The Face of the Waters

1

In the night had come the pure, simple conviction that he was the man of destiny, the one who could turn the trick that would make everything ever so much simpler and better for the seventy-eight humans who lived on the artificial island of Sorve on the watery world called Hydros.

It was a cockeyed idea and Lawler knew it. But it had wrecked his sleep, and none of his usual methods seemed to work to fix that, not meditation, not multiplication tables, not even a few pink drops of the algae-derived tranquillizer on which he was perhaps becoming a little too dependent. From a little after midnight until somewhere close to dawn he lay awake, possessed by his brilliant, heroic, cockeyed idea. And then at last, in the small hours of the morning when the sky was still dark, before any patients could show up to complicate his day and ruin the purity of his sudden new vision, Lawler left the vaargh near the middle of the island where he lived by himself and went down to the sea-wall to see whether the Gillies really had managed to start up their new power plant during the night.

He would congratulate them profusely if they had. He would call forth his whole vocabulary of sign-language gestures to tell them how impressed he was with their awesome technological prowess. He would praise them for having transformed the entire quality of life on Hydros—not just on Sorve, but on the whole planet—in a single masterly stroke.

And then he would say, “My father, the great Dr Bernat Lawler whom you all remember so well, saw this moment coming. “One day,” he would often remark to me when I was a boy, “our friends the Dwellers will achieve the dependable production of a steady supply of electricity. And then a new age will dawn here, when Dweller and human will work side by side in heartfelt cooperation—”

And so on and so on and so on. Subtly intertwining his congratulations with an expression of the need for harmony between the two races. Eventually working his way around to the explicit proposition that Hydran and human should put aside all past coolness and at last begin to toil together in the name of further technological progress. Evoking the sacred name of the late beloved Dr Bernat Lawler as often as he could, reminding them how in his day he had laboured to the full extent of his formidable medical skills on behalf of Dweller and human alike, performing many a miracle of healing, devoting himself unselfishly to the needs of both island communities—laying it on thicker and thicker, making the air throb with emotion, until the Gillies, teary-eyed with newfound interspecies affection, yielded gladly to his casual suggestion that a good way to start the new era off would be to allow the humans to adapt the power plant so that it could produce a supply of fresh water as well as electricity. And then his underlying proposal: the humans would design and build the desalinization unit by themselves, the condenser, the conveyer pipes, the complete item, and hand it over to the Gillies. Here: just plug it in. It costs you nothing and we won’t be dependent on rain catch for our fresh water supply any longer. And we will all be the best of friends forever, you Dwellers and we humans.

That was the fantasy that had pulled Lawler from his sleep. He wasn’t usually given to entangling himself in such far-fetched enterprises as this one. His years as a doctor—not the medical genius that his father had been, but a hard-working and reasonably effective physician, who did a pretty good job, considering the difficulties—had led him to be realistic and practical about most things. But somehow he had convinced himself this night that he was the only person on the island who might actually be able to talk the Gillies into letting water-desalinization equipment be tacked onto their power plant. Yes. He would succeed where all others had failed.

A fat chance, Lawler knew. But in the small hours of the night chances sometimes tend to look fatter than they do in the clear light of morning.

Such electricity as the island had now came from clumsy, inefficient chemical batteries, piles of zinc and copper discs separated by strips of crawlweed paper soaked in brine. The Gillies—the Hydrans, the Dwellers, the dominant beings of the island and of the world where Lawler had spent his entire life—had been working on a better means of electrical generation as long as Lawler could remember, and by now, so the scuttlebutt in town had it, the new power plant was almost ready to go on line—today, tomorrow, next week for sure. If the Gillies actually could manage to achieve that, it would be a tremendous thing for both species. They had already agreed, not very graciously, to let the humans make use of some of the new electricity, which everyone admitted was altogether terrific of them. But it would be even more terrific for the seventy-eight humans who scratched out narrow little subsistence-level lives on the hard narrow little place that was Sorve if the Gillies would relent and let the plant be used for water desalinization also, so that the humans wouldn’t have to depend on the random and infrequent mercies of Sorve rainfall patterns for their fresh water. It must have been obvious even to the Gillies that life would become ever so much easier for their human neighbours if they could count on a reliable and unlimited supply of water.

But of course the Gillies had given no indication so far that they cared about that. They had never shown any particular interest in making anything easier for the handful of humans who lived in their midst. Fresh water might be vital to human needs, but it didn’t matter a damn to the Gillies. What the humans might need, or want, or hope to have, was no concern of the Gillies. And it was the vision of changing all that by single-handed persuasion that had cost Lawler his sleep this night.

What the hell: nothing ventured, nothing gained.

On this tropical night Lawler was barefoot and wore only a twist of yellow cloth made from water-lettuce fronds around his waist. The air was warm and heavy and the sea was calm. The island, that webwork of living and semi-living and formerly living tissue drifting on the breast of the vast world-spanning ocean, swayed almost imperceptibly beneath his feet. Like all the inhabited islands of Hydros, Sorve was rootless, a free-floating wanderer, moving wherever the currents and winds and the occasional tidal surge cared to carry it. Lawler was able to feel the tightly woven withes of the flooring giving and spreading as he walked, and he heard the sea lapping at them just a couple of metres below. But he moved easily, lightly, his long lean body attuning itself automatically to the rhythms of the island’s movements. They were the most natural thing in the world to him.

The softness of the night was deceptive. Most times of the year Sorve was something other than a soft place to live. Its climate alternated between periods of hot-and-dry and cold-and-wet, with only the sweet little summer interlude when Sorve was drifting in mild, humid equatorial latitudes to provide a brief illusion of comfort and ease. This was the good time of the year, now. Food was abundant and the air was sweet. The islanders rejoiced in it. The rest of the year life was much more of a struggle.

Unhurriedly Lawler made his way around the reservoir and down the ramp to the lower terrace. It was a gentle slope from here to the island’s rim. He went past the scattered buildings of the shipyard from which Nid Delagard ran his maritime empire and the indistinct domed shapes that were the waterfront factories, in which metals—nickel, iron, cobalt, vanadium, tin—were extracted from the tissues of low-phylum sea-creatures by slow, inefficient processes. It was hard to make out anything clearly, but after some forty years of living on this one small island Lawler had no trouble getting around any part of the place in the dark.

The big two-storey shed that housed the power plant was just to his right and a little way ahead, down at the water’s edge. He headed toward it.

There was no hint of morning yet. The sky was a deep black. Some nights Sunrise, the sister planet of Hydros, gleamed in the heavens like a great blue-green eye, but tonight Sunrise was absent on the other side of the world, casting its bright glow on the mysterious waters of the unexplored far hemisphere. One of the three moons was visible, though, a tiny point of hard white light off to the east, close to the horizon. And stars shimmered everywhere, cascades of glittering silver powder scattered across the blackness, a ubiquitous dusting of brightnesses. That infinite horde of distant suns formed a dazzling backdrop for the one mighty foreground constellation, the brilliant Hydros Cross—two blazing rows of stars that arched across the sky at right angles to each other like a double cincture, one spanning the world from pole to pole, the other marching steadfastly along above the equator.

For Lawler these were the stars of home, the only stars he had ever seen. He was Hydros-born, fifth generation. He had never been to any other world and never would. Sorve Island was as familiar to him as his own skin. And yet he sometimes tumbled without warning into frightening moments of confusion when all sense of familiarity dissolved and he felt like a stranger here: times when it seemed to him that he had just arrived on Hydros that very day, flung down out of space like a falling star, a castaway from his true native place far away. Sometimes he saw the lost mother world of Earth shining in his mind, bright as any star, its great blue seas divided by the enormous golden-green land-masses that were called continents, and he thought, This is my home, this is my true home. Lawler wondered if any of the other humans on Hydros ever experienced something like that now and again. Probably so, though no one ever spoke of it. They were all strangers here, after all. This world belonged to the Gillies. He and everyone like him here lived here as uninvited guests.

He had reached the brink of the sea now. The familiar railing, rough, woody-textured like everything else on this artificial island that had neither soil nor vegetation, came up to meet his grasp as he clambered to the top of the sea-wall.

Here at the wall the slope in the island’s topography, which ran gradually downhill from the built-up high ground in the interior and the ocean bulwark beyond it, reversed itself sharply and the flooring turned upward to form a meniscus, a crescent rim, that shielded the inner streets against all but the most severe of tidal surges. Grasping the rail, leaning forward over the dark lapping water, Lawler stood staring outward for a moment, as though offering himself to the all-surrounding ocean.

Even in the darkness he had a complete sense of the comma-shaped island’s form and his exact place along its shore. The island was eight kilometres long from tip to tip, and about a kilometre across at its widest point, measuring from the bayfront to the summit of the rear bulwark that held back the open sea. He was near the centre, the innermost gulf. To his right and left the island’s two curving arms stretched outward before him, the rounded one where the Gillies lived, and the narrow tapering one where the island’s little handful of human settlers clustered close together.

Right in front of him, enclosed by that pair of unequal arms, was the bay that was the living heart of the island. The Gillie builders of the island had created an artificial bottom there, an underwater shelf of interlaced wood-kelp timbers attached to the mainland from arm to arm, so that the island always would have a shallow, fertile lagoon adjacent to it, a captive pond. The wild menacing predators that haunted the open sea never entered the bay: perhaps the Gillies had made some treaty with them long ago. A lacing of spongy bottom-dwelling night-algae, needing no light, bound the underside of the bay floor together, ever protecting and renewing it with their steady stubborn growth. Above that was sand, washed in by storms from the great unknown ocean floor farther out. And above that a thicket of useful aquatic plants of a hundred different species or more, in which all manner of sea-creatures swarmed. Shellfish of many sorts inhabited its lower reaches, filtering sea water through their soft tissues and concentrating valuable minerals within themselves for the use of the islanders. Sea-worms and serpents moved among them. Plump and tender fish grazed there. Just now Lawler could see a pod of huge phosphorescent creatures moving about out there, emanating pulsating waves of blue-violet light: the great beasts known as mouths, perhaps, or perhaps they were platforms, but it was still too dark to tell. And beyond the bright green water of the bay was the great ocean sea, rolling to the horizon and past it, holding the entire world in its grasp, a gloved hand gripping a ball. Lawler, staring toward it, felt for the millionth time the weight of its immensity, its thrust and power.

He looked now toward the power plant, solitary and massive on its little snubnosed promontory sticking out into the bay.

They hadn’t finished it after all. The ungainly building, shrouded in festoons of woven straw matting to shield it from the rain, still was silent and dark. A few shadowy figures were shuffling about in front of it. They had the unmistakable slope-shouldered shape of Gillies.

The concept of the power plant was that it would generate electricity by taking advantage of temperature differentials in the sea. Dann Henders, who was as close to an engineer as anyone was on Sorve, had explained it to Lawler after extracting a sketchy description of the project from one of the Gillies. Warm sea-water from the surface level was pulled in through vanes and entered a vacuum chamber, where its boiling point would be greatly reduced. The water, boiling violently, was supposed to yield low-density steam that would drive the turbines of the generator. Cold sea-water, pumped up from the deeper levels beyond the bay, was going to be used then to condense the steam into water again, and it would be returned to the sea through discharge outlets halfway around the island from here.

The Gillies had constructed practically the whole thing—pipes, pumps, vanes, turbines, condensers, the vacuum chamber itself—out of the various organic plastics they produced from algae and other water plants. Apparently they had used scarcely any metal in the design at all, not surprising in view of the difficulty of obtaining metals on Hydros. It was all very ingenious, especially considering that the Gillies weren’t notably technologically-minded, as intelligent galactic species went. Some exceptional genius among them must have come up with the idea. Genius or not, though, they were said to be having an ungodly time making the operation work, and it was yet to produce its first watt. Most of the humans wondered if it ever would. It might have been a whole lot faster and simpler for the Gillies, Lawler thought, if they had let Dann Henders or one of the other engineering-oriented humans sit in on the design of it. But of course the Gillies weren’t in the habit of seeking advice from the unwanted strangers with whom they grudgingly shared their island, even when it might be to their advantage. They had made an exception only when an outbreak of fin-rot was decimating their young, and Lawler’s saintly father had come to them with a vaccine. Which had been many years ago, though, and whatever good will the former Dr Lawler’s services had engendered among the Gillies had long since evaporated, leaving no apparent residue behind.

That the plant still didn’t seem to be working yet was something of a setback for the grand plan that had come to Lawler in the night.

What now? Go and talk to them anyway? Make your florid little speech, grease the Gillies up with some noble rhetoric, follow through with tonight’s visionary impulse before daybreak robs it of whatever plausibility it might have had?

“On behalf of the entire human community of Sorve Island, I, who as you know am the son of the late beloved Dr Bernat Lawler who served you so well in the time of the fin-rot epidemic, wish to congratulate you on the imminent accomplishment of your ingenious and magnificently beneficial—”

“Even though the fulfilment of this splendid dream may perhaps be still some days away, I have come on behalf of the entire human community of Sorve Island to extend to you our profoundest joy at the deep implications we see for the transformation of the quality of life on the island that we share, once you have at last succeeded in—”

“At this time of rejoicing in our community over the historic achievement that is soon to be—”

Enough, he thought. He began to make his way out onto the power-plant promontory.

As he drew near the plant he took care to make plenty of noise, coughing, slapping his hands together, whistling a little tuneless tune. Gillies didn’t like humans to come upon them unexpectedly.

He was still about fifteen metres from the power plant when he saw two Gillies shuffling out to meet him.

In the darkness they looked titanic. They loomed high above him, formless in the dark, their little yellow eyes glowing bright as lanterns in their tiny heads.

Lawler made the greeting-sign, elaborately over-gesturing so that there could be no doubt of his friendly intentions.

One of the Gillies replied with a prolonged snorting vrooom that didn’t sound friendly at all.

They were big upright bipedal creatures, two and a half metres high, covered with deep layers of rubbery black bristles that hung in dense shaggy cascades. Their heads were absurdly small, little dome-shaped structures that sat atop huge shoulders, and from there almost down to the ground their torsos sloped outward to form massive, bulky, ungainly bodies. It was generally assumed by humans that their immense cavernous chests must contain their brains as well as their hearts and lungs. Certainly those little heads had no room for them.

