Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

Sundira Thane came to see him when her supply of the numbweed tranquillizer was all gone. Her vivid, energetic presence filled the little reception room of his vaargh like a trumpet-blast.

But she was coughing again. Lawler knew why, and it wasn’t because alien fungi had invaded her lungs. She looked drawn, tense. The brightness that gave her eyes such intense life was the brightness of anxiety today, not simply that of inner force.

Lawler filled the little storage gourd he had given her with a new supply of the pink drops, enough to last her until the day of departure. After that, if the cough was still with her when they were out at sea, she could share his supply.

She said, “One of those crazy women from the Sisterhood was in town just now, did you know? She was telling everyone that she’s cast our horoscope and none of us will survive the voyage to the new island. Not a single one, she said. Some of us are going to be lost at sea and the rest are going to sail right off the edge of the world and end up in heaven.”

“That’s Sister Thecla, I’d guess. She claims to be clairvoyant.”

“And is she?”

“She once did a horoscope on me, back in the days before the Sisterhood when she was still speaking to men. She said I’d live to a ripe old age and have a happy, fulfilled life. Now she says we’re all going to die at sea. One of those two horoscopes has to be wrong, wouldn’t you think? Here, open your mouth. Let me stare at your larynx for a minute.”

“Maybe Sister Thecla meant that you would be one of the ones who’s going to sail straight to heaven.”

“Sister Thecla is not a reliable source of information,” Lawler said. “Sister Thecla is a seriously disturbed woman, as a matter of fact. Open up.”

He looked down her throat. There was a little mild irritation of the tissues, nothing special: just about what an occasional psychosomatic cough would be expected to produce.

“If Delagard knew how to sail to heaven, he’d have done it already,” Lawler said. “He’d be running a ferry service back and forth. He’d have shipped the Sisters there a long time ago. As for your throat, it’s the same story as before. Tension, nervous coughing, irritation. Just try to relax. Keeping away from Sisters who want to forecast your future for you would be a good idea.”

Sundira smiled. “Those poor silly women. I feel sorry for them.” Though the consultation was over, she seemed in no hurry to leave. She wandered over to the shelf where he kept his little collection of Earth artifacts and studied them for a moment. “You said you’d tell me what these things are.”

He came up alongside her. “The metal statuette’s the oldest one. It’s a god that they worshipped in a land called Egypt, thousands of years ago. Egypt was a land beside a river, one of the most ancient places on Earth, where civilization started. He’s either the sun-god or the god of death. Or both. I’m not certain.”

“Both? How can a sun-god also be a death-god? The sun’s the source of life, it’s bright and warm. Death is something dark. It’s—” She paused. “But Earth’s sun was the bringer of death, wasn’t it? You mean to say they knew that in this place called Egypt thousands of years before it happened?”

“I doubt it very much. But the sun dies every night. And is reborn the next morning. Maybe that was the connection.” Or maybe not. He was only guessing. He knew so little.

She picked up the small bronze figurine and held it in her palm as though weighing it.

“Four thousand years. I can’t imagine four thousand years.”

Lawler smiled. “Sometimes I hold it the way you’re holding it now, and I try to let it take me back to the place where it was made. Dry sand, hot sun, a blue river with trees along its banks. Cities with thousands of people. Huge temples and palaces. But it’s so hard to keep the vision clear. All I can really see in my mind is an ocean and a little island.”

She put the statuette down and pointed to the potsherd. “And this piece of hard painted material, that’s from Greece, you said?”

“Greece, yes. It’s pottery. They made it out of clay. Look, you can see a bit of a picture on it, a figure of a warrior, and a spear that he must have been holding.”

“How beautiful the outline is. It must have been a marvellous piece of work. But we’ll never know, will we? When was Greece? After Egypt?”

“Much later. But still very ancient. They had poets and philosophers there, and great artists. Homer was a Greek.”

“Homer?”

“He wrote The Odyssey. The Iliad .”

“I’m sorry. I don’t—”

“Famous poems, very long ones. One was about a war and one about a sea voyage. My father used to tell me stories that came from them, the bits and pieces that he remembered from his father. Who learned them from his grandfather Harry, whose grandfather was born on Earth. It was only seven generations ago that Earth still existed. Sometimes we forget that: sometimes we forget that Earth ever existed at all. You see that round brown medallion there? That’s a map of Earth. The continents and seas.”

Of all his treasures, Lawler often thought that was the most precious. It was neither the most ancient nor the most beautiful; but the portrait of Earth itself was inscribed on it. He had no idea who had made it, or when, or why. It was a flat hard disc, larger than his coin from the United States of America but still small enough to fit in the palm of his hand. There was lettering around its edges that nobody was able to understand, and in the centre were two overlapping circles in which the map of Earth had been engraved, two continents in one hemisphere and two in the other, with a fifth continent at the bottom of the world in both circles and some large islands breaking the great expanse of the seas. Perhaps they were continents too, some of them: Lawler didn’t quite understand where the boundary was between being an island and being a continent.

He pointed to the left-hand circle. “Supposedly Egypt was here, in the middle of this place. And Greece somewhere up here. And this may have been the United States of America, over on the other side, up here. This little metal piece is a coin that they used there, in the United States of America.”

“For what?”

“Money,” Lawler said. “Coins were money.”

“And this rusted thing?”

“A weapon. A gun, it was called. It fired little darts called bullets.”

She made a little shivering gesture. “You have just these six things of Earth, and one of them has to be a weapon. But they were like that, weren’t they? Making war on each other all the time? Killing each other, hurting each other?”

“Some of them were like that, especially in the ancient days. Later it changed, I think.” Lawler indicated the rough chunk of stone, his final artifact. “This was from some wall they had, a wall between countries, because there was war. That would be like a wall between islands here, if you can imagine such a thing. Eventually peace came and they tore the wall down and everyone celebrated, and pieces of it were saved so no one would forget it had once existed.” Lawler shrugged. “They were people, that’s all. Some were good and some weren’t. I don’t think they were that different from us.”

“But their world was.”

“Very different, yes. A strange and wonderful place.”

“There’s a special look that comes into your eyes when you speak about Earth. I saw it the other night, down by the bay, when you were talking of how we all live in exile. A kind of glow; a look of longing, I guess. You said that some people think Earth was a paradise, and some that it was a place of horror that everyone wanted to escape from. You must be one of those who think it was a paradise.”