Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

They could be worked right to death, it seemed.

Desperately Lawler massaged the one that hadn’t yet died, still hoping in a hopeless way that he could work the nitrogen out of its tissues. For a moment its eyes brightened and it uttered five or six words in the barking, guttural diver language. Lawler didn’t speak diver; but the creature’s words were easy enough to guess at: pain, grief, sorrow, loss, despair, pain . Then the amber eyes glazed over again and the diver lapsed into silence.

Lawler said, as he worked on it, “Divers are adapted for life in the deep ocean. Left to their own devices, they’re smart enough to know not to rise from one pressure-zone to another too fast to handle the gases. Any sea creature knows that, no matter how dumb it is. A sponge would know that, let alone a diver. How did it happen that these three came up so fast?”

“They got caught in the hoist,” Delagard said miserably. “They were in the net and we didn’t know it until it surfaced. Is there anything, anything at all that you can do to save them, doc?”

“The other one on the end is dead too. This one has maybe five minutes left. The only thing I can do is break its neck and put it out of its misery.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. Jesus. What a shitty business.”

It took only an instant, one quick snap. Lawler paused for a moment afterward, shoulders hunched forward, exhaling, feeling a release himself as the diver died. Then he climbed out of the tank, shook himself off, and wrapped the water-lettuce garment around his middle again. What he wanted now, and he wanted it very badly, was a good shot of his numbweed tincture, the pink drops that gave him peace of a sort. And a bath, after having been in the tank with those dying beasts. But his bath quota for the week was used up. A swim would have to do, a little later on in the day. Though he suspected it would take more than that to make him feel clean again after what he had seen in here this morning.

He looked sharply at Delagard.

“These aren’t the first divers you’ve done this to, are they?”

The stocky man didn’t meet his gaze.

“No.”

“Don’t you have any sense? I know you don’t have any conscience, but you might at least have sense. What happened to the other ones?”

They died.”

“I assume that they did. What did you do with the bodies?”

“Made feed out of them.”

“Wonderful. How many?”

“It was a while ago. Four, five—I’m not sure.”

“That probably means ten. Did the Gillies find out about it?”

Delagard’s “Yes” was the smallest possible audible sound a man could have made.

“Yes,” Lawler mimicked. “Of course they found out. The Gillies always know it, when we fuck around with the local fauna. So what did they say, when they found out?”

“They warned me.” A little louder, not much, a sullen under-the-breath naughty-schoolboy tone.

Here it comes, Lawler thought. We’re at the heart of it at last.

“Warned you what?” he asked.

“Not to use divers in my operations any more.”

“But you did, is how it looks. Why the hell did you do it again, if they warned you?”

“We changed the method. We didn’t think there’d be any harm.” Some energy returned to Delagard’s voice. “Listen, Lawler, do you know how valuable those mineral nuggets could be? They could revolutionize our entire existence on this fucking watery hole of a planet! How was I to know the divers would swim right into the goddamned hoist net? How could I figure that they would let themselves stay in it after we signalled that we were lifting?”

“They didn’t let themselves stay in it. They must have been tangled up in it. Intelligent diving animals just don’t let themselves stay in a net that’s rising quickly from four hundred metres.”

Delagard glared defiantly. “Well, they did. For whatever reason, I don’t know.” Then the glare faded, and he offered Lawler the miracle-worker look again, eyes rolling upward imploringly. Still hoping, even now? “There was nothing whatever that you could do to save them, Lawler? Nothing at all?”

“Sure there was. There were all sorts of things I could have done. I just wasn’t in the mood, I guess.”

“Sorry. That was dumb.” Delagard actually looked almost abashed. Huskily he said, “I know you did the best you could. Look, if there’s anything I can send over to your vaargh by way of payment, a case of grapeweed brandy, maybe, or some good baskets, or a week’s supply of banger steaks—”

“The brandy,” Lawler said. “That’s the best idea. So I can get myself good and drunk and try to forget all about what I saw here this morning.” He closed his eyes a moment. “The Gillies are aware that you’ve had three dying divers in here all night.”

“They are? How can you possibly know that?”

“Because I ran into a few while I was wandering around down by the bayshore, and they practically bit my head off. They were frothing mad. You didn’t see them chase me away?” Delagard, suddenly ashen-faced, shook his head. “Well, they did. And I hadn’t done anything wrong, except maybe come a little too close to their power plant. But they never indicated before that the plant was off bounds. So it must have been these divers.”

“You think so?”

“What else could it be?”

“Sit down, then. We’ve got to talk, doc.”

“Not now.”

“Listen to me!”

“I don’t want to listen, okay? I can’t stick around here any longer. I’ve got other things to do. People are probably waiting for me up at the vaargh. Hell, I haven’t even had breakfast yet.”

“Doc, wait a second. Please.”

Delagard reached out to him, but Lawler shook him off. Suddenly the hot moist air of the shed, tinged now with the sweet odour of bodily decomposition, was sickening to him. His head began to swirl. Even a doctor had his limits. He stepped around the gaping Delagard and went outside. Pausing just by the door, Lawler rocked back and forth for a few moments, closing his eyes, breathing deeply, listening to the grumbling of his empty stomach and the creaking of the pier beneath his feet, until the sudden nausea had left him.

He spat. Something dry and greenish came up. He scowled at it.

Jesus. Some start to the morning.

Daybreak had come by this time, the full show. With Sorve this close to the equator, the sun rose swiftly above the horizon in the morning and plummeted just as abruptly at nightfall. It was an unusually magnificent sky this morning, too. Bright pink streaks, interleaved with tinges of orange and turquoise, were splashed across the vault of the heavens. It looked almost like Delagard’s sarong up there, Lawler thought. He had calmed quickly once he was outside the shack in the fresh sea air, but now he felt a new wave of rage churning within him, setting up bad resonances in his gut, and he looked away, down toward his feet, taking deep breaths again. What he needed to do, he told himself, was to get himself home. Home, and breakfast, and perhaps a drop or two of numbweed tincture. And then on to the day’s rounds.

He began to head upslope.

Farther inland on the island, people were up, people were moving around.

Nobody slept much past dawn here. The night was for sleeping, the day for working. In the course of making his way back toward his vaargh to wait for the morning batch of genuine sufferers and chronic complainers to start showing up, Lawler encountered and greeted a significant percentage of the island’s entire human population. Here at the narrow end where the humans lived, everyone was on top of everyone else all the time.

Most of those to whom he nodded as he walked up the easy slope of the hard, bright yellow wickerwork path were people he had known for decades. Practically all the population of Sorve was Hydros-born, and more than half of those had been born and raised right here on this island, like Lawler himself. And so most of them were people who had never specifically chosen to spend their entire lives on this alien ball of water, but were doing it anyway, because they hadn’t been given any choice. The lottery of life had simply handed them a ticket to Hydros at birth; and once you found yourself on Hydros you couldn’t ever get off, because there were no spaceports here, there was no way of leaving the planet except by dying. It was a life sentence, being born here. That was strange, in a galaxy full of habitable and inhabited worlds, not to have had any choice about where you live. But then there were the others, the ones who had come plummeting in from outside via drop-capsule, who had had a choice, who could have gone anywhere in the universe and had chosen to come here, knowing that there was no going away again. That was even stranger.