Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

Seven drops of numbweed and his agitation faded into the familiar welcome numbness.

But his supply of the drug was starting to run low. That seemed a worse problem to Lawler than the water shortage. There was always the hope that it would rain tomorrow, after all. But the numbweed plant didn’t seem to grow in these seas.

Lawler had counted on finding more when the ship reached Grayvard. The ship wasn’t ever going to get to Grayvard, though. He had just enough numbweed left to last him another few weeks, he estimated. Perhaps less. Before long it would all be gone.

What then? What then?

In the meantime, try mixing it with a little sea water.

Sundira told him more about her childhood on Khamsilaine, her turbulent adolescence, her later wanderings from island to island, her ambitions, her hopes, her strivings and failures. They sat together for hours in the musty darkness, stretching their long legs out before them amidst the crates, intertwining their hands like young lovers while the ship drifted placidly on the placid tropical sea. She asked Lawler about his life too, and he related the small tales of his simple boyhood and his quiet, steady, carefully self-circumscribed life as an adult on the one island he had ever known.

Then one afternoon he went belowdecks to rummage in his storage cases for fresh supplies and heard moans and gasps of passion coming from a dark corner of the hold. It was their special corner of the hold; it was a woman’s voice. Neyana was in the rigging, Lis was in the galley, Pilya was off duty and lounging on deck. The only other woman on board was Sundira. Where was Kinverson? He was first watch, like Pilya: he’d be off duty too. That must be Kinverson behind those crates, Lawler realized, urging those gasps and moans out of Sundira’s eager body.

So whatever it was that those two had between them—and Lawler knew what it was—hadn’t ended, not at all, not even in these new days of shared autobiographical confidences and sweetly intertwined hands.

Eight drops of numbweed helped him get through it, more or less.

He measured out what was left of his supply. Not much. Not very much at all.

Food was becoming a problem too. It was so long since they’d had any fresh catch that another attack by a hagfish swarm was almost beginning to seem like an appealing prospect. They lived on their dwindling supply of dried fish and powdered algae, as though they were in the depths of an arctic winter. Sometimes they were able to pull in a load of plankton by trawling a strip of fabric behind the ship, but eating plankton was like eating gritty sand, and the taste was bitter and difficult. Deficiency diseases began to make themselves felt. Wherever he looked Lawler saw cracked lips, dulled hair, blotchy skins, gaunt and haggard faces.

“This is crazy,” Dag Tharp muttered. “We’ve got to turn back before we all die.”

“How?” Onyos Felk asked. “Where’s the wind? When it blows at all here, it blows from the east.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Tharp said. “We’ll find a way. Throw that bastard Delagard overboard and swing the ship around. What do you say, doc?”

“I say we need some rain before long, and a good school of fish to come by.”

“You aren’t with us any more? I thought you were as hot to turn back as we are.”

“Onyos has a good point,” said Lawler cautiously. “The wind’s against us here. With or without Delagard, we may not be able to beat our way back east.”

“What are you saying, doc? That we just have to sail right on around the world until we come up on Home Sea again from the far side?”

“Don’t forget the Face,” Dann Henders put in. “We’ll get to the Face before we start up the other side of the world.”

“The Face,” said Tharp darkly. “The Face, the Face, the Face! Fuck the Face!”

“The Face will fuck us first,” Henders said.

The breeze freshened finally and chopped around from northeast to east-southeast, and blew with surprising chilly vigour, while the sea grew high and confused, breaking frequently across the stern. Suddenly there were fish again, a teeming silvery mass of them, and Kinverson netted a heave load.

“Easy there,” Delagard cautioned, when they sat down at table. “don’t stuff yourselves or you’ll burst.”

Lis outdid herself preparing the meals, conjuring up a dozen different sauces out of what seemed like nothing at all. But there was still no water, which made eating a taxing chore. Kinverson urged them to eat their fish raw once again, to get the benefit of the moisture it contained. Dipping the fresh bleeding chunks in sea water helped to make them more palatable, although it compounded the problem of thirst.

“What’ll happen to us if we drink salt water, doc?” Neyana Golghoz asked. “Will we die? Will we go crazy?”

“We already are crazy,” Dag Tharp said softly.

“We can tolerate a certain amount of salt water,” Lawler said, thinking of the amount he had consumed himself lately. But he wasn’t going to say anything about that. “If we had any fresh water, we could actually stretch the supply by diluting it ten or fifteen per cent with ocean water and it wouldn’t hurt us. In fact it would help us to replace the salt we’re sweating out of ourselves all the time in this hot weather. But we can’t live on straight sea water very long. Our bodies would manage to filter it and turn it into pure water, but our kidneys wouldn’t be able to get rid of the salt buildup without pulling water out of other body tissues to do it. We’d dry up pretty fast. Fever, vomiting, delirium, death.”

Dann Henders set up a row of little solar stills, stretching clear plastic over the mouths of pots partly filled with sea water. Each pot had a cup inside it, placed carefully to catch the drops of fresh water that condensed on the underside of the plastic. But that was a tortuous business. It seemed impossible to produce enough usable water this way to meet their needs.

“What if it doesn’t rain soon?” Pilya Braun asked. “What are we going to do?”

Lawler gestured toward Father Quillan. “We could try praying,” he said.

Late the following evening when the heat held them as tightly as a glove and the ship was standing almost perfectly still in the water, Lawler heard Henders and Tharp whispering in the radio room as he headed back to his cabin to go to sleep. There was something irritatingly abrasive about the scratchy sounds of their voices.

As Lawler halted in the passageway for a moment Onyos Felk came down the ladder and gave him a quick nod of greeting; then Felk went on to the radio room too. Lawler, pausing outside his cabin door, heard Felk say, “The doc’s out here. You want me to ask him in?”

Lawler couldn’t hear the reply. But it must have been affirmative, because Felk turned and beckoned to him and said, “Would you come over here for a minute, doc?”

“It’s late, Onyos. What is it?”

“Just for a minute.”

Tharp and Henders were sitting practically knee-to-knee in the tiny radio room with a guttering candle casting a sombre light between them. There was a flask of grapeweed brandy on the table, and two cups. Tharp ordinarily wasn’t a drinker, Lawler remembered.

Henders said, “Some brandy, doc?”

“I don’t think so, thanks.”

“Everything going all right?”

“I’m tired,” Lawler said, not very patiently. “What’s up, Dann?”

“We’ve been talking about Delagard, Dag and I. And Onyos. Discussing this idiotic fucked-up mess of a voyage that he’s dragged us off on. What do you think of him, doc?”

“Delagard?” Lawler shrugged. “You know what I think.”

“We all know what all of us think. We’ve all known each other too goddamned long. But tell us anyway.”