Very likely the Gillies had been aquatic mammals once. You could see that in the gracelessness with which they moved on land and the ease with which they swam. They spent nearly as much time in the water as on land. Once Lawler had watched a Gillie swim from one side of the bay to the other without breaking the surface for breath; the journey must have taken twenty minutes. Their legs, short and stumpy, were obviously adapted from flippers. Their arms too were flipper-like—thick, powerful little limbs that they held very close to their sides. Their hands, equipped with three long fingers and an opposable thumb, were extraordinarily broad and fell naturally into deep cups well suited for pushing great volumes of water. In some unlikely and astounding act of self-redefinition these beings” ancestors had climbed up out of the sea, millions of years ago, fashioning island homes for themselves woven out of sea-born materials and buffered by elaborate barricades against the ceaseless tidal surges that circled their planet. But they still were creatures of the ocean.

Lawler stepped up as close to the two Gillies as he dared and signalled I-am-Lawler-the-doctor.

When Gillies spoke it was by squeezing their arms inward against their sides, compressing air through deep gill-shaped slits in their chests to produce booming organ-like tones. Humans had never found a way to imitate Gillie sounds in a way that Gillies understood, nor did the Gillies show any interest in learning how to speak the human language. Perhaps its sounds were as impossible for them as Gillie sounds were for humans. But some communication between the races was necessary. Over the years a sign language had developed. The Gillies spoke to humans in Gillie; the humans replied in signs.

The Gillie who had spoken before made the snort again, and added a peculiarly hostile snuffling whistling sound. It held up its flippers in what Lawler recognized as a posture of anger. No, not anger: rage. Extreme rage.

Hey, Lawler thought. What’s up? What have I done?

There wasn’t any doubt about the Gillie’s fury. Now it was making little brushing movements with its flippers that seemed plainly to say, Get away, clear out, get your ass out of here fast.

Perplexed, Lawler signalled I-mean-no-intrusion. I-come-to-parley.

The snort again, louder, deeper. It reverberated through the flooring of the path and Lawler felt the vibration in the soles of his feet.

Gillies had been known to kill human beings who had annoyed them, and even some who hadn’t: a troublesome occasional propensity for inexplicable violence. It didn’t seem deliberate—just an irritated backhand swipe of a flipper, a quick contemptuous kick, a little thoughtless trampling. They were very large and very strong and they didn’t seem to understand, or care, how fragile human bodies could be.

The other Gillie, the bigger of the two, took a step or two in Lawler’s direction. Its breath came with heavy, wheezing, unsociable intensity. It gave Lawler a look that he interpreted as one of aloof, absent-minded hostility.

Lawler signalled surprise and dismay. He signalled friendliness again. He signalled continued eagerness to talk.

The first Gillie’s fiery eyes were blazing with unmistakable wrath.

Out. Away. Go.

No ambiguities there. Useless to attempt any further pacifying palaver. Clearly they didn’t want him anywhere near their power plant.

All right, he thought. Have it your own way.

He had never been brushed off like this by Gillies before; but to take time now to remind them that he was their old friend the island doctor, or that his father had once made himself very useful to them, would be dangerous idiocy. One slap of that flipper could knock him into the bay with a broken spine.

He backed away, keeping a close eye on them, intending to leap backward into the water if they made a threatening move toward him.

But the Gillies stayed where they were, glowering at him as he executed his slinking retreat. When he had reached the main path again they turned and went back inside their building.

So much for that, Lawler thought.

The weird rebuff stung him deeply. He stood for a time by the bayfront railing, letting the tension of the strange encounter ebb from him. His great scheme of negotiating a human-Hydran treaty this night, he saw all too clearly now, had been mere romantic nonsense. It went whistling out of Lawler’s mind like the vapour it was, and a quick flash of embarrassment sent waves of heat running through his skin for a moment.

Well, then. Back to the vaargh to wait for morning, he supposed.

A grating bass voice behind him said, “Lawler?”

Caught by surprise, Lawler whirled abruptly, his heart thundering. He squinted into the greying darkness. He could just barely make out the figure of a short, stocky man with a heavy shock of long, greasy-looking hair standing in the shadows ten or twelve metres to the inland side of him.

“Delagard? That you?”

The stocky man stepped forward. Delagard, yes. The self-appointed top dog of the island, the chief mover and shaker. What the hell was he doing skulking around here at this hour?

Delagard always seemed to be up to something tricky, even when he wasn’t. He was short but not small, a powerful figure built low to the ground, thick-necked, heavy-shouldered, paunchy. He wore an ankle-length sarong that left his broad shaggy chest bare.

Even in the darkness the garment glowed in luminous ripples of scarlet and turquoise and hot pink. Delagard was the richest man in the settlement, whatever that meant on a world where money itself had no meaning, where there was hardly anything you could spend it on. He was Hydros-born, like Lawler, but he owned businesses on several islands and moved around a lot. Delagard was a few years older than Lawler, perhaps forty-eight or fifty.

“You’re out and about pretty early this morning, doc,” Delagard said.

“I generally am. You know that.” Lawler’s voice was tighter than usual. “It’s a good time of day.”

“If you like to be alone, yes.” Delagard nodded toward the power plant. “Checking it out, are you?”

Lawler shrugged. He would sooner throttle himself with his own hands than let Delagard have any inkling of the grandiose heroic fatuity that he had spent this long night engendering.

Delagard said, “They tell me it’ll be on line tomorrow.”

“I’ve been hearing that for a week.”

“No. No, tomorrow they’ll really have it working. After all this time. They’ve generated power already, low level, and today they’ll be bringing it up to capacity.”

“How do you know?”

“I know,” Delagard said. “The Gillies don’t like me, but they tell me things, anyway. In the course of business, you understand.” He came up alongside Lawler and clapped his hand down on the sea-wall railing in a confident, hearty way, as if this island were his kingdom and the railing his sceptre. “You haven’t asked me yet why I’m up this early.”

“No. I haven’t.”

“Looking for you, is why. First I went over to your vaargh, but you weren’t there. Then I looked down to the lower terrace and I caught sight of somebody moving around on the path heading down here and figured it might be you, and I came down here to find out if I was right.”

Lawler smiled sourly. Nothing in Delagard’s tone indicated that he had seen what had taken place out on the power-plant promontory.

“Very early to be paying a call on me, if it’s a professional thing,” Lawler said. “Or a social call, for that matter. Not that you would.” He pointed to the horizon. The moon was still gleaming there. No sign of the first light of morning was visible yet. The Cross, even more brilliant than usual with Sunrise not in the sky, seemed to throb and pulse against the intense blackness. “I generally don’t start my office hours before daybreak. You know that, Nid.”

“A special problem,” said Delagard. “Couldn’t wait. Best taken care of while it’s still dark.”

“Medical problem, is it?”

“Medical problem, yes.”

“Yours?”

“Yes. But I’m not the patient.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“You will. Just come with me.”

“Where?” Lawler said.

“Shipyard.”

What the hell. Delagard seemed very strange this morning. It was probably something important. “All right,” said Lawler. “Let’s get going, then.”

Without another word Delagard turned and started along the path that ran just inside the sea-wall, heading toward the shipyard. Lawler followed him in silence. The path here followed another little promontory parallel to the one on which the power-plant structure stood, and as they moved out on it they had a clear view of the plant. Gillies were going in and out, carrying armloads of equipment.

“Those slippery fuckers,” Delagard muttered. “I hope their plant blows up in their faces when they start it up. If they ever get it started up at all.”

They rounded the far side of the promontory and entered the little inlet where Delagard’s shipyard stood. It was the biggest human enterprise on Sorve by far, employing more than a dozen people. Delagard’s ships constantly went back and forth between the various islands where he did business, carrying trade goods from place to place, the modest merchandise turned out by the various cottage industries that humans operated: fishhooks and chisels and mallets, bottles and jars, articles of clothing, paper and ink, hand-copied books, packaged foods and such. The Delagard fleet also was the chief distributor of metals and plastics and chemicals and other such essential commodities which the various islands so painstakingly produced. Every few years Delagard added another island to his chain of commerce. From the very beginning of human occupation of Hydros, Delagards had been running entrepreneurial businesses here, but Nid Delagard had expanded the family operation far beyond its earlier levels.

“This way,” Delagard said.

A strand of pearly dawnlight broke suddenly across the eastern sky. The stars dimmed and the little moon on the horizon began to fade from sight as the day started to come on. The bay was taking on its emerald morning colour. Lawler, following Delagard down the path into the shipyard, glanced out into it and had his first clear view of the giant phosphorescent creatures that had been cruising around out there all night. He saw now that they were mouths: immense flattened baglike creatures, close to a hundred metres in length, that travelled through the sea with their colossal jaws agape, swallowing everything that lay before them. Once a month or so, a pod of ten or twelve of them turned up in Sorve harbour and disgorged the contents of their stomachs, still alive, into huge wickerwork nets kept there for that purpose by the Gillies, who harvested them at leisure over the weeks that followed. It was a good deal for the Gillies, Lawler thought—tons and tons of free food. But it was hard to see what was in the deal for the mouths.

Delagard said, chuckling, “There’s my competition. If I could only kill off the fucking mouths, I could be hauling in all sorts of stuff myself to sell to the Gillies.”

“And what would they pay you for it with?”

“The same things they use to pay me now for the things I sell them,” said Delagard scornfully. “Useful elements. Cadmium, cobalt, copper, tin, arsenic, iodine, all the stuff this goddamn ocean is made of. But in very much bigger quantities than the dribs and drabs they dole out now, or that we’re capable of extracting ourselves. We get the mouths out of the picture somehow, and then I supply the Gillies with their meat, and they load me up with all kinds of valuable commodities in return. A very nice deal, let me tell you. Within five years I’d make them dependent on me for their entire food supply. There’d be a fortune in it.”

“I thought you were worth a fortune already. How much more do you need?”

“You just don’t understand, do you?”

“I guess not,” Lawler said. “I’m only a doctor, not a businessman. Where’s this patient of yours?”

“Easy, easy. I’m taking you as fast as I can, doc.” Delagard gestured seaward with a quick brushing movement of his hand. “You see down there, by Jolly’s Pier? Where that little fishing boat is? That’s where we’re going.”

Jolly’s Pier was a finger of rotting kelp-timber sticking out thirty metres or so beyond the sea-wall, at the far end of the shipyard. Though it was faded and warped, battered by tides and nibbled by drillworms and raspers, the pier was still more or less intact, a venerable artifact of a vanished era. A crazy old sailor had constructed it, long dead now, a grizzled weird relic of a man whose claim it had been to have journeyed solo completely around the world—even into the Empty Sea, where no one in his right mind would go, even to the borders of the Face of the Waters itself, that immense forbidden island far away, the great planetary mystery that apparently not even the Gillies dared to approach. Lawler could remember sitting out here at the end of Jolly’s Pier when he was a boy, listening to the old man spinning his wild, flamboyant tales of implausible, miraculous adventure. That was before Delagard had built his shipyard here. But for some reason Delagard had preserved the bedraggled pier. He must have liked to listen to the old man’s yarns too, once upon a time.

One of Delagard’s fishing coracles was tied up alongside it, bobbing on the bay swells. On the pier near the place where the coracle was moored was a shed that looked old enough to have been Jolly’s house, though it wasn’t. Delagard, pausing outside it, looked up fiercely into Lawler’s eyes and said in a soft husky growl, “You understand, doc, whatever you see inside here is absolutely confidential.”

“Spare me the melodrama, Nid.”

“I mean it. You’ve got to promise you won’t talk. It won’t just be my ass if this gets out. It could screw us all.”

“If you don’t trust me, get some other doctor. But you might have some trouble finding one around here.”

Delagard gave him a surly look. Then he produced a chilly smile. “All right. Whatever you say. Just come on in.”

He pushed open the door of the shed. It was utterly dark inside, and unusually humid. Lawler smelled the tart salty aroma of the sea, strong and concentrated as though Delagard had been bottling it in here, and something else, sour and pungent and disagreeable, that he didn’t recognize at all. He heard faint grunting noises, slow and rasping, like the sighs of the damned. Delagard fumbled with something just within the door that made a rough, bristly sound. After a moment he struck a match, and Lawler saw that the other man was holding a bundle of dried seaweed that had been tied at one end to form a torch, which he had ignited. A dim, smoky light spread like an orange stain through the shed.

“There they are,” Delagard said.

The middle of the shed was taken up by a crude rectangular storage tank of pitch-caulked wickerwork, perhaps three metres long and two wide, filled almost to the brim with sea-water. Lawler went over to it and looked in. Three of the sleek aquatic mammals known as divers were lying in it, side by side, jammed close together like fish in a tin. Their powerful fins were contorted at impossible angles and their heads, rising stiffly above the surface of the water, were thrown back in an awkward, agonized way. The strange acrid smell Lawler had picked up at the doorway was theirs. It no longer seemed so unpleasant now. The terrible grunting noises were coming from the diver on the left. They were grunts of purest pain.

“Oh, shit,” Lawler said quietly. He thought he understood the Gillies” rage now. Their blazing eyes, that menacing snort. A quick hot burst of anger went rippling through him, setting up a brief twitching in his cheek. “Shit!” He looked back toward the other man in disgust, revulsion, and something close to hatred. “Delagard, what have you done now?”

“Listen, if you think I brought you here just so you could chew me out—”

Lawler shook his head slowly. “What have you done, man?” he said again, staring straight into Delagard’s suddenly flickering eyes. “What the fuck have you done?”

2

It was nitrogen absorption: Lawler didn’t have much doubt of that. The frightful way in which the three divers were twisted up was a clear signal. Delagard must have had them working at some job deep down in the open sea, keeping them there long enough for their joints, muscles and fatty tissues to absorb immense quantities of nitrogen; and then, unlikely as that seemed, they evidently had come to the surface without taking the proper time to decompress. The nitrogen, expanding as the pressure dropped, had escaped into their bloodstream and joints in the form of deadly bubbles.

“We brought them here as soon as we realized there was trouble,” Delagard said. “Figuring maybe you could do something for them. And I thought, keep them in water, they need to stay under water, so we filled this tank and—”

“Shut up,” Lawler said.

“I want you to know, we made every effort—”

“Shut up. Please. Just shut up.”

