Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

She was looking at him oddly. There was a long sticky pause, a pause with a subtext, though he was damned if he knew what it was.

Then she said, in a new abrupt tone, “You’ve never been married, have you, doctor?” The question was as unexpected as a Gillie turning handsprings.

“Once. Not for very long. It was quite a while ago, a bad mistake. And you?”

“Never. I don’t understand how to do it, I guess. Tying yourself down to one person forever—it seems so strange to me.”

“They say it’s possible,” Lawler remarked. “I’ve seen it done, right before my very eyes. But of course I’ve had very little personal experience of it.”

She nodded vaguely. She seemed to be wrestling with something. So was he, and he knew what it was: his reluctance to step across the self-imposed boundaries that he had drawn around his life after Mireyl had left him, his unwillingness to expose himself to the risks of renewed pain. He had grown accustomed to his monastic, disciplined life. More than accustomed: it seemed to be what he wanted, it seemed to be what met his deepest needs. Nothing ventured, nothing lost. Was she waiting for him to make his move? So it appeared, yes. So it appeared. But would he? Could he? He had trapped himself in inflexible indifference and there seemed to be no way that he could allow himself to get out of it.

The mild summer breeze, coming up from the south, brought the fragrance of her sea-moist hair to him, and fluttered her wrap, reminding Lawler that she was naked underneath it. The orange light of the setting sun, gleaming against her bare skin, turned the faint, fine, almost invisible hairs that covered it to gold, so that her breasts glistened where they showed through the open front. Her body was still damp from her swim. Her small pale nipples were hard in the evening’s gentle coolness. She looked supple, trim, enticing.

He wanted her, no doubt of that.

Okay. Go on, then. You aren’t fifteen years old any more. The thing to do is to say to her, “Instead of waiting for morning, come on up to my vaargh right now, and I’ll give you the medicine. And afterward let’s have dinner together and a drink or two. You know. I’d like to get to know you better.” And take it from there. Lawler could hear the words in the air almost as though he had actually spoken them already.

But just then Gabe Kinverson came up the path, fresh from his day at sea. He was still wearing his fishing gear, heavy tentlike garments designed to protect him against the slash of meatfish tentacles. Under one arm he carried a folded-up sail. He paused and stood looming for a moment, a dozen or so metres away, a bulky presence, rugged as a reef, emanating that curious ever-present sense of great strength contained with the greatest difficulty, of hidden violence, of danger.

“There you are,” he said to Sundira. “Been looking for you. Evening, doc.” His tone was calm, bland, enigmatic. Kinverson never sounded as threatening as he looked. He beckoned to her, and she went to him without hesitation.

“Nice talking to you, doctor,” Sundira said, looking back over her shoulder at Lawler.

“Right,” he said.

Kinverson just wants her to mend that sail for him, Lawler told himself.

Sure. Sure.

One of the Earth-dreams came to him again. There were two of them, one very painful and the other one not so bad. Lawler had one of them at least once a month, sometimes both.

This was the easier one, the one where he was actually on Earth himself, walking on solid soil. He was barefoot and there had been rain just a little while before and the ground was soft and warm, and when he wiggled his toes and dug them into it he saw tendrils of soil come spurting up between them, the way sand did when he walked in the shallows of the bay. But the soil of Earth was darker stuff than sand, and much heavier. It yielded slightly underfoot in a way that was very strange.

He was walking through a forest. Trees rose about him on all sides, things like wood-kelp plants with long trunks and dense crowns of leaves far overhead, but they were much more massive than any wood-kelp he had ever seen, and the leaves were so far above him that he was unable to make out their shapes. Birds fluttered in the tree-tops. They made odd melodic sounds, a music he had never heard before and could never remember when he awakened. All manner of strange creatures loped through the forest, some walking on two legs like a human, some crawling on their bellies, some standing on six or eight little stilts. He nodded to them and they acknowledged his greeting as they went by, these creatures of Earth.

He came to a place where the forest opened up and he saw a mountain rising before him. It looked like dark glass, speckled with mirror-bright irregularities, and in the warm golden sunlight it had a wonderful brilliance. The mountain filled half the sky. Trees were growing on it. They looked so small that he could pick one up in his hand, but he knew that they only seemed that way because the mountain was so far from him, that in fact those trees were at least as big as the ones in the forest he had just left, perhaps even bigger.

Somehow he walked around the mountain’s base. There was a long sloping place on the other side, a valley, and beyond the valley he saw a dark sprawling thing that he knew was a city, full of people, more people than he could easily imagine. He went toward it, thinking that he would go among the people of Earth and tell them who he was and where he had come from, and ask them about the lives they led, and whether they knew his great-great-grandfather Harry Lawler or maybe Harry Lawler’s father or grandfather.

But though he walked and walked, the city never grew any closer. It remained forever on the horizon, down there at the far side of the valley. He walked for hours; he walked for days; he walked for weeks. And always the city was out of reach, forever retreating from him as he walked toward it; and when he woke at last he was weary and cramped, as though from a great exertion, and he felt as though he had had no sleep at all.

In the morning Josc Yanez, Lawler’s young apprentice, came to his vaargh for the regular instruction session. The island had a strict apprentice system: no skill must be allowed to die out. This was the first time since the beginning of the settlement that the apprentice doctor had been anyone but a Lawler. But the Lawler line was going to end with him; some other family would have to carry the responsibility after he was gone.

“When we leave,” Josc asked, “will we be able to take all the medical supplies with us?”

“As much as there’s room for aboard the ships,” Lawler told him. “The equipment, most of the drugs, the book of recipes.”

“The patients” records?”

“If there’s room. I don’t know.”

Josc was seventeen, tall and gangling. A sweet-souled boy with an easy smile, an open face, a good way with people. He seemed to have an aptitude for doctoring. He loved the long hours of studying in a way that Lawler himself, fidgety and rebellious as a boy, never really had. This was the second year of Josc’s instruction and Lawler suspected he already knew half of the basic technical principles; the rest, and the skill of diagnosis, would be his in time. He came from a family of sailors; his older brother Martin was one of Delagard’s ferry captains. It was very much like Josc to worry about the patients” medical records. Lawler doubted that they’d be able to take them along: those ships of Delagard’s didn’t seem to have much space for cargo, and there were other things with higher priority than old medical records. He and Josc between them would have to commit everyone’s medical history to memory before they left the island. But that wouldn’t be a big problem. Lawler had most of it in his memory already. And so, he suspected, did Josc.