Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

Lawler said quietly to Delagard, “How exactly are you going to deal with all this? You have some sort of plan?”

“I do,” Delagard said. Suddenly he was full of frenetic energy. “I told you I’d take full responsibility, and I meant it. I’ll go back to the Gillies on my knees, and if I have to lick their hind flippers I will, and I’ll beg for forgiveness. They’ll come around, sooner or later. They won’t actually hold us to this goddamned absurd ultimatum.”

“I admire your optimism.”

Delagard went on, “And if they won’t back off, I’ll volunteer to go into exile myself. Don’t punish everyone, I’ll tell them. Just me. I’m the guilty one. I’ll move to Velmise or Salimil or any place you like, and you’ll never see my ugly face on Sorve again, that’s a promise. It’ll work, Lawler. They’re reasonable beings. They’ll understand that tossing an old lady like Mendy here off the island that’s been her home for eighty years isn’t going to serve any rational purpose. I’m the bastard, I’m the murderous diver-killing villain, and I’ll go if I have to, though I don’t even think it’ll come down to that.”

“You may be right. Maybe not.”

“I’ll crawl before them if I have to.”

“And you’ll bring one of your sons over from Velmise to run the shipyard if they make you leave here, won’t you?”

Delagard looked startled. “Well, what’s wrong with that?”

“They might think you weren’t all that sincere about agreeing to leave. They might think one Delagard was the same as the next.”

“You say it might not be good enough for them, if I’m the only one to go?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. They might want something more than that from you.”

“Like what?”

“What if they told you they’d pardon the rest of us provided you left and agreed that you and your family would never set foot on Sorve again, and that the entire Delagard shipyard would be torn down?”

Delagard’s eyes grew very bright. “No,” he said. “They wouldn’t ask that!”

“They already have. And more.”

“But if I go, if I really go—if my sons pledge never to harm a diver again—”

Lawler turned away from him.

For Lawler the first shock was past; the simple phrase We are going to have to leave Sorve had incorporated itself in his mind, his soul, his bones. He was taking it very calmly, all things considered. He wondered why. Between one moment and the next the existence on this island that he had spent his entire life constructing had been yanked from his grasp.

He remembered the time he had gone to Thibeire. How deeply disquieting it had been to see all those unfamiliar faces, to be unaware of names and personal histories, to walk down a path and not know what lay at the end of it. He had been glad to come home, after just a few hours.

And now he would have to go somewhere else and stay there for the rest of his life; he would have to live among strangers; he would lose all sense that he was a Lawler of Sorve Island, and would become just anybody, a newcomer, an off-islander, intruding in some new community where he had no place and no purpose. That should have been a hard thing to swallow. And yet after that first moment of terrifying instability and disorientation he had settled somehow into a kind of numbed acceptance, as though he were as indifferent to the eviction as Gabe Kinverson seemed to be, or Gharkid, that perversely free-floating man. Strange. Maybe it simply hasn’t sunk in yet, Lawler told himself.

Sundira Thane came up to him. She was flushed and there was a sheen of perspiration on her forehead. Her whole posture was one of excitement and a kind of fierce self-satisfaction.

“I told you they were annoyed with us, didn’t I? Didn’t I? Looks like I was right.”

“So you were,” Lawler said.

She studied him for a moment. “We’re really going to have to leave. I don’t have the slightest doubt of it.” Her eyes flashed brilliantly. She seemed to be glorying in all this, almost intoxicated by it. Lawler remembered that this was the sixth island she had lived on so far, at the age of thirty-one. She didn’t mind moving around. She might even enjoy it.

He nodded slowly. “Why are you so sure of that?”

“Because Dwellers don’t ever change their minds. When they say something they stick to it. And killing divers seems to be a more serious thing to them than killing meatfish or bangers. The Dwellers don’t mind our going out into the bay and hunting for food. They eat meatfish themselves. But the divers are, well, different. The Dwellers feel very protective toward them.”

“Yes,” Lawler said. “I guess they do.”

She stared straight into his eyes. She was nearly on eye level with him. “You’ve lived here a long time, haven’t you, Lawler?”

“All my life.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. This is going to be rough for you.”

“I’ll deal with it,” he said. “Every island can use another doctor. Even a half-baked doctor like me.” He laughed. “Listen, how’s that cough doing?”

“I haven’t coughed once since you gave me that dope.”

“I didn’t think you would.”

Delagard suddenly was at Lawler’s elbow again. Without apologizing for breaking in on his conversation with Sundira, he said, “Will you come with me to the Gillies, doc?”

“What for?”

“They know you. They respect you. You’re your father’s son and that gives you points with them. They think of you as a serious and honourable man. If I have to promise to leave the island, you can vouch for me, that I mean it when I say I’ll go away and never come back.”

“They’ll believe you without my help, if you tell them that. They don’t expect any intelligent being to tell lies, even you. But that still won’t change anything.”

“Come with me all the same, Lawler.”

“It’s a waste of time. What we need to be doing is starting to plan the evacuation.”

“Let’s try it, at least. We can’t be sure if we don’t try.”

Lawler considered that. “Right now?”

“After dark,” Delagard said. “They don’t want to see any of us now. They’re too busy celebrating the opening of the new power plant. They got it going about two hours ago, you know. They’ve got a cable running from the waterfront to their end of the island and it’s carrying juice.”

“Good for them.”

“I’ll meet you down by the sea-wall at sunset, all right? And we’ll go and talk to them together. Will you do that, Lawler?”

In the afternoon Lawler sat quietly in his vaargh, trying to comprehend what it would mean to have to leave the island, working at the concept, worrying at it. No patients came to see him. Delagard, true to his promise of the early morning, had sent some flasks of grapeweed brandy over, and Lawler drank a little, and then a little more, without any particular effect. Lawler thought of allowing himself another dose of his tranquillizer, but somehow that seemed not to be a good idea. He was tranquil enough as it was, right now: what he felt wasn’t his usual restlessness, but rather a sodden dullness of spirit, a heavy weight of depression, for which the pink drops weren’t likely to be of any use.

I am going to leave Sorve Island, he thought.

I am going to live somewhere else, on an island I don’t know, among people whose names and ancestries and inner natures are absolute mysteries to me.

He told himself that it was all right, that in a few months he’d feel just as much at home on Thibeire, or Velmise, or Kaggeram, or whatever island it was that he ultimately settled on, as he did on Sorve. He knew that that wasn’t true, but that was what he told himself, all the same.