Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

“I’m glad you’re so sure of yourself.”

“Yes. So am I. Listen, doc, have faith. We’re almost there. We’ve made it this far, and we’re going to go the rest of the way. There’s nothing to worry about.” He grinned again. “Look, doc, relax, will you? I found a little of Gospo’s brandy hidden away last night. Come on down to my cabin in an hour or so. Everyone will be there. We’ll have a party. We’re going to celebrate our arrival.”

Lawler was the last to arrive. By candlelight in the dark cramped musky-smelling room they were all grouped in a rough semicircle around Delagard, Sundira to his left, Kinverson just on the other side of her, Neyana and Pilya beyond, then Gharkid, Quillan, Tharp, Felk, Lis. Everyone had a cup of brandy. An empty flask and two full ones were on the table. Delagard stood facing them with his back pressed up against the bulwark and his head drawn down into his shoulders in a peculiar way that seemed both defensive and aggressive at the same time. He looked possessed. His eyes were bright, almost feverish. His face, stubbly and peeked with some irritation of the skin, was flushed and sweaty. It struck Lawler suddenly that the man was on the verge of some kind of crisis: an inner eruption, a violent explosion, the release of pent-up emotion that had been too long in storage.

“Have a drink, doc,” Delagard called.

“Thanks. I will. I thought we were out of this stuff.”

“I thought so too,” said Delagard. “I was wrong.” He poured until the cup overflowed, and shoved it along the table toward Lawler. “So you remembered Jolly’s story about the undersea city, eh?”

Lawler took a deep gulp of the brandy, and waited until it had hit bottom.

“How did you know that?”

“Sundira told me. She said you talked to her about it.”

With a shrug Lawler said, “It came floating back into my mind out of nowhere yesterday. I hadn’t thought about it in years. The best part of Jolly’s story, and I’d forgotten it.”

“But I hadn’t,” Delagard said. “I was just telling the others, while we were waiting for you to come down. What do you think, doc? Was Jolly full of shit or wasn’t he?”

“An underwater city? How would that be possible?”

“Gravity funnel, that’s what I remember Jolly saying. Super-technology. Achieved by super-Gillies.” Delagard rotated his cup, rolling the brandy around in it. He was well on his way toward being drunk, Lawler realized. “I always liked that story of his best of all, just like you,” Delagard said. “How the Gillies, half a million years ago, decided to go live under the ocean. There was some land mass on this planet, that’s what they told Jolly, remember? Fair-sized islands, small continents, even, and they dismantled most of that and used the material to build sealed chambers at the deep end of their gravity tunnel. And when they had everything ready they moved down below and shut the door behind them.”

“And you believe this?” Lawler asked.

“Probably not. It’s pretty wild stuff. But it’s a nice story, isn’t it, doc? An advanced race of Gillies down there, the bosses of the planet. Leaving their country cousins behind on the floating islands, serfs and peasants who run the upper world for them as a farm to provide them with food. And all the life-forms on Hydros, the island Gillies and mouths and platforms and divers and hagfish and everything else, right down to the crawlie-oysters and the raspers, are tied together in one big ecological web whose sole purpose is to serve the needs of the ones who live in the undersea city. The island Gillies believe that when they die they come here to live on the Face. Ask Sundira if you don’t believe me. That must mean that they hope to go down below and live a soft life in the hidden city. Maybe the divers believe that too. And the crawlie-oysters.”

“An old man’s crazy fable, this city,” Lawler said. “A myth.”

“Maybe so. Or maybe not.” Delagard offered him a cool, taut smile. His self-control was frightening in its intensity, unreal, ominous. “But let’s say it isn’t. What we saw this morning—this whole incredible jimbo-jambo of whirling, dancing God-knows-what—might in fact be a huge biological machine that provides the energy for the secret Gillie city. The plants that grow over there are metal. I’ll bet that they are. They’re parts of the machine. They’ve got their roots in the sea and they extract minerals and create new tissues out of them. And perform all sorts of mechanical functions. And what’s on that island somewhere, maybe, is a gigantic electrical grid. In the middle of it, I’ll bet, there’s a solar collector, an accumulator disc that pulls in energy that all that semi-living wiring over there is pumping down to the submerged city. What we’ve been feeling is the surplus force of it all. It comes crackling through the air and fucks up our minds. Or would, if we let it. But we aren’t going to let it. We’re smart enough to stay out of its grip. What we’re going to do is sail right along the coast at a safe distance until we come to the entrance to the hidden city, and then—”

Lawler said, “You’re moving too fast, Nid. You say that you don’t think the undersea city is anything more than an old man’s fantasy, and all of a sudden you’re at its entrance.”

Delagard looked unfazed. “I’m just assuming it’s real. For the sake of the conversation. Have some more brandy, doc. This is the last of it for sure. We might as well enjoy it all at once.”

“Assuming it’s real,” said Lawler, “how are you going to build the great city you were talking about here, when the place is already in possession of a bunch of super-Gillies? Aren’t they going to get a little annoyed? Assuming they exist.”

“I imagine they will. Assuming they exist.”

“Then aren’t they likely to call in an armada of rammerhorns and hatchet-jaws and sea-leopards and drakkens to teach us not to come around bothering them again?”

“They won’t get the chance,” Delagard said serenely. “If they’re there, what we’ll do is go down there and conquer the shit out of them.”

“We’ll do what ?”

“It’ll be the easiest thing you can imagine. They’re soft and decadent and old. If they’re there, doc. If. They’ve had their own way on this world since the beginning of time and the concept of an enemy doesn’t even exist in their minds. Everything on Hydros is here to serve them. And they’ve been down there in their hole for half a million years living in luxury we couldn’t even begin to imagine. When we get down there we’ll discover that they’ll have no way of defending themselves at all. Why should they? Defend themselves against whom? We walk right in and tell them we’re taking over, and they’ll roll over and surrender.”

“Eleven half-naked men and women armed with gaffs and belaying pins are going to conquer the capital city of an immensely advanced alien civilization?”

“You ever study any Earth history, Lawler? There was a place called Peru that ruled half a continent and had temples built of gold. A man named Pizarro came in with maybe two hundred men armed with medieval weapons that weren’t any damned good at all, a cannon or two and some rifles you wouldn’t believe, and he seized the emperor and conquered the place just like that. Around the same time a man named Cortes did the same thing in an empire called Mexico that was just as rich. You take them by surprise, you don’t let yourself even allow for the possibility of defeat, you simply march in and get command of their central authority figure, and they fall down at your feet. And everything they have is yours.”

Lawler stared at Delagard, wonder-struck.

“Without even lifting a finger in our own defence, Nid, we allowed ourselves to be thrown off the island where we had lived for a hundred and fifty years by the simple peasant cousins of these super-Gillies, because we knew we didn’t stand a chance in a fight against them. But now you tell me with a straight face that you’re going to overthrow an entire superior technological civilization with your bare hands, and you give me medieval folk tales about mythical kingdoms captured by ancient culture-heroes to prove to me that it can be done. Jesus, Nid! Jesus!”