Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

Resignation seemed to help. Acceptance, even indifference. The trouble was that he couldn’t stay on that numbed-down level consistently. From time to time a sudden flare of shock and bewilderment would hit him, a sense of intolerable loss, even of out-and-out fear. And then he had to start all over again.

When it began to grow dark Lawler left his vaargh and headed down to the sea-wall.

Two moons had risen, and a faint sliver of Sunrise had returned to the sky. The bay was alive with twilight colours, long streaks of reflected gold and purple, fading quickly into the grey of night as he watched. The dark shapes of mysterious sea-creatures moved purposefully in the shallow waters. It was all very peaceful: the bay at sundown, calm, lovely.

But then thoughts of the voyage that awaited him crept into his mind. Lawler looked outward beyond the harbour to the vastness of the unfriendly, inconceivable sea. How far would they have to sail before they found an island willing to take them in? A week’s journey? Two weeks? A month? He had never been to sea at all, not even for a day. That time he had gone over to Thibiere, it had been a simple journey by coracle, just beyond the shallows to the other island that had come up so close by Sorve.

Lawler realized that he feared the sea. The sea was a great world-sized mouth, which he sometimes imagined must have swallowed up all of Hydros in some ancient convulsion, leaving nothing but the little drifting islands that the Gillies had created. It would swallow him too, if he set out to cross it.

Angrily he told himself that this was foolishness, that men like Gabe Kinverson went out into the sea every day and survived it, that Nid Delagard had made a hundred voyages between the islands, that Sundira Thane had come to Sorve from an island in the Azure Sea, which was so far away that he had never heard of it. It would be all right. He would board one of Delagard’s ships and in a week or two it would bring him to the island that would be his new home.

And yet—the blackness, the immensity, the surging power of the terrible world-spanning sea—

“Lawler?” a voice called.

He looked around. For the second time this day Nid Delagard stepped out of the shadows behind him.

“Come on,” the shipyard owner said. “It’s getting late. Let’s go talk to the Gillies.”

There were electric lights glowing in the Gillie power plant, just a little way farther along the curve of the shore. Other lights, dozens of them, maybe hundreds, could be seen blazing in the streets of Gillie-town beyond. The unexpected catastrophe of the expulsion had completely overshadowed the other big event of the day, the inauguration of turbine-driven electrical generation on Sorve Island.

The light coming from the power plant was cool, greenish, faintly mocking. The Gillies had a technology of sorts, which had reached an eighteenth or nineteenth-century Earth-equivalent level, and they had invented a kind of light bulb, using filaments made from the fibres of the exceedingly versatile sea-bamboo plant. The bulbs were costly and difficult to make, and the big voltaic pile that had been the island’s main source of power was clumsy and recalcitrant, producing electricity only in a sluggish, intermittent fashion and constantly breaking down. But now—after how many years of work? Five? Ten?—the island’s bulbs were being lit from a new and inexhaustible source, power from the sea, warm water from the surface converted to steam, steam making the generator’s turbines turn, electricity streaming forth from the generator to light the lamps of Sorve Island.

The Gillies had agreed to let the humans at the other end of the island draw off some of the new power in return for labour—Sweyner would make light bulbs for them, Dann Henders would help with the stringing of cable, and so forth. Lawler had been instrumental in setting up that arrangement, along with Delagard, Nicko Thalheim and one or two others. That was the one little triumph of inter-species cooperation that the humans had been able to manage in recent years. It had taken about six months of slow and painstaking negotiation.

Only this morning, Lawler remembered, he had hoped to work out another such cooperative enterprise with them entirely by himself. That seemed a million years ago. And here they were at nightfall, setting forth to beg just to be allowed to continue living on the island at all.

Delagard said, “We’ll go straight to the honcho cabin, okay? No sense not starting at the top for this one.”

Lawler shrugged. “Whatever you say.”

They walked around the power plant and headed into Gillie territory, still following the shore of the bay. The island widened rapidly here, rising from the low bayfront levels behind the sea-wall to a broad circular plateau that contained most of the Gillie settlement. On the far side of the plateau there was a steep drop where the island’s thick wooden sea-bulwark descended in a straight sheer line to the dark ocean far below.

The Gillie village was arrayed in an irregular circle, the most important buildings in the centre, the others strung raggedly along the periphery. The main difference between the inner buildings and the outer ones seemed to be one of permanence: the inner ones, which appeared to have ceremonial uses, were constructed of the same wood-kelp timber that the island itself was built from, and the outer ones, in which the Gillies lived, were slapdash tent-like things made of moist green seaweed wrapped loosely over sea-bamboo poles. They gave off a ghastly odour of rot as the sun baked them, and when they reached a certain degree of dryness the seaweed coverings were stripped away and replaced with fresh ones. What appeared to be a special caste of Gillies was constantly at work tearing down the huts and building new ones.

It would take about half a day to walk completely across the Gillie end of the island. By the time Lawler and Delagard had entered the inner circle of the village, Sunrise had set and the Hydros Cross was bright in the sky.

“Here they come,” Delagard said. “Let me do the talking, first. If they start getting snotty with me, you take over. I don’t mind if you tell them what a shit you think I am. Whatever works.”

“Do you really think anything’s going to work?”

“Shh. I don’t want to hear you talking like that.”

Half a dozen Gillies—males, Lawler guessed—were approaching them from the innermost part of the village. When they were ten or twelve metres away they halted and arranged themselves in front of the two humans in a straight line.

Delagard raised his hands in the gesture that meant, “We come in peace.” It was the universal humans-to-Gillies greeting. No conversation ever began without it.

The Gillies now were supposed to reply with the funereal wheezing sounds that meant, “We accept you as peaceful and we await your words.” But they didn’t say a thing. They simply stood there and stared.

“I don’t have a good feeling about this, do you?” Lawler said quietly.

“Wait. Wait.”

Delagard made the peace gesture again. He went on to make the hand-signals that meant, “We are your friends and regard you with the highest respect.”

One of the Gillies emitted what sounded like a fart.

Their glittering little yellow eyes, set close together at the base of their small heads, studied the two humans in what seemed like an icy and indifferent way.

“Let me try,” Lawler murmured.

He stepped forward. The wind was blowing from behind the Gillies: it brought him their damp heavy musky smell, mingled with the sharp reek of rotting seaweed from their ramshackle huts.

He made the We-come-in-peace sign. That produced no response, nor did the cognate We-are-your-friends one. After an appropriate pause he proceeded to make the signal that meant, “We seek an audience with the powers that reign.”