Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

“The Dwellers, yes,” he said. “They tear off a couple of strands and wrap them around a chunk of bait and toss it to the meatfish, and when the meatfish swallow them they go limp and float helplessly to the surface. Then the Dwellers move in and harvest them without having to worry about those knifeblade-tipped tentacles. An old sailor named Jolly told me about it, when I was a boy. Later on I remembered it and went out to the harbour and watched them doing it. And collected some of the weed and experimented with it. I thought I might be able to use it as an anaesthetic.”

“And could you?”

“For meatfish, yes. I don’t do much surgery on meatfish, though. What I found when I used it on humans was that any dose that was strong enough to be any good as an anaesthetic also turned out to be lethal.” Lawler smiled grimly. “My trial-and-error period as a surgeon. Mostly error. But I eventually discovered that an extremely dilute tincture was an extremely potent tranquillizer. As you now see. It’s terrific stuff. We could market it throughout the galaxy, if we had any way of shipping anything anywhere.”

“And nobody knows about this drug but you?”

“And the Gillies,” he said. “Pardon me. The Dwellers. And now you. I don’t get much call for tranquillizers here.” Lawler chuckled. “You know, I woke up this morning with some wild notion of trying to talk the Dwellers into letting us tack water-desalinization equipment onto their new power plant, if they ever get it going. Giving them a long heartfelt number about inter-species collaboration. It was a dumb idea, the sort of thing that comes to you in the night and goes away like mist when the sun rises. They’d never have gone for it. But what I really ought to do is mix up a big batch of numbweed and get them good and plastered on it. They’ll let us do anything we want then, I bet.”

She didn’t look amused.

“You’re joking, aren’t you?”

“I suppose I am.”

“If you aren’t, don’t even think of trying it, because you won’t get anywhere. This is no time for asking the Dwellers for favours. They’re pretty seriously annoyed with us.”

“What about?” Lawler asked.

“I don’t know. But something’s definitely making them itchy. I went down to their end of the island last night and they were having a big conference. When they saw me they weren’t at all friendly.”

“Are they ever?”

“With me they are. But they wouldn’t even talk with me last night. They wouldn’t let me near them. And they were holding themselves in the posture of displeasure. You know anything about Dweller body-language? They were stiff as boards.”

The divers, he thought. They must know about the divers. That has to be it. But it wasn’t something that Lawler wanted to discuss right now, not with her, not with anyone.

“The thing about aliens,” he said, “is that they’re alien . Even when we think we understand them, we really don’t understand a damned thing. And I don’t see any way around that problem. Listen, if the cough doesn’t go away in two or three days, come back here and I’ll run some more tests. But stop fretting about killer fungus in your lungs, okay? Whatever it is, it isn’t that.”

“That’s good to hear,” she said. She went over to the shelf of artifacts again. “Are all these little things from Earth?”

“Yes. My great-great-grandfather collected them.”

“Really? Actual Earth things?” Gingerly she touched the Egyptian statuette and the bit of stone that had come from some important wall, Lawler forgot where. “Actual things that came from Earth. I’ve never seen any before. Earth doesn’t even seem real to me, you know? It never has.”

“It does to me,” Lawler said. “But I know a lot of people who feel the way you do. Let me know about that cough, okay?”

She thanked him and went out.

And now for breakfast, Lawler told himself. Finally. A nice whipfish fillet, and algae toast, and some freshly squeezed managordo juice.

But he had waited too long. He didn’t have much appetite, and he simply nibbled at his meal.

A little while later a second patient appeared outside the vaargh. Brondo Katzin, who ran the island’s fish market, had picked up a not-quite-dead arrowfish the wrong way and had a thick, glossy black spine five centimetres long sticking right through the middle of his left hand from one side to the other. “Imagine, being so dumb,” the barrel-chested, slow-witted Katzin kept saying. “Imagine.” His eyes were bugging with pain and his hand, swollen and glossy, looked twice its normal size. Lawler cut the spine loose, swabbed the wound all the way through to get the poison and other irritants out, and gave the fish-market man some gemberweed pills to ease the pain. Katzin stared at his puffed-up hand, ruefully shaking his head. “So dumb,” he said again.

Lawler hoped that he had cleaned out enough of the trichomes to keep the wound from getting infected. If he hadn’t, there was a good chance Katzin would lose the hand, or the whole arm. Practising medicine was probably easier, Lawler thought, on a planet that had some land surface, and a spaceport, and something in the way of contemporary technology. But he did his best with what he had. Heigh-ho! The day was under way.

At midday Lawler came out of his vaargh to take a little break from his work. This had been his busiest morning in months. On an island with a total human population of just seventy-eight, most of them pretty healthy, Lawler sometimes went through whole days, or even longer, without seeing a single patient. On such days he might spend the morning wading in the bay, collecting algae of medicinal value. Natim Gharkid often helped him, pointing out this or that useful plant. Or sometimes he did nothing at all, strolled or swam or went out on the bay in a fishing boat or sat quietly watching the sea. But this wasn’t one of those days. First there was Dana Sawtelle’s little boy with a fever, then Marya Hain with cramps after eating too many crawlie-oysters last night, Nimber Tanimind suffering from a recurrence of his usual tremors and megrims, young Bard Thalheim with a badly sprained ankle as a result of some unwise hijinks on the slippery side of the sea-wall. Lawler uttered the appropriate spells and applied the most likely ointments and sent them all away with the customary reassurances and prognostications. Most likely they’d feel better in a day or so. The current Dr Lawler might not be much of a practitioner, but Dr Placebo, his invisible assistant, generally managed to take care of the patients” problems sooner or later.

Now, though, there was no one else waiting to see him and a little fresh air seemed like a good prescription for the doctor himself. Lawler stepped out into the bright noontime sun, stretched, did a few pinwheels with his extended arms. He peered downslope toward the waterfront. There was the bay, friendly and familiar, its calm enclosed waters rippling gently. It looked wonderfully beautiful just now: a glassy sheet of luminous gold, a glowing mirror. The dark fronds of the varied sea-flora waved lazily in the shallows. Farther out, occasional shining fins breached the glistening surface. A couple of Delagard’s ships lolled by the shipyard pier, swaying gently to the rhythm of the easy tide. Lawler felt as though this moment of summer noon could go on forever, that night and winter would never come again. An unexpected feeling of peace and well-being infiltrated his soul: a gift, a bit of serendipitous joy.

“Lawler,” a voice said from his left.

A dry frayed croak of a voice, a boneyard voice, a voice that was all ashes and rubble. It was a dismal burned-out unrecognizable wreck of a voice that Lawler recognized, somehow, as that of Nid Delagard.