarse—something drawn from the sea; where else but from the sea?—was what they had been made from, evidently very long ago. The stuff was remarkably solid and durable. If you struck a vaargh with a stick, it rang like a metal bell. The first settlers had found them already here when they arrived and had put them to use as temporary housing; but that had been more than a hundred years before, and the islanders were still living in them. Nobody knew why they were here. There were clusters of vaarghs on nearly every island: the abandoned nests, perhaps, of some extinct creature that once had shared the islands with the Gillies. The Gillies lived in dwellings of an entirely different nature, casual seaweed shelters that they discarded and replaced every few weeks, whereas these things seemed as close to imperishable as anything was on this watery world. “What are they?” the early settlers had asked, and the Gillies had replied, simply, “They are vaarghs.” What “vaarghs” meant was anybody’s guess. Communicating with the Gillies, even now, was a haphazard business.

When Lawler came closer he saw that the woman waiting for him was Sundira Thane. Like the priest, she too was a newcomer to Sorve, a tall, serious young woman who had arrived from Kentrup Island a few months before as a passenger aboard one of Delagard’s ships. Her profession was maintenance and repair—boats, nets, equipment, anything—but her real field of interest seemed to be the Hydrans. Lawler had heard she was an expert on their culture, their biology, all aspects of their life.

“Am I too early?” she asked.

“Not if you don’t think you are. Come in.” The entrance to Lawler’s vaargh was a low triangular gash in the wall, like a doorway for gnomes. He crouched and shuffled through it. She came crouching and shuffling after him. She was nearly as tall as he was. She seemed tense, withdrawn, preoccupied.

Pale morning light came slanting into the vaargh. At ground level thin partitions made of the same material as the exterior divided it into three rooms, each small and sharp-angled—his medical office, his bedchamber, and an antechamber that he used as a sitting-room.

It was still only about seven in the morning. Lawler was getting hungry. Breakfast would have to wait a while longer, he realized. But he casually shook a few drops of numbweed tincture into a mug, added a little water, and sipped it as though it were nothing but some medicine he prescribed for his own use every morning. In a way it was. Lawler gave her a quick guilty look. She wasn’t paying any attention at all to what he was doing, though. She was looking at his little collection of artifacts from Earth. Everyone who came here did. Gingerly she ran her finger along the jagged edge of the little orange-and-black potsherd, then looked back questioningly over her shoulder at Lawler. He smiled. “It came from a place called Greece,” he said. “A very famous place on Earth very long ago.”

The drug’s powerful alkaloids had completed their swift circuit of his bloodstream almost at once and entered his brain. He felt the tensions of the dawn encounters ebbing from his spirit.

“I’ve been coughing,” Thane said. “It won’t stop.”

And virtually on cue she broke into a volley of rough, hacking rasps. On Hydros a cough might be as trivial a thing as it was anywhere else; but it might also be something serious. All the islanders knew that.

There was a parasitic waterborne fungus, usually found in northern temperate waters, which reproduced by infesting various forms of marine life with the spores that it released into the atmosphere in dense black clouds. A spore, when inhaled by some aquatic mammal as it came to the surface to breath, lodged in its host’s warm gullet and sprouted immediately, sending forth a dense tangle of bright red hyphae that had no difficulty penetrating lungs, intestines, stomach, even brain tissue. The host’s interior became a tightly packed mass of vivid scarlet wires. The wires were looking for the copper-based respiratory pigment, haemocyanin. Most of the sea creatures of Hydros had haemocyanin in their blood, which gave it a bluish colour. The fungus seemed to have some use for haemocyanin too.

Death by fungus infestation was slow and horrible. The host, bloated with gases excreted by the invader and floating helplessly, would eventually succumb, and soon after that the fungus would extrude its mature fruiting structure through an opening it had carved in the host’s abdomen. This was a globular woody mass that shortly would split apart to release the new generation of adult fungi, which in the course of time would produce fresh clouds of spores, and so the cycle went.

Killer-fungus spores were capable of taking root in human lungs, a situation of no value to either party: humans were unable to provide the fungus with the haemocyanin it desired and the fungus found it necessary to invade and consume every region of the host’s body during the course of its search, a useless expenditure of energy.

The first symptom of fungus infestation in a human was a cough that refused to go away.

“Let’s get a little information about you,” Lawler said. “And then we’ll check this thing out.”