Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

Lawler looked up at it, neatly arranged there in its crisscross way, thousands of unthinkably huge balls of exploding hydrogen lined up so very cleanly in the sky, one row this way and one row that. Martello’s unskilful verses were still in his mind. Now speared the long ships outward/Into the dark of darks. Was one of the suns in that formidable constellation the sun of Earth? No. No. They said you couldn’t see that star from Hydros. These were other stars, the ones that made up the Cross. But somewhere farther out in the darkness, hidden from his view by the great right-angled blast of light that was the Cross, lay that smallish yellow sun under whose mild rays the whole human saga had begun. Golden worlds gleaming, calling/As our fathers went forth . And our mothers, yes. That sun whose swift unexpected ferocity, in a few minutes of cosmic cruelty, had cancelled out that earlier gift of life. Turning ultimately against its own creations, sending implacable gusts of hard radiation, instantly transforming humanity’s mother world to a blackened crisp.

He had dreamed about Earth all his life, ever since his grandfather first had told him tales of the ancestral world, and yet it was still a mystery to him. And always would be, he knew. Hydros was too isolated, too backward, too remote from whatever centres of scholarship might still exist. There was no one here to teach him what Earth had been like. He understood hardly anything about it, its music, its books, its art, its history. Only dribbets and drabbets of data had come down to him, usually only the container, not the thing contained. Lawler knew that there had been a thing called opera, but it was impossible for him to visualize what it had been like. People singing a story? With a hundred musicians playing at the same time? He had never seen a hundred human beings in one place all at once, ever. Cathedrals? Symphonies? Suspension bridges? Highways? He had heard the names of those things; the things themselves were unknown to him. Mysteries, all mysteries. The lost mysteries of Earth.

That little ball—significantly smaller than Hydros, so they said—which had spawned empires and dynasties, kings and generals, heroes and villains, fables and myths, poets, singers, great masters of the arts and the sciences, temples and towers, statues and walled cities. All those glorious mysterious things whose nature he could barely imagine, living as he had all his life on pitiful impoverished watery Hydros. Earth which had spawned us and had sent us forth after centuries of striving into the dark of darks, toward the remote worlds of the indifferent galaxy. And then the door had been slammed shut behind us in one blast of furious radiation. Leaving us stranded out here, lost among the stars.

Golden worlds gleaming, calling —

And here we are now, aboard a little wandering white speck in the great sea, on a planet which itself is no more than a speck in the larger black sea that engulfs us all.

Alone, alone, all, all alone,/Alone on a wide wide sea!

Lawler couldn’t remember the next line. Just as well, he suspected.

He went belowdecks to see about getting some sleep.

A new dream came to him, an Earth-dream but not one like the ones he had had for so many years. This time he dreamed not of the death of Earth but of the leaving of it, the great diaspora, the flight to the stars. Once again he hovered above the familiar blue-green globe of his dream; and as he looked down he saw a thousand slender shining needles rising from it, or perhaps a million, too many for him to begin to count, all of them climbing toward him, surging outward, outward, streaming into space, a steady outward flow of them, a myriad tiny points of light penetrating the blackness that surrounded the blue-green planet. They were the ships of the spacefarers, he knew, the ones who had chosen to leave Earth, the explorers, the wanderers, the settlers, going forth into the great unknown, making their way outward from the mother world to the innumerable stars of the galaxy. He followed their courses across the heavens, tracking them to their destinations, to the many worlds whose names he had heard, worlds as mysterious and magical and unattainable to him as Earth itself: Nabomba Zom where the sea is scarlet and the sun is blue, and Alta Hannalanna where the great sluggish worms with nuggets of precious yellow jade in their foreheads tunnel through the spongy ground, and Galgala the golden, and Xamur where the air is perfume and the electrified atmosphere shimmers and crackles with beauty, and Marajo of the sparkling sands, and Iriarte, and Mentiroso, and Mulano of the double suns, and Ragnarok, and Olympus, and Malebolge, and Ensalada Verde, and Sunrise—

And even Hydros, the dead-end world, from which there was no returning—

The starships pouring outward from Earth went everywhere that there was to go. And somewhere along the way the light that was Earth winked out behind them. Lawler, tossing in turbulent sleep, saw yet again that terrible last blaze of fire, and after it the final blackness closing in, and he sighed for the world that had been. But no one else seemed to notice its passing: they were too busy moving outward, outward, outward.

The next day was the day when Gospo Struvin, making his way along the deck, kicked at an untidy pile of what looked like damp yellow rope and said, “Hey, who left this net here?”

“I told you,” Kinverson said afterward, a dozen times that day. “I don’t trust an easy sea.”

And Father Quillan said, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”

Struvin’s death had been too sudden, and it had come too soon in the voyage, for it to be in any way acceptable or even comprehensible. On Sorve death had always been a possibility: you took a fishing-boat too far out into the bay and a storm came out of nowhere, or you were strolling along the waterfront rampart of the island and the Wave rose up without warning and got you, or you found some nice tasty-looking shellfish growing in the shallows and they turned out not to be so nice after all. The ship, though, had seemed to offer a little zone of invulnerability. Perhaps because it was so vulnerable, perhaps because it was nothing more than a tiny hollow wooden shell, a mere speck floating in the midst of an unthinkable immensity, they had all perversely come to believe they were safe aboard it. Lawler had expected that there would be difficulties, and strain and privation, and a serious injury or two somewhere along the way to Grayvard, a challenge to his sometimes tenuous medical skills. But a death? Here in these calm waters? The death of the captain? And only five days out of Sorve. Just as the eerie tranquillity of the first few days had been troublesome and suspicious, Struvin’s death seemed ominous, a terrible foretaste of more calamities inescapably to come.

The voyagers closed around it the way pink new skin closes around a wound. Everyone became resolutely positive-minded, studiedly hopeful, ostentatiously considerate of the boundaries of everybody else’s overstressed psyche. Delagard announced that he would take command of the ship himself. To even out the shifts, Onyos Felk was moved to the first watch: he would direct the Martello-Kinverson-Braun team in the rigging, and Delagard would direct the new team of Golghoz-Henders-Thane.

After that first lapse of control upon hearing of Struvin’s death, Delagard presented now a facade of cool competence, utter undauntedness. He stood staunch and upright on the bridge, looking on as the watch of the day mounted the rigging. The wind stood fair from the east. The voyages continued onward.

Four days later the palms of Lawler’s hands were still smarting from the sting of the net-creature, and his fingers continued to be very stiff. The elaborate pattern of red lines had faded to a dull brown now, but perhaps Pilya was right that he’d have scars after all. That part didn’t bother him much: there were scars aplenty on him already, from this bit of carelessness or that over the years. But the stiffness troubled him. He needed delicacy in his fingers, not only for the surgery that he was occasionally required to perform, but because of the judicious probing and palpating of his patients” flesh that was an inherent part of the process of diagnosis. He couldn’t read the messages of their bodies with fingers that were like sticks.