Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

It was ugly stuff, but fertile. The water swarmed with life, much of it new and strange. Bulky ungraceful broad-headed fishes as big as a man, with dull blue scales and black blind-looking eyes, nosed around the ships like floating logs. Occasionally a beautiful velvety sea-leopard would come up with terrific velocity from straight below and swallow one in a single lunging gulp. One afternoon a stocky tubular thing twenty metres long with a jaw like a hatchet appeared from nowhere between the flagship and the bow of Bamber Cadrell’s ship and went slamming thunderously across the flagship’s wake, rising up and pounding the water frenziedly with its chin, and when it had passed by there were severed chunks of the broad-headed blue fish scattered everywhere on the yellow waves. Smaller versions of the hatchet-jaw now emerged from below and began to feed. Meatfish abounded here too, swimming in whirling circles with their sharp-tipped tentacles flashing like blades, but they stayed maddeningly out of the reach of Kinverson’s fishing lines.

Armies made up of millions of little many-legged things with glistening transparent bodies cut through the yellow scum like scythes, opening wide boulevards that closed immediately behind them. Gharkid brought up a net-load of them—they scrambled and thrashed wildly against the meshes, panicky in the open sunlight, trying to get back to the water—and when Dag Tharp, not at all serious, suggested that they might be good to eat, Gharkid promptly stewed a batch of them in their own yellow-stained sea-water and ate them with a show of complete unconcern.

“Not so bad,” he said. “Try some.”

Two hours later he still seemed to be all right. Others took the risk, Lawler among them. They ate them legs and all. The little crustaceans were crunchy, vaguely sweet, apparently nourishing. No one reacted badly to them. Gharkid spent the day at the gantry, pulling them up in his net by the thousand, and that night there was a great feast.

Other life-forms of the Yellow Sea were less rewarding. Ambulatory green jellyfish, harmless but messy, found a way of crawling up the sides of the hull onto the deck in great numbers, where they rotted within minutes. They all had to be swept back over the side, a task that took nearly an entire day. In one region the rigid black fruiting-towers of some large alga rose to heights of seven or eight metres above the water in the mornings and exploded in the warmth of midday, bombarding the ships with thousands of hard little pellets that sent people scattering for cover. And there were hagfish in these waters, too. By tens and twenties platoons of the worm-like things went whizzing and buzzing above the waves on flights of hundred metres or so, desperately flapping their sharp-angled leather wings with a weird dreadful purposefulness until at last they fell back into the water. Sometimes they passed close enough to the ship so that Lawler could see the ridges of hard red bristles on their backs, and he would touch his hand to his left cheek, where some abrasions still lingered from his own encounter with one.

“Why do they fly like that?” he asked Kinverson. “Are they trying to catch something that lives in the air?”

“Isn’t anything that lives in the air,” Kinverson said. “Something’s trying to catch them , more likely. They see a big mouth opening behind them and they take off. It’s a pretty good way to escape. The other time they fly is when they’re mating. The females go up ahead a ways, and the males come flying after them. The guys that fly the fastest and longest are the ones that get the girls.”

“Not a bad selection system. If you’re breeding for speed and endurance.”

“Let’s hope we don’t get to see it in action. The fuckers come out by the thousands. They can really fill the air, and they’re absolutely crazed.”

Lawler indicated the rough place on his cheek. “I can imagine. A little one smacked into me right here last week.”

“How little?” Kinverson said incuriously.

“Maybe fifteen centimetres.”

“Lucky thing for you it was so small,” Kinverson said. “Lot of real bitchy things out there.”

“You live in the past too much, doctor,” Pilya had said. But how could he not? The past lived in him. Not only Earth, that remote and mythical place; but Sorve, especially Sorve, where his blood and body and mind and soul had been put together. The past rose up in him all the time. It rose up in him now, as he stood by the rail looking out at the strangeness of the Yellow Sea.

He was ten years old, and his grandfather had called him to his vaargh. His grandfather had retired from doctoring three years before and spent his days walking by the sea-wall, and he was shrunken and yellowish-looking now and it was clear that he didn’t have much longer to live. He was very old, old enough to remember even some of the first-generation settlers, even his own grandfather, Harry Lawler, Harry the Founder.

“I have something for you, boy,” his grandfather said. “Come here. Come closer. You see that shelf, there, Valben? Where the Earth things are? Bring them over to me.”

There were four Earth things there, two flat round metal ones, and a large rusted metal one, and a painted piece of pottery. Once there had been six, but the other two, the little statuette and the piece of rough stone, were in Valben’s father’s vaargh now. Valben’s grandfather had already begun passing his possessions on.

“Here, boy,” his grandfather said. “I want you to have this. It belonged to my grandfather Harry, who got it from his grandfather, who brought it with him from Earth when he went to space. And now it’s yours.” And he gave him the piece of pottery, painted orange and black.

“Not my father? Not my brother?”

“This is for you,” his grandfather said. “To remember Earth by. And to remember me by. You’ll be careful not to lose it, won’t you? Because there are only six Earth things that we have, and if we lose them, we won’t be getting any more. Here. Here.” He pressed it into Valben’s hand. “From Greece, it is. Maybe Socrates once owned it, or Plato. And now it’s yours.”

That was the last time he ever spoke to his grandfather.

For months afterward he carried the piece of painted pottery with him wherever he went. And when he rubbed its jagged rough-edged surface it seemed to him that Earth was alive again in his hand, that Socrates himself was speaking to him out of the bit of pottery, or Plato. Whoever they might have been.

He was fifteen. His brother Coirey, who had run off to sea, was home for a visit. Coirey was nine years older than he was, the oldest of what once had been three brothers, but the middle one, young Bernat, had died so long ago that Valben scarcely remembered him. Coirey was to have been the island’s next doctor, some day; but Coirey had no interest in doctoring. Doctoring would tie him down to a single island. The sea, the sea, the sea, that was what Coirey wanted. And so Coirey had gone off to sea, and letters had come from him from places that were only names to Valben, Velmise and Sembilor and Thetopal and Meisa Meisanda; and now Coirey himself was here, just for a short while, stopping off at Sorve on a voyage to a place called Simbalimak, in a sea known as the Azure Sea that was so far away it seemed like another world.

Valben hadn’t seen him for four years. He didn’t know what to expect. The man who came in had the same face as his father, the face that he was beginning to have also, with strong features, a powerful jaw, a long straight nose; but he was so tanned by sun and wind that his skin looked like an old piece of rugfish hide, and there was an angry slash across his cheek, a purpling scar that ran from the corner of his eye to the corner of his mouth. “Meatfish got me,” he said. “But I got him, too.” He punched Valben’s arm. “Hey, you’re big! Just as big as I am, you are. But lighter. You need some flesh on your bones.” Coirey winked. “Come with me to Meisa Meisanda sometime. They know food, there. It’s a feast day every day. And the women! The women, boy!” He frowned and said, “You go for women, don’t you? Sure, of course you do. Right? Right. What about it, Val? When I get back from Simbalimak, will you take a trip to Meisa Meisanda with me?”