Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

Cursing mightily, Delagard ordered the sails to be struck. Soon the Queen of Hydros was drifting with bare poles rising into a hard white sky. And then the hagfish came.

The ugly bristle-backed winged worms, berserk with lust, were spread out by the millions, just windward of the fleet. It was a sea of hagfish: you could hardly see the water for the thrashing bodies. In surging waves they took to the air—the females in the lead, uncountable numbers of them, blotting out the sunlight. Furiously they beat their shiny sharp-angled little wings; desperately they held their snub-nosed heads aloft; onward they came, maddened platoons of them. And the males were right behind them.

It didn’t matter to them that there were ships in their way. Ships were mere incidental distractions to hagfish in heat. Mountains would have been. They had their genetically programmed course to follow, and they followed it blindly, unresistingly. If it meant that they would smash head on into the side of the Queen of Hydros , so be it. If it meant that they would clear the deck of the ship by a few metres and go cracking into the base of a mast or the door of the forecastle, so be it. So be it. So be it. There was no one on the ship’s deck when the hagfish armada reached it. Lawler already knew what it was like to be struck by an immature one. A full-grown one in the high frenzy of its mating urge would probably be travelling with ten times the force of the one that had hit him: a collision would be fatal, most likely. A glancing blow of a wing-tip would cut through skin to the bone. The touch of those fierce bristles would leave a bloody track.

The only thing to do was hide and wait. And wait, and wait. All hands took refuge below. For hours the buzzing whoosh of their passage filled the air, punctuated by strange whining cries and the sound of brutal, abrupt impacts.

At last there was silence. Cautiously, Lawler and a couple of the others went up on deck.

The air was clear. The swarm had moved on. But dead and dying hagfish were everywhere, piled like vermin wherever some structure of the deck had created an obstacle to their flight. Broken as they were, some still had enough life left in them to hiss and nip and try to rise and fly into the faces of the cleanup crew. It took all day to get rid of them.

After the hagfish came a dark cloud that promised welcome rain, but dropped instead a coating of slime: a migrating mass of some foul-smelling little airborne microorganism that enveloped the ship in its nearly infinite multitudes and left a slick gluey brown pall on sails and rigging and masts and every square millimetre of the deck. Cleaning that off took three days more.

And after that came more rammerhorns, and Kinverson bestrode the deck once more, pounding on his drum to drive them into confusion.

And after the rammerhorns—

Lawler began to think of the great planetary sea as a stubborn, implacably hostile force that was tirelessly throwing one thing after another at them in an irritable response to their presence on its broad bosom. Somehow the voyagers were making the ocean itch, and it was scratching at them. Some of the scratching was pretty intense. Lawler wondered if they would manage to survive long enough to reach Grayvard.

There was a blessed day of heavy rain, at last. It cleaned away the slime of the microorganisms and the reek that the dead hagfish had left on deck, and allowed them to refill their storage casks just when the water situation had been starting to seem critical again. In the wake of the rain a school of divers appeared and frolicked in a genial playful way alongside the ship, leaping in the foam like elegant dancers welcoming tourists to their native land. But no sooner had the divers moved on out of sight than another of the turd-throwing colonial things drifted near, or perhaps it was the same one as before, and bombarded the ship with moist incendiary missiles all over again. It was as though the ocean had belatedly become aware that by sending the rain and then the divers it was showing the voyagers too amiable a face, and wanted to remind them of its true nature.

Then for a time all was quiet again. The winds were fair, the creatures of the ocean relented from the pattern of constant assault. The six ships moved onward serenely toward their goal. Their wakes, long and straight, stretched out behind them like retreating highways through the immense solitude that they had already crossed.

In the calm of a perfect dawn—the sea almost without waves, the breeze steady, the sky shimmering, the lovely blue-green globe of Sunrise visible just above the horizon and one moon still in view also—Lawler came up on deck to find a conference taking place on the bridge. Delagard was there, and Kinverson, and Onyos Felk, and Leo Martello. After a moment Lawler saw Father Quillan too, half hidden behind Kinverson’s bulk.

Delagard had his spy-glass with him. He was scanning the distance with it and reporting on something to the others, who were pointing, staring, commenting.

Lawler clambered up the ladder.

“Something going on?”

“Something sure is, yes,” Delagard said. “One of our ships is missing.”

“Are you serious?”

“Take a look.” Delagard handed Lawler the spy-glass. “An easy night. Nothing unusual between midnight and dawn, the lookouts tell me. Count the ships you can see. One, two, three, four.”

Lawler put the glass to his eye.

One. Two. Three. Four.

“Which one isn’t there?”

Delagard tugged at his thick, greasy coils of hair. “Not sure yet. They don’t have their flags up. Gabe thinks it’s the Sisters who are gone. Splitting off during the night, taking some independent course of their own.”

“That would be crazy,” Lawler said. “They’ve got no real idea how to navigate a ship.”

“They’ve been doing all right so far,” Leo Martello said.

“That’s by simply following along in the convoy. But if they tried to go off on their own—”

“Well, yes,” Delagard said. “It would be crazy. But they are crazy. Those fucking dyke bitches, I wouldn’t for a moment put it past them to do something like—”

He broke off. There was the sound of footsteps on the ladder below them.

“Dag, that you?” Delagard called. To Lawler he explained, “I sent him down to the radio room to do some calling around.”

Tharp’s shrivelled little head appeared, and then the rest of him.

“The Golden Sun ’s the one that’s missing,” Tharp announced.

“Sisters are on the Hydros Cross ,” Kinverson said.

“Right,” said Tharp sourly. “But Hydros Cross answered when I called them just now. So did the Star , the Three Moons and the Goddess . All silent out of the Golden Sun .”

“You absolutely certain? Couldn’t raise them at all?” Delagard asked. “Wasn’t any way at all you could bring them in?”

“You want to try, you go and try. I called around the fleet. Four ships answered.”

“Including the Sisters?” Kinverson persisted.

“I talked to Sister Halla herself, okay?”

Lawler said, “Whose ship is the Golden Sun? I forget.”

“Damis Sawtelle’s,” Leo Martello replied.

“Damis would never go off on his own. He isn’t like that.”

“No,” Delagard said, with a look of suspicion and distrust. “He isn’t, is he, doc?”

Tharp kept on trying to pick up the Golden Sun ’s frequency all day long. The radio operators of the other four ships tried also.

Silence on the Golden Sun channel. Silence. Silence. Silence.

“A ship just doesn’t vanish in the night,” Delagard said, pacing ferociously.

“Well, this one seems to have,” said Lis Niklaus.