Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

Her husband swung around to face her. “Keep quiet, Dana.”

“The hell I will, Damis! The hell I will! You think I’m going to sit here like a child while you people talk about launching an attack on a physically superior group of alien beings who outnumber us about ten to one? We can’t fight them.”

“We have to.”

“No. No.”

“This is all foolishness, this talk of fighting. They’re only bluffing,” Lis Niklaus said. “They won’t really make us go.”

“Oh, yes, they will—”

“Not if Nid has anything to say about it!”

“It’s your precious Nid that got us into this in the first place!” Marya Hain yelled.

“And he’ll get us out of it. The Gillies are angry just now, but they won’t—”

“What do you think, doc?” someone called out.

Lawler had kept silent during the debate, waiting for emotions to play themselves out. It was always a mistake to jump into these things too soon.

Now he rose. Suddenly it was very quiet in the room. Every eye was on him. They wanted The Answer from him. Some miracle, some hope of reprieve. They were confident he’d deliver it. Pillar of the community, descendant of a famous Founder; the trusted doctor who knew everyone’s body better than they did themselves; wise and cool head, respected dispenser of shrewd advice.

He looked around at them all before he began to speak.

“I’m sorry, Damis, Nicko. Nimber. I think all this talk of resistance gets us nowhere useful. We need to admit to ourselves that that isn’t an option.” There was grumbling at once from the war faction. Lawler silenced it with a cool glare. “Trying to fight the Gillies is like trying to drink the sea dry. We’ve got no weapons. We’ve got maybe forty able-bodied fighters at best, against hundreds of them. It isn’t even worth thinking about.” The silence became glacial. But he could see his calm words sinking in: people exchanging glances, heads nodding. He turned toward Lis Niklaus. “Lis, the Gillies aren’t bluffing and Nid doesn’t have any way of getting them to take back their order. He spoke to them and so did I. You know that. If you still think the Gillies are going to change their minds, you’re dreaming.”

How solemn they all looked, how sombre! The Sweyners, Dag Tharp, a cluster of Thalheims, the Sawtelles. Sidero Volkin and his wife Elka, Dann Henders, Martin Yanez. Young Josc Yanez. Lis. Leo Martello. Pilya Braun. Leynila Stayvol. Sundira Thane. He knew them all so well, all but just a few. They were his family, just as he had told Delagard that boozy night. Yes. Yes. It was so. Everyone on this island.

“Friends,” he said, “we’d better face the realities. I don’t like this any more than you do, but we have no choice. The Gillies say we have to leave? Okay. It’s their island. They have the numbers, they have the muscle. We’re going to be living somewhere else soon and that’s all there is to it. I wish I could offer something more cheery, but I can’t. Nobody can. Nobody.”

He waited for some fiery rejoinder from Thalheim or Tanamind or Damis Sawtelle. But they had nothing more to say. There wasn’t anything anyone could say. All this talk of armed resistance had been only whistling in the wind. The meeting broke up inconclusively. There was no choice but to submit: everyone saw that now.

Lawler was standing by the sea-wall between Delagard’s shipyard and the Gillie power plant, looking out at the changing colours in the bay late one afternoon in the second week since the ultimatum, when Sundira Thane went swimming by below. In mid-stroke she glanced up quickly and nodded to him. Lawler nodded back and waved. Her long slender legs flashed in a scissor kick, and she surged forward, torso bending in a sudden swift surface dive.

For a moment Lawler saw Sundira’s pale boyish buttocks gleaming above the water; then she was travelling rapidly just beneath the surface, a lean naked tawny wraith swimming away from shore in steady, powerful strokes. Lawler followed her with his eyes until she was lost to his sight. She swims like a Gillie, he thought. She hadn’t come up for air in what felt to him like three or four minutes. Didn’t she need to breathe at all?

Mireyl had been been a strong swimmer like that, he thought.

Lawler frowned. It surprised him to have his long-ago wife come floating up unsummoned out of the past like this. He hadn’t thought of her for ages. But then he remembered that he had thought of her only last night, in his drunken ramble. Mireyl, yes. Ancient history.

He could almost see her now. Suddenly he was twenty-three again, the young new doctor, and there she was, fair-haired, fair-skinned, compact, wide through the shoulders and the hips, a low centre of gravity: a powerful little projectile of a woman, round and muscular and sturdy. Her face wasn’t clear to him, though. He couldn’t remember her face at all, somehow.

She was a wonderful swimmer. In the water she moved like a javelin. She never appeared to tire and she could remain submerged for ever and ever. Strong and active as he was, Lawler was always hard pressed to keep up with her when they swam. She would turn, finally, laughing, and wait for him, and he would swim up against her, clasp her tight, hold her close against him.

They were swimming now. He came up to her and she opened her arms to him. There were little glistening things swimming around them in the water, lithe and friendly.

“We should get married,” he said.

“Should we?”

“We should, yes.”

“The doctor’s wife. I never thought I’d be the doctor’s wife.” She laughed. “But somebody has to be.”

“No, nobody has to be. But I want you to be.”

She wriggled away from him and started swimming. “Catch me and I’ll marry you!”

“No fair. You had a head start.”

“Nothing’s ever fair,” she called to him.

He grinned and went after her, swimming harder than he ever had before, and this time he caught up with her, halfway across the bay. He couldn’t tell whether it was because he had been swimming beyond his capabilities or because she had deliberately let him catch her. Probably both, he decided.

The doctor had a wife, then.

“Are you happy?” he would ask.

“Oh, yes, yes.”

“So am I.”

A strong marriage. So he supposed, anyway. But she was restless. She had come to Sorve from another island in the first place, and now she wanted to move along, she wanted to see the world, but he was tied to Sorve by his profession, by his staid disciplined temperament, by a million invisible bonds. He didn’t understand how much of a wanderer she really was: he had thought this longing for other islands was only a phase, that she would grow out of it as she settled into married life with him on Sorve.

Another scene, now. Down at the harbour, eleven months after their wedding. Mireyl getting aboard a Delagard inter-island ferry bound for Morvendir, pausing to glance behind her at the pier, waving to him. But not smiling. Neither was he, uncertainly returning her wave. And then she turned her back and was gone.

Lawler had never heard anything from her or about her again. That had been twenty years ago. He hoped she was happy, wherever she was.

Far off in the distance Lawler saw schools of air-skimmers breaking from the water and launching themselves into their fierce finny flights. Their scales glinted in tones of red and gold, like the precious gems in the storybooks of his childhood. He had never seen actual gems—nothing of the sort existed on Hydros—but it was hard to imagine how they could be more beautiful than air-skimmers in flight at sunset. Nor could he imagine a scene more beautiful than Sorve Bay when it showed its evening colours. What a glorious summer evening! There were other times of the year when the air wasn’t this soft and mild—the seasons when the island was in polar waters, hammered by black gales, swept by knife-sharp sleet. Times would come when the weather was too stormy to allow anyone to venture even so far as the edge of the bay for fish and plants, and they all ate dried fish-meat, powdered algae-meal, and dried seaweed strands, and huddled in their vaarghs waiting miserably for the time of warmth to return. But summer! Ah, summer, when the island moved in tropical waters! There was nothing better. Being evicted from the island in midsummer like this made the expulsion all the more painful: they were being cheated out of the finest season of the year.