Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

“No,” Lawler said. “I told you. I don’t know what kind of place it really was. I suppose it was pretty crowded and shabby and dirty toward the end, or there wouldn’t have been such a big emigration from it. But I can’t say. I suppose we’ll never know the truth.” He paused and looked at her closely. “The only thing I know is that it was our home once. We should never forget that. Our real and true home. However much we try to fool ourselves into believing that Hydros is our home, we’re all really just visitors here.”

“Visitors?” Sundira said.

She was standing very close to him. Her grey eyes were bright, her lips were moist. It seemed to Lawler that her breasts were rising and falling more rapidly than usual beneath her light wrap. Imagination? Or was she coming on to him?

“Do you feel at home on Hydros?” Lawler asked her. “Really, really, feel at home?”

“Of course. Don’t you?”

“I wish I did.”

“But you were born here!”

“So?”

“I don’t underst—”

“Am I a Gillie? Am I a diver? Am I a meatfish? They feel at home here. They are at home here.”

“So are you.”

“You still don’t understand,” he said.

“I’m trying, though. I want to.”

This was the moment to reach out to her, Lawler thought. Pull her close, caress her, do this and that, hands, lips, make things happen. She wants to understand you, he told himself. Give her her chance.

And then he heard Delagard’s voice in his head, saying, And also she’s Kinverson’s woman, isn’t she? If she’s useful, and they’re a couple besides, why separate them?

“Yes,” he said, his tone suddenly short. “Lots of questions, not many answers. Isn’t it always that way?” Abruptly he wanted to be alone. He tapped the flask of numbweed tincture. “This supply should last you another couple of weeks, right up to the time we leave. If the cough doesn’t clear up again, let me know.”

She looked a little startled at the brusque dismissal. But then she smiled and thanked him and went out.

Shit, he thought. Shit. Shit. Shit.

Delagard said, “The ships are just about in shape, and we’ve still got a week. My people have really been breaking their balls getting them ready.”

Lawler, at the shipyard, glanced out toward the water, where the entire Delagard fleet was at anchor in the harbour except for one ship that was up in drydock having its hull patched. Two carpenters were busy at it. Three men and four women were at work aboard the two nearest seaborne vessels, hammering and planing. “I assume you mean that figuratively, of course.”

“What? Oh. Oh. Very funny, doc. Listen, everybody who works for me has balls, even the women. It’s just my vulgar way of speaking. Or one of my quaint little figures of speech, whichever you prefer. Do you want to see what we’ve been doing?”

“I’ve never been aboard a ship, you know? Only little fishing boats, coracles, things like that.”

“There’s always a first time. Come on. I’ll show you the flagship.”

It looked smaller, once Lawler was aboard, than Delagard’s ships seemed when riding at anchor in the bay. Still, it looked big enough. It was almost like a miniature island. Lawler could feel it rolling lightly beneath his feet, even here in the shallows. Its keel was made of the same tough hard yellow wood-kelp timber as the island itself, long sturdy fibres tightly lashed together and caulked with pitch. The exterior of the hull had a different sort of caulking. Just as the island’s bulwarks wore a covering mesh of live sea-finger weed that constantly repaired and rewove itself as the ocean battered against the island wall, just as the wooden timbers of the bay floor were reinforced by a layer of protective algae, so too did a dense green network of sea-finger festoon the sides of the hull, coming clear up almost to the railing. The stubby little blue-green tubules of the weed, which had always looked more like tiny bottles than fingers to Lawler, gave the ship a thick bristling coating, jutting out in intricate tangles just below the water-line. The deck was a flat, tight expanse of some lighter wood, carefully sealed to keep the interior of the ship dry when waves came over the bow. Two masts rose at mid-deck. Hatches fore and aft led to mysterious deeper regions.

Delagard said, “What we’ve been doing is resealing the deck and resurfacing the hull. We want to be water-tight all around. We may see some ugly storms and we’ll sure as hell be run down by the Wave somewhere out there. On an inter-island voyage we can try to steer around lousy weather, and if things go the right way for us we can hope to avoid the worst of the Wave, but we may not have it so easy on this trip.”

“Isn’t this an inter-island voyage?” Lawler asked.

“It may not be inter the islands we’d prefer. Sometimes, a voyage like this, you have to take the long way around.”

Lawler didn’t quite follow that, but Delagard didn’t amplify and he let the point go by. Delagard hauled him briskly around the ship, reeling off technical terms: this is the cabinhouse, this the deckhouse, the bridge, the forecastle, the quarterdeck, the bowsprit, the windlass, the water-strider, the gantry and reel. These are gaffing rods, this is the wheel-box, that’s the binnacle. Down below we have the crew quarters here, the hold, the magnetron room, the radio room, the carpenter’s shop, the this, the that. Lawler was scarcely listening. Most of the terms meant nothing to him. What struck him mainly was how everything below was so incredibly close together, one thing jammed up against another. He was accustomed to the privacy and solitude of his vaargh. They would all be in each other’s pockets here. He was trying to imagine himself living on this crowded boat for two, three, four weeks, out there on the open ocean with no land anywhere in sight.

Not a boat, he told himself. A ship. An ocean-going sailing ship.

“What’s the latest word from Salimil?” Lawler asked, when Delagard finally led him up from the claustrophobic depths.

“Dag’s talking to them right now. They were supposed to have the council meeting this morning. My guess is we’re in like a breeze. They’ve got plenty of room there. My son Rylie called me from Salimil last week and told me that four members of the council are definitely for us and two more are leaning our way.”

“Out of how many?”

“Nine.”

“Sounds good,” Lawler said. So they would go to Salimil, then. All right. All right. So be it. He summoned an image of Salimil Island as he imagined it to be—much like Sorve, of course, but somehow bigger, grander, more lavish—and pictured himself arranging his medical equipment in a vaargh by the Salimil shore that his colleague, Dr Nikitin of Salimil, had made ready for him. Lawler had spoken with Nitikin many times by radio. He wondered what the man actually looked like. Salimil, yes. Lawler wanted to believe that Rylie Delagard knew what he was talking about, that Salimil was going to take them in. But Lawler remembered that Delagard’s other son Kendry, who lived on Velmise, had been just as confident that Velmise would accept the refugees from Sorve.

Sidero Volkin came limping up on deck and said to Delagard, “Dag Tharp’s here. He’s in your office.”

Delagard grinned. “Here’s our answer. Let’s go ashore.”

But Tharp was already on his way down to the edge of the water to meet them as they clambered off the ship, and the moment Lawler saw the stricken look on the little radio operator’s red sharp-featured face he knew what the answer from Salimil had been.

“Well?” Delagard asked, all the same.

“Turned us down. Five to four vote. They’re low on water, they said. Because the summer’s been so dry. Offered to take six people, though.”