Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

Kinverson struck the drum three last slow blows, widely spaced—boom—boom— boom —and lowered his arm.

“Dag? Dag, where the hell are you?” It was Delagard’s voice, coming out of the darkness. “Start calling around the fleet. Make sure nobody’s sprung a leak.”

All was dark and quiet in the water. But when Lawler closed his eyes it seemed to him that searing streaks of blue light were flashing back and forth against his lids.

The next tidal surge was the most powerful one yet. It came upon them two days before they were expecting it, evidently because Onyos Felk had got his numbers wrong; and it struck with great enthusiasm and really jubilant malevolence, whacking the ships broadside as they lolled becalmed in a sleepy sea where drifting grey weeds belched a strangely seductive perfume upward into the air. Lawler was working belowdecks to reorganize his inventory of medicines. He thought at first that the rammerhorns had returned, so sharp was the impact. But no, no, this was nothing like the single point-source of a rammerhorn blow: it was more like the flat of a giant hand striking the hull and pushing the ship backward along its own course. He heard the magnetron kick in and waited for the sensation of lift, the sudden silence that meant they were riding the displacement field above the angry water. But the silence didn’t come, and Lawler had to make a quick desperate grab for the side of his bunk as the ship heeled up at a startling angle, throwing him toward the bulkhead. Things fell from his shelves and sped in one quick whoosh along the floor, fetching up in a scrambled heap on the far side of the cabin.

Was this it? The Wave, at last? And would they be able to withstand it?

He held tight and waited. The ship rocked back, fell with what sounded like a colossal crash into the cavity that the surge had left behind, and heeled over the other way, sending everything that had fallen from the shelves sliding back across the cabin. Then it righted itself. All was still. He picked up the Egyptian god and the Greek potsherd and put them back where they had been.

More? Another blow?

No. Still and steady.

Are we sinking, then?

Apparently not. Cautiously Lawler made his way out of the cabin and cocked an ear. Delagard was yelling something. They were all right, he said. It had been a good hard smack, but they were all right.

The force of the big surge had carried them along with it, though, and it had pulled them off course, sweeping them eastward half a day’s journey. But all six vessels had been swept, miraculously, as a single unit. There they were, out of formation but still within sight of one another, drifting on the now tranquil sea. It took an hour to rebuild the formation, six hours more to regain the position they had held when the surge had hit them. Not so bad, really. They went onward.

Nimber Tanamind’s collarbone seemed to be healing properly. Lawler didn’t go back over to the Sorve Goddess to check it out, since nothing that Nimber’s wife Salai told him about his condition indicated that problems were developing. Lawler described to her how she should change the bandage and what to look for in the vicinity of the fracture.

Martin Yanez of the Three Moons called in to say that old Sweyner the glassblower had been struck in the face by a fast-flying hagfish, and now his neck was so sore that he couldn’t hold his head straight. Lawler told Yanez what to do about that. From the Sisterhood ship, the Hydros Cross , came a rare query: Sister Boda was having shooting pains in her left breast. There was no point in going to see her. The Sisters, he knew, weren’t likely to let him examine her. He suggested pain-killers and asked them to call back after Sister Boda’s next menstrual period. That was the last he heard of Sister Boda’s sore breast.

Someone on the Black Sea Star fell from the rigging and dislocated her arm. Lawler led Poilin Stayvol step by step through the process of relocating it for her. Someone on the Golden Sun was vomiting black bile. It turned out that he had been experimenting with eating arrowfish caviar. Lawler advised a more cautious diet. Someone on the Sorve Goddess complained of recurring nightmares. Lawler suggested a nip of brandy before going to sleep. For Lawler it was business as usual.

Father Quillan, perhaps envious, observed that it must be wonderfully gratifying to him to be needed in this way, to be so essential to the life of an entire community, to be able to heal the suffering ones, more often than not, when they turned to him in pain.

“Gratifying? I suppose so. I’ve never actually bothered to think much about it. It’s simply my job.”

And so it was. But Lawler realized that there was something in what the priest had said. His power over Sorve Island had been almost godlike, or at least priestly. What did it mean, after all, to have been the doctor there for twenty-five years? Why, that he had had every man’s balls in his hand at one time or another, that he had had his arm up every woman’s cunt, that just about everyone on Sorve under the age of twenty-five was someone he had pulled out into the air, bloody and kicking, and given his first slap on the rump. All that tended to create a certain bond. It gave the doctor a certain claim on them, and they on him. No wonder people anywhere will worship their doctor, Lawler thought. To them he is the Healer. The Doctor. The Magician. The one who protects, the one who gives comfort and surcease from pain. It had been going on that way since the days of the cave dwellers, back there on poor damned doomed lost Earth. He was only the latest in a long long line. And, unlike the hapless Father Quillan and others of his profession, whose thankless task it was to proffer the blessings of an invisible god, he was actually in a position where he could sometimes deliver tangible benefits. So yes, yes, he was a powerful figure in the community by virtue of his vocation, the man with the power of life and death, respected and needed and probably feared, and he supposed that that was gratifying. Very well. He was gratified. He didn’t see how that made much of a difference.

They were in the Green Sea now, where dense colonies of a lovely aquatic plant made it almost impossible for the ships to move forward. The plant was succulent, with thick glossy spoon-shaped leaves sprouting from a brown central stem and a central sporing stalk topped by brilliant yellow-and-purple reproductive bodies. Air-filled bladders kept the plants afloat. Feathery grey roots twined like tentacles below the surface, tangled together in dark mats. The plants were so closely interwoven below the waterline that they formed what was virtually an unbroken carpet covering the sea. The ships butted bow-first into them and came to a standstill.

Kinverson and Neyana Golghoz went out in the water-strider with machetes to hack them apart.

“Useless,” Gharkid said, to no one in particular. “I know these plants. You cut them up, each one turns into five new ones.”

Gharkid was right. Kinverson chopped at the pretty weeds with might and main while Neyana pedalled the strider forward by sheer brute force; but no opening appeared. It wasn’t possible for one man, no matter how strong, to cut a big enough hole in the plant mass to create any real channel. The sundered pieces of each plant took up independent lives immediately: you could almost see them growing themselves back, sealing off the cut place, putting out new roots, sending up shiny new spoons and showy new sporing stalks.

“Let me check my medical supplies,” said Lawler. “I might have something we can sprinkle on them that they won’t enjoy.”

He went below, to the cargo hold. What he had in mind was a tall flask of a black viscous oil sent to him long ago by his colleague Dr Nikitin of Salamil Island in return for a favour. Supposedly Dr Nikitin’s oil was useful in killing fireflower, an unpleasant stinging plant that occasionally caused problems for human swimmers, though Gillies didn’t seem to mind its presence at all. Lawler had never needed to make use of the oil: the last fireflower infestation in Sorve Bay had occurred when he was still a young man. But it was the only thing in his collection of drugs, medicines, ointments and potions that was intended to do injury to some form of plant life. Maybe it would be effective against the one they were encountering here. He saw no harm in trying.