Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

“You know I can’t leave here, Coirey. I have studying to do.”

“Studying.”

“Father’s teaching me doctoring.”

“Oh. Right. Right. I forgot that, didn’t I? You’re going to be the next Dr Lawler. But you can come away to sea with me for a little while first, can’t you?”

“No,” Valben said. “No, I can’t.”

And then he understood why his grandfather had given the little bit of pottery from Earth to him, and not to his older brother Coirey.

His brother never returned to Sorve again.

He was seventeen, and deep in his medical studies.

“High time you did an autopsy with me, Valben,” his father said. “It’s all just theory for you so far. But you’ve got to find out what’s inside the package sooner or later.”

“Maybe we ought to wait until I’ve finished my anatomy lessons,” he said. “So I have a better idea of what I’m seeing.”

“This is the best kind of anatomy lesson there is,” his father said.

And took him inside, to the surgical room, where someone was lying on the table under a light blanket of water-lettuce cloth. He drew the blanket aside and Valben saw that it was an old woman with grey hair and flabby breasts that fell aside toward her armpits; and then a moment later he realized that he knew her, that he was looking at Bamber Cadrell’s mother, Samara, the wife of Marinus. Of course he would know her, he realized: there were only sixty people on the island, and how could any of them be strangers? But still—Marinus” wife, Bamber’s mother—naked like this, lying dead on the surgical table—

“She died this morning, very quickly, just fell down in her vaargh. Marinus brought her in. Most likely her heart, but I want to see for certain, and you should see too.” His father picked up his case of surgical tools. Then he said, softly, “I didn’t enjoy my first autopsy either. But it’s a necessary thing, Valben. You’ve got to know what a liver looks like, and a spleen, and lungs, and a heart, and you can’t learn it by reading about them. You have to know the difference between healthy organs and diseased ones. And we don’t get that many bodies to work on, here. This is an opportunity I can’t let you pass up.”

He selected a scalpel, showing Valben the proper grip, and made the first incision. And began to lay bare the secrets of Samara Cadrell’s body.

It was bad at first, very bad.

Then he found he could tolerate it, that he was getting used to the awfulness of it, the shock of taking part in this bloody violation of the sanctuary of the body.

And after a time it actually became fascinating, when he had managed to forget that this was a woman he had known all his life, and was thinking of her only as an arrangement of internal organs of various colours and textures and shapes.

But that night, when he was done with the last of his studying and was out behind the reservoir with Boda Thalheim and sliding his hands across her smooth flat belly, he couldn’t keep from thinking that behind this tight drum of taut lovely skin there also was an arrangement of internal organs of various colours and textures and shapes very much like those he had seen this afternoon, the shining coils of intestines and all the rest, and that within these firm round breasts were intricate glands scarcely different from those within the flabby breasts of Samara Cadrell, which his father had demonstrated for him a few hours before with deft strokes of his scalpel. And he pulled his hands back from Boda’s sleek body as though it had turned into Samara’s under his caresses.

“Is something wrong, Val?”

“No. No.”

“Don’t you want to?”

“Of course I do. But—I don’t know—”

“Here. Let me help you.”

“Yes. Oh, Boda. Oh, yes!”

And in moments everything was all right. But he wondered if he would ever touch a girl again without having vivid images of her pancreas and kidneys and fallopian tubes rise unbidden and unwanted in his mind, and it occurred to him that being a doctor was a very complex business indeed.

Images out of bygone times. Phantoms that would never leave him.

Three days later Lawler went down to the cargo hold in the ship’s belly for some medical supplies, carrying only a small taper to light his way. In the dimness he nearly walked into Kinverson and Sundira, who were coming out from between the crates. They looked sweaty and dishevelled and a little surprised to see him, and there wasn’t much doubt of what they had been up to.

Kinverson, unabashed, looked at him straight on and said, “Morning, doc.”

Sundira didn’t say a thing. She tugged her wrap together in front, where it was parted, and went on past, expressionless, meeting Lawler’s eyes only for a moment and quickly looking away. She seemed not so much embarrassed as simply retreating into a self-containing sphere. Stung, Lawler nodded as if this were a completely neutral encounter in a completely neutral part of the ship, and continued forward to the medical storage area.

It was the first real evidence he had ever had that Kinverson and Thane were lovers, and it hit him harder than he would have expected. Kinverson’s words about the mating habits of hagfish, a few days earlier, came back to him now. He wondered whether they had been aimed at him in some sly, mocking way. The guys that fly the fastest get the girls.

No. No. Lawler knew that he had had plenty of opportunities of his own back on the island to get something going with Sundira. He had chosen not to, for reasons that had seemed to make sense at the time.

So why was he so hurt now?

You want her more than you’ll admit even to yourself, don’t you?

Yes. He did. Especially right now.

Why? Because she’s involved with somebody else?

What did it matter? He wanted her. Lawler had known that before, and had done nothing about it. Maybe it was time to start thinking harder about why he hadn’t.

He saw them together again later in the day in the stern, up by the gantry bridge. From the looks of things Kinverson had caught something unusual, and he was showing it to her, the proud huntsman displaying his catch to his woman.

“Doc?” Kinverson called, poking his head over the edge of the bridge. He smiled in a way that was either blandly amiable or casually condescending, Lawler wasn’t sure which. “Come up here for a minute, will you, doc? Something here that might interest you.”

Lawler’s first impulse was to shake his head and keep on going. But he didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of avoiding them. What was he afraid of? That he’d see Kinverson’s paw-prints all over her skin? He told himself not to be so stupid and scrambled up the little ladder to the gantry.

Kinverson had all manner of fishing equipment bolted to the deck, gaffs and hooks and lines and such. Here, too, were the nets Gharkid used in trawling for algae.

A graceful greenish creature that looked a little like a diver, but smaller, was lying limply on the gantry-bridge floor in a yellow puddle, as though Kinverson had just pulled it aboard. Lawler didn’t recognize it. Some sort of a mammal, most likely. Air-breathing, like so many other inhabitants of Hydros” ocean.

“What’s that you have there?” he asked Kinverson.

“Well, now, we’re not so sure, doc.”

It had a low, sloping forehead, an elongated muzzle tipped with stubby grey whiskers, and a slender streamlined body ending in a three-vaned tail. There was a pronounced spinal ridge. Its forelimbs were flattened into narrow flippers somewhat like those of Gillies. Curved grey claws, short and sharp, protruded from them. Its eyes, black and round and shining, were open.

It didn’t appear to be breathing. But it didn’t look dead, either. The eyes held an expression. Fear? Bewilderment? Who could say? They were alien eyes. They seemed to be worried ones.