Lawler stripped off the water-lettuce wrap he was wearing and clambered into the tank. Water went splashing over the side as he crowded himself in next to the divers. But there wasn’t much that he could do for them. The one in the middle was dead already: Lawler put his hands to the creature’s muscular shoulders and felt the rigor starting to take hold. The other two were more or less alive—so much the worse for them; they must be in hideous pain, if they were conscious at all. The divers” usually smooth torpedo-shaped bodies, longer than a man’s, were bizarrely knotted, each muscle straining against its neighbour, and their glistening golden skins, normally slick and satiny, felt rough, full of little lumps. Their amber eyes were dull. Their jutting underslung jaws hung slack. A grey spittle covered their snouts. The one on the left was still groaning steadily, every thirty seconds or so, wrenching the sound up from the depths of its guts in a horrifying way.

“Can you fix them somehow?” Delagard asked. “Is there anything you can do at all? I know you can do it, doc. I know you can.” There was an urgent wheedling tone in Delagard’s voice now that Lawler couldn’t remember ever hearing in it before. Lawler was accustomed to the way sick people would cede godlike power to a doctor and beg for miracles. But why did Delagard care so much about these divers? What was going on here, really? Surely Delagard didn’t feel guilty. Not Delagard.

Coldly Lawler said, “I’m no diver doctor. Doctoring humans is all I know how to do. And I could stand to be a whole lot better even at that than I am.”

“Try. Do something. Please.”

“One of them’s dead already, Delagard. I was never trained to raise the dead. You want a miracle, go get your friend Quillan the priest in here.”

“Christ,” Delagard muttered.

“Exactly. Miracles are his speciality, not mine.”

“Christ. Christ.”

Lawler felt carefully for pulses along the divers” throats. Yes, still beating after a fashion, slow, uneven. Did that mean they were moribund? He couldn’t say. What the hell was a normal pulse, for a diver? How was he supposed to know stuff like that? The only thing to do, he thought, was to put the two that were still alive back in the sea, get them down to the depths where they had been, and bring them up again, slowly enough this time so they could rid themselves of the excess nitrogen. But there was no way to manage that. And it was probably too late anyway.

In anguish he made futile, almost mystical passes over the twisted bodies with his hands, as though he could drive the nitrogen bubbles out by gesture alone. “How deep were they?” Lawler asked, without looking up.

“We aren’t sure. Four hundred metres, maybe. Maybe four fifty. The bottom was irregular there and the sea was moving around so we couldn’t keep close track of how much line we’d paid out.”

Clear to the bottom of the sea. It was lunacy.

“What were you looking for?”

“Manganese nuggets,” Delagard said. “And there was supposed to be molybdenum down there too, and maybe some antimony. We trawled up a whole goddamned menagerie of mineral samples with the scoop.”

“Then you should have used the scoop to bring your manganese up,” said Lawler angrily. “Not these.”

He felt the right-hand diver ripple and convulse and die as he held it. The other was still writhing, still moaning.

A cold bitter fury took hold of him, fuelled as much by contempt as by wrath. This was murder, and stupid unthinking murder at that. Divers were intelligent animals—not as intelligent as the Gillies, but intelligent enough, surely smarter than dogs, smarter than horses, smarter than any of the animals of old Earth that Lawler had heard about in his storybook days. The seas of Hydros were full of creatures that could be regarded as intelligent; that was one of the bewildering things about this world, that it had evolved not just a single intelligent species, but, apparently, dozens of them. The divers had a language, they had names, they had some kind of tribal structure. Unlike nearly all the other intelligent life-forms on Hydros, though, they had a fatal flaw: they were docile and even friendly around human beings, gentle frolicking companions in the water. They could be induced to do favours. They could be put to work, even.

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.

Dag Tharp, who ran the radio unit and did dental work on the side and sometimes served as Lawler’s anaesthetist, was the first to go by, a tiny angular man, red-faced and fragile-looking, with a scraggy neck and a big, sharply hooked nose emerging between little eyes and practically fleshless lips. Behind him down the path came Sweyner, the toolmaker and glassblower, a little old fellow, knotted and gnarled, and his knotted, gnarled wife, who looked like his twin sister. Some of the newer settlers suspected that she was, but Lawler knew better. Sweyner’s wife was Lawler’s second cousin, and Sweyner was no kin to him—or her—at all. The Sweyners, like Tharp, were both Hydros-born, and native to Sorve. It was a little irregular to marry a woman from your own island, as Sweyner had done, and that—along with their physical resemblance—accounted for the rumours.

Lawler was near the high spine of the island now, the main terrace. A wide wooden ramp led to it. There were no staircases on Sorve: the stubby inefficient legs of the Gillies weren’t well designed for using stairs. Lawler took the ramp at a quick pace and stepped out onto the terrace, a flat stretch of stiff, hard, tightly bound yellow sea-bamboo fibres fifty metres wide, varnished and laminated with seppeltane sap and supported by a trellis of heavy black kelp-timber beams. The island’s long, narrow central road cut across it. A left turn took you to the part of the island where the Gillies lived, a right turn led into the shantytown of the humans. He turned right.

“Good morning, doctor-sir,” Natim Gharkid murmured, twenty paces or so down the road, moving aside to let Lawler go by.

Gharkid had come to Sorve four or five years ago from some other island: a soft-eyed soft-faced man with dark smooth skin, who had not yet managed to fit himself into the life of the community in any very significant way. He was an algae farmer, who was going down to spend his day harvesting seaweeds in the shallows. That was all that he did. Most of the humans on Hydros followed a variety of occupations: in such a small population, it was necessary for people to attempt to master several skills. But Gharkid didn’t seem concerned about that. Lawler was not only the island’s doctor but also the pharmacist, the meteorologist, the undertaker, and—so Delagard apparently thought—the veterinarian. Gharkid, though, was an algae-farmer and nothing else. Lawler thought he was probably Hydros-born, but he wasn’t certain of it, so rarely did the man reveal anything at all about himself. Gharkid was the most self-effacing person Lawler had ever known, quiet and patient and diligent, amiable but unfathomable, a vague silent presence and not much more.

They exchanged automatic smiles as they passed each other now.

Then came three women in a row, all of them in loose green robes: Sisters Halla, Mariam and Thecla, who a couple of years ago had formed some sort of convent down at the tip of the island, past the ashmasters” yard, where bone of all sorts was stored to be processed into lime and then into soap, ink, paint and chemicals of a hundred uses. No one but ashmasters went there, ordinarily; the Sisters, living beyond the boneyard, were safe from all disturbance. It was an odd place to choose to live, all the same. Since setting up their convent the Sisters had had as little to do with men as they could manage. There were eleven of them altogether by now, nearly a third of all the human women on Sorve: a curious development, unique in the island’s short history. Delagard was full of lewd speculations about what went on down there. Very likely he was right.

“Sister Halla,” he said, saluting. “Sister Mariam. Sister Thecla.”

They looked at him the way they might have done if he had said something filthy. Lawler shrugged and went on.

The main reservoir was just up ahead, a covered circular tank three metres high and fifty metres across, constructed of varnished poles of sea-bamboo bound together with bright orange hoops of algae fronds and caulked within with the red pitch that was made from water-cucumbers. A berserk maze of wooden pipes emerged from it and fanned out toward the vaarghs that began just beyond it. The reservoir was probably the most important structure in the settlement. The first humans to get here had built it, five generations ago in the early twenty-fourth century when Hydros was still being used as a penal colony, and it required constant maintenance, endless patching and caulking and rehooping. There had been talk for at least ten years of replacing it with something more elegantly made, but nothing had ever been done about it, and Lawler doubted that anything ever would. It served its purpose well enough.

As Lawler approached the great wooden tank he saw the priest who had lately come to live on Hydros, Father Quillan of the Church of All Worlds, edging slowly around it from the far side, doing something extremely strange. Every ten paces or thereabouts Quillan would halt, face the reservoir wall, and stretch his arms out against it in a sort of hug, pressing his fingertips thoughtfully against the wall here and there as though probing for leaks.

“Afraid that the wall’s going to pop?” Lawler called to him. The priest was an offworlder, a newcomer. He had been on Hydros less than a year and had arrived on Sorve Island only a few weeks before. “You don’t need to worry about that.”

Quillan looked quickly around, visibly embarrassed. He took his hands away from the side of the reservoir.

“Hello, Lawler.”

The priest was a compact, austere-looking man, balding and clean-shaven, who might have been any age at all between forty-five and sixty. He was thin, as if all the flesh had been sweated off him, with a long oval face and a strong, bony nose. His eyes, set deep in their sockets, were a chilly light blue and his skin was very pale, almost bleached-looking, though a steady diet of the maritime-derived things that people ate on Hydros was starting to give him the dusky sea-tinged complexion that the old-time settlers had: the algae cropping out in the skin, so to speak.

Lawler said, “The reservoir’s extremely sturdy. Believe me, Father. I’ve lived here all my life and that reservoir hasn’t burst its walls even once. We couldn’t afford to let that happen.”

Quillan laughed self-consciously. “That isn’t what I was doing actually. I was embracing its strength, as a matter of fact.”

“I see.”

“Feeling all that contained power. Experiencing a sense of great force under restraint—tons of water held back by nothing more than human will and determination.”

“And a lot of sea-bamboo and hooping, Father. Not to mention God’s grace.”

“That too,” Quillan said.

Very peculiar, hugging the reservoir because you wanted to experience its strength. But Quillan was always doing curious things like that. There seemed to be some kind of desperate hunger in the man: for grace, for mercy, for surrender to something larger than himself. For faith itself, perhaps. It seemed odd to Lawler that a man who claimed to be a priest would be so needy of spirit.

He said, “My great-great-grandfather designed it, you know. Harry Lawler, one of the Founders. He could do anything he put his mind to, my grandfather used to say. Take out your appendix, sail a ship from one island to another, design a reservoir.” Lawler paused. “He was sent here for murder, old Harry was. Manslaughter, I should say.”

“I didn’t know. So your family has always lived on Sorve?”

“Since the beginning. I was born here. Just about a hundred and eighty metres from where we’re standing, actually.” Lawler slapped the side of the reservoir affectionately. “Good old Harry. We’d be in real trouble here without this. You see how dry our climate is.”

“I’m starting to find out,” said the priest. “doesn’t it ever rain here at all?”

“Certain times of the year,” Lawler said. “This isn’t one of the times. You won’t see any rain around here for another nine, ten months. That’s why we took care to build our reservoirs so that they wouldn’t spring any leaks.”

Water was scarce on Sorve: the kind of water that humans could use, at any rate. The island travelled through arid territory most of the year. That was the work of the inexorable currents. The floating islands of Hydros, though they drifted more or less freely in the sea, were nevertheless penned for decades at a time within clearly defined longitudinal belts by powerful ocean currents, strong as great rivers. Every year each island carried out a rigidly defined migration from one pole to the other and back again; each pole was surrounded by a vortex of swift water that seized the incoming islands, swung them around, and sent them off toward the opposite end of the planet. But though the islands passed through every latitudinal belt in their annual north-south migrations, east-west fluctuations were minimal because of the force of the prevailing currents. Sorve, in its endless travelling up and down the world, had stayed between the fortieth and sixtieth degrees of west longitude as long as Lawler could remember. That seemed basically to be an arid belt in most latitudes. Rain was infrequent except when the island was moving through the polar zones, where heavy downfalls were the rule.

The almost perpetual droughts were no problem for the Gillies, who were constructed for drinking sea-water anyway. But they made existence complicated for the humans. Water rationing was a routine fact of life on Sorve. There had been two years—when Lawler was twelve, and again when he was twenty, the dark year of his father’s death—when freakish rainfall had pelted the island for weeks without ceasing, so that the reservoirs had overflowed and the rationing had been abandoned. That had been an interesting novelty for the first week or so, each time, and then the unending downpours, the grey days and the rank smell of mildew, had become a bore. On the whole Lawler preferred drought: he was accustomed to it, at least.

Quillan said, “This place fascinates me. It’s the strangest world I’ve ever known.”

“I could say the same thing, I suppose.”

“Have you travelled much? Around Hydros, I mean.”

“I was on Thibeire Island once,” Lawler said. “It came very close, floated up right out there in the harbour, and a bunch of us took a coracle over to it and spent the whole day there. I was fifteen, then. That’s the only time I’ve been anywhere else.” He gave Quillan a wary glance. “But you’re a real traveller, I understand. They tell me you’ve seen quite a chunk of the galaxy in your day.”

“Some,” Quillan said. “Not all that much. I’ve been to seven worlds altogether. Eight, counting this one.”

“That’s seven more than I’ll ever see.”

“But now I’ve reached the end of the line.”

“Yes,” Lawler said. “That you certainly have.”

Offworlders who came to live on Hydros were beyond Lawler’s comprehension. Why did they do it? To let yourself be stuffed into a drop-capsule on Sunrise, next door in the sky just a dozen or so million kilometres away, and be flipped out into a landing orbit that would dump you down in the sea near one of the floating islands—knowing that you could never leave Hydros again? Since the Gillies refused to countenance the building of a spaceport anywhere on Hydros, coming here was strictly a one-way journey, and everyone out there understood that. But still they came—not many, but a steady trickle of them, choosing to live forever after as castaways on a shoreless shore, on a world without trees or flowers, birds or insects or green fields of grass, without furry animals or hooved ones—without ease, without comfort, without any of the benefits of modern technology, awash on the ceaseless tides, drifting from pole to pole and back again aboard islands made of wickerwork on a world fit only for creatures with fins or flippers.

Lawler had no idea why Quillan had wanted to come to Hydros, but it wasn’t the thing you asked someone. A kind of penance, perhaps. An act of self-abnegation. Certainly it wasn’t to perform church functions. The Church of All Worlds was a schismatic post-Papal Catholic sect without any adherents, so far as Lawler knew, anywhere on the planet. Nor did the priest seem to be here as a missionary. He had made no attempts to make converts since his arrival on Sorve, which was just as well, for religion had never been a matter of much interest among the islanders. “God is very far away from us on Sorve Island,” Lawler’s father had liked to say.

Quillan looked sombre for a moment, as though contemplating the realities of his having stranded himself on Hydros for the rest of his days. Then he said, “You don’t mind always staying in the same place? You don’t ever get restless? Curious about the other islands?”

