Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

The ship caught the wind and moved quickly off to the southwest. Their unlovely foe, unable to travel at the same pace, soon was out of sight behind them. But its pretty offshoots, its dainty fluttering fireflies, continued to ride the breeze for hours in lessening numbers, and it was dawn before Delagard felt it was safe for the defenders in the rigging to come down.

Sundira spent the next three days mending the sails, with help from Kinverson, Pilya and Neyana. The ship made no headway while the spars were bare. The air was still; the sun was disagreeably strong; the sea was quiet. Sometimes a fin flickered above the surface in the distance. Lawler had the feeling they were under constant surveillance now.

He calculated that he had a week’s supply of numbweed left, at best.

Another free-floating creature, neither as gigantic nor as repellent nor as hostile as the last, came by: a large featureless ovoidal thing, perfectly smooth, of a lovely emerald colour, aglow with radiant luminosity. It stood up out of the water to its midsection, but the sea was so clear here that its shining lower half was easily visible. The thing was perhaps twenty metres around at its waist, and ten or fifteen metres in length from its submerged bottom to its rounded summit.

Delagard, jumpy, ready for anything, lined everyone up along the side of the ship armed with gaffs. But the ovoid drifted on past, harmless as a piece of fruit. Perhaps that was all that it was. Two more wandered along later the same day. The third was more spherical than the first, the second more elongated, but they seemed otherwise to be of the same kind. They seemed to take no notice of the Queen . What these ovoids needed, Lawler decided, were huge glistening eyes, the better to stare at the ship as they floated past it. But their faces were blind, smooth, mysterious, maddeningly bland. There was a curious solemnity about them, a massive calm gravity. Father Quillan said they reminded him of a bishop he had once known; and then he had to explain to everyone what a bishop was.

After the ovoids came a species of flying fish, neither the elegant iridescent air-skimmers of Home Sea nor the hideous hagfish of the open ocean. These were delicate-looking glossy creatures about fifteen centimetres long with filmy graceful wings that lifted them to astonishing heights. They could be seen far off, bursting almost vertically from the water and travelling for extraordinary distances before swooping back down and re-entering the ocean virtually without a splash. Moments later they were aloft again, up and down, up and down, coming closer to the ship with each cycle of flight and descent, until finally they were just off the starboard bow.

These fliers didn’t seem any more dangerous than yesterday’s huge floating emerald ovoids. They flew so high that there was no risk of colliding with them on deck, and so there was no need to duck and hide as would have been necessary if an overflight of hagfish had come by. They were so beautiful, gleaming brilliantly against the bright hard dome of the sky, that nearly the entire ship’s complement turned out to watch their passage.

Their bodies were practically transparent. It was easy to make out their fine wiry bones, their round pulsing red-violet stomachs, their threadlike blue veins, as they went shooting by overhead. Their blood-red eyes were finely faceted, glinting as they caught the light.

Beautiful, yes. But as they coursed through the air above the ship a strange rain fell from them, a faint shimmering shower of dark glittering drops that bit deep and burned wherever they touched.

In the first few moments no one realized what was happening. The initial nipping bites of the fliers” secretions were barely perceptible annoyances. But the pain was cumulative: the acid worked its way in, and what had been an odd little mild itch turned quickly to agony.

Lawler, standing in the shadow of the foresails, was shielded against the worst of the bombardment. Some scattering outspray caught him along his forearm, not enough to provoke more than a frown. But then he saw dark mottled scars beginning to appear on the polished yellow wood of the deck just a short distance away, and he looked up to see his shipmates howling and prancing wildly around, slapping at their arms, rubbing at their cheeks.

“Get down!” he called. Take cover! It’s coming from those flying fish!”

The airborne attackers had passed over the ship now and gone on beyond. But already a second wave of the creatures was rising from the sea off to starboard.

The entire onslaught lasted close to an hour, half a dozen waves in all. Afterward, the victims lined up one by one in Lawler’s infirmary to have their burns treated.

Sundira, who had been in the rigging when the fliers came, was the last one to come. She had been wearing nothing but a twist of cloth about her waist, and blisters were rising all over her body now. In silence Lawler dabbed her with ointment. She stood naked before him and his hands moved over her skin, rubbing the ointment in around her nipples, along her thighs, up her crotch to a point a fingerbreadth’s length from her loins.

They hadn’t made love since before the night of the limpet. But Lawler found no desire stirring in him now as he touched her, even in the most intimate places.

Sundira noticed it too. Lawler could feel her muscles tensing beneath his probing fingers. She was drawing herself up tightly, angrily.

She said finally, “You’re handling me like so much meat, Val.”

“I’m a medical man trying to care for a patient who’s got a bunch of nasty blisters all over her skin.”

“That’s all I am to you now?”

“Right at this moment, yes. You think it’s a good idea for a doctor to start breathing hard every time he touches an attractive patient’s body?”

“I’m not just any patient, am I?”

“Of course you aren’t.”

“But you’ve been keeping away from me for days. And now you treat me like a stranger. What’s the problem?”

“Problem?” He gave her a troubled look. Tapping her lightly on the hip, he said, “Turn around. I missed the ones in the small of your back. Where’s there a problem, Sundira?”

“Am I right that you don’t want me any more?”

He dipped his fingers into the ointment flask and rubbed the stuff on her just above her bare buttocks.

“I didn’t know we had a specific schedule. Do we?”

“Of course not. But look how you’re touching me now.”

“I just got through telling you,” Lawler said. “Let me try again. I thought you were here for medical care, not for lovemaking. Doctors learn early that it’s never a good idea to mix the two. But also it might have occurred to me, not as a matter of ethics but just one of common sense, that you wouldn’t want me to come on to you at a time when you happen to have painful blisters all over your skin. Okay?” This was the closest thing to a quarrel they had ever had. “Does that sound reasonable, Sundira?”

She swung around to face him. “It’s because of what I did with Delagard, isn’t it?”

“ What? ”

“You hate the idea that he had his hands on me, and more than his hands, and now you don’t want anything to do with me again.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes. And I’m right, too. If you could see the expression on your face just now—”

Lawler said, “We were all out of our minds while that thing was stuck to the hull. Nobody’s responsible for anything that happened that night. You think I wanted to fuck Neyana? If you want the truth, Sundira, it was you I was looking for you when I first came up on deck. Not that I could even remember your name, or my own, in the condition I was in. But I saw you and I wanted you and I headed toward you, only Leo Martello got to you first. And then Neyana caught hold of me and so I went with her. I was under the influence, same as you, same as everybody. Everybody except Father Quillan and Gharkid, that is. Our two holy men.” Lawler’s cheeks were hot. He felt his heartbeat climbing. “Jesus, Sundira, I’ve known about you and Kinverson all along, and that hasn’t stopped me, has it? And on the limpet night there was you and Martello first, before Delagard. Why would what you did with Delagard matter to me any more than what you’ve done with all the others?”