Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

One of Delagard’s fishing coracles was tied up alongside it, bobbing on the bay swells. On the pier near the place where the coracle was moored was a shed that looked old enough to have been Jolly’s house, though it wasn’t. Delagard, pausing outside it, looked up fiercely into Lawler’s eyes and said in a soft husky growl, “You understand, doc, whatever you see inside here is absolutely confidential.”

“Spare me the melodrama, Nid.”

“I mean it. You’ve got to promise you won’t talk. It won’t just be my ass if this gets out. It could screw us all.”

“If you don’t trust me, get some other doctor. But you might have some trouble finding one around here.”

Delagard gave him a surly look. Then he produced a chilly smile. “All right. Whatever you say. Just come on in.”

He pushed open the door of the shed. It was utterly dark inside, and unusually humid. Lawler smelled the tart salty aroma of the sea, strong and concentrated as though Delagard had been bottling it in here, and something else, sour and pungent and disagreeable, that he didn’t recognize at all. He heard faint grunting noises, slow and rasping, like the sighs of the damned. Delagard fumbled with something just within the door that made a rough, bristly sound. After a moment he struck a match, and Lawler saw that the other man was holding a bundle of dried seaweed that had been tied at one end to form a torch, which he had ignited. A dim, smoky light spread like an orange stain through the shed.

“There they are,” Delagard said.

The middle of the shed was taken up by a crude rectangular storage tank of pitch-caulked wickerwork, perhaps three metres long and two wide, filled almost to the brim with sea-water. Lawler went over to it and looked in. Three of the sleek aquatic mammals known as divers were lying in it, side by side, jammed close together like fish in a tin. Their powerful fins were contorted at impossible angles and their heads, rising stiffly above the surface of the water, were thrown back in an awkward, agonized way. The strange acrid smell Lawler had picked up at the doorway was theirs. It no longer seemed so unpleasant now. The terrible grunting noises were coming from the diver on the left. They were grunts of purest pain.

“Oh, shit,” Lawler said quietly. He thought he understood the Gillies” rage now. Their blazing eyes, that menacing snort. A quick hot burst of anger went rippling through him, setting up a brief twitching in his cheek. “Shit!” He looked back toward the other man in disgust, revulsion, and something close to hatred. “Delagard, what have you done now?”

“Listen, if you think I brought you here just so you could chew me out—”

Lawler shook his head slowly. “What have you done, man?” he said again, staring straight into Delagard’s suddenly flickering eyes. “What the fuck have you done?”

It was nitrogen absorption: Lawler didn’t have much doubt of that. The frightful way in which the three divers were twisted up was a clear signal. Delagard must have had them working at some job deep down in the open sea, keeping them there long enough for their joints, muscles and fatty tissues to absorb immense quantities of nitrogen; and then, unlikely as that seemed, they evidently had come to the surface without taking the proper time to decompress. The nitrogen, expanding as the pressure dropped, had escaped into their bloodstream and joints in the form of deadly bubbles.

“We brought them here as soon as we realized there was trouble,” Delagard said. “Figuring maybe you could do something for them. And I thought, keep them in water, they need to stay under water, so we filled this tank and—”

“Shut up,” Lawler said.

“I want you to know, we made every effort—”

“Shut up. Please. Just shut up.”

Lawler stripped off the water-lettuce wrap he was wearing and clambered into the tank. Water went splashing over the side as he crowded himself in next to the divers. But there wasn’t much that he could do for them. The one in the middle was dead already: Lawler put his hands to the creature’s muscular shoulders and felt the rigor starting to take hold. The other two were more or less alive—so much the worse for them; they must be in hideous pain, if they were conscious at all. The divers” usually smooth torpedo-shaped bodies, longer than a man’s, were bizarrely knotted, each muscle straining against its neighbour, and their glistening golden skins, normally slick and satiny, felt rough, full of little lumps. Their amber eyes were dull. Their jutting underslung jaws hung slack. A grey spittle covered their snouts. The one on the left was still groaning steadily, every thirty seconds or so, wrenching the sound up from the depths of its guts in a horrifying way.

“Can you fix them somehow?” Delagard asked. “Is there anything you can do at all? I know you can do it, doc. I know you can.” There was an urgent wheedling tone in Delagard’s voice now that Lawler couldn’t remember ever hearing in it before. Lawler was accustomed to the way sick people would cede godlike power to a doctor and beg for miracles. But why did Delagard care so much about these divers? What was going on here, really? Surely Delagard didn’t feel guilty . Not Delagard.

Coldly Lawler said, “I’m no diver doctor. Doctoring humans is all I know how to do. And I could stand to be a whole lot better even at that than I am.”

“Try. Do something. Please.”

“One of them’s dead already, Delagard. I was never trained to raise the dead. You want a miracle, go get your friend Quillan the priest in here.”

“Christ,” Delagard muttered.

“Exactly. Miracles are his speciality, not mine.”

“Christ. Christ.”

Lawler felt carefully for pulses along the divers” throats. Yes, still beating after a fashion, slow, uneven. Did that mean they were moribund? He couldn’t say. What the hell was a normal pulse, for a diver? How was he supposed to know stuff like that? The only thing to do, he thought, was to put the two that were still alive back in the sea, get them down to the depths where they had been, and bring them up again, slowly enough this time so they could rid themselves of the excess nitrogen. But there was no way to manage that. And it was probably too late anyway.

In anguish he made futile, almost mystical passes over the twisted bodies with his hands, as though he could drive the nitrogen bubbles out by gesture alone. “How deep were they?” Lawler asked, without looking up.

“We aren’t sure. Four hundred metres, maybe. Maybe four fifty. The bottom was irregular there and the sea was moving around so we couldn’t keep close track of how much line we’d paid out.”

Clear to the bottom of the sea. It was lunacy.

“What were you looking for?”

“Manganese nuggets,” Delagard said. “And there was supposed to be molybdenum down there too, and maybe some antimony. We trawled up a whole goddamned menagerie of mineral samples with the scoop.”

“Then you should have used the scoop to bring your manganese up,” said Lawler angrily. “Not these.”

He felt the right-hand diver ripple and convulse and die as he held it. The other was still writhing, still moaning.

A cold bitter fury took hold of him, fuelled as much by contempt as by wrath. This was murder, and stupid unthinking murder at that. Divers were intelligent animals—not as intelligent as the Gillies, but intelligent enough, surely smarter than dogs, smarter than horses, smarter than any of the animals of old Earth that Lawler had heard about in his storybook days. The seas of Hydros were full of creatures that could be regarded as intelligent; that was one of the bewildering things about this world, that it had evolved not just a single intelligent species, but, apparently, dozens of them. The divers had a language, they had names, they had some kind of tribal structure. Unlike nearly all the other intelligent life-forms on Hydros, though, they had a fatal flaw: they were docile and even friendly around human beings, gentle frolicking companions in the water. They could be induced to do favours. They could be put to work, even.