“Not really,” Lawler said. “Thibeire was pretty much like Sorve, I thought. The same general layout, the same general feel. Only there was nobody there that I knew. If one place is just like another, why not stay in the place you know, among the people you’ve always lived with?” His eyes narrowed. “It’s the other worlds I wonder about. The dry-land ones. Actual solid planets. I wonder what it’s like to go and go for days and never see open water even once, to be on a hard surface all the time, not just an island but a whole huge continent where you can’t see right across from one end of the place where you live to the other, an enormous land mass that has cities and mountains and rivers on it. Those are just empty words to me. Cities. Mountains. I’d like to know what trees are like, and birds, and plants that have flowers. I wonder about Earth, you know? I dream sometimes that it still exists, that I’m actually on it, breathing its air, feeling its soil under my feet. Getting it under my fingernails. There’s no soil anywhere on Hydros, do you realize that? Only the sand of the sea bottom.”

Lawler glanced quickly at the priest’s hands, at his fingernails, as though they might still have the black dirt of Sunrise under them. Quillan’s eyes followed Lawler’s, and he smiled but said nothing.

Lawler said, “I overheard you talking last week with Delagard at the community centre, about the planet you lived on before you came here, and I still remember every word of what you said. How the land there seems to go on forever, first grassland and then a forest and then mountains and a desert on the far side of the mountains. And the whole time I sat there trying to imagine what all those things really looked like. But of course I’ll never know. We can’t get to other worlds from here, eh? For us they might just as well not exist. And since every place on Hydros is the same as every other place, I’m not inclined to go roaming.”

“Indeed,” said Quillan gravely. After a moment he added, “That isn’t typical, is it, though?”

“Typical of whom?”

“The people who live on Hydros. Never travelling anywhere, I mean.”

“A few of us are wanderers. They like to change islands every five or six years. Some aren’t like that. Most aren’t, I’d say. At any rate I’m one of the ones who isn’t.”

Quillan considered that.

“Indeed,” he said again, as though processing some intricate datum. He appeared to have exhausted his run of questions for the moment. Some weighty conclusion seemed about to come forth.

Lawler watched him without great interest, politely waiting to hear what else Quillan might have to say.

But a long moment passed and Quillan still was silent. Evidently he had nothing further to say after all.

“Well,” Lawler said, “time to open the shop, I guess.”

He began to walk up the path toward the vaarghs.

“Wait,” said Quillan.

Lawler turned and looked back at him. “Yes?”

“Are you all right, doctor?”

“Why? Do I look sick to you?”

“You look upset about something,” Quillan said. “You don’t often look that way. When I first met you you struck me as a man who just lives his life, day by day, hour by hour, taking whatever comes in his stride. But somehow you look different this morning. That outburst of yours about other worlds—I don’t know. It didn’t seem like you. Of course I can’t say that I actually know you.”

Lawler gave the priest a guarded stare. He didn’t feel like telling him about the three dead divers in the shed on Jolly’s Pier.

There were a few things on my mind last night. I didn’t get much sleep. But I didn’t realize it was so obvious.”

“I’m good at seeing such things,” said Quillan, smiling. His pale blue eyes, usually remote and even veiled, seemed unusually penetrating just then. “It doesn’t take much. Listen, Lawler, if you’d like to talk to me about anything—anything at all, any time, just get things off your chest—”

Lawler grinned and indicated his chest, which was bare.

“Plainly there’s nothing on it, is there?”

“You know what I mean,” Quillan said.

For a moment something seemed to be passing between them, a crackling sort of tension, a linkage that Lawler neither desired nor enjoyed. Then the priest smiled again, genially, too genially, a deliberately bland, vague, benign smile obviously intended to create distance between them. He held up one hand in what might have been a blessing or perhaps a dismissal, and nodded, and turned and walked away.

3

As he drew near his vaargh Lawler saw that a woman with long, straight dark hair was waiting for him outside. A patient, he supposed. She was facing away from him and he wasn’t sure who she was. At least four women on Sorve had hair like that.

There were thirty vaarghs in the group where Lawler lived, and another sixty or so, not all of them inhabited, down near the tip of the island. They were irregular grey structures, asymmetrical but roughly pyramidal in shape, hollow within, twice the height of a tall man and tapering to a blunt drooping point. Near their summits they were pierced with window-like openings, angled outward so that rain would enter only in the most driving of storms, and then with difficulty. Some kind of thick, rugged cellulose, puckered and coarse—something drawn from the sea; where else but from the sea?—was what they had been made from, evidently very long ago. The stuff was remarkably solid and durable. If you struck a vaargh with a stick, it rang like a metal bell. The first settlers had found them already here when they arrived and had put them to use as temporary housing; but that had been more than a hundred years before, and the islanders were still living in them. Nobody knew why they were here. There were clusters of vaarghs on nearly every island: the abandoned nests, perhaps, of some extinct creature that once had shared the islands with the Gillies. The Gillies lived in dwellings of an entirely different nature, casual seaweed shelters that they discarded and replaced every few weeks, whereas these things seemed as close to imperishable as anything was on this watery world. “What are they?” the early settlers had asked, and the Gillies had replied, simply, “They are vaarghs.” What “vaarghs” meant was anybody’s guess. Communicating with the Gillies, even now, was a haphazard business.

When Lawler came closer he saw that the woman waiting for him was Sundira Thane. Like the priest, she too was a newcomer to Sorve, a tall, serious young woman who had arrived from Kentrup Island a few months before as a passenger aboard one of Delagard’s ships. Her profession was maintenance and repair—boats, nets, equipment, anything—but her real field of interest seemed to be the Hydrans. Lawler had heard she was an expert on their culture, their biology, all aspects of their life.

“Am I too early?” she asked.

“Not if you don’t think you are. Come in.” The entrance to Lawler’s vaargh was a low triangular gash in the wall, like a doorway for gnomes. He crouched and shuffled through it. She came crouching and shuffling after him. She was nearly as tall as he was. She seemed tense, withdrawn, preoccupied.

Pale morning light came slanting into the vaargh. At ground level thin partitions made of the same material as the exterior divided it into three rooms, each small and sharp-angled—his medical office, his bedchamber, and an antechamber that he used as a sitting-room.

It was still only about seven in the morning. Lawler was getting hungry. Breakfast would have to wait a while longer, he realized. But he casually shook a few drops of numbweed tincture into a mug, added a little water, and sipped it as though it were nothing but some medicine he prescribed for his own use every morning. In a way it was. Lawler gave her a quick guilty look. She wasn’t paying any attention at all to what he was doing, though. She was looking at his little collection of artifacts from Earth. Everyone who came here did. Gingerly she ran her finger along the jagged edge of the little orange-and-black potsherd, then looked back questioningly over her shoulder at Lawler. He smiled. “It came from a place called Greece,” he said. “A very famous place on Earth very long ago.”

The drug’s powerful alkaloids had completed their swift circuit of his bloodstream almost at once and entered his brain. He felt the tensions of the dawn encounters ebbing from his spirit.

“I’ve been coughing,” Thane said. “It won’t stop.”

And virtually on cue she broke into a volley of rough, hacking rasps. On Hydros a cough might be as trivial a thing as it was anywhere else; but it might also be something serious. All the islanders knew that.

There was a parasitic waterborne fungus, usually found in northern temperate waters, which reproduced by infesting various forms of marine life with the spores that it released into the atmosphere in dense black clouds. A spore, when inhaled by some aquatic mammal as it came to the surface to breath, lodged in its host’s warm gullet and sprouted immediately, sending forth a dense tangle of bright red hyphae that had no difficulty penetrating lungs, intestines, stomach, even brain tissue. The host’s interior became a tightly packed mass of vivid scarlet wires. The wires were looking for the copper-based respiratory pigment, haemocyanin. Most of the sea creatures of Hydros had haemocyanin in their blood, which gave it a bluish colour. The fungus seemed to have some use for haemocyanin too.

Death by fungus infestation was slow and horrible. The host, bloated with gases excreted by the invader and floating helplessly, would eventually succumb, and soon after that the fungus would extrude its mature fruiting structure through an opening it had carved in the host’s abdomen. This was a globular woody mass that shortly would split apart to release the new generation of adult fungi, which in the course of time would produce fresh clouds of spores, and so the cycle went.

Killer-fungus spores were capable of taking root in human lungs, a situation of no value to either party: humans were unable to provide the fungus with the haemocyanin it desired and the fungus found it necessary to invade and consume every region of the host’s body during the course of its search, a useless expenditure of energy.

The first symptom of fungus infestation in a human was a cough that refused to go away.

“Let’s get a little information about you,” Lawler said. “And then we’ll check this thing out.”

He took a fresh records folder from a drawer and scrawled Sundira Thane’s name on it.

“Your age?” he asked.

“Thirty-one.”

“Birthplace?”

“Khamsilaine Island.”

He glanced up, “That’s on Hydros?”

“Yes,” she said, a little too irritably. “Of course.” Another siege of coughing took her. “You’ve never heard of Khamsilaine?” she asked, when she could speak again.

“There are a lot of islands. I don’t get around much. I’ve never heard of it, no. What sea does it move in?”

“The Azure.”

“The Azure,” Lawler said, marvelling. He had only the haziest idea where the Azure Sea might be. “Imagine that. You’ve really covered some territory, haven’t you?” She offered no reply. He said, after a moment, “You came here from Kentrup a little while back, is that right?”

“Yes.” More coughing.

“How long did you live there?”

“Three years.”

“And before that?”

“Eighteen months on Velmise. Two years on Shaktan. About a year on Simbalimak.” She looked at him coldly and said, “Simbalimak’s in the Azure Sea also.”

“I’ve heard of Simbalimak,” he said.

“Before that, Khamsilaine. So this is my sixth island.”

Lawler made a note of that.

“Ever married?”

“No.”

He noted that down too. The general distaste for marrying within one’s own island’s population had led to a custom of unofficial exogamy on Hydros. Single people looking to get married usually moved to some other island to find a mate. When a woman as attractive as Sundira Thane had done as much moving around as she had without ever marrying anyone, it meant either that she was very particular or else that she wasn’t looking at all.

Lawler suspected that she simply wasn’t looking. The only man he had noticed her spending time with, in her few months on Sorve, was Gabe Kinverson, the fisherman. The moody, untalkative, crag-faced Kinverson was strong and rugged and, Lawler supposed, interesting in an animal sort of way, but he wasn’t the kind of man that Lawler imagined a woman like Sundira Thane would want to marry, assuming that marriage was what she was after. And in any case Kinverson had never been the marrying sort himself.

“When did this coughing start?” he asked.

“Eight, ten days ago. Around the time of the last Night of Three Moons, I’d say.”

“You ever experience anything like it before?”

“No, never.”

“Fever, pains in the chest, chilly sensations?”

“No.”

“Does any sputum come up when you cough? Or blood?”

“Sputum? Fluid, do you mean? No, there hasn’t been any sort of—”

She went into yet another coughing fit, the worst one yet. Her eyes grew watery, her cheeks reddened, her whole body seemed to shake. Afterward she sat with her head bowed forward between her shoulders, looking weary and miserable.

Lawler waited for her to catch her breath.

She said finally, “We haven’t been in the latitudes where killer fungus grows. I keep telling myself that.”

“That doesn’t signify, you know. The spores travel thousands of kilometres on the wind.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“You don’t seriously think you’ve got killer fungus, do you?”

She looked up, almost glaring at him. “Do I know? I might be full of red wires from my chest to my toes, and how would I be able to tell? All I know is that I can’t stop coughing. You’re the one who can tell me why.”

“Maybe,” Lawler said. “Maybe not. But let’s have a look. Get your shirt off.”

He drew his stethoscope from a drawer.

It was a preposterously crude instrument, nothing more than a cylinder of sea-bamboo twenty centimetres long to which a pair of plastic earpieces at the ends of two flexible tubes had been affixed. Lawler had next to nothing in the way of modern medical equipment at his service, scarcely anything, in fact, that a doctor even of the twentieth or twenty-first centuries would have regarded as modern. He had to make do with primitive things, medieval equipment. An X-ray scan could have told him in a couple of seconds whether she had a fungus infestation. But where would he get an X-ray scanner? On Hydros there was so little contact with the greater universe beyond the sky, and no import-export trade whatever. They were lucky to have any medical equipment here at all. Or any doctors, even half-baked ones like him. The human settlement here was inherently impoverished. There were so few people, such a shallow reservoir of skills.

Stripped to the waist, she stood beside his examining table, watching him as he slipped the stethoscope’s collar around his neck. She was very slender, almost too thin; her arms were long, muscular the way a thin woman’s arms are muscular, with flat, hard little muscles; her breasts were small and high and far apart. Her features were compressed in the centre of her wide strong-boned face, small mouth, thin lips, narrow nose, cool grey eyes. Lawler wondered why he had thought she was attractive. Certainly there was nothing conventionally pretty about her. It’s the way she carries herself, he decided: the head thrust forward a little atop the long neck, the strong jaw out-thrust, the eyes quick, alert, busy. She seemed vigorous, even aggressive. To his surprise he found himself aroused by her, not because her body was half bare—there was nothing uncommon about nudity, partial or otherwise, on Sorve Island—but because of the vitality and strength she projected.

It was a long time since he had been involved in any way with any woman. These days the celibate life seemed ever so much the simplest way, free of pain and mess once you got past the initial feelings of isolation and bleakness, if you could, and he eventually had. He had never had much luck with liaisons, anyway. His one marriage, when he was twenty-three, had lasted less than a year. Everything that had followed had been fragmentary, casual, incidental. Pointless, really.

The little flurry of endocrine excitement passed quickly. In a moment he was professional again. Dr Lawler making an examination.

He said, “Open your mouth, very very wide.”

“There isn’t all that much to open.”

“Well, do your best.”

She gaped at him. He had a little tube with a light on it, something handed down to him by his father; the tiny battery had to be recharged every few days. He put it down her throat and peered through it.

“Am I full of red wires?” she asked, when he withdrew it.

“Doesn’t look that way. All I see is a little soreness in the vicinity of the epiglottis, nothing very unusual.”

“What’s the epiglottis?”

“The flap that guards your glottis. Don’t worry about it.”

He put the stethoscope’s end against her sternum and listened.

“Can you hear the wires growing in there?”

“Shh.”

Lawler moved the cylinder slowly around in the hard, flat area between her breasts, listening to her heart, and then out along the rib cage.

