Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

He had come up along the southern path from the water-front and was standing between Lawler’s vaargh and the little tank where Lawler kept his current stock of freshly picked medicinal algae. He was flushed and rumpled and sweaty and his eyes looked strangely glassy, as though he had had a stroke.

“What the hell has happened now?” Lawler asked, exasperated.

Delagard made a wordless gaping movement with his mouth, like a fish out of water, and said nothing.

Lawler dug his fingers into the man’s thick, meaty arm. “Can you speak? Come on, damn you. Tell me what’s happened.”

“Yeah. Yeah.” Delagard moved his head from side to side in a slow, ponderous, pole-axed way. “It’s very bad. It’s worse than I ever imagined.”

“What is?”

“Those fucking divers. The Gillies are really furious about them. And they’re going to come down on us very hard. Very very very hard. It’s what I was trying to tell you about this morning in the shed, when you walked out on me.”

Lawler blinked a couple of times. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”

“Give me some brandy first.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Come inside.”

He poured a strong jolt of the thick sea-coloured liquor for Delagard, and, after a moment’s consideration, a smaller drink for himself. Delagard put his away in a single gulp and held out the cup. Lawler poured again.

After a little while Delagard said, picking his way warily through his words as if struggling with some speech impediment, “The Gillies came to visit me just now, about a dozen of them. Walked right up out of the water down at the shipyard and asked my men to call me out for a talk.”

Gillies? At the human end of the island? That hadn’t happened in decades. Gillies never went farther south than the promontory where they had built their power plant. Never.

Delagard gave him a tortured look. “What do you want,” I said. Using the politest gestures, Lawler, everything very very courteous. I think the ones that were there were the big Gillie honchos, but how can you be sure? Who can tell one of them from the next? They looked important, anyway. They said, “Are you Nid Delagard” as if they didn’t know. And I said I was, and then they grabbed me.”

“ Grabbed you?”

“I mean, physically grabbed me. Put their little funny flippers on me. Pushed me up against the wall of my own building and restrained me.”

“You’re lucky you’re still around to talk about it.”

“No kidding. I tell you, doc, I was scared shitless. I thought they were going to gut me and fillet me right there. Look, look here, the marks of their claws on my arm.” He showed fading reddish spots. “My face is swollen, isn’t it? I tried to pull my head away and one of them bumped me, maybe by accident, but look. Look. Two of them held me and a third one put his nose in my face and started telling me things, and I mean telling me, big booming noises, oom whang hoooof theeeezt, ooom whang hooof theeezt. At the beginning I was so shaken up I couldn’t understand any of it. But then it came clear. They said it again and again until they made sure I understood. An ultimatum, it was.” Delagard’s voice dropped into a lower register. “We’ve been thrown off the island. We have thirty days to clean ourselves out of here. Every last one of us.”

Abruptly Lawler felt the ground disappearing beneath his feet.

“ What? ”

The other man’s hard little brown eyes had taken on a frantic glitter. He signalled for more brandy. Lawler poured without even looking at the cup. “Any human remaining on Sorve when the time’s up will be tossed into the lagoon and not allowed back up on shore. Any structures we’ve erected here will be demolished. The reservoir, the shipyard, these buildings here in the plaza, everything. Things we leave behind in the vaarghs go into the sea. Any ocean-going vessels we leave in the harbour will be sunk. We are terminated, doc. We are ex-residents of Sorve Island. Finished, done for, gone.”

Lawler stared, incredulous. A quick cycle of turbulent emotions ran through him: disorientation, depression, despair. Confusion assailed him. Leave Sorve? Leave Sorve?

He began to tremble. With an effort he got himself under control, fighting his way back to inner equilibrium.

Tightly he said, “Killing some divers in an industrial accident is definitely not a good thing to have done. But this is too much of an overreaction. You must have misunderstood what they were saying.”

“Like shit I did. Not a chance. They made themselves very very clear.”

“We all have to go?”

“We all have to go, yes. Thirty days.”

Am I hearing him correctly, Lawler wondered? Is any of this really happening?

“And did they give a reason?” he asked. “Was it the divers?”

“Of course it was,” Delagard said in a low husky voice clotted by shame. “It was just like you said this morning. The Gillies always know everything that we do.”

“Christ. Christ.” Anger was beginning to take the place of shock. Delagard had casually gambled with the lives of everyone on the island, and he had lost. The Gillies had warned him: Don ’ t ever do that again, or we ’ ll throw you out of here . And he had done it again anyway. “What a contemptible bastard you are, Delagard!”

“I don’t know how they found out. I took precautions. We brought them in by night, we kept them covered until they were in the shed, the shed itself was locked—”

“But they knew.”

“They knew,” Delagard said. “They know everything, the Gillies. You screw somebody else’s wife, the Gillies know about it. But they don’t care. Not about that. You kill a couple of divers and they care like crazy.”

“What did they tell you, the last time you had an accident with divers? When they warned you not to use divers again in your work, what did they say they’d do if they caught you?”

Delagard was silent.

“What did they tell you?” Lawler said again, pressing harder.

Delagard licked his lips. “That they’d make us leave Sorve,” he muttered, once again looking down at his feet like a schoolboy being reprimanded.

“And you did it anyway. You did it anyway.”

“Who would believe them? Jesus, Lawler, we’ve lived here for a hundred and fifty years! Did they mind when we moved in? We dropped out of space and squatted right down on their fucking islands and did they say, “Go away, hideous repellent four-limbed hairy alien beings?” No. No. They didn’t give a crap.”

“There was Shalikomo,” Lawler said.

“A long time ago, that was. Before either of us was born.”

“The Gillies killed a lot of people on Shalikomo. Innocent people.”

“Different Gillies. Different situation.”

Delagard pressed his knuckles together and made a little popping sound with them. His voice began to rise in pitch and volume. He seemed very swiftly to be casting off the guilt and the shame that had engulfed him. That was a knack he had, Lawler thought, the rapid restoration of his own self-esteem. “Shalikomo’s an exception,” he said. The Gillies had thought there were far too many humans on Shalikomo, which was a very small island, and had told some of them to go; but the humans of Shalikomo had been unable to agree on who should go and who could stay, and hardly anyone left the island, and in the end the Gillies decided how many humans they would allow to live there among themselves and killed the rest. “It’s ancient history,” Delagard said.

“It was a long time ago, yes,” said Lawler. “But what makes you think it can’t all happen again?”

Delagard said, “The Gillies have never been particularly hostile anywhere else. They don’t like us, but they don’t stop us from doing whatever we want to do, so long as we stay down at our end of the island and don’t get too numerous. We harvest kelp, we fish as much as we like, we build buildings, we hunt for meatfish, we do all sorts of things that aliens might be expected to resent, and not a word out of them. So if I was able to train a few divers to help me in oceanfloor metals recovery, which could only benefit the Gillies as well as us, why do you suppose I would think that they’d become so exercised over the death of a few animals in the line of work that they—they would—”