Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

“I’d say that you are, doctor.”

“Am I?”

“You’re very highly regarded, do you know that? Everyone I’ve spoken to has great praise for your patience, your endurance, your wisdom, your strength of character. Especially your strength of character. They tell me that you’re one of the toughest and strongest and most resilient people in the community.”

It sounded like a description of someone else entirely, someone far less brittle and inflexible than Valben Lawler. Lawler chuckled. “I may seem that way from the outside, I suppose. How wrong they all are.”

“I’ve always believed that a person is what he seems to others to be,” the priest said. “What you happen to think about yourself is completely unreliable and irrelevant. Only in the estimation of others can your true worth be validly determined.”

Lawler flicked an astonished glance at him. His long, austere face looked absolutely serious.

“Is that what you believe?” Lawler asked. He noticed that a note of irritation had crept into his voice. “I haven’t heard anything quite so crazy in a long time. But no, no, you’re just playing games with me, aren’t you? You like playing games of that sort.”

The priest offered no response. They fell silent, side by side in the cool morning sunlight. Lawler stared into the emptiness beyond. It lost focus and became a great blur of bobbing colours, an aimless ballet of water-flowers.

Then after a few moments he looked more closely at what was going on out there.

“I guess even the water-flowers aren’t completely invulnerable, eh?” he said, pointing out across the water. Some huge submerged creature’s mouth was visible on the far side of the field of flowers now, moving slowly among them just below the surface, creating a gaping dark cavern into which the bright-hued plants were tumbling by the dozens. “You can be as resilient as you like, but there’s always something coming along eventually to gobble you up. Isn’t that so, Father Quillan?”

Quillan’s reply was lost in a sudden gusting breeze.

There was another long cool silence. Lawler could still hear Quillan saying, “ A person is what he seems to others to be. What you happen to think about yourself is completely unreliable and irrelevant.’ Total nonsense, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? Of course it was.

And then Lawler heard his own voice saying, without giving him any warning, “Father Quillan, why did you decide to come to Hydros in the first place?”

“Why?”

“Yes, why. This is a damned inhospitable planet, if you happen to be human. It wasn’t designed for us and we manage to live here only in uncomfortable circumstances and it isn’t possible to leave once you get here. Why would you want to maroon yourself forever on a world like that?”

Quillan’s eyes became curiously animated. With some fervour he said, “I came here because I found Hydros irresistibly attractive.”

That’s not really an answer.”

“Well, then.” There was a new edge on the priest’s voice, as though he felt that Lawler was pushing him into saying things he would just as soon not say. “Let’s put it that I came because it’s a place where all galactic refuse ultimately winds up. It’s a world populated entirely by discards, rejects, the odds and ends of the cosmos. That’s what it is, isn’t it?”

“Of course not.”

“All of you are the descendants of criminals. There aren’t any criminals in the rest of the galaxy any more. On the other worlds everyone is sane now.”

“I doubt that very much.” Lawler couldn’t believe that Quillan was serious. “We’re the descendants of criminals, yes, some of us. That isn’t any secret. People who were said to be criminals, at any rate. My great-great-grandfather, for instance, was sent here because he had some bad luck, that was all. He accidentally killed a man. But let’s say that you’re right, that we’re merely so much debris and the descendants of debris. Why would you want to live amongst us, then?”

The priest’s chilly blue eyes gleamed. “Isn’t it obvious? This is where I belong.”

“So you could do your holy work among us, and lead us to grace?”

“Not in the slightest. I came here for my needs, not yours.”

“Ah. So you came out of pure masochism, some kind of need to punish yourself. Is that it, Father Quillan?” Quillan was silent. But Lawler knew that he must be right. “Punishment for what? A crime? You just told me there aren’t any more criminals.”

“My crimes have been directed against God. Which makes me one of you fundamentally. An outcast, an exile by my inherent nature.”

“Crimes against God,” Lawler said, musing. God was as remote and mysterious a concept to him as monkeys and jungles, crags and goats. “What kind of crime could you possibly commit against God? If he’s omnipotent, presumably he’s invulnerable, and if he isn’t omnipotent how can he be God? Anyway, you told me only a week or two ago that you didn’t even know whether or not you believed in God.”

“Which in itself is a crime against Him.”

“Only if you believe in him. If he doesn’t exist, you certainly can’t do him any injury.”

“You have a priest’s way with a sneaky argument,” Quillan said approvingly.

“Were you serious, that other time, when you said you weren’t sure of your faith?”

“Yes.”

“Not playing verbal games with me? Not just offering me a little dollop of quick cheap cynicism for the sake of a moment’s quick amusement?”

“No. Not at all. I swear it.” Quillan reached out and put his hand across Lawler’s wrist, an oddly intimate, confiding sort of gesture which at another time Lawler might have regarded as an unacceptable encroachment but which now seemed almost endearing. In a low, clear voice he said, “I dedicated myself to the service of God when I was still a very young man. That sounds pretty pompous, I know. But in practice what it’s meant has been a lot of hard and disagreeable work, not just long sessions of prayer in cold draughty rooms at unlikely hours of the morning and night, but also the doing of chores so nasty that only a doctor, I suppose, would understand. The washing of the feet of the poor, so to speak. All right, so be it. I knew that that was what I was volunteering for, and I don’t want any medals for it. But what I didn’t know, Lawler, what I never remotely imagined at the outset, was that the deeper I got into serving God through serving suffering humanity, the more vulnerable I’d become to periods of absolute spiritual deadness. To long stretches when I felt cut off from all connection with the universe about me, when human beings became as alien to me as aliens are, when I didn’t have the slightest shred of belief in the higher Power to which I had pledged to devote my life. When I felt so completely alone that I can’t even begin to describe it to you. The harder I worked, the more pointless it all became. A very cruel joke: I was hoping to earn God’s grace, I suppose, and instead He’s given me some good stiff doses of His absence. Are you following me, Lawler?”

“And what causes this deadness in you, do you think?”

“That’s what I came here to find out.”

“Why here, though?”

“Because there’s no Church here. Because there are only the most fragmentary human communities. Because the planet itself is hostile to us. And because it’s a place of no return, like life itself.” Something beyond Lawler’s comprehension was dancing in Quillan’s eyes now, something as baffling as a candle flame that burned downward instead of up. He seemed to be staring at Lawler out of some deep annihilating eternity from which he knew he had come and to which he yearned to return. “I wanted to lose myself here, do you see? And in that way maybe to find myself. Or at least to find God.”