Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

The idea came to him to stroll through the sleeping settlement, a sentimental journey to say his farewells, looking at everything as though this were his last night on Hydros, reliving everything that had happened to him here and there and here and there, every episode of his life. The places where he had stood with his father looking out at sea, where he had listened to old Jolly’s fantastic tales, where he had caught his first fish, where he had embraced his first girl. Scenes associated with his friendships, and with his loves, such as they had been. The side of the bay where he’d been the time he’d come close to spearing Nicko Thalheim. And the place back of the boneyard where he’d spied on grey-bearded Marinus Cadrell screwing Damis Sawtelle’s sister Mariam, who was a nun in the convent now. Which reminded him of the time he’d screwed Mariam himself, a few years later, down in Gillie country, the two of them living dangerously and loving it. Everything came flooding back. The shadowy figure of his mother. His brothers, the one who had died much too young and the one who had gone off to sea and floated out of his life forever. His father, indefatigable, formidable, remote, revered by all, drilling him endlessly in matters of medical technique when he’d much rather have been splashing in the bay: those boyhood days that hadn’t seemed like a boyhood at all, so many hard grim hours of enforced study, cutting him off from the games and fun. You will be the doctor some day, his father saying again and again. You will be the doctor. His wife Mireyl getting aboard the Morvendir ferry. Time was ticking backward. Tick, and it was the day of his trip to Thibeire Island. Tick, and he and Nestor Yanez were running, dizzy with laughter and fear, from the furious female Gillie that they had pelted with ginzo eggs. Tick, and here was the long-faced delegation that had come to tell him that his father was dead, that he was the doctor now. Tick, and he was finding out what it was like to deliver a baby. Tick, and he was dancing drunkenly along the bulwark’s topmost point in the middle of a three-moon night with Nicko and Nestor Lyonides and Moira and Meela and Quigg, a young merry Valben Lawler who seemed to him now like someone else he had once known, long long ago. The whole thing, his forty-plus years on Sorve viewed in reverse. Tick. Tick. Tick. Yes, I’ll take a nice long walk through the past before the sun comes up, he thought. From one end of the island to another. But it seemed like a good idea to go back to his vaargh before setting out, though he wasn’t sure why.

He tripped going through the low entrance and fell sprawling. And was still lying there when morning sunlight came in, hours later to wake him.

For a moment Lawler couldn’t quite remember what he had said or done in the night. Then it all came back. Being hugged by a Gillie. The scent of it was still on him. Then Delagard, brandy, more brandy, the prospect of a voyage to Velmise, Salimil, maybe even Grayvard. And that strange moment of exhilaration at the thought of leaving Sorve. Had it been real? Yes. Yes. He was sober now, and it was still there.

But—my God—my head!

How much brandy, he wondered, had Delagard succeeded in pouring into him last night?

A child’s high voice from outside the vaargh said, “Doctor? I hurt my foot.”

“Just a second,” Lawler said, in a voice like a file.

There was a meeting that evening in the community centre to discuss the situation. The air in the centre was thick and steamy, rank with sweat. Feelings were running high. Lawler sat in the far corner opposite the door, his usual place. He could see everything from there. Delagard hadn’t come. He had sent word of pressing business at the yard, messages awaited from his ships at sea.

“It’s all a trap,” Dann Henders said. “The Gillies are tired of us being here, but they don’t want to bother killing us themselves. So they’re going to force us to go out to sea and the rammerhorns and sea-leopards will kill us for them.”

“How do you know that?” Nicko Thalheim asked.

“I don’t. I’m just guessing. I’m trying to figure why they’re making us leave the island over a trivial thing like three dead divers.”

“Three dead divers aren’t so trivial!” Sundira called out. “You’re talking about intelligent creatures!”

“Intelligent?” Dag Tharp said mockingly.

“You bet they are. And if I were a Gillie and I found out that the goddamned humans were killing off divers, I’d want to be rid of them too.”

Henders said, “Well, whatever. I say that if the Gillies succeed in throwing us out of here, we’ll find the whole goddamned ocean rising up against us once we’re out to sea. And not by any accident. The Gillies control the sea animals. Everybody knows that. And they’ll use them against us to wipe us out.”

“What if we simply don’t let the Gillies throw us out?” Damis Sawtelle asked. “What if we fight back?”

“Fight?” said Bamber Cadrell. “Fight how? Fight with what? You out of your mind, Damis?”

They were both ferry-captains, solid practical men, friends since boyhood. Right now they were looking at each other with the dull, glowering look of lifelong enemies.

“Resistance,” Sawtelle said. “Guerrilla warfare.”

“We sneak down to their end of the island and grab something that looks important from that holy building of theirs,” Nimber Tanamind suggested. “And refuse to give it back unless they agree to let us stay.”

“That sounds dumb to me,” Cadrell said.

Nicko Thalheim said, “To me too. Stealing their jujus won’t get us anywhere. Armed resistance is the ticket, just like Damis says. Guerrilla warfare, absolutely. Gillie blood flowing in the streets until they back down on the expulsion order. They don’t even have the concept of war on this planet. They won’t know what the hell we’re doing if we put up a fight.”

“Shalikomo,” somebody said from the back. “Remember what happened there.”

“Shalikomo, yes,” another voice called. “They’ll slaughter us the same way they did them. And there won’t be a damned thing we can do to stop it.”

“Right,” Marya Hayn said. “We’re the ones who don’t have the concept of war, not them. They know how to kill when they want to. What are we going to attack them with, scaling knives? Hammers and chisels? We aren’t fighters. Our ancestors were, maybe, but we don’t even know what the idea means.”

“We have to learn,” said Thalheim. “We can’t let ourselves be driven from our homes.”

“Can’t we?” Marya Hain asked. “What choice do we have? We’re here only by their sufferance. Which they have now withdrawn. It’s their island. If we try to resist, they’ll pick us up one by one and throw us into the sea, the way they did on Shalikomo.”

“We’ll take plenty of them with us,” Damis Sawtelle said, with heat in his voice.

Dann Henders burst into laughter. “Into the sea? Right. Right. We’ll hold their heads under water until they drown.”

“You know what I meant,” Sawtelle grumbled. “They kill one of us, we kill one of them. Once they start dying they’ll change their minds pretty damn fast about making us leave.”

“They’ll kill us faster than we could kill them,” said Poitin Stayvol’s wife Leynila. Stayvol was Delagard’s second most senior captain, after Gospo Struvin. He was off sailing the Kentrup ferry just then. Leynila, short and fiery, could always be counted on to speak up against anything that Damis Sawtelle favoured. They had been that way since they were children. “Even one for one, where’s that going to get us?” Leynila demanded.

Dana Sawtelle nodded. She crossed the room to stand next to Marya and Leynila. Most of the women were on one side of the room and the handful of men who constituted the war faction were on the other. “Leynila’s right. If we try to fight we’ll all be killed. What’s the sense of it? If there’s a war and we fight like terrific heroes and at the end of it we’re all dead, how will we be better off than if we had simply got into a ship and gone somewhere else?”