Robert Silverberg: The Face of the Waters

The softness of the night was deceptive. Most times of the year Sorve was something other than a soft place to live. Its climate alternated between periods of hot-and-dry and cold-and-wet, with only the sweet little summer interlude when Sorve was drifting in mild, humid equatorial latitudes to provide a brief illusion of comfort and ease. This was the good time of the year, now. Food was abundant and the air was sweet. The islanders rejoiced in it. The rest of the year life was much more of a struggle.

Unhurriedly Lawler made his way around the reservoir and down the ramp to the lower terrace. It was a gentle slope from here to the island’s rim. He went past the scattered buildings of the shipyard from which Nid Delagard ran his maritime empire and the indistinct domed shapes that were the waterfront factories, in which metals—nickel, iron, cobalt, vanadium, tin—were extracted from the tissues of low-phylum sea-creatures by slow, inefficient processes. It was hard to make out anything clearly, but after some forty years of living on this one small island Lawler had no trouble getting around any part of the place in the dark.

The big two-storey shed that housed the power plant was just to his right and a little way ahead, down at the water’s edge. He headed toward it.

There was no hint of morning yet. The sky was a deep black. Some nights Sunrise, the sister planet of Hydros, gleamed in the heavens like a great blue-green eye, but tonight Sunrise was absent on the other side of the world, casting its bright glow on the mysterious waters of the unexplored far hemisphere. One of the three moons was visible, though, a tiny point of hard white light off to the east, close to the horizon. And stars shimmered everywhere, cascades of glittering silver powder scattered across the blackness, a ubiquitous dusting of brightnesses. That infinite horde of distant suns formed a dazzling backdrop for the one mighty foreground constellation, the brilliant Hydros Cross—two blazing rows of stars that arched across the sky at right angles to each other like a double cincture, one spanning the world from pole to pole, the other marching steadfastly along above the equator.

For Lawler these were the stars of home, the only stars he had ever seen. He was Hydros-born, fifth generation. He had never been to any other world and never would. Sorve Island was as familiar to him as his own skin. And yet he sometimes tumbled without warning into frightening moments of confusion when all sense of familiarity dissolved and he felt like a stranger here: times when it seemed to him that he had just arrived on Hydros that very day, flung down out of space like a falling star, a castaway from his true native place far away. Sometimes he saw the lost mother world of Earth shining in his mind, bright as any star, its great blue seas divided by the enormous golden-green land-masses that were called continents, and he thought, This is my home, this is my true home . Lawler wondered if any of the other humans on Hydros ever experienced something like that now and again. Probably so, though no one ever spoke of it. They were all strangers here, after all. This world belonged to the Gillies. He and everyone like him here lived here as uninvited guests.

He had reached the brink of the sea now. The familiar railing, rough, woody-textured like everything else on this artificial island that had neither soil nor vegetation, came up to meet his grasp as he clambered to the top of the sea-wall.

Here at the wall the slope in the island’s topography, which ran gradually downhill from the built-up high ground in the interior and the ocean bulwark beyond it, reversed itself sharply and the flooring turned upward to form a meniscus, a crescent rim, that shielded the inner streets against all but the most severe of tidal surges. Grasping the rail, leaning forward over the dark lapping water, Lawler stood staring outward for a moment, as though offering himself to the all-surrounding ocean.

Even in the darkness he had a complete sense of the comma-shaped island’s form and his exact place along its shore. The island was eight kilometres long from tip to tip, and about a kilometre across at its widest point, measuring from the bayfront to the summit of the rear bulwark that held back the open sea. He was near the centre, the innermost gulf. To his right and left the island’s two curving arms stretched outward before him, the rounded one where the Gillies lived, and the narrow tapering one where the island’s little handful of human settlers clustered close together.

Right in front of him, enclosed by that pair of unequal arms, was the bay that was the living heart of the island. The Gillie builders of the island had created an artificial bottom there, an underwater shelf of interlaced wood-kelp timbers attached to the mainland from arm to arm, so that the island always would have a shallow, fertile lagoon adjacent to it, a captive pond. The wild menacing predators that haunted the open sea never entered the bay: perhaps the Gillies had made some treaty with them long ago. A lacing of spongy bottom-dwelling night-algae, needing no light, bound the underside of the bay floor together, ever protecting and renewing it with their steady stubborn growth. Above that was sand, washed in by storms from the great unknown ocean floor farther out. And above that a thicket of useful aquatic plants of a hundred different species or more, in which all manner of sea-creatures swarmed. Shellfish of many sorts inhabited its lower reaches, filtering sea water through their soft tissues and concentrating valuable minerals within themselves for the use of the islanders. Sea-worms and serpents moved among them. Plump and tender fish grazed there. Just now Lawler could see a pod of huge phosphorescent creatures moving about out there, emanating pulsating waves of blue-violet light: the great beasts known as mouths, perhaps, or perhaps they were platforms, but it was still too dark to tell. And beyond the bright green water of the bay was the great ocean sea, rolling to the horizon and past it, holding the entire world in its grasp, a gloved hand gripping a ball. Lawler, staring toward it, felt for the millionth time the weight of its immensity, its thrust and power.

He looked now toward the power plant, solitary and massive on its little snubnosed promontory sticking out into the bay.

They hadn’t finished it after all. The ungainly building, shrouded in festoons of woven straw matting to shield it from the rain, still was silent and dark. A few shadowy figures were shuffling about in front of it. They had the unmistakable slope-shouldered shape of Gillies.

The concept of the power plant was that it would generate electricity by taking advantage of temperature differentials in the sea. Dann Henders, who was as close to an engineer as anyone was on Sorve, had explained it to Lawler after extracting a sketchy description of the project from one of the Gillies. Warm sea-water from the surface level was pulled in through vanes and entered a vacuum chamber, where its boiling point would be greatly reduced. The water, boiling violently, was supposed to yield low-density steam that would drive the turbines of the generator. Cold sea-water, pumped up from the deeper levels beyond the bay, was going to be used then to condense the steam into water again, and it would be returned to the sea through discharge outlets halfway around the island from here.

The Gillies had constructed practically the whole thing—pipes, pumps, vanes, turbines, condensers, the vacuum chamber itself—out of the various organic plastics they produced from algae and other water plants. Apparently they had used scarcely any metal in the design at all, not surprising in view of the difficulty of obtaining metals on Hydros. It was all very ingenious, especially considering that the Gillies weren’t notably technologically-minded, as intelligent galactic species went. Some exceptional genius among them must have come up with the idea. Genius or not, though, they were said to be having an ungodly time making the operation work, and it was yet to produce its first watt. Most of the humans wondered if it ever would. It might have been a whole lot faster and simpler for the Gillies, Lawler thought, if they had let Dann Henders or one of the other engineering-oriented humans sit in on the design of it. But of course the Gillies weren’t in the habit of seeking advice from the unwanted strangers with whom they grudgingly shared their island, even when it might be to their advantage. They had made an exception only when an outbreak of fin-rot was decimating their young, and Lawler’s saintly father had come to them with a vaccine. Which had been many years ago, though, and whatever good will the former Dr Lawler’s services had engendered among the Gillies had long since evaporated, leaving no apparent residue behind.