Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

Dann Henders had gashed his forearm on a gaff while helping Kinverson bring on board some enormous flopping man-sized fish, and Lawler, his supply of bandages depleted, went down to the cargo hold to get more from his reserve stores. He was always uneasy when he went down there, ever since his encounter with Kinverson and Sundira; he assumed they were still slipping off there together and the last thing he wanted was to stumble upon them again.

But Kinverson was on deck just then, busy gutting his fish. Lawler rummaged around amidships for a time in the dark musty depths of the hold. Then he turned to start making his way back up and practically collided with Sundira Thane, coming toward him down the same narrow, badly lit passageway that he had just entered.

She seemed as surprised to find Lawler there as he was to see her, and the surprise appeared genuine. “Val?” she said. Her eyes went wide and she took a hasty awkward step back from him just in time to avoid crashing into him.

Then the ship lurched sharply and flung her forward again, right into his arms.

It had to be an accident: she would never have done anything so blatant. Bracing himself against the stack of packing crates behind him, Lawler let his stack of folded bandages drop and caught her as she came whirling into him like a discarded doll that some petulant little girl had thrown. He held her, steadying her on her feet. The ship started to lurch back the other way and he tightened his grip to keep her from being hurled against the far wall. They stood nose to nose, eye to eye, laughing.

Then the ship righted itself and Lawler became aware that he was still holding her. And enjoying it.

So much for his alleged asceticism. What the hell. What the hell, indeed.

His lips went to hers, or perhaps hers went to his: he was never quite sure afterward which it had been. But the kiss was a long and active and interesting one. After that, though the ship’s motions had become much less extreme, there was nothing really to be gained by letting go of her. His hands moved, though, one roaming the small of her back, the other sliding downward to her taut muscular rump, and he pulled her even closer against him, or she pushed herself closer: that too was an uncertain thing.

Lawler was wearing only a twist of yellow cloth around his waist. Sundira had on a light hip-length grey wrap. It was easy enough to untwist and unwrap. The whole thing was happening in a simple, orderly, predictable way, though it was not at all dull for being so predictable: it had the clear, crisp, lucid inevitability of a dream, and a dream’s infinitely promising mysteriousness. Dreamily Lawler explored her skin. It was smooth and warm. Dreamily Sundira ran her fingers across the back of his neck. Dreamily he moved his right hand from her back to her front, down between their close-pressed bodies, past the valley between her small firm breasts where he had probed with his stethoscope what seemed several hundred years before, and on downward over her flat belly to the juncture of her thighs. He touched her. She was wet. She began to take the lead away from him now, pushing him backward, not in any unfriendly way but just trying, so it seemed, to guide him into a place between the packing crates where they would have room to lie down, or at least almost to lie down. After a moment he understood that.

It was close, cramped quarters. They both were long-legged people. But somehow they managed things, without even having rehearsed them. Neither of them said a word. Sundira was lively and active and quick. Lawler was vigorous and eager. It took just a moment for them to synchronize their rhythms and then it was smooth sailing all the way. Somewhere in the middle of things Lawler found himself trying to calculate how long it had actually been since he had last done this, and he dictated an angry memorandum to himself that got his attention back where it belonged.

Afterward they lay laughing and gasping in a sweaty heap, their legs still intertwined in a complicated fashion that might have been a challenge for the octopoids of the coral reef to bring off. Lawler sensed that this was not the time to be saying anything that might be considered as sentimental or romantic.

But he had to say something, eventually.

“You didn’t follow me down here, did you?” he asked, finally breaking the long silence.

She looked at him with surprise and amusement mingling in her look.

“Why would I have done that?”

“How would I know?”

“I came down here to get some rope-mending tools. I didn’t know you were here. The next thing was the ship jumping around and then I was in your arms.”

“Yes. You don’t regret that, do you?”

“No,” she said. “Why should I? Do you?”

“Not at all.”

“Good,” she said. “We could have done this a long time back, you know.”

“Could we?”

“Of course we could. Why did you wait so long?”

He studied her by the light of the dim, smoky taper. Her cool grey eyes held a glint of amusement, definite amusement, but he saw no mockery there. Even so, it seemed to him that she was taking this rather more lightly than he was.

“I could ask the same thing,” he said.

“Good point.” Then, after a moment: “I gave you some opportunities. You very carefully didn’t take them.”

“I know.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a long story,” he said. “Also very boring. Does it matter?”

“Not really.”

“Good.”

They fell into another spell of silence.

After a little while the thought came to him that it might be a good idea to make love again, and he began idly stroking her arm and her thigh as they lay entangled on the floor of the hold. He detected the first little tremors of response in her, but with a remarkable display of control and tact she contrived to abort the process before it had gone too far to halt and gently disengaged herself from his grasp.

“Later,” she said in a friendly way. “I really did have a reason for coming down here, you know.”

She rose and put her wrap back on and gave him a cool, cheerful grin and a wink, and disappeared into the storeroom in the stern.

Lawler was startled by her imperturbability. Certainly he had no right to expect that what had just happened would be as unsettling to her as it had been for him after his long period of self-imposed celibacy. She had seemed to welcome it, yes. She had definitely seemed to enjoy it. All the same, had it really been nothing more than a casual random event for her, a mere fortuitous consequence of the lurching of the ship? So it would seem.

Father Quillan, one torpid afternoon, decided to make a Catholic out of Natim Gharkid. At least that was what he appeared to be doing, with great intensity, as Lawler wandered past them and glanced down from the bridge. The priest, looking sweaty and inflamed, was offering the little brown-skinned man a voluble conceptual flow; and Gharkid was listening intently in his usual impassive way. “Father, Son and Holy Ghost,” Quillan said. “A single Godhead, but a triple entity.” Gharkid nodded solemnly. Lawler, an unseen listener, blinked at the strange term “Holy Ghost’. Whatever could that be? But Quillan had moved onward from there. Now he was explaining something called the Immaculate Conception. Lawler’s attention wandered and he strolled on, but when he came back that way fifteen minutes later Quillan was still at it, speaking now of redemption, renewal, essence and existence, the meaning of sin and how it can exist in a creature which is the image of God, and why it had become necessary to send to the world a Saviour who by His death would take upon Himself the evils of mankind. Some of it made sense to Lawler, some seemed the wildest gibberish; and after a time the proportion of gibberish to sense struck him as so high that he was offended by Quillan’s intense dedication to such an absurd creed. Quillan was too intelligent, Lawler thought, to give any veracity to these notions of a god who first must create a world populated by a flawed version of himself and then send an aspect of himself to that world to redeem it from its built-in flaws by letting himself be killed. And it angered him to think that Quillan, after keeping his religion to himself so long, was fastening now on the hapless Gharkid as his first convert.