Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

Kinverson and Sundira had landed in different watches, and therefore bunked in different compartments. Lawler was surprised at that. Not that it mattered much who slept where, really: there was so little privacy in those crowded bunks that anybody interested in a bit of screwing around would have to go creeping down into the cargo hold on the next level below and do their coupling sandwiched between the crates. But were they a couple, as Delagard had said, or not? Apparently not, Lawler was beginning to realize. Or if they were, they were a damned loose-knit one. They had hardly even seemed to notice each other since the start of the voyage. Perhaps whatever had happened between them on Sorve, if anything had, had been nothing more than a quick meaningless fling, a random casual meeting of bodies, a way of passing the time.

He pushed open the door of his cabin with his shoulder and went inside. The cabin wasn’t much bigger than a closet. It held a bunk, a basin, and a little wooden chest in which Lawler kept the few personal possessions he had brought with him from Sorve. Delagard hadn’t let them bring much. Lawler had taken a few articles of clothing, his fishing gear, some pots and pans and plates, a mirror. The artifacts from Earth had come with him, too, of course. He kept them on a shelf opposite his bunk.

The rest of his things, such as they were, his modest furniture and his lamps and some ornaments that he had fashioned out of pretty sea-drift, he had bequeathed to the Gillies. His medical equipment and most of his supplies and his meagre library of handwritten medical texts were up front, off the galley, in a cabin that was serving as the ship’s infirmary. The main medical stores were below, in the cargo hold.

He lit a taper and examined his cheek in the mirror. It was a rough, lumpy piece of sea-glass that Sweyner had made for him years ago, and it provided a rough, lumpy reflection, cloudy and indistinct. Glass of high quality was a rarity on Hydros, where the only source of silica was the heaped-up shells of diatoms from the bottom of the bay. But Lawler was fond of the mirror, bubbled and murky though it was.

The collision with the hagfish didn’t seem to have done any serious damage. There was a little abraded patch just above his left cheekbone, mildly sore where a few of the reddish bristles had broken off in his skin, and that was all. Lawler swabbed it down with a little of Delagard’s grapeweed brandy to protect himself against infection. His medical sixth sense told him that there was nothing to worry about.

The numbweed flask stood next to the brandy. He pondered it for a moment or two.

He had had his usual ration of it already today, before breakfast. He didn’t need any more just now.

But what the hell, he thought. What the hell.

Later Lawler found himself wandering up to the crew compartments, looking for companionship, he wasn’t sure whose.

The shift had changed again. The second watch was on duty now, and the starboard compartment was empty. Lawler peered into the other compartment and saw Kinverson asleep on his bunk, Natim Gharkid sitting up crosslegged with his eyes closed as though in some kind of meditation, and Leo Martello scribbling away, writing by feeble lamplight with his pages spread out on a low wooden chest. Working on his interminable epic poem, Lawler supposed.

Martello was about thirty, strongly built, full of energy, usually jigging around as if on springs. He had large brown eyes and a lively, open face, and liked to keep his head shaved. His father had come voluntarily to Hydros, a self-exiled drop-capsule man. He had turned up on Sorve when Lawler was a boy and had married Jinna Sawtelle, Damis” elder sister. They were both gone now, swept away by the Wave while out in a small boat at the wrong time.

Since he was fourteen or so Martello had worked in Delagard’s shipyard, but his chief claim to distinction was the immense poem he claimed to be writing, a retelling of the great migration from doomed Earth to the worlds of the galaxy. He had been busy with it for years, so he said. No one had ever seen more than a few lines of it.

Lawler stood in the doorway, not wanting to disturb him.

“Doctor,” Martello said. “Just the man I want to see. I need some sunburn medicine. I did a really good job on myself today.”

“Let’s have a peek at it.”

Martello shrugged out of his shirt. Though deeply tanned, he was reddened now beneath the tan. Hydros” sun was stronger than the one under which the ancestral race of humans had evolved. Lawler was kept busy all the time treating skin cancers, sun poisoning, all sorts of dermatological miseries.

“Doesn’t look so terrible,” Lawler told him. “Come around to my cabin in the morning and I’ll take care of it, all right? If you think you’ll have trouble sleeping, I can give you something now.”

“I’ll be okay. I’ll sleep on my belly.”

Lawler nodded. “How’s the famous poem going?”

“Slowly. I’ve been rewriting Canto Five.”

A little to his own surprise Lawler heard himself say, “Can I have a look?”

Martello seemed surprised too. But he pushed one of the curling algae-paper sheets toward him. Lawler held it open with both hands to read it. Martello’s handwriting was boyish and crude, all great looping whorls and swirls.

“And our mothers too,” Lawler pointed out.

“Them too,” Martello said, looking a little annoyed. “They get a canto of their own a little farther on.”

“Right,” Lawler said. “It’s very powerful poetry. Of course, I’m no real judge. You don’t like poems that rhyme?”

“Rhyme’s been obsolete for hundreds of years, doctor.”

“Has it? I didn’t know that. My father used to recite poems sometimes, ones from Earth. They liked using rhymes back then. It is an ancient Mariner / And he stoppeth one of three./ “ By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, / Now wherefore stopp’st thou me? "”

“What poem was that?” Martello asked.

“It’s called “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". It’s about a sea voyage—a very troubled voyage. The very deep did rot: O Christ! / That ever this should be!/Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs / Upon the slimy sea. ”

“Powerful stuff. Do you know the rest of it?”

“Just stray fragments here and there,” Lawler said.

“We ought to get together and talk about poetry some time, doctor. I didn’t realize you knew any.” Martello’s sunny expression darkened for a moment. “My father loved the old poems too. He brought a book of Earth poetry with him from the planet where he lived before he came here. Did you know that?”

“No,” Lawler said, excited. “Where is it?”

“Gone. It was with him when he and my mother drowned.”

“I would have wanted to see it,” said Lawler sadly.

“There are times I think I miss that book as much as I do my mother and father,” Martello said. He added ingenuously, “Is that a horrible thing to say, doctor?”

“I don’t think so, I think I understand what you mean.” Water, water, every where , Lawler thought. And all the boards did shrink. “Listen, come around to see me first thing after your morning shift, will you, Leo? I’ll fix up that sunburned back of yours then.”

Water, water, every where/Nor any drop to drink.

Still later Lawler found himself alone on deck again, under the night sky, throbbing blackness above him, a cool steady breeze blowing out of the north. It was past midnight. Delagard, Henders and Sundira were in the rigging, calling arcane cryptic things to one another. The Cross was perfectly centred overhead.