Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

“The bastards. Well, fuck them.”

“That what you want me to tell them?” Tharp asked.

“Don’t tell them anything. I wouldn’t waste the time on them. We aren’t going to send them six. It’s all or none, wherever we go.” He looked at Lawler.

“What’s next?” Lawler asked. “Shaktan? Kaggeram?” The island names came easily to his lips. But he had no idea where they were, or what they might be like.

“They’ll give us the same crap,” Delagard said.

“I could try Kaggeram anyway,” said Tharp. “They’re pretty decent over there, I remember. I was there about ten years ago, when—”

“Fuck Kaggeram,” Delagard said. “They’ve got one of those council deals too. They’ll need a week to debate it, and then a public meeting, and a vote, and all that. We don’t have that much more time.” Delagard seemed to disappear into thought. He might have been a world away. He had the look of someone who was making abstruse calculations with the most intense mental effort. Delagard’s eyes were half shut, his thick black brows were close together. A heavy shell of silence surrounded him. “Grayvard,” he said finally.

“But Grayvard’s eight weeks from here,” said Lawler.

“Grayvard?” Tharp said, looking startled. “You want me to call Grayvard?”

“Not you. Me. I’ll make the call myself, right from this ship.” Delagard was silent again a moment. Once more he seemed very distant, working out mental sums. Then he nodded as if satisfied with his answer and said, “I’ve got cousins on Grayvard. I know how to bargain with my own cousins, for Christ’s sake. What to offer. They’ll take us. You can be damn sure of that. There won’t be any problem. Grayvard it is!”

Lawler stood watching as Delagard went striding back toward the ship.

Grayvard? Grayvard?

He knew almost nothing about it: an island at the far edge of the island group in which Sorve moved, an island which spent as much time in the adjacent Red Sea as it did in Home Sea. It was about as distant as an island could be and still have any sort of real relationship with Sorve.

Lawler had been taught in school that forty of the islands of Hydros had human settlements on them. Maybe the official number was up to fifty or sixty by now: he didn’t know. The true total was probably a good deal higher than that, since everyone lived in the shadow of the Shalikomo massacre that had happened in the time of the third generation, and whenever an island’s population began to grow too large, ten or twenty people would leave to seek a new life somewhere else. The settlers who moved to those new islands didn’t necessarily have the means to establish radio contact with the rest of Hydros. So it was easy to lose count. Say, eighty islands with humans, by this time, or even a hundred. Scattered over an entire planet, a planet said to be bigger than Earth itself had been. Communication between the islands was spotty and difficult beyond one’s own little island group. Hazy inter-island alliances formed and dissolved as the islands travelled around the world.

Once, long ago, some humans had attempted to build an island of their own, so they wouldn’t have to live all the time under the eyes of Gillie neighbours. They had figured out how it was done and had begun weaving the fibres, but before they got very far the island was attacked by huge sea creatures and destroyed. Dozens of lives were lost. Everyone assumed the monsters had been sent by the Gillies, who obviously hadn’t liked the idea of humans setting up a little independent domain of their own. No one had ever tried it again.

Grayvard, Lawler thought. Well, well, well.

One island is as good as another, he told himself. He’d manage to adapt, somehow, wherever they landed. But would they be really welcome on Grayvard? Would they even be able to find it, somewhere out there between Home Sea and the Red Sea? What the hell. Let Delagard worry about it. Why should he care? It was all out of his hands.

Gharkid’s voice, thin and husky and piping, came to Lawler as he was walking slowly back up to his vaargh.

“Doctor? Doctor-sir?”

He was heavily laden, staggering under the weight of two immense dripping baskets stuffed with algae that he carried in a shoulder-harness. Lawler halted to wait for him. Gharkid came lurching toward him and let the baskets slide from his shoulders practically at Lawler’s feet.

Gharkid was a small wiry man, so much shorter than Lawler that he had to crane his head far back in order to look at him straight on. He smiled, showing brilliant white teeth against the dusky backdrop of his face. There was something earnest and very appealing about him. But the childlike simplicity that the man affected, that cheerful peasant innocence, could be a little cloying sometimes.

“What’s all this?” Lawler asked, looking down at the tangle of weeds spilling out of the baskets, green ones and red ones and yellow ones streaked with gaudy purple veins.

“For you, doctor-sir. Medicines. For when we leave, to take with us.”

Gharkid grinned. He seemed very pleased with himself.

Lawler, kneeling, poked through the sopping mess. He was able to recognize some of the seaweeds. This bluish one was the painkiller, and this with the dark strap-shaped lateral leaves yielded the better of the two antiseptics, and this one—yes, this one was numbweed. Unquestionably numbweed. Good old Gharkid. Lawler looked up and as his gaze met Gharkid’s there was for just a moment a flash of something not all that naive and childlike in Gharkid’s dark eyes.

“To take with us on the ship,” Gharkid said, as though Lawler hadn’t comprehended before. “These are the good ones, for the drugs. I thought you’d want them, some extras.”

“You’ve done very well,” Lawler said. “Here. Let’s carry this stuff up to my vaargh.”

It was a rich haul. The man had gathered some of everything that had any medicinal use. Lawler had been putting it off and putting it off and at last Gharkid had simply gone out into the bay and loaded up on the whole pharmacopoeia. Well done indeed, Lawler thought. Especially the numbweed. There’d be just enough time to process all this before they sailed, get it all refined down into powders and salves and ointments and tinctures. And then the ship would be nicely stocked with medicines for the long pull to Grayvard. He knew his algae, Gharkid did. Once again Lawler wondered if Gharkid was really as much of a simpleton as he seemed, or if that was merely some sort of defensive pose. Gharkid often seemed like a blank soul, a tabula rasa on which anyone was free to write anything at all. There had to be more to him than that, somewhere inside. But where?

The final days before sailing were bad ones. Everyone admitted the necessity to go, but not everybody had believed it would really happen, and now reality was closing in with terrible force. Lawler saw old women making piles of their possessions outside their vaarghs, staring blankly at them, rearranging them, carrying things inside and bringing other things out. Some of the women and a few of the men cried all the time, some of them quietly, some not so quietly. The sounds of hysterical sobbing could be heard all through the night. Lawler treated the worst cases with numbweed tincture. “Easy, there,” he kept saying. “Easy, easy.” Thorn Lyonides was drunk three days straight, roaring and singing, and then he started a fight with Bamber Cadrell, saying that nobody was going to make him get on board one of those ships. Delagard came by with Gospo Struvin and said, “What the fuck is this,” and Lyonides jumped at him, snarling and screeching like a lunatic. Delagard hit him in the face, and Struvin caught him around the throat and throttled him until he calmed down. “Put him on his ship,” Delagard said to Cadrell. “Make sure he stays there until we sail.”