Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

Instead of getting to know her better now that they were lovers he found that she was becoming more remote and indistinct to him. Lawler hadn’t expected that. He wished there was more. But he didn’t see how he could make there be more unless she wanted it.

She seemed to want to hold him at arm’s length and take from him nothing more than she was already getting from Kinverson. Unless he had misread her, she didn’t desire any other kind of intimacy. Lawler had never known a woman like that, so indifferent to permanence, to continuity, to the union of spirits, one who appeared to take each event as it came and never troubled to link it to what had gone before or what might come afterward. Then he realized that he did know someone like that.

Not a woman. Himself. The long-ago Lawler of Sorve Island, skipping from lover to lover with no thought except for the moment. But he was different now. Or so he hoped.

In the night Lawler heard muffled shouts and thumps coming from the cabin next to his. Delagard and Lis were having a quarrel. It wasn’t the first time, not by any means; but this one sounded louder and angrier than most.

In the morning, when Lawler went down to the galley early for breakfast, Lis was huddled over her stove with her face averted. From the side her face looked puffy; and when she turned he saw a yellow bruise along her cheekbone and another over her eye. Her lip was split and swollen.

“You want me to give you something for that?” Lawler asked.

“I’ll survive.”

“I heard the noise last night. What a lousy thing.”

“I fell out of my bunk, is what happened.”

“And went rattling around the cabin for five or ten minutes, shouting and cursing? And Nid, when he picked you up, felt like shouting and cursing too? Come off it, Lis.”

She gave him a cold, sullen look. She seemed close to tears. He had never seen tough, salty Lis so close to breaking before.

Quietly he said, “Let breakfast wait a few minutes. I can clean up that cut for you and give you something to take the sting out of those bruises.”

“I’m used to it, doc.”

“He hits you often?”

“Often enough.”

“Nobody hits anybody any more, Lis. That kind of stuff went out with the cave men.”

“Tell that to Nid.”

“You want me to? I will.”

Panic flared in her eyes. “No! For Christ’s sake, don’t say a word, doc! He’ll kill me.”

“You really are afraid of him, aren’t you?”

“Aren’t you?”

Lawler said, surprised, “No. Why should I be?”

“Well, maybe you aren’t. But that’s you. I figure I got off lucky. I was doing something he didn’t like, and he found out, and he took it a lot harder than I ever imagined he would. Taught me a thing or two, that did. Nid’s a wild man. I thought last night he was going to murder me.”

“Call me, next time. Or bang on the cabin wall.”

“There won’t be a next time. I’m going to be good from now on. I mean it.”

“You’re that much afraid of him?”

“I love him, doc. Can you believe that? I love the dirty bastard. If he doesn’t want me screwing around, I’m not going to screw around. He’s that important to me.”

“Even though he hits you.”

“That tells me how important I am to him.”

“You can’t seriously mean that, Lis.”

“I do. I do.”

He shook his head. “Jesus. He slams you black and blue, and you tell me it’s because he loves you so much.”

“You don’t understand these things, doc,” Lis said. “You never did. You never could.”

Lawler studied her in bewilderment, trying to comprehend. She was as alien to him as a Gillie right now.

“I guess I don’t,” he said.

After the windstorm the sea was quiet for a while, never exactly tranquil but not especially challenging, either. There came another zone thick with the clustering sea-plants, though these were less dense than the first one and they got through without needing Dr Nitikin’s lethal aphrodisiac oil. A little farther on was a place where close-packed clumps of mysterious lanky yellow-green algae drifted. They humped themselves up above the surface of the sea as the ship went by and emitted sad whooshing exhalations from dark waggling bladders dangling on short prickly stems: “Go back,” they seemed to be saying. “Go back, go back, go back.” It was a disturbing and troublesome sound. This was plainly an unlucky place to be. But before long the strange algae were no longer to be seen, though it was still possible, for another half a day or so, to hear their distant melancholy murmur occasionally riding on the gusts of a following wind.

The next day another unfamiliar life-form appeared: a gigantic floating colonial creature, a whole population in itself, hundreds or perhaps thousands of different kinds of specialized organisms suspended from one huge float nearly the size of a platform or a mouth. Its fleshy transparent central body glistened up out of the water at them like a barely submerged island; and as they drew closer they could see the innumerable components of the thing quivering and whirring and churning about in their individual duties, this group of organisms paddling, this set trawling for fish, these little fluttering organs around the edges serving as stabilizers for the whole vast organism as it moved in its stately way through the sea.

When the ship came near it the creature extruded several dozen clear pipe-like structures, a couple of metres in height, that rose like thick glossy chimneys above the surface of the water.

“What are those things, do you think?” Father Quillan asked.

“Visual apparatus?” Lawler suggested. “Periscopes of some sort?”

“No, look, now there’s something coming out of them—”

“Watch out!” Kinverson yelled from overhead. “It’s shooting at us!”

Lawler pulled the priest down with him to the deck just as a blob of some gooey reddish substance went whistling past. The blob fell in mid-deck, two or three metres behind them. It looked like a large orange turd, shapeless and quivering. Steam began to rise from it. Half a dozen similar projectiles landed at other points along the deck, and more were arriving every moment.

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Delagard roared, stomping around wildly. “The stuff is burning the deck. Buckets and shovels! Buckets and shovels! Tack! Tack, Felk! Get us the hell out of here, damn you!”

The deck was sizzling and steaming where the blobs were eating into it. Felk, at the wheel, struggled to pull away from the bombardment, shoving and dodging and manoeuvring the ship with frantic zeal. Under his hoarse commands the duty watch pulled the ropes about, swung the yards, reset the sails. Lawler, Quillan and Lis Niklaus rushed about the deck, shovelling up the soft corrosive projectiles and tossing them overboard. Dark charred scars remained wherever one of the acid lumps had touched the pale yellow wood of the planks. The colonial creature, distant now, continued to hurl its missiles at the ship with methodical unthinking hostility, though now they dropped harmlessly into the water, stirring up puffs of vapour as they boiled downwards and disappeared.

The charred marks in the deck were too deep to remove. Lawler suspected that the sticky projectiles, if they hadn’t been swept up immediately, would have burned right down from deck to deck until they emerged through the hull.

The following morning Gharkid saw a grey cloud of whizzing airborne forms far off to starboard.

“Hagfish in mating frenzy.”

Delagard swore and gave the order for a change of course.

“No,” Kinverson said. “That won’t work. There’s no time to manoeuvre. Lower the sails.”

“What?”

“Take them down or they’ll act as hagfish nets when the swarm hits us. We’ll be up to our asses in hagfish on deck.”