“I’m trying to pick up audible evidence of inflammation of the pericardium,” he told her, “which is the sac surrounding the heart. I’m also listening for the sounds produced in the air tubes and sacs of your lungs. Take a deep breath and hold it. Try not to cough.”

Instantly, unsurprisingly, she began to cough. Lawler held the stethoscope to her as the coughing went on and on. Any information was information. Eventually the coughing stopped, leaving her red-faced and weary again.

“Sorry,” she said. “It was like when you said, Don’t cough, that it was a signal of some kind to my brain and I—”

She began to cough again.

“Easy,” he said. “Easy.”

This time the attack was shorter. He listened, nodded, listened again. Everything sounded normal.

But he had never had a case of killer-fungus infestation to handle. All Lawler knew about it was what he had heard from his father long ago or learned by talking to doctors on other islands. Would the stethoscope really be able to tell him, he wondered, what might or might not have taken up residence in her lungs?

“Turn around,” he said.

He listened to the sounds of her back. He had her raise her arms and pressed his fingers against her sides, feeling for alien growths. She wriggled as though he were tickling her. He drew a blood sample from her arm, and sent her behind the screen in the corner of the room to give him a urine specimen. Lawler had a microscope of sorts, which Sweyner the toolmaker had fashioned for him. It had no more resolution than a toy, but perhaps if there were something living within her he would be able to see it anyway.

He knew so little, really.

His patients were a daily reproach to his skills. Much of the time he simply had to bluff his way. His medical knowledge was a feeble mix of hand-me-downs from his eminent father, desperate guesswork, and hard-won experience, gradually accumulated at his patients” expense. Lawler had been only halfway through his medical education when his father died and he, at not quite twenty, found himself doctor to the island of Sorve. Nowhere on Hydros was there real medical training to be had, or anything that could remotely be considered a modern medical instrument, or any medicines other than those he could compound himself out of marine lifeforms, imagination, and prayers. In his late and great father’s time some charitable organization on Sunrise had dropped packages of medical supplies once in a while, but the packages were few and far between and they had to be shared among many islands. And they had stopped coming long ago. The inhabited galaxy was very large; nobody thought much about the people living on Hydros any more. Lawler did his best, but his best often wasn’t good enough. When he had the chance, he consulted with doctors on other islands, hoping to learn something from them. Their medical skills were just as muddy as his, but he had learned that sometimes by exchanging ignorances with them he could generate a little spark of understanding. Sometimes.

“You can put your shirt back on,” Lawler said.

“Is it the fungus, do you think?”

“All it is is a nervous cough,” he told her. He had the blood sample on the glass slide, now, and was peering at it through the single eyepiece. What was that, red on red? Could they be scarlet mycelial fibres coiling through the crimson haze? No. No. A trick of the eye. This was normal blood. “You’re perfectly all right,” he said, looking up. She was still bare-breasted, her shirt over her skinny arm, frozen in suspense. Her expression was a suspicious one. “Why do you need to think you’ve got a horrible disease?” Lawler asked. “All it is is a cough.”

“I need to think I don’t have a horrible disease. That’s why I came to you.”

“Well, you don’t.” He hoped to God he was right. There was no real reason to think he wasn’t.

He watched her as she dressed, and found himself wondering whether there might actually be something going on between her and Gabe Kinverson. Lawler, who had little interest in island gossip, hadn’t considered that possibility before, and, considering it now, he was startled to observe how uncomfortable he was with it.

He said, “Have you been under any unusual stress lately?”

“Not that I’m aware of, no.”

“Working too hard? Sleeping badly? Love affair that isn’t going well?”

She shot him a peculiar look. “No. On all three.”

“Well, sometimes we get stressed out and we don’t even notice it. The stress becomes built in, part of our routine. What I’m saying is that I think this is a nervous cough.”

“That’s all?” She sounded disappointed.

“You want it to be a killer-fungus infestation? All right, it’s a killer-fungus infestation. When you reach the stage where the wiry red threads are coming out your ears, cover your head in a sack so you don’t upset your neighbours. They might think they were at risk, otherwise. But of course they won’t be, not until you begin giving off spores, and that’ll come much later.”

She laughed. “I didn’t know you were such a comedian.”

“I’m not.” Lawler took her hand in his, wondering whether he was trying to be provocative or simply being avuncular, his Good Old Doc Lawler persona. “Listen,” he said, “I can’t find anything wrong with you physically. So the odds are the cough is just a nervous habit you picked up somehow. Once you start doing it, you irritate the throat linings, the mucosa and such, and the cough starts feeding on itself and gets worse and worse. Eventually it’ll go away on its own, but eventually can be a long time. What I’m going to give you is a neural damper, a tranquillizer drug, something to calm your cough reflex down long enough to let the mechanical irritation subside, so that you’ll stop sending cough signals to yourself.”

That came as a surprise to him too, that he would share the numbweed with her. He had never said a word about it to anyone, let alone prescribed it for a patient. But giving her the drug seemed to be the right thing to do. He had enough to spare.

He took a small dry storage gourd from his cabinet, poured a couple of centilitres of the pink fluid into it, and capped it with a twist of sea-plastic.

“This is a drug I derived myself from numbweed, which is one of the algae that grows in the lagoon. Give yourself five or six drops of it every morning, no more, in a glass of water. It’s strong stuff.” He studied her with a close, searching look. “The plant is full of potent alkaloids that could knock you for a loop. Just nibble one little frond of it and you’d be unconscious for a week. Or maybe forever. This is a highly diluted extract, but be careful with it anyway.”

“You had a little of it yourself, didn’t you, when we first came in here?”

So she’d been paying attention after all. Quick eyes, a sharp observer. Interesting.

“I get nervous too now and then,” Lawler said.

“Do I make you nervous?”

“All my patients do. I don’t really know much about medicine, and I’d hate them to find that out.” He forced a laugh. “No, that isn’t true. I don’t know as much about medicine as I should, but I know enough to manage. But I find that the drug calms me when I’m not having a good morning, and today didn’t start off particularly well for me. It had nothing to do with you. Here, you might as well take your first dose right now.”

He measured it out for her. She sipped carefully, uneasily, and made a wry face as the curious sweet taste of the alkaloids registered on her.

“You feel the effect?” Lawler asked.

“Right away! Hey, good stuff!”

“Too good, maybe. A little insidious.” He made notes on her dossier. “Five drops in a glass of water every morning, no more, and you don’t get a refill until the first of the month.”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

Her entire facial expression had changed; she looked much more relaxed now, the cool grey eyes warmer, almost twinkling, the lips not so tightly pursed, the tense cheek muscles allowed a little slack. She looked younger. She looked prettier. Lawler had never had a chance before to observe the effects of numbweed on anyone else. They were unexpectedly dramatic.

She said, “How did you discover this drug?”

“The Gillies use numbweed as a muscle relaxant when they’re hunting meatfish in the bay.”

“The Dwellers, you mean?”

The prissy correction caught Lawler by surprise. “Dwellers” was what the dominant native life-forms of Hydros called themselves. But “Gillies” was what anyone who had been on Hydros more than a few months called them, at least around here. Maybe the usage was different on the island where she was from, he thought, off in the Azure Sea. Or perhaps it was what the younger people were saying now. Usages changed. He reminded himself that he was ten years older than she was. But most likely she used the formal term out of respect, because she fancied herself as a student of Gillie culture. What the hell: whichever way she liked it, he’d try to be accommodating.

“The Dwellers, yes,” he said. “They tear off a couple of strands and wrap them around a chunk of bait and toss it to the meatfish, and when the meatfish swallow them they go limp and float helplessly to the surface. Then the Dwellers move in and harvest them without having to worry about those knifeblade-tipped tentacles. An old sailor named Jolly told me about it, when I was a boy. Later on I remembered it and went out to the harbour and watched them doing it. And collected some of the weed and experimented with it. I thought I might be able to use it as an anaesthetic.”

“And could you?”

“For meatfish, yes. I don’t do much surgery on meatfish, though. What I found when I used it on humans was that any dose that was strong enough to be any good as an anaesthetic also turned out to be lethal.” Lawler smiled grimly. “My trial-and-error period as a surgeon. Mostly error. But I eventually discovered that an extremely dilute tincture was an extremely potent tranquillizer. As you now see. It’s terrific stuff. We could market it throughout the galaxy, if we had any way of shipping anything anywhere.”

“And nobody knows about this drug but you?”

“And the Gillies,” he said. “Pardon me. The Dwellers. And now you. I don’t get much call for tranquillizers here.” Lawler chuckled. “You know, I woke up this morning with some wild notion of trying to talk the Dwellers into letting us tack water-desalinization equipment onto their new power plant, if they ever get it going. Giving them a long heartfelt number about inter-species collaboration. It was a dumb idea, the sort of thing that comes to you in the night and goes away like mist when the sun rises. They’d never have gone for it. But what I really ought to do is mix up a big batch of numbweed and get them good and plastered on it. They’ll let us do anything we want then, I bet.”

She didn’t look amused.

“You’re joking, aren’t you?”

“I suppose I am.”

“If you aren’t, don’t even think of trying it, because you won’t get anywhere. This is no time for asking the Dwellers for favours. They’re pretty seriously annoyed with us.”

“What about?” Lawler asked.

“I don’t know. But something’s definitely making them itchy. I went down to their end of the island last night and they were having a big conference. When they saw me they weren’t at all friendly.”

“Are they ever?”

“With me they are. But they wouldn’t even talk with me last night. They wouldn’t let me near them. And they were holding themselves in the posture of displeasure. You know anything about Dweller body-language? They were stiff as boards.”

The divers, he thought. They must know about the divers. That has to be it. But it wasn’t something that Lawler wanted to discuss right now, not with her, not with anyone.

“The thing about aliens,” he said, “is that they’re alien. Even when we think we understand them, we really don’t understand a damned thing. And I don’t see any way around that problem. Listen, if the cough doesn’t go away in two or three days, come back here and I’ll run some more tests. But stop fretting about killer fungus in your lungs, okay? Whatever it is, it isn’t that.”

“That’s good to hear,” she said. She went over to the shelf of artifacts again. “Are all these little things from Earth?”

“Yes. My great-great-grandfather collected them.”

“Really? Actual Earth things?” Gingerly she touched the Egyptian statuette and the bit of stone that had come from some important wall, Lawler forgot where. “Actual things that came from Earth. I’ve never seen any before. Earth doesn’t even seem real to me, you know? It never has.”

“It does to me,” Lawler said. “But I know a lot of people who feel the way you do. Let me know about that cough, okay?”

She thanked him and went out.

And now for breakfast, Lawler told himself. Finally. A nice whipfish fillet, and algae toast, and some freshly squeezed managordo juice.

But he had waited too long. He didn’t have much appetite, and he simply nibbled at his meal.

A little while later a second patient appeared outside the vaargh. Brondo Katzin, who ran the island’s fish market, had picked up a not-quite-dead arrowfish the wrong way and had a thick, glossy black spine five centimetres long sticking right through the middle of his left hand from one side to the other. “Imagine, being so dumb,” the barrel-chested, slow-witted Katzin kept saying. “Imagine.” His eyes were bugging with pain and his hand, swollen and glossy, looked twice its normal size. Lawler cut the spine loose, swabbed the wound all the way through to get the poison and other irritants out, and gave the fish-market man some gemberweed pills to ease the pain. Katzin stared at his puffed-up hand, ruefully shaking his head. “So dumb,” he said again.

Lawler hoped that he had cleaned out enough of the trichomes to keep the wound from getting infected. If he hadn’t, there was a good chance Katzin would lose the hand, or the whole arm. Practising medicine was probably easier, Lawler thought, on a planet that had some land surface, and a spaceport, and something in the way of contemporary technology. But he did his best with what he had. Heigh-ho! The day was under way.

4

At midday Lawler came out of his vaargh to take a little break from his work. This had been his busiest morning in months. On an island with a total human population of just seventy-eight, most of them pretty healthy, Lawler sometimes went through whole days, or even longer, without seeing a single patient. On such days he might spend the morning wading in the bay, collecting algae of medicinal value. Natim Gharkid often helped him, pointing out this or that useful plant. Or sometimes he did nothing at all, strolled or swam or went out on the bay in a fishing boat or sat quietly watching the sea. But this wasn’t one of those days. First there was Dana Sawtelle’s little boy with a fever, then Marya Hain with cramps after eating too many crawlie-oysters last night, Nimber Tanimind suffering from a recurrence of his usual tremors and megrims, young Bard Thalheim with a badly sprained ankle as a result of some unwise hijinks on the slippery side of the sea-wall. Lawler uttered the appropriate spells and applied the most likely ointments and sent them all away with the customary reassurances and prognostications. Most likely they’d feel better in a day or so. The current Dr Lawler might not be much of a practitioner, but Dr Placebo, his invisible assistant, generally managed to take care of the patients” problems sooner or later.

Now, though, there was no one else waiting to see him and a little fresh air seemed like a good prescription for the doctor himself. Lawler stepped out into the bright noontime sun, stretched, did a few pinwheels with his extended arms. He peered downslope toward the waterfront. There was the bay, friendly and familiar, its calm enclosed waters rippling gently. It looked wonderfully beautiful just now: a glassy sheet of luminous gold, a glowing mirror. The dark fronds of the varied sea-flora waved lazily in the shallows. Farther out, occasional shining fins breached the glistening surface. A couple of Delagard’s ships lolled by the shipyard pier, swaying gently to the rhythm of the easy tide. Lawler felt as though this moment of summer noon could go on forever, that night and winter would never come again. An unexpected feeling of peace and well-being infiltrated his soul: a gift, a bit of serendipitous joy.

“Lawler,” a voice said from his left.

A dry frayed croak of a voice, a boneyard voice, a voice that was all ashes and rubble. It was a dismal burned-out unrecognizable wreck of a voice that Lawler recognized, somehow, as that of Nid Delagard.

He had come up along the southern path from the water-front and was standing between Lawler’s vaargh and the little tank where Lawler kept his current stock of freshly picked medicinal algae. He was flushed and rumpled and sweaty and his eyes looked strangely glassy, as though he had had a stroke.

“What the hell has happened now?” Lawler asked, exasperated.

Delagard made a wordless gaping movement with his mouth, like a fish out of water, and said nothing.

Lawler dug his fingers into the man’s thick, meaty arm. “Can you speak? Come on, damn you. Tell me what’s happened.”

