Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

“Well, that could be,” the priest said. “But I’d be very surprised. I’ve never actually met a truly simple man.”

“Do you mean that?”

“You may think they are, but you’re always wrong. In my line of work you eventually get a chance to see into people’s souls, when they finally come to trust you, or when they finally begin to believe that a priest is nothing but a thin curtain that stands between them and God. And then you discover that even the simple ones aren’t simple at all. Innocent, perhaps, but never simple. The human mind at its most minimal is too complex ever to be simple. So forgive me, doctor, if I suggest that you return to your first hypothesis about Gharkid. I believe that he thinks. I believe that he is a seeker after God, just like all the rest of us.”

Lawler smiled. Believing in God was one thing, seeking after God something else entirely. Gharkid might well be a believer, on some basic unquestioning level, for all Lawler knew. But it was Quillan who was the seeker. It always amused Lawler the way people projected their own needs and fears on the world about them and elevated them to the status of fundamental laws of the universe.

And was finding God really what they were all trying to do, every one of them? Quillan, yes. He had a professional need, so to speak. But Gharkid? Kinverson? Delagard? Lawler himself?

Lawler took a long close look at Quillan. By this time he had learned how to read the priest’s face. Quillan had two modes of expression. One was the pious and sincere one. The other was the cold, dead, cynical, God-empty one. He shifted from one to the other in accordance with whatever spiritual storms were raging within his troubled mind. Right now Lawler suspected he was getting the pious Quillan, the sincere Quillan.

He said, “You think I’m a seeker after God too?”

“Of course you are!”

“Because I can quote a few lines of the Bible?”

“Because you think that you can live your life in His shadow and not for a moment accept the fact of His existence. Which is a situation that automatically calls its own opposite into being. Deny God and you are doomed to spend your life searching for Him, if only for the sake of finding out whether you’re right about His nonexistence.”

“Which is your situation exactly, Father.”

“Of course.”

Lawler glanced down the deck toward Gharkid, who was patiently sorting through his latest catch of algae, trimming away the dead strands and flinging them over the side. He was singing to himself, a little tuneless song.

“And if you neither deny God nor accept him, what then?” Lawler asked. “Wouldn’t you then be a truly simple person?”

“I suppose you would, yes. But I’m yet to find any person like that.”

“I suggest you have a chat with our friend Gharkid, then.”

“Oh, but I have,” the priest said.

Still there was no rain. The fish decided to come back within reach of Kinverson’s fishing gear, but the skies remained unyielding. The voyage was well into its third week, and the water they had brought with them from Sorve was seriously depleted now. What was left of it had begun to take on a dank, brackish taste. Rationing was second nature to them all, but the prospect of struggling through the entire eight-week journey to Grayvard on what was presently in their storage tubs was a grim one.

It was still too soon to start living on the eyeballs and blood and spinal fluid of sea-creatures—techniques which Kinverson cited as things he had done during long solitary rainless voyages—and the situation wasn’t yet critical enough to get out the equipment by which fresh water could be distilled from the sea. That was a last resort, inefficient and wearisome, a matter of the slow, steady accumulation of single drops, good only for a desperation supply.

But there were other things they could do. Raw fish, full of moisture and relatively low on salt, was part of everyone’s daily diet now. Lis Niklaus did her best to clean and trim it into neat appealing fillets; but even so it quickly became a tiresome regimen and sometimes a nauseating one. Wetting one’s skin and clothing down with sea water was useful also. It was a way of reducing body temperature and thereby cutting back on the internal need for water. And it was the only way to keep clean, since the fresh water on board was too precious to use for washing.

Then one afternoon the sky darkened unexpectedly and a cloudburst broke over them. “Buckets!” Delagard yelled. “Bottles, casks, flasks, anything! Get them out on deck!”

Like demons they ran up and down the ladders, hauling out anything that might hold water until the deck was covered with receptacles of all sorts. Then they stripped, every one of them, and danced naked in the rain like lunatics, washing the salt crusts from their skins and from their clothes. Delagard cavorted on the bridge, a burly satyr with a hairy chest as fleshy as a woman’s. With him was Lis, laughing and shouting and jumping beside him, her long yellow hair pasted to her shoulders, her big globular breasts bouncing like planets threatening to leave their orbits. Emaciated little Dag Tharp danced with sturdy Neyana Golghoz, who looked strong enough to flip him over her shoulder. Lawler was savouring the downpour by himself near the rear mast when Pilya Braun came dancing by, eyes shining, lips drawn back in a fixed grin of invitation. Her olive skin was glossy and splendid in the rain. Lawler danced with her for a minute or so, admiring her strong thighs and deep bosom, but when by her motions Pilya seemed to indicate dancing off with him to some snug place belowdecks, Lawler pretended not to understand what she was trying to communicate, and after a time she moved away.

Gharkid capered on the gantry-bridge next to his pile of seaweed. Dann Henders and Onyos Felk had joined hands and were prancing around near the binnacle. Father Quillan, bony and pale with his robe cast aside, seemed to be in a trance, head turned to the sky, eyes glassy, arms outstretched, shoulders working rhythmically. Leo Martello was dancing with Sundira, the two of them looking good together, slim, agile, vigorous. Lawler glanced around for Kinverson and found him up by the bow, not dancing at all, just standing matter-of-factly naked in the rain letting the water stream down his powerful frame.

The storm lasted no more than fifteen minutes. Lis calculated afterward that it had provided them with half a day’s additional supply of water.

There was constant doctoring for Lawler to do, the shipboard accidents, the blisters, the sprains, some mild dysentery, one day a broken collarbone aboard Bamber Cadrell’s ship. Lawler felt the strain of trying to spread himself over the entire fleet. Much of what he had to do he did by radio, crouching in front of Dag Tharp’s incomprehensible jumble of equipment in the Queen of Hydros ” radio room. But broken bones couldn’t be set by radio. He went by water-strider to Cadrell’s Sorve Goddess to handle the job.

Riding in the strider was an uneasy business. The thing was a lightweight human-powered hydrofoil, as flimsy as one of the long-legged giant crabs that Lawler sometimes had seen delicately picking their way across the floor of Sorve Bay: a mere shell made of laminated strips of the lightest wood, equipped with pedals, pontoon floats, underwater outrigger wings to provide lift, and a high-efficiency propeller. A semi-live coating of slimy microorganisms that minimized frictional drag grew on its skin.

Dann Henders rode with Lawler on his trip over to the Sorve Goddess . The strider was lowered into the water by davits and they descended to it by ropes, hand over hand. Lawler’s feet rested at a distance of no more than centimetres from the surface of the sea when he took his place on the frontmost of the strider’s two seats. The fragile little vehicle rocked lightly on the gentle swells. It felt as though only a thin film protected him from a yawning abyss. Lawler imagined tentacles rising from the depths, mocking eyes big as platters staring at him out of the waves, silvery jaws opening to bite.