Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

He began to think that the idea of bringing Delagard under control was futile. Delagard was too powerful a force to bring under control. He was like the Wave: you might not like where it was taking you, but there wasn’t much you could do about it. Not really.

In the aftermath of the catastrophe Delagard bustled with inexhaustible energy about the deck getting the ship ready for the resumption of the voyage. The masts were repaired, the sails were raised. If Delagard had been a driven, determined man before, he seemed completely demoniacal now, a relentless force of nature. The analogy with the Wave seemed to be the right one, Lawler thought. The loss of his precious ships appeared to have thrust Delagard across some threshold of will into a new realm of purposefulness. Furious, volatile, supercharged with energy, Delagard functioned now at the centre of a vortex of kinetic power that made him all but impossible to approach. Do this! Do that! Fix this! Move that! He left no space about himself for someone like Lawler to come up to him and say, “We aren’t going to let you take this ship where you want to take it, Nid.”

There were fresh bruises and cuts on Lis Niklaus” face the morning after the Wave. “I didn’t say a thing to him,” she told Lawler, as he worked to repair the damage. “He just went wild and started hitting me as soon as we got inside the cabin.”

“Has that happened before?”

“Not like this, no. He’s a crazy man, now. Maybe he thought I was going to say something he wouldn’t like. The Face, the Face, the Face, that’s all he can think about. He talks about it in his sleep. Negotiates deals, threatens competitors, promises wonders—I don’t know.” Big, solid woman that she was, she looked suddenly shrunken and frail, as though Delagard were drawing life out of her and into himself. “The longer I live with him, the more he scares me. You think he’s just a rich shipyard owner, interested in nothing but drinking and eating and screwing and getting even richer. God knows what for. And then once in a while he lets you look a little way inside him and you see devils.”

“Devils?”

“Devils, visions, fantasies. I don’t know. He thinks this big island will make him like an emperor here, or maybe like a god, that everyone will obey him, not just people like us, but the other islanders, the Gillies too, even. And on other worlds. Do you know he wants to build a spaceport?”

“Yes,” Lawler said. “He told me that.”

“He’ll do it, too. He gets what he wants, that man. He never rests, he never lets up. He thinks in his sleep. I mean it.” Lis gingerly touched a purpling place between her cheekbone and her left eye. “Are you going to try to stop him, do you think?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Be careful. He’ll kill you if you try to get in his way. Even you, doc. He’ll kill you the way he’d kill a fish.”

The Empty Sea seemed well named, clear and featureless, no islands, no coral reefs, no storms, hardly even a cloud overhead. The hot sun cast long orange gleams on the listless, glassy blue-grey swells. The horizon seemed a billion kilometres away. The wind was slack and fitful. Tidal surges came rarely now, and they were minor ones when they came, hardly more than a ripple on the sea’s flat bosom. The ship coasted easily over them.

Nor was there much in the way of marine life either. Kinverson trawled his lines in vain; Gharkid’s nets brought up scarcely any seaweed that might be of use. Occasionally some glittering school of fish went by, or larger sea-creatures could be seen sporting at a distance, but it was rare that anything came close enough to be caught. The existing supplies on board, the stocks of dried fish and algae, were running very low. Delagard ordered that the daily rations be cut. It looked to be a hungry voyage from here on. And a thirsty one too. There had been no time to put out the usual catch-receptacles during the fantastic downpour that had struck just before the coming of the Wave. Now, under that serene cloudless sky, the level in the water-casks grew lower every day.

Lawler asked Onyos Felk to show him where they were on the chart. The mapkeeper was vague, as usual, about his geography; but he indicated a point on the chart far out into the Empty Sea, close to midway between the equator and the supposed location of the Face of the Waters.

“Can that be right?” Lawler asked. “Can we really have come so far?”

“The Wave was moving at an incredible speed. It carried us with it all day long. The miracle is that the ship didn’t simply break up.”

Lawler studied the chart. “We’ve gone too far to turn back, haven’t we?”

“Who’s talking about turning back? You? Me? Certainly Delagard isn’t.”

“If we wanted to,” Lawler said. “Just if.”

“We’d be better off just keeping on going,” said Felk gloomily. “We’ve got no choice, really. There’s all that emptiness behind us. If we turn back toward known waters, we’ll probably starve before we get anyplace useful. About the only chance we’ve got now is to try to find the Face. There might be food and fresh water available there.”

“You think so?”

“What do I know?” Felk said.

Leo Martello said, “Do you have a minute, doc? I want to show you something.”

Lawler was in his cabin, sorting through his papers. He had three boxes here of medical records for sixty-four former citizens of Sorve Island who presumably had been lost at sea. Lawler had fought bitterly with Delagard for the right to bring them along when the fleet left Sorve, and for once he had managed to win. What now? Keep them? For what? On the chance that the five vanished ships would reappear with all hands on board? Save them to be used by some future historian of the island?

Martello was as close to being the island’s historian as anyone was. Maybe he’d like these useless documents to work into the later cantos of his epic.

“What is it, Leo?”

“I’ve been writing about the Wave,” Martello said. “What happened to us, and where we are now, and where we may be going, and all of that. I thought you might want to read what I’ve done so far.”

He grinned eagerly. There was a bright glow of excitement in his glossy brown eyes. Lawler realized that Martello must be tremendously proud of himself, that he was looking for applause. He envied Martello his exuberance, his outgoing nature, his boundless enthusiasms. Here in the midst of this desperate doomed journey Martello was capable of finding poetry. Amazing.

“Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself?” Lawler asked. “The last I heard, you had just got up to the emigration from Earth to the first colonized worlds.”

“Right. But I figure I’ll eventually reach the part of the poem that tells of our life on Hydros, and this voyage will be a big part of it. So I thought, why not write it down now while it’s still fresh in my mind, instead of waiting until I’m an old man forty or fifty years from now to do it?”

Why not indeed, Lawler thought.

Martello had been letting his shaven scalp grow in, over the past few weeks: dense, rank brown hair now had sprouted. It made him look ten years younger. Martello would probably live fifty more years if anyone on this ship did. Seventy, even. Plenty of time to write poetry. But yes, it was better to get the poetic impressions down on the page right now.

Lawler extended a hand. “Okay, let’s have a look at it,” he said.

Lawler read a few lines of it and pretended to scan the rest. It was a long scrawled outpouring, the same awkward mawkish stuff as the other piece of the great epic that Martello had allowed him to see, though at least this segment had the vigour of personal recollection.