Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

Pilya seemed worried about Lawler’s hands also. As she came up on deck for her turn in the rigging she saw him and took them gently in hers, as she had in the moments after Gospo Struvin’s death.

“They don’t look good,” she said. “Are you putting on your salve?”

“Faithfully. Although they’re healed beyond the point where the salve can do much good.”

“And the other medicine, the pink drops? The painkiller?”

“Oh, yes. Yes. I wouldn’t think of being without it.”

She rubbed her fingers lightly over his. “You are such a good man, such a serious man. If anything happened to you it would break my heart. I was frightened for you when I saw you fighting with that thing that killed the captain. And when I knew that your hands were hurt.”

A look of purest devotion spread like a sunrise over her sharp-planed snub-nosed face. Pilya’s features were coarse and unbeautiful, but her eyes were warm and shining. The contrast between her golden hair and her sleek olive-toned skin was very appealing. She was a strong, uncomplicated girl, and the emotion she was projecting now was the strong and uncomplicated one of unconditional love. Warily, not wanting to rebuff her too cruelly, Lawler withdrew his hands from her grasp while at the same time giving her a benevolent, noncommittal smile. It would have been easy enough to accept what she was offering, find some secluded nook in the cargo hold, enjoy the simple pleasures that he had denied himself so long. He was no priest, he reminded himself. He had taken no vow of celibacy. But he had lost faith somehow in his own emotions. He was unwilling to trust himself even in so unthreatening an adventure as this one would probably turn out to be.

“Do you think we will live?” she asked him suddenly.

“Live? Of course we’ll live.”

“No,” she said. “I still am afraid that we will die at sea, all of us. Gospo was only the first.”

“We’ll be all right,” said Lawler. “I told you that the other day and I’ll tell you again. Gospo had bad luck, that’s all. There’s always someone whose luck is bad.”

“I want to live. I want to get to Grayvard. There will be a husband waiting for me on Grayvard. Sister Thecla told me that, when she read my future, before we left. She said that when I come to the end of the voyage I will find my husband.”

“Sister Thecla told a lot of people a lot of crazy things about what was going to happen to us at the end of the voyage. You mustn’t pay any attention to fortune-tellers. But if a husband is what you want, Pilya, I hope that Sister Thecla told the truth for you.”

“An older man is what I want. Someone wise and strong, who will teach me things as well as love me. No one ever taught me anything, you know. Except how to work on a ship, and so I have worked on ships, and sailed here and there and here and there for Delagard, and I have never had a husband. But now I want one. It is my time. I am nice to look at, is that not so?”

“Very nice,” Lawler said.

Poor Pilya, he thought. He felt guilty for not loving her.

She turned away from him, as if recognizing that they were not heading in the direction she wanted this conversation to go. After a moment she said, “I was thinking about the little things from Earth that you showed me, the things you have in the cabin. The beautiful little things. How pretty they were! I told you I wanted one, and you said no, you couldn’t give me one, but now I have changed my mind anyway. I don’t want one. They are the past. I want only the future. You live in the past too much, doctor.”

“It’s a bigger place than the future, for me. There’s more room to look around.”

“No. No. The future is very big. The future goes on forever and ever. You wait and see if I am not right. You should throw those old things away. I know that you will never do it, but you should.” She gave him a shy, tender smile. “I need to go aloft now,” she said. “You are a very fine man. I thought I should tell you that. I just want you to know that you have a friend if you want one.” And then she turned and darted away.

Lawler watched her climb the rigging. Poor Pilya, he thought again. What a sweet girl you are. I could never love you, not in the way I would need to love you. But in your own way you are very fine.

She climbed lithely and swiftly, and in a moment she was high overhead. She climbed like one of the monkeys he remembered from his childhood storybooks, those books so full of tales of the incomprehensible land-world that Earth had been, that place of jungles, deserts, glaciers, monkeys and tigers, camels and swift horses, polar bears, walruses, goats that skipped from crag to crag. What were crags? What were goats? He had had to invent them for himself, from the sketchy hints in the stories. Goats were shaggy and lanky, with enormously long legs that had the spring of steel in them. Crags were rough upturned slabs of rock, which was something like wood-kelp timber only unimaginably harder. Monkeys were like ugly little men, brown and hairy and sly, and scrambled through the treetops, screeching and chattering. Well, Pilya was nothing at all like that. But she moved about up there as though it were her natural element.

It struck Lawler then that he wasn’t able to remember what it had been like making love to Pilya’s mother Anya, back there twenty years in the past. He recalled only that he had. But all the rest, the sounds Anya made, the way she moved, the shape of her breasts—gone. As gone as Earth itself, those sounds of hers. As though nothing had ever happened between them. Anya had had the same golden hair and dark smooth skin as Pilya, he recalled, but it seemed to him that her eyes had been blue. Lawler had been miserable, then, bleeding from a thousand wounds after Mireyl’s disappearance, and Anya had wandered along and offered a little comfort. Like mother, like daughter. Did mothers and daughters make love the same way also, driven unconsciously by some power of the genes? Would Pilya, in his arms, shift and blur and transform herself in his eyes into her mother? If he embraced Pilya, would he recapture his lost memories of Anya? Lawler pondered that, wondering if it was worth making the experiment to find out. No, he decided. No.

“Studying the water-flowers, doctor?” Father Quillan said, just at his side.

Lawler glanced around. Quillan had an odd slithery way of approaching: he would materialize out of the air as though he were a thing of ectoplasm and move up the rail toward you without seeming to move at all. And then he was there beside you, shimmering with metaphysical uneasiness.

“Water-flowers?” Lawler said abstractedly, half amused at having been caught in the midst of such lascivious speculations. “Oh. There. Yes, I see.”

How could he not have seen? On this brilliant sunny morning bobbing water-flowers were strewn everywhere on the bosom of the ocean. They were erect fleshy stalks about a metre high with bright fist-sized sporing structures at their top ends, very gaudily coloured, bright scarlet with yellow petals striped with green, and curious swollen black air-bladders below. The air-bladders hung just below the surface, keeping the water-flowers afloat. Even when slapped by a passing high swell the plants would pop up immediately, back into the perpendicular like tireless clowns that could be knocked down again and again without ever failing to rebound.

“A miracle of resilience,” Quillan said.

“A lesson to us all, yes,” said Lawler, suddenly inspired to a sermon. “We must try at all times to emulate them. In this life we get hit and hit and hit and each time we have to bounce right back. The water-flower should be our model: invulnerable to everything, completely resistant, capable of enduring all blows. But in fact we aren’t as bouncy as water-flowers, are we, Father?”