Robert Silverberg - The Face of the Waters

To Charlie Brown, the focus of the LOCUS—and probably about time, too.

There was blue above and a different blue below, two immense inaccessible voids, and the ship appeared almost to be hovering suspended between one blue void and the other, touching neither, motionless, perfectly becalmed. But in fact it was in the water, right where it belonged, not above it, and it was moving all the time. Night and day for four days now it had headed steadily outward, travelling away from Sorve, sailing ever farther into the trackless sea.

When Valben Lawler came up on the deck of the flagship early on the morning of the fifth day there were hundreds of long silvery snouts jutting out of the water on all sides. That was new. The weather had changed, too: the wind had dropped, the sea was listless, not merely calm now but quiet in a peculiarly electric, potentially explosive way. The sails were slack. Limp ropes dangled. A thin sharp line of grey haze cut across the sky like an invader from some other part of the world. Lawler, a tall, slender man of middle years with an athlete’s build and grace, grinned down at the creatures in the water. They were so ugly that they were almost charming. Sinister brutes, he thought.

Wrong. Sinister, yes; brutes, no. There was a chilly glint of intelligence in their disagreeable scarlet eyes. One more intelligent species, on this world that had so many. They were sinister precisely because they weren’t brutes. And very nasty-looking: those narrow heads, those extended tubular necks. They seemed like huge metallic worms sticking up out of the water. Those obviously capable jaws; those small sawblade-keen teeth, scores of them, gleaming in the sunlight. They looked so totally and unequivocally malevolent that you really had to admire them.

Lawler played for a moment with the idea of jumping over the side and splashing around among them.

He wondered how long he’d last if he did. Five seconds, most likely. And then peace, peace forever. A nicely perverse idea, a quick little suicidal fantasy. But of course he wasn’t serious. Lawler wasn’t the suicidal type, or he’d have done it long ago, and in any case he was chemically insulated at the moment against depression and anxiety and other such disagreeable things. That little nip of numbweed tincture that he’d given himself upon arising: how grateful he was for that. The drug provided him, at least for a few hours, with a little impervious jacket of calmness that allowed him to look a bunch of toothy monsters like these in the eye and grin. Being a doctor—being the doctor, the only one in the community—did have certain advantages.

Lawler caught sight of Sundira Thane up by the foremast, leaning out over the rail. Unlike Lawler, the lanky dark-haired woman was an experienced ocean traveller who had made many inter-island journeys, sometimes crossing great distances. She knew the sea. He was out of his element here.

“You ever see things like those before?” he asked her.

She glanced up. “They’re drakkens. Ugly buggers, aren’t they? And smart and quick. Swallow you whole, they would, if you gave them half a chance. Or a quarter of a chance. Lucky thing for us that we’re up here and they’re down there.”

“Drakkens,” Lawler repeated. “I never heard of them.”

“They’re northern. Not often seen in tropical waters, or in this particular sea. I guess they wanted a summer holiday.”

The narrow toothy snouts, half as long as a man’s arm, rose like a forest of swords from the surface of the water. Lawler glimpsed hints of slender ribbony bodies below, shining like polished metal, dangling into the depths. Occasionally a drakken’s fluked tail came into view, or a powerful webbed claw. Bright flame-red eyes looked back at him with disturbing intensity. The creatures were talking to each other in high, vociferous tones, a hard-edged clangorous yipping, a sound like hatchets striking against anvils.

Gabe Kinverson appeared from somewhere and moved to the rail, taking up a position between Lawler and Thane. Kinverson, brawny and immense, with a blunt wind-burned face, had the tools of his trade with him, a bundle of hooks and line and a long wood-kelp fishing rod. “Drakkens,” he muttered. “What bastards they are. I was coming back once with a ten-metre sea-leopard tied to my boat and five drakkens ate it right out from under me. Not a goddamned thing I could do.” Kinverson scooped up a broken belaying pin and hurled it into the water. The drakkens went to it as though it were bait, converging, rising shoulder-high from the water, snapping at it, yipping furiously. They let it sink past them and vanish.

They can’t come up on board, can they?” Lawler asked.

Kinverson laughed. “No, doc. They can’t come up on board. Lucky thing for us, too.”

The drakkens—there might have been three hundred of them—swam alongside the ships for a couple of hours, keeping pace easily, jabbing the air with their evil snouts, carrying on their ominous running line of comments. But by mid-morning they were gone, abruptly slipping down out of sight all at once and not surfacing again.

The wind picked up a short while later. The crew of the day watch moved about busily in the rigging. Far off to the north a little black rainstorm congealed into being just below a layer of dirty-looking overcast and dropped a dark webwork of precipitation that seemed not quite to be reaching the water. In the vicinity of the ships the air remained clear and dry, and still had a crackling edge to it.

Lawler went belowdecks. There was work waiting for him there, nothing very taxing. Neyana Golghoz had a blister on her knee; Leo Martello was troubled by sunburned shoulders; Father Quillan had bruised his elbow falling out of his bunk. When he was done with all that Lawler made his regular radio calls to the other ships to see if any medical problems had cropped up on them. Around noon he headed up to the deck to get some air. Nid Delagard, the owner of the fleet and the leader of the expedition, was conferring with his flagship captain, Gospo Struvin, just outside the wheel-box. Their laughter carried readily the length of the ship. Two of a kind, they were, stocky thick-necked men, stubborn and profane, full of raucous energy.

“Hey, you see the drakkens this morning, doc?” Struvin called. “Sweet, weren’t they?”

“Very pretty, yes. What did they want with us?”

“Checking us out, I guess. You can’t go very far in this ocean without something or other coming around to snoop. There’ll be lots more wildlife visiting us as we go. Look there, doc. To starboard.”

Lawler followed the captain’s pointing hand. The bloated and vaguely spherical shape of some immense creature was visible just below the surface. It was like a moon that had fallen from the sky, greenish and enormous and pockmarked all over. Lawler saw after a moment that the pockmarks were actually round mouth-like apertures, set close together over the entire surface area of the sphere, which were tirelessly opening and closing. A hundred gulping mouths, constantly at work. A thousand, maybe. A myriad long blueish tongues busily flicked in, out, in, out, like whips flailing the water. The thing was nothing but mouths, a gigantic floating eating machine.