Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

“I hope I get to go on the same ship you do,” the boy said. Lawler, next to his brother Martin, was Josc’s greatest hero.

“No,” Lawler told him. “We’ll have to be on separate ships. If the one I’m on is lost at sea, at least you’ll still be around to be the doctor.”

Josc looked thunderstruck. At what? At the idea that Lawler’s ship might be lost at sea and his hero would perish? Or at the idea that he was really going to be the community doctor some day, and perhaps some day very soon?

Probably that was it. Lawler remembered how he had felt when it had first come home to him that his own apprenticeship actually had a serious purpose, this gruelling, endless study and drilling: that he would one day be expected to take his father’s place in this office and do all the things that his father did. He had been about fourteen then. And by the time he was twenty his father was dead and he was the doctor.

“Listen, don’t worry about it,” Lawler said. “Nothing’s going to happen to me. But we have to think of worst possible cases, Josc. You and I, we have all the medical knowledge this settlement has, between us. We have to protect it.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Okay. That means we travel in separate ships. You see what I’m saying?”

“Yes,” the boy said. “Yes, I understand. I’d prefer to be with you, but I understand.” He smiled. “We were going to talk about inflammations of the pleura today, weren’t we?”

“Inflammations of the pleura, yes,” said Lawler. He unfolded his worn, blurred anatomical chart. Josc sat forward, alert, attentive, eager. The boy was an inspiration. He reminded Lawler of something he had begun lately to forget, that his profession was more than a job: it was a calling. “Inflammations and pleural effusions, both. Symptomatology, causation, therapeutic measures.” He could hear his own father’s voice, deep, measured, inexorable, tolling in his mind like a great gong. “A sudden sharp pain in the chest, for example—”

Delagard said, “I’m afraid the news isn’t so good.”

“Oh?”

They were in Delagard’s office in the shipyard. It was midday, Lawler’s usual break from doctoring. Delagard had asked him to stop in. There was an open bottle of grapeweed brandy on the wood-kelp table, but Lawler had declined a drink. Not during working hours, he said. He had always tried to keep his mind clear when he was doctoring, except for the numbweed; and he told himself that the numbweed did no harm in that way. If anything it made his mind more clear.

“I’ve got some results. So far they aren’t good results. Velmise isn’t going to take us in, doc.”

It was like a kick in the belly.

“They told you that?”

Delagard shoved a sheet of message-parchment across the table. “Dag Tharp brought me this about half an hour ago. It’s from my son Kendy, on Velmise. He says they had their council meeting last night and they voted us down. Their immigration quota for the year is six, and they’re willing to stretch it to ten, considering the unusual circumstances. But that’s all they’ll take.”

“Not seventy-eight.”

“Not seventy-eight, no. It’s the old Shalikomo thing. Every island afraid of having too many people and getting the Gillies upset. Of course, you could say that ten is better than none. If we sent ten to Velmise, and ten to Salimil, and ten more to Grayvard—”

“No,” Lawler said. “I want us all to stick together.”

“I know that. All right.”

“If we don’t go to Velmise, what’s the next best possibility?”

“Dag’s talking to Salimil right now. I’ve got a son there too, you know. Maybe he’s a little more persuasive than Kendy. Or maybe the Salimil people aren’t quite as tight-assed. Christ, you’d think we were asking Velmise to evacuate their whole goddamned town to make room for us. They could fit us in. It might be tough for a time, but they’d manage. Shalikomos don’t happen twice.” Delagard riffled through a sheaf of parchment sheets in front of him and handed them across to Lawler. “Well, fuck Velmise. We’ll come up with something. What I want is for you to look at these.”

Lawler glanced at them. Each page held a list of names, scrawled in Delagard’s big, bold script.

“What are these?”

“I told you a couple of weeks ago, I’ve got six ships, and that divides out to thirteen to a ship. Actually, the way it works out, we’ll have one ship with eleven, two each with fourteen, the other three with thirteen apiece. You’ll see why in a minute. These are the passenger manifests I’ve drawn up.” Delagard tapped the top one. “Here. This is the one that ought to interest you the most.”

Lawler scanned it quickly. It read:

ME AND LIS

GOSPO STRUVIN

DOC LAWLER

QUILLAN

KINVERSON

SUNDIRA THANE

DAG THARP

ONYOS FELK

DANN HENDERS

NATIM GHARKID

PILYA BRAUN

LEO MARTELLO

NEYANA GOLGHOZ

“Nice?” Delagard asked.

“What is this?”

“I told you. The passenger manifest. That’s our ship, the Queen of Hydros . I think it’s a pretty good group.”

Lawler stared at Delagard in astonishment. “You bastard, Nid. You really know how to look after yourself.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about the terrific job you’ve done ensuring your own safety and comfort while we’re at sea. You aren’t even embarrassed to show this to me, are you? No, I bet you’re proud of it. You’ve got the only doctor in the community on your own ship, and the most skilled communications man, and the closest thing we have to an engineer, and the mapkeeper. And Gospo Struvin’s the number one captain of your fleet. Not a bad basic crew, for a voyage of God knows how long taking us to God knows where. Plus Kinverson the sea-hunter, who’s so strong he doesn’t even seem human and knows his way around the ocean the way you do around your shipyard. That’s a damned fine team. And no annoying children, no old people, nobody who’s in poor health. Not bad, friend.”

Anger showed for a moment, but only a moment, in Delagard’s glittering little eyes.

“Look, doc, it’s the flagship. This may not be such an easy voyage, if we wind up having to go all the way to Grayvard. We need to survive.”

“More than the others?”

“You’re the only doctor. You want to be on all the ships at once? Try it. I figured, you have to be on one ship or another, you might as well be on mine.”

“Of course.” Lawler ran his finger along the edge of the sheet. “But even applying the Delagard-first rule, I can’t figure a few of these choices. What good is Gharkid to you? He’s a complete cipher of a human being.”

“He knows seaweed. That’s the one thing he does know. He can help us in finding food.”

“Sounds reasonable.” Lawler glanced at Delagard’s plump belly. “We wouldn’t want to go hungry out there, would we? Eh? Eh?” Looking at the list again, he said, “And Braun? Golghoz?”

“Hard workers. Mind their own business.”

“Martello? A poet? ”

“He isn’t just a poet. He knows what to do aboard a ship. Anyway, why not a poet? This is going to be like an odyssey. A fucking odyssey. A whole island emigrates. We’ll have somebody to write down our story.”

“Very nice,” said Lawler. “Bring your own Homer along, so posterity gets to hear all about the great voyage. I like that.” He checked the list again. “I notice you’ve got only four women here, to ten men.”

Delagard smiled. “The proportion of women to men isn’t much in my control. We’ve got thirty-six females on this island and forty-two males. But eleven of the ladies belong to the fucking Sisterhood, don’t forget. I’m sending them off on a ship by themselves. Let them figure out how to sail it, if they can. So we’ve got only twenty-five women and girls otherwise, five ships, mothers need to stay with their children, et cetera, et cetera. I calculated we had room for four on our ship.”