Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

“You’ll see, doc. I promise you.”

Lawler looked around, appealing to the others. But they sat mute, glazed, as though asleep.

“Why are we even wasting our time on this?” he asked. “There’s no such city. It’s an impossible concept. You don’t believe in it for a minute, Nid. Do you? Do you?”

“I’ve already told you, maybe I do, maybe I don’t. Jolly believed in it.”

“Jolly was crazy.”

“Not when he first came back to Sorve. It was only later, after he’d been laughed at for years—”

But Lawler had had enough. Delagard went round and round and round and nothing he said made sense. The close, dank air in the cabin suddenly was as hard to breathe as water. Lawler felt as if he were choking. Spasms of claustrophobic nausea swept over him. He yearned powerfully for his numbweed.

He understood now that Delagard wasn’t simply dangerously obsessive: he was completely crazy.

And we are all lost down here at the far end of the world, Lawler thought, with no way of escaping and no place to escape to even if we could.

“I can’t listen to this garbage any more,” he said in a voice half strangled by rage and disgust, and got up and rushed from the room.

“Doc!” Delagard called. “Come back here! Damn you, doc, come back!”

Lawler slammed the door and kept on going.

As he stood alone on the deck Lawler knew even without turning around that Father Quillan had come up behind him. That was odd, knowing without looking. It must be some side effect of the furious emanations pouring over them out of the Face.

“Delagard asked me to come up and talk with you,” the priest said.

“About what?”

“Your outburst down below.”

“ My outburst?” Lawler said, astonished. He turned and looked at the priest. By the strange many-coloured light that crackled all about them Quillan seemed more gaunt than ever, his long face a thing of a myriad planes, his skin tanned and glossy, his eyes bright as beacons. “What about Delagard’s outburst? Lost cities under the sea! Cockeyed wars of conquest modelled on mythical fables out of antiquity!”

“They weren’t mythical. Cortes and Pizarro really lived, and really did conquer great empires with just a handful of troops, a thousand years ago. It’s the truth. It’s been documented in Earth history.”

Lawler shrugged. “What happened long ago on another planet doesn’t matter here.”

“You say that? You, the man who visits Earth in his dreams?”

“Cortes and Pizarro weren’t dealing with Gillies. Delagard’s a lunatic and everything he’s been saying to us today is absolute madness.” Then, suddenly cautious, he said, “Or don’t you agree?”

“He’s a volatile, melodramatic man, full of frenzy and fire. But I don’t think he’s crazy.”

“An undersea city at the deep end of a gravity funnel? You actually think such a thing can exist? You’ll believe anything, won’t you? Yes, you will. You can believe Father, Son and Holy Ghost, so why not an undersea city?”

“Why not?” the priest said. “Stranger things than that have been found on other worlds.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Lawler said sullenly.

“And it’s a plausible explanation for why Hydros is the way it is. I’ve been giving this place some thought, Lawler. There are no real water worlds in the galaxy, you know. The others that are like Hydros all have chains of natural islands, at least, archipelagoes, the tops of sunken mountains showing above the sea. Hydros is just a big ball of water, though. But if you postulate that there once was a certain amount of land, and it was cut away to build one or more enormous undersea cities, until at last all of Hydros” surface territory had disappeared into the sea and there was nothing but water left on top—”

“Maybe so. Or maybe not.”

“It stands to reason. Why are the Gillies an island-building race? Because they’re evolving from an aquatic form and need land to live on? That’s a reasonable theory. But what if it’s the other way around entirely, that they were land-dwellers to begin with, and the ones who were left behind at the surface at the time of the migration underground evolved into a semi-aquatic form when the land was taken away? That would account for—”

Wearily Lawler said, “You argue science the way you argue theology: start with an illogical notion, then pile all kinds of hypotheses and speculations on top of it in the hope of making it make sense. If you want to believe that the Gillies suddenly got bored with living outdoors, so they built themselves a hideaway in the ocean, stripped away all the land surface of the planet in the process, and left a mutated amphibious form of themselves up above just for the hell of it, go ahead and believe it. I don’t care. But do you also believe that Delagard can march in and conquer them the way he says he’s planning to do?”

“Well—”

“Look,” Lawler said, “I don’t for a moment think that this magical city exists. I used to talk to this Jolly too, and he always seemed like a crackpot to me. But even if the place is right around the next bend in the coast, we can’t possibly invade it. The Gillies would wipe us out in five minutes.” He leaned close to the other man. “Listen to me. Father. What we really need to do is put Delagard under restraint and get ourselves out of here. I felt that way weeks ago, and then I changed my mind, and now I see I was right the first time. The man’s deranged and we have no business being in this place.”

“No,” said Quillan.

“No?”

“Delagard may be as disturbed as you say he is, and his schemes pure lunacy. But I won’t support you in any attempt to interfere with him. Quite the contrary.”

“You want to continue sniffing around the Face, regardless of the risks?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

For a beat or two Lawler was silent. “Right,” he said finally. “It slipped my mind for the moment. Angels. Paradise. How could I have let myself forget that you were the one who encouraged Delagard to come here in the first place, for your own private reasons, which have nothing to do with his?” Lawler waved a hand contemptuously at the wild circus of gyrating vegetation across the strait on the shore of the Face. “You still think that that’s the land of the angels over there? Of the gods?”

“In a way, yes.”

“And you still think you can wangle some kind of redemption for yourself over there?

“Yes.”

“Redeemed by that? Lights and noise?”

“Yes.”

“You’re crazier than Delagard.”

“I can understand why you’d think so,” the priest said.

Lawler laughed harshly. “I can just see you marching beside him into the undersea city of the super-Gillies. He’s carrying a gaff and you’re carrying a cross, and the two of you are singing hymns, you in one key and him in another. The Gillies come forward and kneel, and you baptize them one by one, and then you explain to them that Delagard is now their king.”

“Please, Lawler.”

“Please what? You want me to pat you on the head and tell you how impressed I am with your profound ideas? And then go below and tell Delagard how grateful I am for his inspired leadership? No, Father, I’m sailing aboard a ship commanded by a madman, who with your connivance has brought us to the weirdest and most dangerous place on this planet, and I don’t like it, and I want to get out of here.”

“If only you’d be willing to see that what the Face has to offer us—”

“I know what the Face has to offer. Death is what it has to offer. Father. Starvation. Dehydration. Or worse. You see those lights flashing over there? You feel that strange electrical crackling? It doesn’t feel friendly to me. It feels lethal, in fact. Is that your idea of redemption? Dying?”