Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

He pushed the distracting thoughts aside. Useless fantasies, these were: he and Sundira had grown up thousands of kilometres and many years apart. And even if things had been different in this way, whatever continuity they would have built on Sorve would have been shattered by the expulsion in any case. All paths led to this point of floating exile, bobbing in a tiny ship in the midst of the Empty Sea.

Sundira’s questing mind had eventually taken her into deep scandal. She was in her early twenties; her father was still Mayor; she lived by herself at the edge of the human community on Khamsilaine and spent as much of her time among the Dwellers as they would allow. “It was an intellectual challenge. I wanted to learn all I could about the world. Understanding the world meant understanding the Dwellers. There was something going on here, I was sure: something that none of us were seeing.”

She became fluent in the Dweller language—not a common skill, it appeared, on Khamsilaine. Her father appointed her the island’s ambassador to the Dwellers: all contact with them was carried on through her. She spent as much time in the Dweller village at the island’s south end as she did in her own community. Most of them merely tolerated her presence, as Dwellers customarily did; some were bluntly hostile, as Dwellers often were; but there were a few that seemed almost friendly. Sundira felt she was coming to know some of those as actual individuals, not merely as the hulking ominous undifferentiated alien creatures that Dwellers seemed to most human beings to be.

That was my mistake, and theirs: getting too close to them. I presumed on that closeness. I remembered certain things that I had seen when I was a girl, when Tomas and I were sneaking around where we shouldn’t have gone. I asked questions. I got evasive answers. Tantalizing answers. I decided I needed to go sneaking again.”

Whatever it was that Sundira had seen in the secret chambers of the Gillies, she didn’t seem able to communicate its nature to Lawler: perhaps she was being secretive with him, perhaps she simply hadn’t seen enough to comprehend anything. She hinted at ceremonies, communions, rituals, mysteries; but the vagueness in her descriptions seemed to be centred in her own perceptions, not in her willingness to share what she knew with him. “I went back to the same places I had crept into with Tomas years before. This time I was caught. I thought they were going to kill me. Instead they took me to my father and told him to kill me. He promised that he’d drown me, and they seemed to accept that. We went out in a fishing boat and I jumped over the side. But he had arranged for a boat from Simbalimak to pick me up, around at the back of the island. I had to swim for three hours to get to it. I never went back to Khamsilaine. And I never saw my father or spoke with him again.”

Lawler touched her cheek gently.

“So you know something about exile too.”

“Something, yes.”

“You never said a word to me.”

She shrugged. “What did it matter? You were hurting so much. Would it have made you feel any better if I told you that I had had to leave my native island too?”

“It might have.”

“I wonder,” she said.

A day or two later and they were in the hold again; and again afterward she spoke of the life she had left behind. A year on Simbalimak—a serious love affair there, which she had alluded to once before, and further attempts to probe the secrets of the Gillies that ended nearly as disastrously as her illicit prowlings on Khamsilaine—and then she had moved along, out of the Azure Sea entirely, off to Shaktan. Whether it was Gillie pressure or the collapse of the affair that caused her to leave was a point about which Lawler wasn’t quite certain, and he didn’t care to ask.

Shaktan to Velmise, Velmise to Kentrup, at last Kentrup to Sorve: a restless life and not a particularly happy one, so it would seem. There was always some new question beyond the last answer. More attempts to penetrate Gillie secrets; more trouble as a result. Other love affairs, coming to nothing. An isolated, fragmentary, roving existence. Why had she come to Sorve? “Why not? I wanted to leave Kentrup. Sorve was a place to go to. It was close, it had room for me. I would have stayed awhile and moved along.”

“Is that how you expected things to be for the rest of your life? Stay somewhere a little while, and then go somewhere else, and then leave that place too?”

“I suppose so,” she said.

“What were you looking for?”

“The truth.”

Lawler waited, offering no comment.

She said, “I still think something’s going on here that we only barely suspect. The Dwellers have a unitary society. It doesn’t vary from island to island. There’s a link: between one Dweller community and another, between the Dwellers and the divers, the Dwellers and the platforms, the Dwellers and the mouths. Between the Dwellers and the hagfish, for all I know. I want to know what the link is.”

“Why do you care so much?”

“Hydros is where I’m going to have to spend all the rest of my life. Doesn’t it make sense for me to learn as much about it as I can?”

“So you aren’t troubled, then, that Delagard has hijacked us and is dragging us off like this?”

“No. The more I see of this planet, the more I can understand of it.”

“You aren’t afraid to sail to the Face? To go into uncharted waters?”

“No,” she said. Then, after a moment: “Yes, maybe a little. Of course I’m afraid. But only a little.”

“If some of us tried to stop Delagard from carrying out his plan, would you be willing to join us?”

“No,” she said, without hesitation.

Some days there was no wind at all, and the ship lay like a dead thing in the water, altogether becalmed under a swollen sun that grew larger all the time. The air here in these deep tropics was dry and hot and often it was a struggle simply to breathe. Delagard performed wonders at the helm, ordering the sails to be swung around this way and that, that way and this, in order to catch the faintest puff of breeze, and somehow they moved along, most of the time, making their steady headway to the southwest, ever deeper into this barren wilderness of water. But there were the other days too, the terrible ones, when it seemed that there would be no gust of air again to fill the sails, not ever, and they would sit here forever until they turned to skeletons. “As idle as a painted ship,” Lawler said, “upon a painted sea.”

“What’s that?” Father Quillan asked.

“A poem. From Earth, an old one. One of my favourites.”

“You’ve quoted from it before, haven’t you? I remember the metre of it. Something about water, water everywhere.”

“Nor any drop to drink,” said Lawler.

The water was all but gone now. There was nothing but sticky shadows left at the bottom of most of the casks. Lis measured out the supply in dribbles.

Lawler was entitled to an extra ration, if he needed it for medicinal purposes. He wondered how to deal with the problem of administering his daily doses of the numbweed tincture. The stuff had to be taken in highly diluted form or it was dangerous; and he could hardly allow himself the luxury of that much water for a purely private indulgence. What then? Mix it with sea water? He could get away with that for a little while, at least; there’d be a cumulative effect on his kidneys if he kept it up very long, but he could always hope that some rain would come in a few days and he’d have a chance to flush himself clean.

There was always the possibility also of simply not taking the drug at all.

He tried that just as an experiment one morning. By midday his scalp felt strangely itchy. By late afternoon his skin was crawling as though infested with scale. He was trembling and sweaty with need by twilight.