Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

“God? Where? Someplace down there at the bottom of this enormous ocean?”

“Why not? He doesn’t seem to be anywhere else, does He?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Lawler began to say. But then from high overhead came a startling cry.

“Land ho!” Pilya Braun sang out. She was in the foremast rigging, standing on the yard. “Island to the north! Island to the north!”

There were no islands in these waters, neither to the north or south, nor to the east or west. If there were, everyone aboard would have been looking forward to the sighting for days. But no one had said a word about islands here.

Onyos Felk, in the wheel-box, let loose a bellow of disbelief. Shaking his head, the mapkeeper came stumping toward Pilya on his short bandy legs. “What are you saying, girl? What island? What would an island be doing in this part of the sea?”

“How would I know?” Pilya called. She held on to the ropes with one hand and swung herself far out over the deck. “did I put it there?”

“There can’t be an island.”

“Come up here and see for yourself, you dried-up old fish!”

“What? What?”

Lawler shaded his eyes and peered into the distance. All he saw were the bobbing water-flowers. But Quillan tugged eagerly at his arm. “There! Do you see?”

Did he? Yes, yes, Lawler thought he saw something: a thin yellow-brown line, perhaps, on the northern horizon. An island, though? How could he tell?

Everyone was on deck, now, milling around. In the midst of it all was Delagard, carrying the precious sea-chart globe cradled in one arm and a stubby spy-glass fashioned of a yellowish metal in the other. Onyos Felk went scurrying up to him and reached for the globe. Delagard gave him a poisonous look and shook him off with a hiss.

“But I need to look at—”

“Keep your hands away, will you?”

“The girl says there’s an island. I want to prove to her that that’s impossible.”

“She sees something, doesn’t she? Maybe it is one. You don’t know everything, Onyos. You don’t know anything.” With furious demonic energy Delagard pushed his way past the gawping mapkeeper and began to mount the rigging, climbing with his elbows and his teeth, still cradling the globe in his right arm and gripping the spy-glass with the left. He reached the yard somehow, wedged himself in, put the glass to his eye. There was a tremendous silence below him on the deck. After an infinitely long time Delagard looked down and said, “Damned if there isn’t!” The ship-owner handed the spy-glass to Pilya and feverishly pored over the globe, tracing the movements of neighbouring islands with exaggerated elbows-out excursions of his fingers. “Not Velmise, no. Not Salimil. Kaggeram? No. No. Kentrup?” He shook his head. Everyone was watching him. It was quite a performance, Lawler thought. Delagard passed the sea-chart to Pilya, took back the glass from her, gave her a little pat on the rump. He stared again. “God fuck us all! A new one, that’s what it is! They’re building it right now! Look at that! The timbers! The scaffolding! God fuck us all!” He tossed the spy-glass toward the deck. Dann Henders caught it deftly before it struck and put it to his eye, while the others crowded around him. Delagard was on his way down from the rigging, muttering to himself. “God fuck us all! God fuck us all!”

The spy-glass went from hand to hand. In a few minutes, though, the ship was close enough to the new island so that it could be seen without the aid of the glass. Lawler stared, fascinated and awed.

It was a narrow structure, perhaps twenty or thirty metres wide and a hundred metres long. Its highest point rose just a couple of metres out of the water, a ridge that looked like the humped spine of some colossal sea-creature basking just below the surface. Gillies, about a dozen of them, were moving ponderously about on it, hauling logs into place, bracing them up, cutting notches with strange Gillie tools, wrapping fibrous bindings about them.

The sea nearby was boiling with life and activity. Some of the creatures in it were Gillies, Lawler saw, Gillies by the score. The little domes of their heads were popping up and down in the tranquil waves like the tops of water-flowers. But he recognized also the long, sleek, shining forms of divers moving among them. They were fetching wood-kelp timbers up from the depths, it seemed, delivering them to the Gillies in the water, who were hewing them, squaring them off, passing them along an underwater chain to the shore of the new island, where other Gillie workers dragged them up into the air and set about preparing them for installation.

The Black Sea Star had pulled up to starboard. Figures were moving around on its deck, pointing, waving. On the other side, the Sorve Goddess was coming up fast, with the Three Moons not far behind it.

“That’s a platform over there,” Gabe Kinverson said. “North side of the island, to the left.”

“Jesus, yes!” Delagard cried. “Will you look at the size of it!”

Immobile just beyond the island, drifting alongside it as though moored, was what looked like a second island but which was in fact the enormous sea-creature that the island itself had for a moment seemed to be. Platforms were the largest animals of the seas of Hydros that any human had ever heard of, larger even than the all-devouring whale-like beasts known as mouths: huge flat blocky things, vaguely rectangular in shape, so inert they might just as well have been islands. They drifted casually in all seas, passively straining microorganisms from the water through screenlike apertures around their perimeters. How they managed to take in enough food in the course of a day to sustain themselves, even feeding round the clock as they did, was beyond anyone’s comprehension. Lawler imagined that they must be as sluggish as driftwood, metabolically—mere giant lumps of barely sentient meat. And yet their vast purple eyes, set in triple rows of six along their backs, each one wider across than a man’s shoulders, seemed to hold some sort of sombre intelligence. Now and then a platform had come wandering into Sorve Bay, floating with its belly just above the submerged planks of the bay floor. One time Lawler, out in the bay fishing from a small boat, had rowed unknowingly right over one, and found himself looking down in utter amazement into a set of those great sad eyes that stared back up at him through the transparent water with a sort of godlike detachment and even, he imagined, a weird kind of compassion.

This platform seemed to be in use as nothing more or less than a work-table. Bands of Gillies were toiling industriously on its back. They were moving about in knee-deep water, coiling and twining long strands of algae fibres that were being pushed up onto the platform from below by shining green tentacles. The tentacles were as thick as an arm, very supple, with fingerlike projections at their ends. No one, not even Kinverson, had any idea what kind of creature they might belong to.

Father Quillan said, “How marvellous it is, the way they all work together, those different animals!”

Lawler turned to the priest. “No one’s ever seen an island under construction before, not that I’ve ever heard of. So far as we’ve known, all the islands are hundreds or even thousands of years old. So this is how they do it! What a sight!”

“Some day,” Quillan said, “this whole planet will have real land like other worlds. The sea floor will rise, millions of years from now. By building these artificial islands and coming up out of the sea to live, the Gillies are preparing themselves for their next evolutionary phase.”

Lawler blinked. “How do you know that?”

“I studied geology and evolution at the seminary on Sunrise. Don’t you think priests are taught anything but rituals and scriptures? Or that we take the Bible literally? This place has a very quiet geological history, you know. There weren’t any dynamic crustal movements that pushed mountain ranges and whole continents up out of the primordial sea the way it happened on land worlds, and so everything remained on the same level, most of it submerged. In time the sea was able to erode away any land formations that did project above the water. But all that’s due to change. Pressure’s building up at the planet’s core. Internal gravitational stresses are slowly creating turbulence, and in thirty million years, forty million, fifty—”