Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

He said, after a moment, “How accurate do you imagine this chart is? Considering that it’s fifty years old, and all.”

“Have we learned anything new about Hydros in the past fifty years? This is the best sea-chart we have. Old Felk was a master craftsman, and he talked to everyone who went to sea, anywhere. And checked his information against observations made from space, on Sunrise. It’s accurate, all right. Damned accurate.”

Lawler followed the movements of the islands as though mesmerized by them. Maybe the chart really did give reliable information, maybe not: he was in no position to tell. He had never understood how anyone at sea ever could find his way back to his own island, let alone reach some distant one, considering that both the ship and the island were in motion all the time. I ought to ask Gabe Kinverson about that sometime, Lawler thought.

“All right. What’s your plan?”

Delagard pointed toward Sorve on the chart. “You see this island southwest of us, coming up out of the next strip? That’s Velmise. It’s drifting north and east, moving at a higher velocity than we are, and it’ll pass within relatively easy reach about a month from now. At that time it’ll be maybe a ten-day journey from here, maybe even less. I’m going to put through a message to my son there and ask him if they’d be willing to take us in, all seventy-eight of us.”

“And if they aren’t? Velmise is pretty damned small.”

“We have other choices. Here’s Salimil moving up from the other side. It’ll be something like two and a half weeks from us when we have to leave here.”

Lawler considered the prospect of spending two and a half weeks in a ship on the open sea. Under the blazing eye of the sun, in the constant parching blast of the salt sea-breeze, eating dried fish, pacing back and forth on a little deck with nothing to see but ocean and more ocean.

He reached for the brandy bottle and filled his cup again himself.

Delagard said, “If Salimil won’t take us, we’ve got Kaggeram down here, or Shaktan, or Grayvard, even. I have kin on Grayvard. I think I can arrange something. That would be an eight-week journey.”

Eight weeks? Lawler tried to imagine what that would be like.

He said, after a time, “Nobody’s going to have room for seventy-eight people on thirty days” notice. Not Velmise, not Salimil, not anybody.”

“In that case we’ll just have to split up, a few of us going here, a few of us going there.”

“No!” Lawler said with sudden vehemence.

“No?”

“I don’t want that. I want the community to stay together.”

“What if it can’t be done?”

“We have to find a way. We can’t take a group of people who have been together all their lives and scatter them all over the goddamned ocean. We’re a family, Nid.”

“Are we? I guess I don’t think of it that way.”

“Think of it that way now.”

“Well, then,” Delagard said. He sat quietly, frowning. “I guess as a last resort we could simply present ourselves on one of the islands that isn’t currently inhabited by humans and ask the Gillies living there for sanctuary. It’s happened before.”

“The Gillies there would know that we were thrown out by our Gillies here. And why.”

“Maybe it wouldn’t matter. You know Gillies as well as I do, doc. A lot of them are pretty tolerant of us. To them we’re just one more example of the inscrutable way of the universe, something that simply happened to wash up on their shores out of the great sea of space. They understand that it’s a waste of breath questioning the inscrutable way of the universe. Which I suppose is why they simply shrugged and let us move in on them when we first came here.”

“The wisest ones think that way, maybe. The rest of them detest us and don’t want a damned thing to do with us. Why the hell should the Gillies of some other island take us in when the Sorve Gillies have tossed us out as murderers?”

“We’ll be all right,” Delagard said serenely, not reacting in any visible way to the ugly word. He nursed his brandy cup with both hands, staring into it. “We’ll go to Velmise. Or Salimil, or Grayvard if we have to, or someplace completely new. And we’ll all stay together and make a new life for ourselves. I’ll see to that. Count on it, doc.”

“Do you have enough ships to carry us?”

“I’ve got six. Thirteen to a ship and we’ll make it without even feeling crowded. Stop worrying, doc. Have another drink.”

“I have one already.”

“Mind if I do, then?”

“Suit yourself.”

Delagard laughed. He was getting drunk, now. He caressed the sea-chart as though it were a woman’s breast; and then he lifted it delicately and stowed it once again in the cabinet. The brandy bottle was nearly empty. Delagard produced another one from somewhere and poured himself a stiff shot. He swayed as he did it, caught himself, chuckled.

He said, slurring his words, “I assure you of one thing, doc, which is that I’m going to bust my ass to find us a new island and get us there safely. Do you believe me when I tell you that, doc?”

“Sure I do.”

“And can you forgive me in your heart for what I did to those divers?” Delagard asked woozily.

“Sure. Sure.”

“You’re a liar. You hate my guts.”

“Come off it, Nid. What’s done is done. Now we simply have to live with it.”

“Spoken like a true philosopher. Here, have another.”

“Right.”

“And another for good old Nid Delagard too. Why not? Another for good old Delagard, yeah. Here you are, Nid. Why, thank you, Nid. Than you very much. By damn, this is fine stuff. Fine—stuff—” Delagard yawned. His eyes closed, his head descended toward the table. “Fine—stuff—” he murmured. He yawned again, and belched softly, and then he was asleep. Lawler finished his own cup and left the building.

It was very silent out there, only the lapping of the wavelets of the bay against the shore, and Lawler was so used to that that he scarcely heard it. Dawn was still an hour or two away. The Cross burned overhead with terrible ferocity, cutting through the black sky from horizon to horizon like a luminous four-armed framework that was up there to keep the world from tumbling freely through the heavens.

A kind of crystalline clarity possessed Lawler’s mind. He could practically hear his brain ticking.

He realized that he didn’t mind leaving Sorve.

The thought astonished him. You’re drunk, he told himself.

Maybe so. But somehow, somewhere in the night, the shock of the expulsion had fallen away from him. Altogether gone or simply temporarily misplaced, Lawler couldn’t say. But at least for now he was able suddenly to look the idea of leaving in the eye, without flinching. Leaving here was something he could handle. It was more than that, even. The prospect of going from here was—

Exhilarating? Could that be it?

Exhilarating, yes. The pattern of his life had been set, frozen—Dr Lawler of Sorve, a First Family man, a Lawler of the Lawlers, getting a day older every day, do your daily work, heal the sick as best you can, walk along the sea-wall, swim a little, fish a little, put in the required time teaching your craft to your apprentice, eat and drink, visit with old friends, the same old old friends you’d had when you were a boy, then go to sleep, wake up and start all over, come winter, come summer, come rain, come drought. Now that pattern was going to change. He would live somewhere else. He might be someone else. The idea fascinated him. He was startled to realize that he was even a little grateful. He had been here so long, after all. He had been himself for so long.

You are very very drunk, Lawler said to himself again, and laughed. Very very very very.