Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

On the next-to-last day, and the last day also, parties of Gillies came right down to the border between their territory and the human settlement and stood there watching in their inscrutable way, as if making sure the humans were making ready to clear out. Everyone on Sorve knew now that there would be no reprieve, no revocation of the order of expulsion. The last doubters, the last deniers, had had to cave in under the pressure of those fishy, staring, implacable eyes. Sorve was lost to them forever. Grayvard would be their new home. That much was settled.

Just before the end, hours from departure, Lawler climbed the island to its rearmost point, on the side opposite the bay, where the high bulwark faced the ocean. It was noon, and the water was ablaze with reflected light.

From his vantage point on the bulwark Lawler looked out across the open sea and imagined himself sailing on it, far from any shore. He wanted to find out if he still feared it, that endless world of water on which he would embark not very long from now.

No. No. All the fear seemed to have gone from him that drunken night at Delagard’s place. It hadn’t returned. Lawler stared into the distance and saw nothing but ocean, and that was all right. There wasn’t anything to fear. He would be exchanging the island for a ship, which was nothing more than a miniature island, really. What was the worst-case possibility, then? That his ship would sink in a storm, he supposed, or be smashed by the Wave, and he’d die. All right: he had to die sooner or later. That wasn’t news. But ships weren’t lost at sea all that often. The odds were that they would reach Grayvard safely. He would go ashore once again and begin a new life.

What Lawler still felt, rather than fear of the voyage that lay ahead, was the occasional sharp stab of grief for all he would be leaving behind. The longing arose quickly and just as quickly went, unsatisfied.

But now, strangely, the things he was leaving behind began to leave him. As Lawler stood with his back to the settlement, staring into the great dark expanse of the water, they all seemed to depart on the breeze that was blowing past him out to sea: his awesome father, his gentle elusive mother, his almost forgotten brothers. His whole childhood, his coming of age, his brief marriage, his years as the island doctor, as the Dr Lawler of his generation. Everything going away, suddenly. Everything. He felt weirdly light, as if he could simply mount the breeze and float through the air to Grayvard. All the shackles seemed to have broken. Everything that held him here had fallen from him in a moment. Everything.

The first four days of the voyage had been placid, almost suspiciously so. “Real strange is what it is,” said Gabe Kinverson, and solemnly shook his head. “You’d expect some troubles by now, this far out in the middle of nowhere,” he said, looking out over the slow, calm blue-grey swells. The wind was steady. The sails were full. The ships stayed close together, moving serenely across a glassy sea on their route toward the northwest, toward Grayvard. A new home; a new life; for the seventy-eight voyagers, the castaways, the exiles, it was like a second birth. But should any birth, a first one or a second, be as easy as this? And how much longer would it be this easy?

On the first day, when they were still crossing the bay, Lawler had found himself wandering astern again and again to look back at Sorve Island as it receded into invisibility.

In those early hours of the voyage Sorve had risen behind them like a long tawny mound. It still seemed real and tangible then. He was able to make out the familiar central spine and the outcurving arms, the grey spires of the vaarghs, the power plant, the rambling buildings of Delagard’s shipyard. He thought he could even see the sombre line of Gillies who had come down to the shore to watch the six vessels depart.

Then the water began to change colour. The deep rich green of the shallow bay gave way to the ocean colour, which here was a dark blue tinged with grey. That was the true mark of cutting loose from shore, when you had left the bay behind. To Lawler it felt as if a trapdoor had been sprung, catapulting him into free fall. Now that the artificial bottom had dropped away beneath them Sorve began rapidly to shrink, becoming nothing but a dark line on the horizon, and then nothing at all.

Farther out the ocean would be other colours, depending on the microorganisms in it, the surrounding climate, the upwellings of particulate matter from the depths. The different seas were named according to their prevailing hue: the Red Sea, the Yellow, the Azure, the Black. The one to fear was the Empty Sea, the sea that was pale ice-blue, a desert sea. Great tracts of the ocean were like that and almost nothing lived in them. But the route of the expedition would pass nowhere near any of that.

The ships were travelling in a tight pyramid-shaped formation that they would try to hold to day and night. Each vessel was under the command of one of Delagard’s ferry captains except for the one on which the eleven women of the Sisterhood sailed all by themselves. Delagard had offered to give them one of his men to be their pilot, but they had refused, as he had expected them to do. “Sailing a ship’s no problem,” Sister Halla told him. “We’ll watch what you do and we’ll do the same thing.”

Delagard’s flagship, the Queen of Hydros , was in the lead, at the apex of the pyramid, with Gospo Struvin in charge. Then came two side by side, the Black Sea Star commanded by Poilin Stayvol and the Sorve Goddess under Bamber Cadrell, and behind them the other three ships in a broader line, the Sisterhood in the middle aboard the Hydros Cross flanked by the Three Moons under Martin Yanez and the Golden Sun commanded by Damis Sawtelle.

Now, with Sorve altogether gone from view, there was nothing in sight anywhere but sky and sea, the flat horizon, the gentle ocean swells. A curious sort of peace descended over Lawler. He found it surprisingly easy to submerge himself in the vastness of it all, to lose himself completely. The sea was calm and seemed likely to stay that way forever. Sorve could no longer be seen, that was true. Sorve had disappeared. What of it? Sorve no longer mattered.

He moved forward along the deck, savouring the force of the wind against his back as it pushed the ship steadily onward, every minute carrying him farther and farther from anything he had ever known.

Father Quillan was standing by the foremast. The priest wore a dark grey wrap of some unusual light woven material, airy and soft, something he must have brought with him from another world. There were no such fabrics available on Hydros.

Lawler paused by his side. Quillan gestured broadly toward the sea. It was like an enormous blue jewel, sparkling with fierce brilliance, its great glassy curve reaching outward on all sides as if the entire planet were a single shining polished sphere. “Looking at all that, you wouldn’t believe that anything but water exists anywhere in the world, would you?”

“Not here, no.”

“Such an enormous ocean. Such emptiness everywhere.”

“Makes you think there has to be a god, does it? The immensity of it all.”

Quillan looked at him, startled.

“Does it?”

“I don’t know. I was asking you.”

“Do you believe in God, Lawler?”

“My father did.”

“But not you?”

Lawler shrugged. “My father had a Bible. He used to read it to us. It got lost, somewhere, a long time back. Or stolen. I remember a little of it. “And God said, let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters… And God called the firmament Heaven.” That’s Heaven up there, right, Father Quillan? Behind the sky? And the waters that are supposed to be above it, that’s the ocean of space, isn’t it?” Quillan was staring at him in astonishment. “And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear, and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas.”