“Yeah. Yeah.” Delagard moved his head from side to side in a slow, ponderous, pole-axed way. “It’s very bad. It’s worse than I ever imagined.”

“What is?”

“Those fucking divers. The Gillies are really furious about them. And they’re going to come down on us very hard. Very very very hard. It’s what I was trying to tell you about this morning in the shed, when you walked out on me.”

Lawler blinked a couple of times. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”

“Give me some brandy first.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Come inside.”

He poured a strong jolt of the thick sea-coloured liquor for Delagard, and, after a moment’s consideration, a smaller drink for himself. Delagard put his away in a single gulp and held out the cup. Lawler poured again.

After a little while Delagard said, picking his way warily through his words as if struggling with some speech impediment, “The Gillies came to visit me just now, about a dozen of them. Walked right up out of the water down at the shipyard and asked my men to call me out for a talk.”

Gillies? At the human end of the island? That hadn’t happened in decades. Gillies never went farther south than the promontory where they had built their power plant. Never.

Delagard gave him a tortured look. “What do you want,” I said. Using the politest gestures, Lawler, everything very very courteous. I think the ones that were there were the big Gillie honchos, but how can you be sure? Who can tell one of them from the next? They looked important, anyway. They said, “Are you Nid Delagard” as if they didn’t know. And I said I was, and then they grabbed me.”

“Grabbedyou?”

“I mean, physically grabbed me. Put their little funny flippers on me. Pushed me up against the wall of my own building and restrained me.”

“You’re lucky you’re still around to talk about it.”

“No kidding. I tell you, doc, I was scared shitless. I thought they were going to gut me and fillet me right there. Look, look here, the marks of their claws on my arm.” He showed fading reddish spots. “My face is swollen, isn’t it? I tried to pull my head away and one of them bumped me, maybe by accident, but look. Look. Two of them held me and a third one put his nose in my face and started telling me things, and I mean telling me, big booming noises, oom whang hoooof theeeezt, ooom whang hooof theeezt. At the beginning I was so shaken up I couldn’t understand any of it. But then it came clear. They said it again and again until they made sure I understood. An ultimatum, it was.” Delagard’s voice dropped into a lower register. “We’ve been thrown off the island. We have thirty days to clean ourselves out of here. Every last one of us.”

Abruptly Lawler felt the ground disappearing beneath his feet.

“What?”

The other man’s hard little brown eyes had taken on a frantic glitter. He signalled for more brandy. Lawler poured without even looking at the cup. “Any human remaining on Sorve when the time’s up will be tossed into the lagoon and not allowed back up on shore. Any structures we’ve erected here will be demolished. The reservoir, the shipyard, these buildings here in the plaza, everything. Things we leave behind in the vaarghs go into the sea. Any ocean-going vessels we leave in the harbour will be sunk. We are terminated, doc. We are ex-residents of Sorve Island. Finished, done for, gone.”

Lawler stared, incredulous. A quick cycle of turbulent emotions ran through him: disorientation, depression, despair. Confusion assailed him. Leave Sorve? Leave Sorve?

He began to tremble. With an effort he got himself under control, fighting his way back to inner equilibrium.

Tightly he said, “Killing some divers in an industrial accident is definitely not a good thing to have done. But this is too much of an overreaction. You must have misunderstood what they were saying.”

“Like shit I did. Not a chance. They made themselves very very clear.”

“We all have to go?”

“We all have to go, yes. Thirty days.”

Am I hearing him correctly, Lawler wondered? Is any of this really happening?

“And did they give a reason?” he asked. “Was it the divers?”

“Of course it was,” Delagard said in a low husky voice clotted by shame. “It was just like you said this morning. The Gillies always know everything that we do.”

“Christ. Christ.” Anger was beginning to take the place of shock. Delagard had casually gambled with the lives of everyone on the island, and he had lost. The Gillies had warned him: Don’ t ever do that again, or we’ ll throw you out of here. And he had done it again anyway. “What a contemptible bastard you are, Delagard!”

“I don’t know how they found out. I took precautions. We brought them in by night, we kept them covered until they were in the shed, the shed itself was locked—”

“But they knew.”

“They knew,” Delagard said. “They know everything, the Gillies. You screw somebody else’s wife, the Gillies know about it. But they don’t care. Not about that. You kill a couple of divers and they care like crazy.”

“What did they tell you, the last time you had an accident with divers? When they warned you not to use divers again in your work, what did they say they’d do if they caught you?”

Delagard was silent.

“What did they tell you?” Lawler said again, pressing harder.

Delagard licked his lips. “That they’d make us leave Sorve,” he muttered, once again looking down at his feet like a schoolboy being reprimanded.

“And you did it anyway. You did it anyway.”

“Who would believe them? Jesus, Lawler, we’ve lived here for a hundred and fifty years! Did they mind when we moved in? We dropped out of space and squatted right down on their fucking islands and did they say, “Go away, hideous repellent four-limbed hairy alien beings?” No. No. They didn’t give a crap.”

“There was Shalikomo,” Lawler said.

“A long time ago, that was. Before either of us was born.”

“The Gillies killed a lot of people on Shalikomo. Innocent people.”

“Different Gillies. Different situation.”

Delagard pressed his knuckles together and made a little popping sound with them. His voice began to rise in pitch and volume. He seemed very swiftly to be casting off the guilt and the shame that had engulfed him. That was a knack he had, Lawler thought, the rapid restoration of his own self-esteem. “Shalikomo’s an exception,” he said. The Gillies had thought there were far too many humans on Shalikomo, which was a very small island, and had told some of them to go; but the humans of Shalikomo had been unable to agree on who should go and who could stay, and hardly anyone left the island, and in the end the Gillies decided how many humans they would allow to live there among themselves and killed the rest. “It’s ancient history,” Delagard said.

“It was a long time ago, yes,” said Lawler. “But what makes you think it can’t all happen again?”

Delagard said, “The Gillies have never been particularly hostile anywhere else. They don’t like us, but they don’t stop us from doing whatever we want to do, so long as we stay down at our end of the island and don’t get too numerous. We harvest kelp, we fish as much as we like, we build buildings, we hunt for meatfish, we do all sorts of things that aliens might be expected to resent, and not a word out of them. So if I was able to train a few divers to help me in oceanfloor metals recovery, which could only benefit the Gillies as well as us, why do you suppose I would think that they’d become so exercised over the death of a few animals in the line of work that they—they would—”

“The last straw, maybe,” Lawler said. The one that broke the camel’s back.”

“Huh? What the fuck are you saying?”

“Ancient Earth proverb. Never mind. What I’m saying is that for whatever reason, the diver thing pushed them over the edge and now they want us out of here.”

Lawler closed his eyes a moment. He imagined himself packing up his things, getting aboard a boat bound for some other island. It wasn’t easy.

We are going to have to leave Sorve. We are going to have to leave Sorve. We are going to—

He realized that Delagard was talking.

“It was a stunner, let me tell you. I never expected it. Standing there up against the wall with two big Gillies holding my arms and another one smack up in front of my nose saying, You all have to clear out in thirty days, you will vanish from this island or else. How do you think I felt about that, doc? Especially knowing I was the one responsible for it. You said this morning I didn’t have any conscience, but you don’t know a damned thing about me. You think I’m a boor and a lout and a criminal, but what do you know, anyway? You hide away in here by yourself and drink yourself silly and sit there judging other people who have more energy and ambition in one finger than you have in your entire—”

“Knock it off, Delagard.”

“You said I had no conscience.”

“Do you?”

“Let me tell you, Lawler, I feel like shit, bringing this thing down on us. I was born here too, you know. You don’t have to give me any snot-nose condescending First Family stuff, not me. My family’s been here from the beginning just like yours. We practically built this island, we Delagards. And now to hear that I’m being tossed out like a bunch of rotten meat, and that everyone else has to go too—” The tone of Delagard’s voice changed yet again. The anger melted; he spoke more softly, earnestly, sounding almost humble. “I want you to know that I’ll take full responsibility for what I’ve done. What I’m going to do is—”

“Hold it,” Lawler said, raising one hand to cut him off. “You hear noise?”

“Noise? What noise? Where?”

Lawler inclined his head toward the door. Sudden shouts, harsh cries, were coming from the long three-sided plaza that separated the island’s two groups of vaarghs.

Delagard said, nodding, “Yeah, now I hear it. An accident, maybe?”

But Lawler was already moving, out the door, heading for the plaza at a quick loping trot.

There were three weatherbeaten buildings—shacks, really, shanties, bedraggled lean-tos—on the plaza, one on each side of it. The biggest, along the upland side, was the island school. On the nearer of the two downslope sides was the little cafй that Lis Niklaus, Delagard’s woman, ran. Beyond it was the community centre.

A small knot of murmuring children stood outside the school, with their two teachers. In front of the community centre half a dozen of the older men and women were drifting about in a random, sunstruck way, moving in a ragged circle. Lis Niklaus had emerged from her cafй and was staring open-mouthed at nothing in particular. On the far side were two of Delagard’s captains, squat, blocky Gospo Struvin and lean, long-legged Bamber Cadrell. They were at the head of the ramp that led into the plaza from the waterfront, holding on to the railing like men expecting an immediate tidal surge to strike. Between them, bisecting the plaza with his mass, the hulking fish-merchant Brondo Katzin stood like a huge stupefied beast, gazing fixedly at his unbandaged right hand as though it had just sprouted an eye.

There was no sign of any accident, any victim.

“What’s going on?” Lawler asked.

Lis Niklaus turned toward him in a curiously monolithic way, swinging her entire body around. She was a tall, fleshy, robust woman with a great tangle of yellow hair and skin so deeply tanned that it looked almost black. Delagard had been living with her for five or six years, ever since the death of his wife, but he hadn’t married her. Perhaps he was trying to protect his sons” inheritance, people supposed. Delagard had four grown sons, living on other islands, each of them on a different one.

She said hoarsely, sounding half strangled, “Bamber and Gospo just came up from the shipyard—they say the Gillies were here—that they said—they told us—they told Nid—”

Her voice trailed off in an incoherent sputter.

Shrivelled little Mendy Tanamind, Nimber’s ancient mother, said in a piping tone, “We have to leave! We have to leave!” She giggled shrilly.

“Nothing funny about it,” Sandor Thalheim said. He was just as ancient as Mendy. He shook his head vehemently, making his dewlaps and wattles tremble.

“All because of a few animals,” Bamber Cadrell said. “Because of three dead divers.”

So the news was out already. Too bad, Lawler thought. Delagard’s men should have kept their mouths shut until we figured out a way to handle this.

Someone sobbed. Mendy Tanamind giggled again. Brondo Katzin broke from his stasis and began bitterly to mutter, over and over, “The fucking stinking Gillies! The fucking stinking Gillies!”

“What’s the trouble here?” Delagard asked, finally coming stumping up along the path from Lawler’s vaargh.

“Your boys Bamber and Gospo took it upon themselves to carry the news,” Lawler said. “Everybody knows.”

“What? What? The bastards! I’ll kill them!”

“It’s a little too late for that.”

Others were entering the plaza now. Lawler saw Gabe Kinverson, Sundira Thane, Father Quillan, the Sweyners. And more right behind them. They came crowding in, forty, fifty, sixty people, practically everybody. Even five or six of the Sisters were there, standing close together, a tight little female phalanx. Safety in numbers. Dag Tharp appeared. Marya and Gren Hain. Josc Yanez, Lawler’s seventeen-year-old apprentice, who was going to be the island’s next doctor someday. Onyos Felk, the mapkeeper. Natim Gharkid had come up from his algae beds, his trousers soaked to the waist. The news must have travelled through the whole community by this time.

Mostly their faces showed shock, astonishment, incredulity. Is it true? they were asking. Can it be?

Delagard cried out, “Listen, all of you, there’s nothing to worry about! We’re going to get this thing smoothed over!”

Gabe Kinverson came up to Delagard. He looked twice as tall as the shipyard owner, a great slab of a man, all jutting chin and massive shoulders and cold, glaring sea-green eyes. There was always an aura of danger about Kinverson, of potential violence.

“They threw us out?” Kinverson asked. “They really said we had to leave?”

Delagard nodded.

“Thirty days is what we have, and then out. They made that very clear. They don’t care where we go, but we can’t stay here. I’m going to fix everything, though. You can count on that.”

“Seems to me you’ve fixed everything already,” Kinverson said. Delagard moved back a step and glared at Kinverson as if bracing for a fight. But the sea-hunter seemed more perplexed than angry. “Thirty days and then get out,” Kinverson said, half to himself. “If that don’t beat everything.” He turned his back on Delagard and walked away, scratching his head.

Perhaps Kinverson really didn’t care, Lawler thought. He spent most of his time far out at sea anyway, by himself, preying on the kinds of fish that didn’t choose to come into the bay. Kinverson had never been active in the life of the Sorve community; he floated through it the way the islands of Hydros drifted in the ocean, aloof, independent, well defended, following some private course.

But others were more agitated. Brondo Katsin’s delicate-looking little golden-haired wife Eliyana was sobbing wildly. Father Quillan attempted to comfort her, but he was obviously upset himself. The gnarled old Sweyners were talking to each other in low, intense tones. A few of the younger women were trying to explain things to their worried-looking children. Lis Niklaus had brought a jug of grapeweed brandy out of her cafй and it was passing rapidly from hand to hand among the men, who were gulping from it in a sombre, desperate way.

Lawler said quietly to Delagard, “How exactly are you going to deal with all this? You have some sort of plan?”

“I do,” Delagard said. Suddenly he was full of frenetic energy. “I told you I’d take full responsibility, and I meant it. I’ll go back to the Gillies on my knees, and if I have to lick their hind flippers I will, and I’ll beg for forgiveness. They’ll come around, sooner or later. They won’t actually hold us to this goddamned absurd ultimatum.”

“I admire your optimism.”

Delagard went on, “And if they won’t back off, I’ll volunteer to go into exile myself. Don’t punish everyone, I’ll tell them. Just me. I’m the guilty one. I’ll move to Velmise or Salimil or any place you like, and you’ll never see my ugly face on Sorve again, that’s a promise. It’ll work, Lawler. They’re reasonable beings. They’ll understand that tossing an old lady like Mendy here off the island that’s been her home for eighty years isn’t going to serve any rational purpose. I’m the bastard, I’m the murderous diver-killing villain, and I’ll go if I have to, though I don’t even think it’ll come down to that.”

