Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

“You tell me, Nid. You seemed to think it was here.”

“That was Jolly who thought so.”

“Jolly was crazy. Jolly’s brains got cooked when he took his trip around the Face.”

Delagard nodded sombrely. His eyelids rolled slowly down over his bloodshot eyes. Lawler thought for a moment that he had fallen asleep standing up. Then he said, still keeping his eyes closed, “I’ve been out here by myself all night, doc. Working things out in my mind. Trying to take a practical view of the situation. It sounds funny to you, because you think I’m crazy. But I’m not crazy, doc. Not really. I may do things that look crazy to other people, but I’m not crazy myself. I’m just different from you. You’re sober, you’re cautious, you hate taking chances, you just want to go along and go along and go along. That’s all right. There are people like you in the universe and there are people like me, and we never really understand each other, but sometimes it happens that we get thrown together in a situation and we have to work together anyway. Doc, I wanted to come here more than anything I’ve ever wanted in my life. For me it was the key to everything. Don’t ask me to explain. You’d never get it, anyway. But now I’m here and I see made a mistake. There’s nothing here for us. Nothing.”

“Pizarro,” Lawler said. “Cortes. They would at least have gone ashore before turning tail and running.”

“Don’t fuck around with me now,” said Delagard. “I’m trying to level with you.”

“You gave me Pizarro and Cortes when I tried to level with you, Nid.”

Delagard opened his eyes. They were frightful: bright as coals, fiery with pain. He drew back the corner of his mouth in what might have been an attempt at a smile. “Go easy, doc. I was drunk.”

“I know.”

“You know what my mistake was, doc? I believed my own bullshit. And Jolly’s bullshit. And Father Quillan’s. Quillan fed me a lot of stuff about the Face of the Waters as a place where godly powers would be mine for the taking, or so I interpreted what he was saying. And here we are. Here we lie. Rest in peace. I stood here all night and I thought. How would I build a spaceport? With what? How could anyone live in all that chaos over there without going out of his mind in half a day? What would we eat? Could we even breathe the air? No wonder the Gillies won’t come here. The miserable place is uninhabitable. And suddenly everything came clear to me, and I was standing here all by myself, face to face with myself, laughing at myself. Laughing, doc. But the joke was on me, and it wasn’t very funny. This whole voyage has been sheer lunacy, hasn’t it, doc?”

Delagard was swaying back and forth, now. Lawler saw abruptly that he must still be drunk. There had to be one more hidden cache of brandy on board and probably he’d been drinking all night. For days, maybe. He was so drunk that he thought he was sober.

“You ought to lie down. I can give you a sedative.”

“Fuck your sedative. What I want is for you to agree with me! It’s been a crazy voyage. Hasn’t it, doc?”

“You know that’s what I think, Nid.”

“And you think I’m crazy too.”

“I don’t know if you are or you aren’t. What I do know is that you’re right on the verge of collapse.”

“Well, what if I am?” Delagard asked. “I’m still the captain of this ship. I got us into this. All those people who died, they died because of me. I can’t let anybody else die. I’ve got the responsibility for getting us out.”

“What’s your plan, then?”

“What we need to do now,” Delagard said, speaking slowly and carefully out of some almost unfathomable depth of fatigue, “is work out a course that’ll take us up into inhabited waters, and go to the first island we can reach and fucking beg them to take us in. Eleven people: they can always find room for eleven people, no matter how crowded they try to tell us they are.”

“That sounds fine with me.”

“I figured it would.”

“Okay, then. You go get yourself some rest, Nid. The rest of us will get us out of here right now. Felk can navigate, and we’ll pull the sails around, and by mid-afternoon we’ll be a hundred kilometres from here and making for someplace like Grayvard as fast as we know how.” Lawler nudged Delagard toward the steps leading down from the bridge. “Go on. Before you drop.”

“No,” Delagard said. “I told you, I’m still the captain. If we have to leave here, it’ll be with me at the wheel.”

“All right. Whatever you like.”

“It isn’t what I like. It’s what I have to do. What I need to do. And there’s something I need from you, doc, before we go.”

“What’s that?”

“Something that’ll let me deal with the way things have turned out. It’s been a total defeat, hasn’t it? A complete fuck-up. I’ve never failed at anything in my life until now. But this catastrophe—this disaster—” Delagard’s hand suddenly jabbed out and clutched at Lawler’s arm. “I need a way of making myself able to live with it, doc. The shame. The guilt. You don’t think I’m capable of feeling guilt, but what the fuck did you ever know about me, anyway? If we survive this trip everyone on Hydros is going to look at me wherever I go and say, There’s the man who headed the voyage, who led six ships full of people right down the toilet. And there’ll be reminders for me all the time. From now on every time I see you, or Dag, or Felk, or Kinverson—” Delagard’s eyes were fixed and fiery now. “You’ve got some drug, don’t you, that numbs out your feelings, right? I want you to give me some. I want to dose myself up on it but good, and stay dosed from here on in. Because the only other thing for me to do now is kill myself, and that’s something I can’t even imagine doing.”

“Drugs are a form of killing yourself, Nid.”

“Spare me the pious bullshit, will you, doc?”

“I mean it. Take it from somebody who spent years dosing himself with the stuff. It’s a living death.”

“That’s still better than a dead death.”

“Maybe so. But in any case I can’t give you any. I used up the last of my supply before we got here.”

Delagard’s grasp on Lawler’s arm tightened fiercely. “You’re lying to me!”

“Am I?”

“I know you are. You can’t live without the drug. You take it every day. Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think everybody does?”

“It’s all gone, Nid. Do you remember last week, when I was so sick? What I was doing was going through withdrawal. There isn’t a drop left. You can search my stores if you like. But you won’t find any.”

“You’re lying to me!”

“Go and look. You can have all you can find. That’s a promise.” Carefully Lawler lifted Delagard’s hand from his arm. “Listen, Nid, just lie down and get yourself some rest. By the time you wake up we’ll be far from here and you’ll feel better, believe me, and you’ll be able to start the whole process of forgiving yourself. You’re a resilient man. You know how to deal with things like guilt—believe me, you do. Right now you’re so damned tired and depressed that you can’t see beyond the next five minutes, but once we’re out in the open sea again—”

“Hold on a minute,” Delagard said, looking over Lawler’s shoulder. He pointed toward the gantry area in the stern. “What the fuck’s happening down there?”

Lawler turned to see. Two figures were struggling, a big man and a much slighter one: Kinverson and Quillan, an unlikely pair of antagonists. Kinverson had his hands clamped on the priest’s thin shoulders and was holding him at arm’s length, immobilized, while Quillan fought to break free.

Lawler scrambled down the steps and hurried aft, with Delagard stumbling along behind him.