Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

“No! This is insanity, Sundira. What I’m going to do is take you belowdecks and tie you up until you come to your senses.”

“Don’t touch me,” she said very quietly. “I tell you, Val, don’t try to touch me.” She looked toward the rack of gaffs.

“All right. I hear you.”

“I’m going to go. What about you?”

“You know the answer to that.”

“You promised that we’d go together, or not at all.”

“Not at all, then, that’s the deal.”

“But I want to go, Val. I do.”

Cold anger surged in him and congealed his spirit. He hadn’t expected this final betrayal. Bitterly he said, “Then go, if you really mean it.”

“Come with me?”

“No. No. No. No.”

“You promised—”

“I’m going back on my promise, then,” Lawler said. “I never meant to go. If I promised you that I’d go if you did, then I was lying to you. I’ll never go.”

“I’m sorry, Val.”

“So am I.”

He wanted again to seize her, to pull her belowdecks, to lash her down in his cabin until the ship was safely out to sea. But he knew that he could never do that. There was nothing he could do. Nothing.

“Go,” he said. “Stop talking about it and do it. This is making me sick.”

“Come with me?” she said yet again. “It’ll be very quick.”

“Never.”

“All right, Val.” She smiled sadly. “I love you, you know. Don’t ever forget that. I’m asking you out of love, and if you won’t to it, well, I’ll still love you afterward. And I hope that you’ll love me.”

“How could I?”

“So long, Val. But I’ll be seeing you later.”

Lawler looked on, not believing it, as she clambered down the gantry ladder to the main deck, walked to the side, climbed over the rail, dived smoothly and expertly into the waiting sea. She began to swim toward shore, moving swiftly, vigorously, legs scissoring powerfully, arms cutting through the dark water. He watched her as he had watched her once before, a million years ago, swimming in the waters of Sorve Bay. But he turned away, unwilling to watch any longer, when she was still less than halfway to the shore. He went to his cabin and locked the door behind him and sat down on his bunk in the gathering darkness. This would be a good moment for some numbweed, a jug of it, a tub, drink it down in one great gulp, let it wash away all the pain. But of course none of it was left. So there was nothing he could do but sit quietly and wait for time to pass. What might have been hours went by, or years. After a while he heard Delagard’s voice above, calling out the order to get the ship under way.

He had rarely seen the sky as clear, or the Hydros Cross as brilliant, as it was this night. The air was utterly still. The sea was calm. How could the ship be moving, in such a glassy sea, on such a windless night? And yet it moved. As though by a magic spell, gliding smoothly through the darkness. They had been travelling for hours. The brightness of the Face had dwindled until it was only a purple glow on the horizon, and then less than that, and now it could hardly be seen at all. When morning came they would be far off in the Empty Sea.

Lawler lay by himself, on a pile of netting near the stern.

He had never felt so alone in his life.

The others moved about the deck in silence, doing things with the sails, the ropes, the backstays, the booms, the whole intricate rig of nautical paraphernalia that he had never really understood and now had banished from his mind. They had no need of him; and he wanted nothing to do with them. They were machines, part of a greater machine. Tick. Tick.

Sundira had come to him soon after they sailed. “It’s all right,” she said. “Nothing’s changed.”

He shivered and turned away when she approached him. He couldn’t look at her.

“You’re wrong,” he said. “Everything’s changed. You’re part of the machine, now. And you want me to be in there with you. It ticks and you dance to it.”

“It isn’t like that, Val. You’d be the machine. You’d be the ticking too. You’d be the dance.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Of course not. How could you?” She touched him lovingly, and he pulled away as if she had the power to transform him with a touch. She looked at him in regret. “Okay,” she said softly. “Whatever you want.”

That had been hours ago. He hadn’t gone to the galley to join the others for evening mess, but he felt no hunger. If he never ate again, that would be all right. The idea of sitting down at table with them was unthinkable. The one unchanged man, in this ship of zombies—the only one still real—

Words. Fragments of memory. A lost poem out of a lost ancient world.

Lawler looked up at the cold blaze of the distant stars. An unexpected calmness had come over him. He was surprised at how calm he felt, as though he had passed beyond any realm where storms might reach. Even in the days when he had had the numbweed to ease him he had hardly ever felt as peaceful as this.

Why? Had the Face worked some mystery on him even at long range, as it had on Sundira?

He doubted it. Nor could it be affecting him now. Surely he was outside its range. There was nothing here to work on his mind now but the dark vault of the sky, and the quietly surging sea, and the hard clear light of the stars. There was the Cross, spanning the southern sky, the great double arch of suns—billions of them, someone had once told him. Billions of suns! And tens of billions of worlds! His mind staggered under the image. Those teeming multitudes of worlds—cities, continents, creatures of a thousand thousand thousand kinds—

He stared upward at them all, and as he stared a new vision grew in him, slowly, formless at first, then clarifying itself with a mighty rush, until there was scarcely room in his mind for anything else. He saw the stars as one vast web, one single immense metaphysical construct, linked into a mysterious galactic unity in just the same way that all the separate particles of this water-world were bound in union.

Lines of force pulsed in the void, streaming through the firmament like rivers of blood, connecting everything to everything. An infinite connectivity throbbed between the worlds. He could feel the universe breathing, a living entity, aflame with unquenchable vitality.

Hydros belonged to the heavens; and the heavens were a single great fiery sensate thing. Enter Hydros and you were a part of the All. The offer was there. And only he, of all the universe, had chosen to refuse entry into that one thing.

Only he. Only he.

Was that what he truly wanted? This solitude, this terrible independence of spirit?

The Face offered immortality—godhood, even—within one enormous united organism. And yet he had chosen to remain Valben Lawler and nothing but Valben Lawler. Proudly had he turned away from what had been extended to those who had made this voyage. Let poor troubled Quillan deliver himself up gladly to the god he had sought all his life; let little Dag Tharp find whatever comfort he could in the Face; let the mysterious Gharkid, who had searched for something greater than himself, go to the Face. Not me. I am not like them.

He thought of Kinverson. Even he, that rugged, solitary man, had opted ultimately for the Face. Delagard. Sundira.

Well, so be it, Lawler told himself. I am who I am. For better or for worse.