Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

“What are you doing?” Lawler asked. “Let go of him.”

“I let go, he goes across to the Face. That’s what he says. You want him to do that, doc?”

Quillan looked weirdly ecstatic. He wore a sleepwalker’s glazed stare. His pupils were dilated, his skin was as pale as though he had been drained of blood. His lips were drawn back in a frozen grin.

Kinverson said, “He was wandering around here like somebody who’s out of his head. Going to the Face, he kept saying. Going to the Face. Started to climb over the side, and I grabbed him, and he hit me. Jesus, I never knew he was such a fighter! But I think he’s quieting down a little now.”

“Try letting go,” Lawler said. “See what he does.”

Shrugging, Kinverson released him. Quillan began at once to press onward toward the rail. The priest’s eyes were shining as if with an inner light.

“You see?” the fisherman asked.

Delagard came shouldering forward. He looked groggy but determined. Order had to be maintained aboard ship. He caught the priest by his wrist. “What are you up to? What do you think you’re trying to do?”

“Going ashore—the Face—to the Face—” Quillan’s dreamy grin broadened until it seemed that his cheeks must split. “The god wants me—the god in the Face—”

“Jesus,” Delagard said, his face mottling in exasperation. “What are you saying? You’ll die if you go over there. Don’t you understand that? There’s no way to live over there. Look at the light coming from everything. The place is poison. Snap out of it, will you! Snap out of it!”

“The god in the Face—”

Quillan struggled to break free of Delagard’s grasp, and for a moment succeeded. He took two sliding steps toward the rail. Then Delagard caught him again, yanking Quillan toward him and slapping him so hard that the priest’s lip began to bleed. Quillan stared at him, stunned. Delagard raised his hand again.

“Don’t,” Lawler said. “He’s coming out of it.”

Indeed something was changing in Quillan’s eyes. The glow was leaving them, and the rigid look of trance. He seemed dazed now but fully conscious, trying to blink away his confusion. Slowly he rubbed his face where Delagard had struck him. He shook his head. The motion widened into a convulsive body-long shudder, and he began to tremble. Tears glistened in his eyes.

“My God. I actually was going over there. That was what I was doing, wasn’t I? It was pulling me. I felt it pulling.”

Lawler nodded. It seemed to him that he felt it too, suddenly. A pulsation, a throbbing in his mind. Something stronger than the tempting urge, the mild tug of curiosity, that he and Sundira had felt the night before. It was a powerful mental pressure, drawing him inward, calling him toward the wild shore behind the surf-line.

Angrily he brushed the idea aside. He was getting as crazy as Quillan.

The priest was still talking about the pull he had felt. “There was no way I could resist it. It was offering me the thing I’d been searching for all my life. Thank God Kinverson grabbed me in time.” Quillan gave Lawler a dishevelled look, terror mixed with bewilderment. “You were right, doc, what you said yesterday. It would have been suicide. I thought just then that I’d be going to God, to a god of some sort. But it was the devil, for all I know. That’s Hell over there. I thought it was Paradise, but it’s Hell.” The priest’s voice trailed off. Then, more distinctly, he said to Delagard, “I ask you to take us away from this place. Our souls are in danger here, and if you don’t believe that there is such a thing as the soul, then at least consider that it’s our lives that are in peril. If we stay here any longer—”

“Don’t worry,” Delagard said. “We aren’t going to stay. We’re leaving here as fast as we can.”

Quillan made an O of surprise with his lips.

Wearily Delagard said, “I’ve had a little revelation of my own, Father, and it agrees with yours. This voyage was a gigantic fucking miscalculation, if you’ll excuse the vernacular. We don’t belong here. I want to get out of here as much as you do.”

“I don’t understand. I thought—that you—”

“Don’t think so much,” said Delagard. “Thinking too much can be very bad for you.”

“Did you say we’re leaving?” Kinverson asked.

“That’s right.” Delagard looked up defiantly at the big man. His face was red with chagrin. But he seemed almost amused now by the extent of the calamity that was tumbling down upon him. He was beginning to seem himself again. Something not far from a smile played across his features. “We’re clearing out.”

“Fine with me,” said Kinverson. “Any time you say.”

Lawler glanced away, his attention caught suddenly by something very strange.

He said abruptly, “Did you hear that sound, just now? Somebody speaking to us out of the Face?”

“What? Where?”

“Stand very still and listen. It’s coming from the Face. “ Doctor-sir. Captain-sir. Father-sir ."” Lawler mimicked the high, thin, soft voice with keen accuracy. “You hear that? “ I am with the Face now, captain-sir. Doctor-sir. Father-sir .” It’s as if he’s standing right here next to us.”

“Gharkid!” Quillan exclaimed. “But how—where—”

Others were coming on deck, now: Sundira, Neyana, Pilya Braun. Dag Tharp and Onyos Felk were a few paces behind them. All of them seemed astounded by what they had heard. The last to appear was Lis Niklaus, moving in a peculiar shambling, stumbling way. She jabbed her forefinger at the sky again and again, as though trying to stab it.

Lawler turned and looked up. And saw what Lis was pointing to. The swirling colours in the sky were congealing, taking shape—the shape of the dark, enigmatic face of Natim Gharkid. A gigantic image of the mysterious little man hovered above them, inescapable, inexplicable.

“Where is he?” Delagard cried, in a thick, clotted voice. “How’s he doing that? Bring him here! Gharkid! Gharkid!” He waved his arms frantically. “Go find him. All of you! Search the ship! Gharkid!”

“He’s in the sky,” Neyana Golghoz said blandly, as if that explained everything.

“No,” Kinverson said. “He’s on the Face. Look there—the water-strider’s gone. He must have gone across while we were busy with the Father.”

Indeed, the strider’s housing was empty. Gharkid had taken it out by himself and crossed the little bay to the shore beyond. And had entered the Face; and had been absorbed; and had been transformed. Lawler stared in wonder and terror at the huge image in the sky. Gharkid’s face, no question of that. But how? How?

Sundira came up beside him. Her arm slipped through his. She was shivering with fear. Lawler wanted to comfort her, but no words would come.

Delagard was the first to find his voice.

“Work stations, everyone! Pull that anchor up! I want to see sails! We’re getting the hell out of here right now!”

“Wait a second,” Quillan said quietly. He nodded toward the shore. “Gharkid’s coming back.”

The little man’s journey toward the ship seemed to take a thousand years. No one dared move. They all stood in a row watching by the rail, frozen, appalled.

The image of Gharkid had vanished from the sky the moment the real Gharkid had come into view. But the unmistakable tone of Gharkid’s voice, somehow, was still a part of the strange mental emanation that had begun to radiate steadily from the Face. The physical incarnation of the man might be returning, but something else had remained behind.

He had abandoned the water-strider—Lawler saw it now, beached in the vegetation at the edge of the shore; tendrils of new growth were already beginning to wrap themselves around it—and was swimming across the narrow bay: wading, really. He moved at an unhurried pace, obviously not regarding himself in any danger from whatever creatures might inhabit these strange waters. Of course not, Lawler thought. He was one of them now.