Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

“Delagard’s different. You hate him. He disgusts you.”

“Does he?”

“He’s a murderer and a bully. He got us all thrown off Sorve Island. Ever since then he’s been running this expedition like a tyrant. He beats Lis. He killed Henders. He lies, he cheats, he does whatever he feels like doing in order to get his way. Everything about him is loathsome to you, and you can’t stand the idea that he’s fucked me too, now, whether or not I was in my right mind when I let him do it. So you’re taking it out on me. You don’t want to put your mouth where Delagard’s mouth has been, let alone your cock. Isn’t that so, Val?”

“You’re doing an awful lot of mind-reading, suddenly. I never knew you were telepathic, Sundira.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass. Is it so or isn’t it?”

“Look, Sundira—”

“It is, isn’t it?” Her tone, which had been hard and cold, softened suddenly, and she looked at him with a tenderness and longing that surprised him. “Val, Val, don’t you think it disgusts me too, to know that I had that man inside me? Don’t you think I’ve been trying to wash myself clean of him ever since? But that shouldn’t be your problem. I don’t have spots on my skin where he touched me. You have no right to turn against me like this, simply because some alien thing clamped itself to the side of our ship one night and made us commit acts that we never would have dreamed of doing otherwise.” Then there was bright anger in her eyes again. “If it isn’t Delagard, what is it? Tell me.”

In a voice thickened by shame Lawler said, “All right. I admit it. It is Delagard.”

“Oh, shit, Val.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you?”

“I don’t think I even realized what was bothering me myself, not until you flung it in my face like this. But yes, yes, I suppose that on some level it’s been eating away at me since that night. Delagard’s hand crawling around between your legs. Delagard’s blubbery mouth on your breasts.” Lawler closed his eyes a moment. “It wasn’t your fault. I’m acting like a stupid adolescent kid.”

“You’re right on all counts. You’re being very silly. And I want to remind you that under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have let Delagard screw me in a million years. Not if he was the last man in the galaxy.”

Lawler smiled. “The devil made you do it.”

“The limpet.”

“Same thing.”

“If you say so. But it never happened, not really. Not by any conscious act of mine. And I’m trying as hard as I know how to unhappen it. You try too. I love you, Val.”

He looked at her in astonishment. That was a phrase that had never arisen between them. He had never imagined that it would. It was so long since he had last heard it that he couldn’t remember who it was who had said it to him.

What now? Was he expected to say it too?

She was grinning. She wasn’t expecting him to say anything. She knew him too well for that.

“Come here, doctor,” she said. “I need some more intense examination.”

Lawler glanced around to see if the infirmary door was locked. Then he went to her.

“Watch out for my blisters,” she said.

Things like giant periscopes rose from the sea, glistening stalks twenty metres high topped with five-sided blue polygons. From distances of half a kilometre or so they regarded the ship with a cool, unwavering gaze for hours. They were eye-stalks, obviously. But the eyes of what?

The periscopes slipped down into the water and didn’t reappear. Next came great yawning mouths, vast creatures similar to those of Home Sea, but even larger: large enough, it would seem, for them to swallow the Queen of Hydros at a single gulp. They too stayed at a distance, lighting up the sea day and night with their greenish phosphorescence. Mouths had never been known to create difficulties for ships on Hydros, but these were the mouths of the Empty Sea, capable of anything. The dark chasms of their open gullets were a threatening, troublesome sight.

The water itself grew phosphorescent. The effect was mild at first, just a little tingle of colour, a faint charming glow. But then it intensified. At night the ship’s wake was a line of fire across the sea. Even by day the waves looked fiery. The spray that occasionally broke across the rail had a bright sparkle.

There was a rain of stinging jellyfish. There was a display of madly frolicking divers, breaking the surface and leaping so high they seemed to be trying to take wing and fly. In one place something that looked like a collection of wooden poles tied together by a bundle of shabby cords came walking across the surface of the sea, with a tiny many-eyed globular creature in an open capsule at the centre of it, as though travelling on stilts.

Then one morning Delagard, peering over the edge of the rail—he was constantly on patrol now, wary of attack from any quarter—reared back abruptly and cried out, “What the fuck? Kinverson, Gharkid, will you come here and look at this?”

Lawler joined the group. Delagard was pointing straight down. At first Lawler saw nothing unusual; but then he noticed that the ship had sprouted a skirt of some sort about twenty centimetres below the surface, an outgrowth of yellowish fibrous stuff that extended outward all along the hull for a distance of a metre or so. No, not a skirt, Lawler decided: more like a ledge, a woody shelf.

Delagard turned to Kinverson. “You ever see anything like that before?”

“Not me.”

“You, Gharkid?”

“No, captain-sir, never.”

“Some sort of seaweed growing on us? A cross between a seaweed and a barnacle? What do you think, Gharkid?”

Gharkid shrugged. “It is a mystery to me, captain-sir.”

Delagard had a rope-ladder flung over the rail and went over the side to inspect. Hanging from the ladder by one arm, dangling just above the surface of the water and leaning far out and down, he used a long-handled barnacle-scraper to prod at the strange excresence. He came back up red-faced and cursing.

The problem, he said, was with the network of sea-finger weed that grew on the hull as a constantly self-repairing coating, protecting and reinforcing the ship’s outer timbers. “Some local plant has hooked up with it. A related species, maybe. Or a symbiote. Whatever it is, it’s clustering around the sea-finger, attaching itself as fast as it can, and it’s growing like crazy. The shelf that’s jutting out of us now is big enough already to be causing a perceptible drag. But if it keeps going at the rate it’s expanding, in a couple of days we’re going to find ourselves sealed in for good.”

“What are we going to do about it?” Kinverson asked.

“You have any suggestions?”

“That somebody go out there in the water-strider and cut the damned stuff off while it can still be done.”

Delagard nodded. “Good idea. I’ll volunteer to take the first shift. Will you go with me?”

“Sure.” Kinverson said. “Why not?”

Delagard and Kinverson climbed into the water-strider. Martello, operating the davits, lifted it and swung it far out past the rail, well beyond the new ledge, before lowering it to the surface of the water.

The trick was to pedal fast enough to keep the strider afloat, but not so fast that the man operating the barnacle-scraper would be unable to cut away the intrusive growths. That was hard to manage at first. Kinverson, holding the scraper, made the most of his long reach to lean over and chop at the ledge; but he took only a couple of strokes and then the strider went shooting past the place where he was working, and when they backed up and tried to hold it in one position for a longer time it began to lose lift and slip down into the water.