Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

“There it is!” he cried. “Did you believe me or didn’t you? There’s the Face at last! Look at it! Look at it!”

It was impossible not to feel awe. Even the dullest and simplest of the voyagers—Neyana, say, or Pilya, or Gharkid—seemed moved by its encroaching presence, by the strangeness of the landscape ahead, by the power of the inexplicable psychic emanations that came in pulsing waves from the Face. All eleven of the voyagers stood arrayed side by side on deck, nobody bothering to sail or to steer, staring in stunned silence as the ship drifted toward the island as if caught in some powerful magnetic grip.

Only Kinverson appeared, if not untouched, then at least unshaken. He had awakened from his trance. Now he too was staring fixedly at the approaching shore. His craggy face seemed riven by strong emotion of some sort. But when Dag Tharp turned to him and asked him if he was afraid at all, Kinverson replied with a blank look, as if the question had no meaning for him, and a flat incurious glare, as though he felt no need to have it explained.

“Afraid?” he said. “No. Should I be?”

The constant motion of everything on the island struck Lawler as its most bewildering aspect. Nothing was at rest. Whatever vegetation lay along its shore, if vegetation was indeed what it was, appeared to be in a process of intense, dynamic, churning growth. There was no stillness anywhere. There were no recognizable patterns of topography. Everything was moving, everything was writhing, flailing, weaving itself into the tangled web of shimmering substance and unweaving itself again, whipping about in a ceaseless lunatic dance of exhausting energy that might well have been going on this way since the beginning of time.

Sundira came up alongside Lawler and laid her hand gently on his bare shoulder. They stood facing outward, scarcely daring even to breath.

“The colours,” she said softly. “The electricity.”

It was a fantastic display. Light was constantly born from every millimetre of surface. Now it was a pure white, now a brilliant red, now the deepest of violets, verging on impenetrable black. And then came colours Lawler could barely name. They were gone before he could comprehend them, and others just as potent came in their place.

It was light that had the quality of vast noise: it was an explosion, a terrible din, a flashing, pounding dazzle. The overwhelming energy of it had a perverse, demented vigour: such fury could hardly be sane. Phantasmal eruptions of cold flame danced and gleamed and vanished and were replaced. One could not dwell on the same part of it very long; the force of those violent bursts of colour forced the eye away. Even when you didn’t look, Lawler thought, it pounded insistently at your brain all the same. The place was like an immense radio device that sent forth an inexorable broadcast on the biosensory wavelengths. He could feel its emanation probing him, touching his mind, slithering around inside his skull like invisible fingers caressing his soul.

He stood motionless, shivering, his arm around Sundira’s waist, all his muscles clenched from scalp to toes.

Then, cutting through the crazed blazing brilliance, there came something just as violent, just as demented, but much more familiar: the voice of Nid Delagard, transformed now into something raw and harsh and weirdly rigid, but recognizable even so. “All right, back to your posts, all of you! We’ve got work to do!”

Delagard was panting in strange excitement. His face had a dark, stormy look, as though some private tempest was roiling his soul. In an odd frantic way he moved along the deck among them, roughly seizing them one by one, swinging them around bodily to get their eyes off the Face.

“Turn away! Turn away! That cockeyed light’ll hypnotize you if you give it the chance!”

Lawler felt Delagard’s fingers digging into the flesh of his upper arms. He yielded to the tugging and let Delagard pull him away from the astonishing sight across the water.

“You’ve got to force yourself not to look,” Delagard said. “Onyos, take the wheel! Neyana, Pilya, Lawler, let’s get those sails to the wind! We need to find ourselves a harbour.”

Sailing with slitted eyes, working hard to avert their gaze from the incomprehensible display that was erupting before them, they cruised along its turbulent shore seeking some cove or bay where they might find shelter. At first it seemed that there was none. The Face was one long headland, impenetrable, unwelcoming.

Then the ship swept unexpectedly through the line of breakers and found itself in calm waters, a placid bay encircled by two jutting limbs of the island rimmed by steep hills. But the placidity was deceptive and short-lived. Within moments of their arrival the bay began to heave and swell. In the churning water thick black strands of what might have been kelp rose into view, flailing the surface like the dark limbs of monsters, and spiky spear-like protrusions appeared menacingly between them, emitting clouds of sinister radiant yellow smoke. Convulsions of the land seemed to be taking place along the shore.

Lawler, exhausted, began to imagine images, mysterious, abstract, tantalizing. Unfamiliar shapes danced in his mind. He felt a maddening unreachable itch behind his forehead and pressed his hands to his temples, but it did no good.

Delagard paced the deck, brooding, muttering. After a time he gave orders to swing the ship around and took it out beyond the breakers again. As soon as they had left the bay it grew calm. It looked as tempting as it had before.

“Do we try again?” Felk asked.

“Not now,” said Delagard dourly. His eyes flashed with cold anger. “Maybe this isn’t a good place. We’ll move along westward.”

The coast to the west was unpromising: rough and wild and steep. A crisp acrid odour of combustion drifted on the wind. Flaming sparks floated upward from the land. The air itself seemed to be burning. Occasional waves of overpowering telepathic force came drifting toward them from the island, short sudden jolts that caused mental confusion and disarray. The midday sun was bloated and discoloured. There appeared to be no inlets anywhere. After a time Delagard, who had gone below, reappeared and announced in a tight, bitter voice that he was abandoning, for the moment, his attempts to make a closer approach.

They retreated to a point well beyond the churning surf, where the sea was flat and shallow, streaming with colours that rose from a bed of glistening sand. There they cast anchor for the first time since the beginning of the voyage.

Lawler found Delagard at the rail, staring into the distance.

“Well? What do you think of your paradise now, Nid? Your land of milk and honey?”

“We’ll find a way in. We just came on it from the wrong side, that’s all.”

“You want to land there?”

Delagard turned to face him. His bloodshot eyes, strangely transformed by the clashing light all around them, seemed to be dead, utterly without life. But when he spoke his voice was as strong as ever. “Nothing that I’ve seen so far has changed my mind about anything, doc. This is the place I want to be. Jolly was able to make a landfall here, and so will we.”

Lawler made no reply. There wasn’t anything he could think of to say that wasn’t likely to trigger an explosion of insane wrath in Delagard.

But then he grinned and leaned forward and clapped his hand to Lawler’s shoulder amiably. “Doc, doc, doc, don’t look so solemn! Of course this is a weird-looking place. Of course. Why else would the Gillies have kept away from it all this time? And of course the stuff that comes wafting out of there feels strange to us. We simply aren’t used to it. But that doesn’t mean we need to be afraid of it. This is just a fancy bunch of visual effects. Just decorations, just trimming on the package. They don’t mean a thing. Not a fucking thing.”