Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

Quillan shot him a sudden startled, wild-eyed glance.

“Isn’t it true,” Lawler said, “that your church believes that suicide is one of the gravest of all sins?”

“You’re the one who’s talking about suicide, not me.”

“You’re the one who’s planning to commit it.”

“You don’t understand what you’re saying, Lawler. And in your ignorance you’re distorting everything.”

“Am I?” Lawler asked. “Am I, really?”

Late that afternoon Delagard ordered the anchor pulled up, and once more they moved westward along the coast of the Face. A hot, steady on-shore breeze was blowing, as though the huge island were trying to gather them in.

“Val?” Sundira called. She was just above him in the rigging, fixing the stays on the fore yard.

He looked up toward her.

“Where are we, Val? What’s going to happen to us?” She was shivering in the tropic warmth. Uneasily she glanced toward the island. “Looks like my idea of this place as the scene of some sort of nuclear devastation was wrong. But it’s scary all the same, over there.”

“Yes.”

“And yet I still feel drawn to it. I still want to know what it really is.”

“Something bad is what it is,” Lawler said. “You can see that from here.”

“It would be so easy to turn the ship toward shore—you and me, Val, we could do it right now, just the two of us—”

“No.”

“Why not?” There wasn’t much conviction in her question. She looked as uncertain about the island as he was. Her hands were shaking so badly that she dropped her mallet. Lawler caught it as it fell and tossed it back up to her. “What would happen to us, do you think, if we went closer to the shore?” she asked. “If we went up onto the Face itself?”

“Let somebody else find that out for us,” Lawler told her. “Let Gabe Kinverson go over there, if he’s so brave. Or Father Quillan. Or Delagard. This is Delagard’s picnic: let him be the first to go ashore. I’ll stay here and watch what happens.”

“That makes sense, I suppose. And yet—yet—”

“You’re tempted.”

“Yes.”

“There’s a pull, isn’t there? I feel it too. I hear something inside me saying, Go on across, have a look, see what’s there. There’s nothing else like it in the world. You have to see it . But it’s a crazy idea.”

“Yes,” Sundira said quietly. “You’re right. It is.”

She was silent for a time, concentrating on the repairs. Then she climbed down to his level in the rigging. Lawler touched his fingertips lightly, almost experimentally, to her bare shoulder. She made a soft sound and pressed herself up against him, and together they stared out at the colour-stained sea, the swollen setting sun, the haze of bewildering light rising from the island across the way.

“Val, can I stay with you in your cabin tonight?” she asked.

She hadn’t done that often, and not for a long time. The two of them together were too big for the tiny cabin, for his narrow bunk.

“Of course.”

“I love you, Val.”

Lawler ran his hands across the strong ridges of her shoulders and up to the nape of her neck. He felt more strongly drawn to her than ever before: almost as though they were two halves of some severed organism, and not just two semi-strangers who had happened to find themselves thrown together on a bizarre voyage to a perilous place. Was it the peril, he wondered, that had brought them together? Was it—God forbid!—the enforced togetherness in the middle of the ocean that made him so open to her now, so eager to be near her?

“I love you,” he whispered.

They ran for his cabin. He had never felt this close to her … to anyone. They were allies, just the two of them against a turbulent, mystifying universe. With only each other to clutch as the mystery of the Face enveloped them.

The short night was a tangle of interwoven arms and legs, sweaty bodies slipping and sliding against one another, eyes meeting eyes, smiles meeting smiles, breath mingling with breath, soft words spoken, her name on his lips, his on hers, reminiscences exchanged, new memories forged, no sleep at all. Just as well, Lawler thought. Sleep might bring new phantoms. Better to pass the night in wakefulness. And in passion. The new day could well be their last.

He went on deck at dawn. These days he was working first watch. During the night, Lawler saw, the ship had passed within the line of breakers again. Now it was anchored in a bay very much like the first one, though there were no hills along the shore, only low meadows densely packed with dark vegetation.

This time the bay seemed to be accepting their presence, even welcoming it. Its surface was calm, not so much as a ripple; there was no hint of the flailing kelp that had driven them almost at once from the last one.

Here, as everywhere else, the water was luminescent, sending up cascades of pink and gold and scarlet and sapphire radiance; and on shore the wild looping dance of never-resting life was going on with the usual frenzy. Purple sparks rose from the land. The air seemed to be aflame again. There were bright colours everywhere. The insane indefatigable magnificence of the place was a hard thing to face first thing in the morning after a sleepless night.

Delagard was alone on the bridge, huddling into himself in an odd way, arms locked across his cheek.

“Come talk to me, doc,” he said.

Delagard’s eyes were bleary and reddened. He looked as if he had had no sleep, not just this night past, but for days. His jowls were greyish and sagging, his head seemed to have folded downward into his thick neck. Lawler saw a tic at work in Delagard’s cheek. Whatever demon had been riding him yesterday on their first approach to the shore of the Face had returned in the night.

Hoarsely Delagard said, “I hear that you think I’m crazy.”

“Does it matter a damn to you if I do?”

“Will it make you any happier if I tell you that I’m starting to come around almost to agree with you? Almost. Almost.”

Lawler searched for a trace of irony in Delagard’s words, of humour, of mockery. But there was none. Delagard’s voice was thick and husky, with a cracked edge to it.

“Look at that fucking place,” Delagard muttered. He waved his arms in loose looping circles. “Look at it, doc! It’s a wasteland. It’s a nightmare. Why did I ever come here?” He was shaking, and his skin was pale beneath the beard. He looked terrifyingly haggard. In a low husky voice he said, “Only a crazy man would have come this far. I see that clear as anything, now. I saw it yesterday when we pulled into that bay, but I tried to pretend it wasn’t so. I was wrong. At least I’m big enough to admit that. Christ, doc, what was I thinking of when I brought us to this place? It isn’t meant for us.” He shook his head. When he spoke again his voice was no more than an anguished croak. “Doc, we’ve got to get out of here right away.”

Was he serious? Or was this all some grotesque test of loyalty?

“Do you mean it?” Lawler asked him.

“Damned right I do.”

Yes. He really did. He was terrified, quaking. The man seemed to be disintegrating before Lawler’s eyes. It was a stupefying reversal, the last thing Lawler would have expected. He struggled to come to terms with it.

After a while he said, “What about the sunken city?”

“You think that there is one?” Delagard asked.

“Not for a second. But you do.”

“Like shit I do. I had too much brandy, that’s all. We’ve travelled a third of the way around the Face, I figure, and there hasn’t been any sign of it. You’d suppose there’d be a strong coastal current if there’s a gravity funnel holding the sea open up ahead. A vortex flow. But where the fuck is it?”