Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

He fought to clear his brain. He could barely comprehend what was happening.

A thing invading the ship, driving everybody crazy with lust.

Names returned to his mind and he matched them with faces and forms. Quillan. Gharkid. Resisting the force. And those who hadn’t: he and Neyana, Sundira and Martello, Sundira and Delagard. Kinverson and Pilya. Felk and Lis. On and on in an unending change of partners, a feverish dance of pricks and cunts. Where was Lis? He wanted Lis. He had never wanted her before. He had never wanted Neyana either. But he did now. Now, Lis, yes. And then Pilya, finally. Give her what she’s been after this whole voyage. And Sundira after that. Get her away from loathsome Delagard. Sundira, yes, and then Neyana again, and Lis, and Pilya—Sundira, Neyana, Pilya, Lis—fuck till dawn—fuck till noon—fuck till the end of time—

“I’m going to kill it,” Quillan said. “Hand me that gaff, Natim.”

“You don’t feel its force?” Lawler asked. “You’re immune?”

“Of course I’m not immune,” the priest said.

“So your vows—”

“It isn’t the vows that are holding me back. It’s simple fear, Lawler.” To Gharkid Quillan said, “The gaff should just about reach. Hang on to my legs so I don’t go overboard.”

“Let me do it,” Lawler said. “My arms are longer than yours.”

“Stay where you are.”

The priest pulled himself up on the rail and wriggled down the outer side of the hull. Gharkid grabbed his legs. Lawler steadied Gharkid. Looking down, Lawler saw something that looked like a bright yellow plaque perhaps a metre across clinging to the ship just above the water-line. It was flat and circular with a little puckered dome in its centre. Quillan reached down as far as he could and stabbed at it. Again. Again. A tiny spurt of blue fluid rose like a feeble little fountain from the creature’s back. Another poke. The creature quivered convulsively.

Lawler felt the pain in his loins beginning to ease.

“Hold me tighter!” Quillan called. “I’m starting to slip!”

“No, Father-sir. No!”

Lawler clamped his hands around Quillan’s upturned ankles. He felt the priest’s body go taut as he bent away from the ship, reached downward, drove the gaff home with a short hard thrust. The thing clinging to the ship rippled wildly along its fleshy perimeter. Its colour darkened to a deep green, then to a morbid black; sudden writhing ridges arose in its soft flesh; it drew itself up and fell back into the sea and was swept off into the ship’s wake.

Almost at once Lawler felt his mind throw off the last of its fog.

“My God,” he said. “What was it?”

“A limpet is what Gharkid called it,” said Quillan. “Stuck to the ship, dousing us all with wild pheromones.” He was quivering as though released from some unbearable tension. “Some of us were able to fight it. Some weren’t.”

Lawler looked updeck. Everywhere naked people were wandering slowly about, looking dazed, like newly awakened sleepers. Leo Martello stood beside Neyana, staring at her as if he had never seen her before in his life. Kinverson was with Lis Niklaus. Lawler’s eyes met Sundira’s. She seemed stunned. Her hand brushed again and again across her flat bare belly in an anguished scrubbing motion, as if to rub away the impress of Delagard’s flesh against her own.

The limpet was a harbinger. In these low latitudes the Empty Sea appeared to be getting less empty.

A new kind of drakken appeared, a southern species. They were much like the ones of the north, but larger and more cunning-looking, with a cheerily calculating look about them. Instead of travelling in swarms of many hundreds these drakkens moved in a pack of only a few dozen, and when their long tubular heads came jutting up out of the water they were very widely spaced, as though each member of the pack demanded and received a generous territorial allotment from its companions. They accompanied the ship for hours, kicking along untiringly beside it with their noses up in the air. Their gleaming crimson eyes never closed. It was easy enough to believe that they were waiting for darkness and an opportunity to come scrambling up on board. Delagard ordered the watch below to go on duty early, patrolling the deck armed with gaffs.

At twilight the drakkens submerged, all of them vanishing in a single moment in that sudden simultaneous way of their kind, as if they had been sucked down in one gulp by some vastness below them. Delagard wasn’t convinced that they were gone and kept the patrols on deck all night. But there was no attack, and in the morning the drakkens were nowhere to be seen.

Then late that afternoon as darkness began to fall a great amorphous soft mass of some sallow viscous stuff came drifting by the ship on the windward side. It went on and on, stretching out over hundreds of metres, perhaps more. It might almost have been an island of some strange kind, it was so big: a colossal flabby island, an island made entirely of mucus, a gigantic agglomeration of snot. When they drew closer to it they realized that this huge puckered wrinkled thing was actually alive, or at least partly so. Its pale custardy surface was lightly quivering in fitful motion, pushing up little rounded projections which almost immediately sank back down into the central mass.

Dag Tharp struck a comic pose. “Here we are, ladies and gentlemen! The Face of the Waters at last!”

Kinverson laughed. “More like the other end, is the way it looks to me.”

“Look there,” Martello said. “Bits of light rising from it, fluttering around in the air. How beautiful they are!”

“Like fireflies,” said Quillan.

“Fireflies?” Lawler asked.

“They have them on Sunrise. Insects equipped with luminescent organs. You know what insects are? Land-dwelling six-legged arthropods, unbelievably common on most worlds. Fireflies are insects that come out at twilight and blink their little lights on and off. Very pretty, very romantic. The effect is much like this.”

Lawler watched. It was a beautiful sight, yes; tiny fragments of that enormous turgid drifting mass detaching themselves and rising, borne upward on the light breeze, glowing as they rose, quick flashes of yellow brilliance, little soaring sunlets. The air was full of them, dozens, hundreds. They coasted on the wind, rose, fell, climbed again. On, off, on, off: flashing, flashing, flashing.

On Hydros beauty was almost always cause for suspicion. Lawler felt a growing uneasiness as the fireflies danced.

Then Lis Niklaus yelled, “The sail’s on fire!”

Lawler glanced upward. Some of the fireflies had come drifting across the ship, and wherever they fetched up against one of the sails they clung and glowed steadily, igniting the close-woven sea-bamboo fabric. Little puffs of smoke were spiralling upward in a dozen places; little red gleams of burning threads could be seen. In fact the ship was under attack.

Delagard shouted orders for a change of course. The Queen pulled away as fast as it could from the bloated enemy on its flank. Anyone not needed to shift the sails was sent aloft to defend them. Lawler scrambled around in the rigging with the others, batting at the little sparklers as they came drifting into the sails, scraping away at the ones that were already affixed to them. The heat of them was insignificant but persistent: the constant warmth they emitted while stuck to the fabric was what achieved ignition. Lawler saw charred places where they had been pulled free in time, others where starlight glittered through small holes in the sails, and—high up on the foremast topsail—a scarlet tongue of flame, tipped with a black trail of smoke, where the material was ablaze.

Kinverson was climbing swiftly toward the burning place. He reached it and began to clamp his hands over the blaze to smother it. The bright flamelets disappeared one by one into his grasp as though by a conjuring trick. In moments nothing but glowing embers could be seen; and then those too were out. The firefly that had ignited the fire was already gone. It had fallen to the deck as the sail gave way around it, leaving behind a ragged, blackened hole the size of a man’s head.