Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

Later, alone in his cabin, Lawler studied what was left of his numbweed supply. About two days” worth, he figured. He poured half of it into a flask and drank it down.

What the hell, he thought.

He drank the other half too. What the hell.

The withdrawal symptoms began the morning after next, just before noon: the sweats, the shakes, the nausea. Lawler was ready for them, or thought he was. But they quickly grew more severe, far worse than he had expected, a test so tough he was unsure that he would pass it. The intensity of the pain, sweeping in on him in great billowing waves, frightened him. He imagined that he could feel his brain expanding, pressing against the walls of his skull.

Automatically he looked for his flask, but of course the flask was empty. He crouched on his bunk, shivering, feverish, miserable.

Sundira came to him in mid-afternoon.

“Is it what happened the other day?” she asked.

“Martello? No, that isn’t it.”

“Are you sick, then?”

He indicated the empty flask.

After a moment she understood. “Is there anything I can do, Val?”

“Hold me, that’s all.”

She cradled his head in her arms, against her breast. Lawler shook violently for a while. Then he grew calmer, though he still felt terrible.

“You seem better,” she said.

“A little. Don’t go away.”

“I’m still here. Do you want some water?”

“Yes. No. No, just stay where you are.” He nestled against her. He could feel the fever rising, falling, rising again, with sudden devastating velocity. The drug was more powerful than even he had suspected and his dependency evidently had been a very strong one. And yet—yet—the pain fluctuated; as the hours passed there were moments when he felt almost normal. That was odd. But it gave him hope. He didn’t mind fighting if he had to, but he wanted to win in the end.

Sundira stayed with him all through the afternoon. He slept, and when he woke she was still there. His tongue felt swollen. He was too weak to stand.

“Did you know it would be like this?” she asked.

“Yes. I suppose I did. Maybe not quite this bad.”

“How do you feel now?”

“It varies,” Lawler said.

He heard a voice outside the door. “How is he?” Delagard.

“He’s worried about you,” Sundira said to Lawler.

“Very thoughtful of him.”

“I told him you were sick.”

“Not going into details?”

“No details, no.”

The night was a terrifying one. Lawler thought for a time that he would go out of his mind. But then in the small hours came another of those unexpected, inexplicable periods of recovery, as though something were reaching into his brain from afar and turning down the craving for the drug. By dawn he felt his appetite return; and when he stood up—it was the first time he had risen from his bunk since the fever had started—he was able to keep his balance. “You look okay,” Sundira told him. “Are you?” “More or less. The bad stuff will come back. This is going to be a long struggle.”

But when it did come back it was less severe than it had been. Lawler was at a loss to explain the change. He had expected three, four, even five days of utter horror and then perhaps a gradual sloping off of the torment as his system gradually purged itself of the need. This was only the second day, though.

Again that sense of intervention from without, something guiding him, lifting him, pulling him free of the morass.

Then the tremors and sweats again. And then another spell of recovery, lasting nearly half a day. He went up on deck, enjoyed the fresh air, walked slowly around. Lawler told Sundira that he felt he was getting off too easy.

“Count your blessings,” she said.

By nightfall he was sick again. On, off: up, down. But the basic trend was favourable. He seemed to be recovering. By the end of the week there were only occasional moments of discomfort. He looked at the empty flask and grinned.

The air was clear, the wind was strong. The Queen of Hydros sped onward at a steady swift rate, following its southwesterly track around the watery globe.

The sea’s phosphorescence increased in intensity day by day, even hour by hour. The whole world began to look luminous. Water and sky glowed day and night. Nightmarish creatures of half a dozen unfamiliar kinds burst from the water to soar briefly overhead and disappear with great splashes in the distance. Huge mouths yawned in the depths.

Silence reigned much of the time aboard the Queen . Everyone moved quietly and efficiently through his chores. There was much to do, for now only eleven remained to do the work that fourteen had performed at the beginning of the voyage. Martello, lighthearted, cheery, optimistic, had done much to set the tone for the rest: his death inevitably altered things.

But also the Face was growing nearer. That must have something to do with the newly sombre mood, Lawler thought. It was impossible yet to see it on the horizon, but everyone knew it was there, not far away. Everyone felt it. It was a real presence on board. Its effects were indefinable but unmistakable. Something was there, Lawler found himself thinking, something more than a mere island. Something alert and aware. Waiting for them.

He shook his head, trying to clear it. These were nonsensical fantasies, feverish nightmare horrors, insubstantial, foolish. The drug withdrawal must still be operating on him, he told himself. He was wobbly, weary, vulnerable.

The Face continued to occupy his mind. He struggled to remember the things Jolly had told him about it long ago, but everything was vague and muddled under thirty years” layers of memories. A wild and fantastic place, Jolly had said. Full of plants unlike the ones that grew in the sea. Plants, yes. Strange colours, bright lights shining day and night, a weird realm at the far edge of the world, beautiful and eerie. Had Jolly said anything about animals, land-dwelling creatures of any sort? No, nothing that Lawler could recall. No animal life, just thick jungles.

But there was something about a city, too—

Not on the Face. Near it.

Where? In the ocean? The image eluded him. He struggled to recapture the times he had spent with Jolly, down by the water, the leathery-faced sun-darkened old man rocking back and forth, casting his fishing lines, talking, talking—

A city. A city in the sea. Under the sea.

Lawler caught the tip of the recollection, felt it slip away, lunged for it, could not get it, lunged again—

A city under the sea. Yes. A doorway in the ocean opening into a passageway, a gravity funnel of some sort, leading downward to a tremendous underwater city where the Gillies lived, a hidden city of Gillies as superior to the island-dwelling ones as kings are to peasants—Gillies living like gods, never coming up to the surface, sealed away under the sea in pressurized vaults, living in solemn majesty and absolute luxury—

Lawler smiled. That was it, yes. A grand fable, a glorious fantasy. The finest, most flamboyant of all Jolly’s tales. He could remember trying to imagine what that city had been like, envisioning tall, stately, infinitely majestic Gillies moving through lofty archways into shining palatial halls. Thinking about it now, he felt like a boy again, crouching in wonder at the old seaman’s feet, straining to hear the hoarse, rasping voice.

Father Quillan had been thinking about the Face too.

“I have a new theory about it,” he announced.

The priest had spent an entire morning meditating, sitting beside Gharkid in the gantry area. Lawler, going past them, had stared in wonder. The two of them had seemed lost in trances. Their souls might have been on some other plane of existence entirely.