“You may be right. Maybe not.”

“I’ll crawl before them if I have to.”

“And you’ll bring one of your sons over from Velmise to run the shipyard if they make you leave here, won’t you?”

Delagard looked startled. “Well, what’s wrong with that?”

“They might think you weren’t all that sincere about agreeing to leave. They might think one Delagard was the same as the next.”

“You say it might not be good enough for them, if I’m the only one to go?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. They might want something more than that from you.”

“Like what?”

“What if they told you they’d pardon the rest of us provided you left and agreed that you and your family would never set foot on Sorve again, and that the entire Delagard shipyard would be torn down?”

Delagard’s eyes grew very bright. “No,” he said. “They wouldn’t ask that!”

“They already have. And more.”

“But if I go, if I really go—if my sons pledge never to harm a diver again—”

Lawler turned away from him.

For Lawler the first shock was past; the simple phrase We are going to have to leave Sorve had incorporated itself in his mind, his soul, his bones. He was taking it very calmly, all things considered. He wondered why. Between one moment and the next the existence on this island that he had spent his entire life constructing had been yanked from his grasp.

He remembered the time he had gone to Thibeire. How deeply disquieting it had been to see all those unfamiliar faces, to be unaware of names and personal histories, to walk down a path and not know what lay at the end of it. He had been glad to come home, after just a few hours.

And now he would have to go somewhere else and stay there for the rest of his life; he would have to live among strangers; he would lose all sense that he was a Lawler of Sorve Island, and would become just anybody, a newcomer, an off-islander, intruding in some new community where he had no place and no purpose. That should have been a hard thing to swallow. And yet after that first moment of terrifying instability and disorientation he had settled somehow into a kind of numbed acceptance, as though he were as indifferent to the eviction as Gabe Kinverson seemed to be, or Gharkid, that perversely free-floating man. Strange. Maybe it simply hasn’t sunk in yet, Lawler told himself.

Sundira Thane came up to him. She was flushed and there was a sheen of perspiration on her forehead. Her whole posture was one of excitement and a kind of fierce self-satisfaction.

“I told you they were annoyed with us, didn’t I? Didn’t I? Looks like I was right.”

“So you were,” Lawler said.

She studied him for a moment. “We’re really going to have to leave. I don’t have the slightest doubt of it.” Her eyes flashed brilliantly. She seemed to be glorying in all this, almost intoxicated by it. Lawler remembered that this was the sixth island she had lived on so far, at the age of thirty-one. She didn’t mind moving around. She might even enjoy it.

He nodded slowly. “Why are you so sure of that?”

“Because Dwellers don’t ever change their minds. When they say something they stick to it. And killing divers seems to be a more serious thing to them than killing meatfish or bangers. The Dwellers don’t mind our going out into the bay and hunting for food. They eat meatfish themselves. But the divers are, well, different. The Dwellers feel very protective toward them.”

“Yes,” Lawler said. “I guess they do.”

She stared straight into his eyes. She was nearly on eye level with him. “You’ve lived here a long time, haven’t you, Lawler?”

“All my life.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. This is going to be rough for you.”

“I’ll deal with it,” he said. “Every island can use another doctor. Even a half-baked doctor like me.” He laughed. “Listen, how’s that cough doing?”

“I haven’t coughed once since you gave me that dope.”

“I didn’t think you would.”

Delagard suddenly was at Lawler’s elbow again. Without apologizing for breaking in on his conversation with Sundira, he said, “Will you come with me to the Gillies, doc?”

“What for?”

“They know you. They respect you. You’re your father’s son and that gives you points with them. They think of you as a serious and honourable man. If I have to promise to leave the island, you can vouch for me, that I mean it when I say I’ll go away and never come back.”

“They’ll believe you without my help, if you tell them that. They don’t expect any intelligent being to tell lies, even you. But that still won’t change anything.”

“Come with me all the same, Lawler.”

“It’s a waste of time. What we need to be doing is starting to plan the evacuation.”

“Let’s try it, at least. We can’t be sure if we don’t try.”

Lawler considered that. “Right now?”

“After dark,” Delagard said. “They don’t want to see any of us now. They’re too busy celebrating the opening of the new power plant. They got it going about two hours ago, you know. They’ve got a cable running from the waterfront to their end of the island and it’s carrying juice.”

“Good for them.”

“I’ll meet you down by the sea-wall at sunset, all right? And we’ll go and talk to them together. Will you do that, Lawler?”

In the afternoon Lawler sat quietly in his vaargh, trying to comprehend what it would mean to have to leave the island, working at the concept, worrying at it. No patients came to see him. Delagard, true to his promise of the early morning, had sent some flasks of grapeweed brandy over, and Lawler drank a little, and then a little more, without any particular effect. Lawler thought of allowing himself another dose of his tranquillizer, but somehow that seemed not to be a good idea. He was tranquil enough as it was, right now: what he felt wasn’t his usual restlessness, but rather a sodden dullness of spirit, a heavy weight of depression, for which the pink drops weren’t likely to be of any use.

I am going to leave Sorve Island, he thought.

I am going to live somewhere else, on an island I don’t know, among people whose names and ancestries and inner natures are absolute mysteries to me.

He told himself that it was all right, that in a few months he’d feel just as much at home on Thibeire, or Velmise, or Kaggeram, or whatever island it was that he ultimately settled on, as he did on Sorve. He knew that that wasn’t true, but that was what he told himself, all the same.

Resignation seemed to help. Acceptance, even indifference. The trouble was that he couldn’t stay on that numbed-down level consistently. From time to time a sudden flare of shock and bewilderment would hit him, a sense of intolerable loss, even of out-and-out fear. And then he had to start all over again.

When it began to grow dark Lawler left his vaargh and headed down to the sea-wall.

Two moons had risen, and a faint sliver of Sunrise had returned to the sky. The bay was alive with twilight colours, long streaks of reflected gold and purple, fading quickly into the grey of night as he watched. The dark shapes of mysterious sea-creatures moved purposefully in the shallow waters. It was all very peaceful: the bay at sundown, calm, lovely.

But then thoughts of the voyage that awaited him crept into his mind. Lawler looked outward beyond the harbour to the vastness of the unfriendly, inconceivable sea. How far would they have to sail before they found an island willing to take them in? A week’s journey? Two weeks? A month? He had never been to sea at all, not even for a day. That time he had gone over to Thibiere, it had been a simple journey by coracle, just beyond the shallows to the other island that had come up so close by Sorve.

Lawler realized that he feared the sea. The sea was a great world-sized mouth, which he sometimes imagined must have swallowed up all of Hydros in some ancient convulsion, leaving nothing but the little drifting islands that the Gillies had created. It would swallow him too, if he set out to cross it.

Angrily he told himself that this was foolishness, that men like Gabe Kinverson went out into the sea every day and survived it, that Nid Delagard had made a hundred voyages between the islands, that Sundira Thane had come to Sorve from an island in the Azure Sea, which was so far away that he had never heard of it. It would be all right. He would board one of Delagard’s ships and in a week or two it would bring him to the island that would be his new home.

And yet—the blackness, the immensity, the surging power of the terrible world-spanning sea—

“Lawler?” a voice called.

He looked around. For the second time this day Nid Delagard stepped out of the shadows behind him.

“Come on,” the shipyard owner said. “It’s getting late. Let’s go talk to the Gillies.”

5

There were electric lights glowing in the Gillie power plant, just a little way farther along the curve of the shore. Other lights, dozens of them, maybe hundreds, could be seen blazing in the streets of Gillie-town beyond. The unexpected catastrophe of the expulsion had completely overshadowed the other big event of the day, the inauguration of turbine-driven electrical generation on Sorve Island.

The light coming from the power plant was cool, greenish, faintly mocking. The Gillies had a technology of sorts, which had reached an eighteenth or nineteenth-century Earth-equivalent level, and they had invented a kind of light bulb, using filaments made from the fibres of the exceedingly versatile sea-bamboo plant. The bulbs were costly and difficult to make, and the big voltaic pile that had been the island’s main source of power was clumsy and recalcitrant, producing electricity only in a sluggish, intermittent fashion and constantly breaking down. But now—after how many years of work? Five? Ten?—the island’s bulbs were being lit from a new and inexhaustible source, power from the sea, warm water from the surface converted to steam, steam making the generator’s turbines turn, electricity streaming forth from the generator to light the lamps of Sorve Island.

The Gillies had agreed to let the humans at the other end of the island draw off some of the new power in return for labour—Sweyner would make light bulbs for them, Dann Henders would help with the stringing of cable, and so forth. Lawler had been instrumental in setting up that arrangement, along with Delagard, Nicko Thalheim and one or two others. That was the one little triumph of inter-species cooperation that the humans had been able to manage in recent years. It had taken about six months of slow and painstaking negotiation.

Only this morning, Lawler remembered, he had hoped to work out another such cooperative enterprise with them entirely by himself. That seemed a million years ago. And here they were at nightfall, setting forth to beg just to be allowed to continue living on the island at all.

Delagard said, “We’ll go straight to the honcho cabin, okay? No sense not starting at the top for this one.”

Lawler shrugged. “Whatever you say.”

They walked around the power plant and headed into Gillie territory, still following the shore of the bay. The island widened rapidly here, rising from the low bayfront levels behind the sea-wall to a broad circular plateau that contained most of the Gillie settlement. On the far side of the plateau there was a steep drop where the island’s thick wooden sea-bulwark descended in a straight sheer line to the dark ocean far below.

The Gillie village was arrayed in an irregular circle, the most important buildings in the centre, the others strung raggedly along the periphery. The main difference between the inner buildings and the outer ones seemed to be one of permanence: the inner ones, which appeared to have ceremonial uses, were constructed of the same wood-kelp timber that the island itself was built from, and the outer ones, in which the Gillies lived, were slapdash tent-like things made of moist green seaweed wrapped loosely over sea-bamboo poles. They gave off a ghastly odour of rot as the sun baked them, and when they reached a certain degree of dryness the seaweed coverings were stripped away and replaced with fresh ones. What appeared to be a special caste of Gillies was constantly at work tearing down the huts and building new ones.

It would take about half a day to walk completely across the Gillie end of the island. By the time Lawler and Delagard had entered the inner circle of the village, Sunrise had set and the Hydros Cross was bright in the sky.

“Here they come,” Delagard said. “Let me do the talking, first. If they start getting snotty with me, you take over. I don’t mind if you tell them what a shit you think I am. Whatever works.”

“Do you really think anything’s going to work?”

“Shh. I don’t want to hear you talking like that.”

Half a dozen Gillies—males, Lawler guessed—were approaching them from the innermost part of the village. When they were ten or twelve metres away they halted and arranged themselves in front of the two humans in a straight line.

Delagard raised his hands in the gesture that meant, “We come in peace.” It was the universal humans-to-Gillies greeting. No conversation ever began without it.

The Gillies now were supposed to reply with the funereal wheezing sounds that meant, “We accept you as peaceful and we await your words.” But they didn’t say a thing. They simply stood there and stared.

“I don’t have a good feeling about this, do you?” Lawler said quietly.

“Wait. Wait.”

Delagard made the peace gesture again. He went on to make the hand-signals that meant, “We are your friends and regard you with the highest respect.”

One of the Gillies emitted what sounded like a fart.

Their glittering little yellow eyes, set close together at the base of their small heads, studied the two humans in what seemed like an icy and indifferent way.

“Let me try,” Lawler murmured.

He stepped forward. The wind was blowing from behind the Gillies: it brought him their damp heavy musky smell, mingled with the sharp reek of rotting seaweed from their ramshackle huts.

He made the We-come-in-peace sign. That produced no response, nor did the cognate We-are-your-friends one. After an appropriate pause he proceeded to make the signal that meant, “We seek an audience with the powers that reign.”

From one of the Gillies came the farting sound again. Lawler wondered if it was the same Gillie that had rumbled and snorted at him so menacingly in the early hours of the day, down by the power plant.

Delagard offered I-ask-forgiveness-for-an-unintended-transgression. Silence: cold indifferent eyes remotely watching.

Lawler tried How-may-we-atone-for-departure-from-right-conduct. He got nothing back.

“The lousy fuckers,” Delagard muttered. “I’d like to put a spear right through their fat bellies.”

“They know that,” Lawler said. “That’s why they don’t want to dicker with you.”

“I’ll go away. You talk to them by yourself.”

“If you think it’s worth trying.”

“You have a clean record with them. Remind them who you are. Who your father was and what he did for them.”

“Any other suggestions?” Lawler asked.

“Look, I’m just trying to be helpful. But go on, do it any way you like. I’ll be at the shipyard. Stop off there when you get back and let me know how it goes.”

Delagard slipped off into the darkness.

Lawler took a few steps closer to the six Gillies and began again with the initiating gesture. Next he identified himself: Valben Lawler, doctor, son of Bernat Lawler the doctor. The great healer whom they surely remembered, the man who had freed their young ones from the menace of fin-rot.

He felt the strong irony of it: this was the opening of the speech he had spent half the night rehearsing in his sleepless mind. He was getting a chance to deliver it after all. In the context of a very different situation, though.

They looked at him without responding.

At least they didn’t fart this time, Lawler thought.

He signalled, “We are ordered to leave the island. Is this so?”

From the Gillie on the left came the deep soughing tone that meant an affirmative.

“This brings us great sorrow. Is there any way that we can cause this order to be withdrawn?”

Negative, boomed the Gillie on the right.

Lawler stared at them hopelessly. The wind picked up, flinging their heavy odour into his face by the bucketful, and he fought back nausea. Gillies had never seemed other than strange and mysterious to him, and a little repellent. He knew that he should take them for granted, simply one aspect of the world where he had always lived, like the ocean or the sky. But for all their familiarity they remained, to him, creatures of another creation. Star-things. Aliens: us and them, humans and aliens, no kinship. Why was that? he wondered. I’m as much a native of this world as they are.

He held his ground and told them, “It was simply an unfortunate accident that those divers died. There was no malice involved.”

Boom. Wheeze. Hwsssh.

Meaning: We are not interested in why it happened, only that it happened at all.

Behind the six Gillies, bleak greenish lights flashed on and off, illuminating the curious structures—statues? machines? idols?—that occupied the open space at the centre of the village, strange lumps and knobs of metals that had been patiently extracted from the tissues of small sea-creatures and assembled into random-looking, rust-caked heaps of junk.

“Delagard promises never to use divers again,” Lawler told the Gillies, cajoling them now, looking hopefully for an opening.

Wheeze. Boom. Indifference.

“Won’t you tell us how we can make things good again? We regret what happened. We regret it intensely.”

No response. Cold yellow eyes, staring, aloof.

This is idiocy, Lawler thought. It’s like arguing with the wind.

“Damn it, this is our home !” he cried, matching the words with furious equivalent gestures. “It always has been!”

Three rumbling tones, descending in thirds.

“Find another home?” Lawler asked. “But we love this place! I was born here. We’ve never done harm to you before, any of us. My father—you knew my father, he was helpful to you when—”

The farting sound again.

It meant exactly what it sounded like, Lawler thought.

There was no sense in going on. He understood fully the futility of it. They were losing patience with him. Soon would come the rumbling, the snorting, the anger. And then anything might happen.

With a wave of a flipper one of the Gillies indicated that the meeting was at its end. The dismissal was unmistakable.

Lawler made a gesture of disappointment. He signalled sadness, anguish, dismay.

To which one of the Gillies replied, surprisingly, with a quick rolling phrase that might almost have been one of sympathy. Or was that only his optimistic imagination? Lawler couldn’t be sure. And then, to his amazement, the creature stepped out of the line and came shuffling toward him with unexpected speed, its flipper-arms extended. Lawler was too startled to move. What was this? The Gillie loomed over him like a wall. Here it comes, he thought, the onslaught, the casual lethal outburst of irritation. He stood as though rooted. Some frantic impulse toward self-preservation shrieked within him, but he couldn’t find the will to try to flee. The Gillie caught him by one arm and pulled him close and enfolded him with its flippers in a tight, smothering embrace. Lawler felt the sharp curved claws lightly digging into his flesh, gripping him with strange, mystifying delicacy. He remembered the red marks Delagard had shown him.

All right. Do whatever you want. I don’t give a damn. Lawler had never been this close to a Gillie before. His head was pressed against the Gillie’s huge chest. He heard the Gillie heart beating in there, not the familiar human lub-dub but more of a thum-thum-thum, thum-thum-thum. A baffling Gillie brain was only a few centimetres from his cheek. Gillie reek flooded his lungs. He felt dizzy and sick—but, weirdly, not at all frightened. There was something so overpowering about having been swept into this bizarre Gillie-hug that there was no room in him for fear just now. The alien’s nearness stirred some kind of whirling in his mind. A sensation as powerful as a winter storm, as powerful as the Wave itself, came raging up through the roots of his soul. The taste of seaweed was in his mouth. The salt sea was coursing through his veins.

The Gillie held him for a time, as if communicating something—something—that couldn’t be expressed in words. The embrace was neither friendly nor unfriendly. It was beyond Lawler’s understanding entirely. The grip of the strong arms was tight and rough, but apparently not meant to injure him. Lawler felt like a small child being hugged by some ugly, strange, unloving foster mother. Or like a doll clasped to the great beast’s bosom.

Then the Gillie released him, pushing him away with a brusque little shove, and went shuffling back to rejoin the others. Lawler stood frozen, trembling. He watched as the Gillies, taking no further notice of him, swung ponderously about, moved away, set out on their return to their village. He stood looking after them for a long while, understanding nothing. The rank sea smell of the Gillie still clung to him. It seemed to him just then that the odour would stay with him forever.

They must have been saying goodbye, he decided finally. That’s it, yes. A Gillie farewell, a tender parting hug. Or not so tender, but a kiss-off, all the same. Does that make sense? No, not really. But neither does anything else. Let’s call it a gesture of farewell, Lawler thought. And leave it at that.

The night was far along. Slowly Lawler picked his way back along the shore, past the power plant once again, down to the shipyard, toward the rickety little wooden house where Delagard lived. Delagard disdained living in vaarghs. He liked to be close to the yard at all times, he said.

Lawler found him alone, awake, drinking grapeweed brandy by the fitful light of a smoky fire. The room was small, cluttered, full of hooks and line, netting, oars, anchors, stacked rugfish hides, cases of brandy. It looked like a storeroom, not a dwelling. The house of the richest man on the island, this was.

Delagard sniffed. “You stink like a Gillie. What were you doing, letting them fuck you?”

“You guessed it. You ought to try it. You might learn a thing or two.”

“Very funny. But you do stink of Gillie, you know. Did they try to rough you up?”

“One of them brushed against me as I was leaving,” Lawler said. “I think it was an accident.”

Shrugging, Delagard said, “All right. You get anywhere with them?”

“No. Did you really think I would?”

“There’s always hope. A gloomy guy like you may not think so, but there always is. We’ve got a month to make them come around. You want a drink, doc?”

Delagard was already pouring. Lawler took the cup and drank it off quickly.

“It’s time to knock off the bullshit, Nid. Time to dump this fantasy of yours about making them come around.”

Delagard glanced upward. By the pallid flickering light his round face seemed heavier than it actually was, the shadows high-lighting rolls of flesh around his throat, turning his tanned, leathery-looking cheeks to sagging jowls. His eyes seemed small and beady and weary.

“You think?”

“No question of it. They really want to be rid of us. Nothing we could say or do will change that.”

“They tell you that, did they?”

“They didn’t need to. I’ve been on this island long enough to understand that they mean what they say. So have you.”

“Yes,” Delagard said thoughtfully. “I have.”

“It’s time to face reality. There’s not a chance in hell that we can talk them into taking back their decree. What do you think, Delagard? Is there? For Christ’s sake, is there? ”

“No. I don’t suppose there is.”

“Then when are you going to stop pretending there is? Do I have to remind you what they did on Shalikomo when they said to go and people didn’t go?”

“That was Shalikomo, long ago. This is Sorve, now.”

“And Gillies are Gillies. You want another Shalikomo here?”

“You know the answer to that, doc.”

“All right, then. You knew from the first that there wasn’t any hope of changing their minds. You were just going through the motions, weren’t you? For the sake of showing everybody how concerned you were about the mess that you had singlehandedly created for us.”

“You think I’ve been bullshitting you?”

“I do.”

“Well, it isn’t so. Do you understand what I feel like, having brought all this down on us? I feel like garbage, Lawler. What do you think I am, anyway? Just a heartless bloodsucking animal? You think I can just shrug and tell the town, Tough tittie, folks, I had a good thing going there for a while with those divers and then it just didn’t work out, so we have to move, sorry for the inconvenience, so long, see you around? Sorve is my home community, doc. I felt I had to show that I’d at least try to undo the damage I caused.”

“Okay. You tried. We both tried. And got nowhere, as we both expected all along. Now what are you going to do?”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I told you before. No more windy talk about kissing the Gillies” flippers and begging them to forgive. We have to begin figuring out how we’re going to get away from here and where we’re going to go. Start making plans for the evacuation, Delagard. It’s your baby. You caused all this. Now you have to fix it.”

“As a matter of fact,” Delagard said slowly, “I’ve already been working on doing just that. Tonight while you were parleying with the Gillies I sent word to the three ships of mine that are currently making ferry trips that they should turn around and get back here right away to serve as transport vessels for us.

“Transporting us where?”

“Here, have another drink.” Delagard filled Lawler’s glass again without waiting for a response. “Let me show you something.”

He opened a cabinet and took a sea-chart from it. The chart was a laminated plastic globe about sixty centimetres in diameter, made of dozens of individual strips of varying colours fitted together by some master craftsman’s hand. From within it came the ticking sound of a clockwork mechanism. Lawler leaned toward it. Sea-charts were rare and precious things. He had rarely had a chance to see one at such close range.

“Onyos Felk’s father Dismas made this, fifty years ago,” Delagard said. “My grandfather bought it from him when old Felk thought he wanted to go into the shipping trade and needed money for building ships. You remember the Felk fleet? Three ships. The Wave sank them all. Hell of a thing, pay for your ships by selling your sea-chart, then lose the ships. Especially when it’s the best chart ever made. Onyos would give his left ball to have it, but why should I sell? I let him consult it once in a while.”

Circular purple medallions the size of a thumbnail were moving slowly up and down along the chart, some thirty or forty of them, perhaps even more, driven by the mechanism within. Most went in a straight line, heading from one pole toward the other, but occasionally one would glide almost imperceptibly into an adjacent longitudinal strip, the way an actual island might wander a little to the east or to the west while riding the main current carrying it toward the pole. Lawler marvelled at the thing’s ingenuity.

Delagard said, “You know how to read one of these? These here are the islands. This is Home Sea. This island here is Sorve.”

A little purple blotch, making its slow way upward near the equator of the globe against the green background of the strip on which it was travelling: an insignificant speck, a bit of moving colour, nothing more. Very small to be so dear, Lawler thought.

“The whole world is shown here, at least as we understand it to be. These are the inhabited islands, in purple—inhabited by humans. This is the Black Sea, this is the Red Sea, this is the Yellow Sea over here.”

“What about the Azure Sea?” Lawler asked.

Delagard seemed a little surprised. “Way up over here, practically in the other hemisphere. What do you know about the Azure Sea, doc?”

“Nothing much. Someone mentioned it to me recently, that’s all.”

“A hell of a trip from here, the Azure Sea. I’ve never been there.” Delagard turned the globe to show Lawler the other side. “Here’s the Empty Sea. This big dark thing down here is the Face of the Waters. Do you remember the great stories old Jolly used to tell about the Face?”

“That grizzly old liar. You don’t actually believe he got anywhere near it, do you?”

Delagard winked. “It was a terrific story, wasn’t it?”

Lawler nodded and let his mind wander for a moment back close to thirty-five years, thinking of the weatherbeaten old man’s oft-repeated tale of his lonely crossing of the Empty Sea, of his mysterious and dreamlike encounter with the Face, an island so big you could fit all the other islands of the world into it, a vast and menacing thing filling the horizon, rising like a black wall out of the ocean in that remote and silent corner of the world. On the sea-chart, the Face was merely a dark motionless patch the size of the palm of a man’s hand, a ragged black blemish against the otherwise blank expanse of the far hemisphere, down low almost in the south polar region.

He turned the globe back to the other hemisphere and watched the islands slowly moving about.

Lawler wondered how a sea-chart made so long ago could predict the current positions of the islands in any useful way. Surely they were deflected from their primary courses by all sorts of short-term weather phenomena. Or had the maker of the chart taken that all into account, using some sort of scientific magic inherited from the great world of science in the galaxy beyond? Things were so primitive on Hydros that Lawler was always surprised when any kind of mechanism worked; but he knew that it was different on the other inhabited worlds of space, where there was land, and a ready supply of metals, and a way to move from world to world. The technological magics of Earth, of the old lost mother world, had carried over to those worlds. But there was nothing like that here.

He said, after a moment, “How accurate do you imagine this chart is? Considering that it’s fifty years old, and all.”

“Have we learned anything new about Hydros in the past fifty years? This is the best sea-chart we have. Old Felk was a master craftsman, and he talked to everyone who went to sea, anywhere. And checked his information against observations made from space, on Sunrise. It’s accurate, all right. Damned accurate.”

Lawler followed the movements of the islands as though mesmerized by them. Maybe the chart really did give reliable information, maybe not: he was in no position to tell. He had never understood how anyone at sea ever could find his way back to his own island, let alone reach some distant one, considering that both the ship and the island were in motion all the time. I ought to ask Gabe Kinverson about that sometime, Lawler thought.

“All right. What’s your plan?”

Delagard pointed toward Sorve on the chart. “You see this island southwest of us, coming up out of the next strip? That’s Velmise. It’s drifting north and east, moving at a higher velocity than we are, and it’ll pass within relatively easy reach about a month from now. At that time it’ll be maybe a ten-day journey from here, maybe even less. I’m going to put through a message to my son there and ask him if they’d be willing to take us in, all seventy-eight of us.”

“And if they aren’t? Velmise is pretty damned small.”

“We have other choices. Here’s Salimil moving up from the other side. It’ll be something like two and a half weeks from us when we have to leave here.”

Lawler considered the prospect of spending two and a half weeks in a ship on the open sea. Under the blazing eye of the sun, in the constant parching blast of the salt sea-breeze, eating dried fish, pacing back and forth on a little deck with nothing to see but ocean and more ocean.

He reached for the brandy bottle and filled his cup again himself.

Delagard said, “If Salimil won’t take us, we’ve got Kaggeram down here, or Shaktan, or Grayvard, even. I have kin on Grayvard. I think I can arrange something. That would be an eight-week journey.”

Eightweeks? Lawler tried to imagine what that would be like.

He said, after a time, “Nobody’s going to have room for seventy-eight people on thirty days” notice. Not Velmise, not Salimil, not anybody.”

“In that case we’ll just have to split up, a few of us going here, a few of us going there.”

“No!” Lawler said with sudden vehemence.

“No?”

“I don’t want that. I want the community to stay together.”

“What if it can’t be done?”

“We have to find a way. We can’t take a group of people who have been together all their lives and scatter them all over the goddamned ocean. We’re a family, Nid.”

“Are we? I guess I don’t think of it that way.”

“Think of it that way now.”

“Well, then,” Delagard said. He sat quietly, frowning. “I guess as a last resort we could simply present ourselves on one of the islands that isn’t currently inhabited by humans and ask the Gillies living there for sanctuary. It’s happened before.”

“The Gillies there would know that we were thrown out by our Gillies here. And why.”

“Maybe it wouldn’t matter. You know Gillies as well as I do, doc. A lot of them are pretty tolerant of us. To them we’re just one more example of the inscrutable way of the universe, something that simply happened to wash up on their shores out of the great sea of space. They understand that it’s a waste of breath questioning the inscrutable way of the universe. Which I suppose is why they simply shrugged and let us move in on them when we first came here.”

“The wisest ones think that way, maybe. The rest of them detest us and don’t want a damned thing to do with us. Why the hell should the Gillies of some other island take us in when the Sorve Gillies have tossed us out as murderers?”

“We’ll be all right,” Delagard said serenely, not reacting in any visible way to the ugly word. He nursed his brandy cup with both hands, staring into it. “We’ll go to Velmise. Or Salimil, or Grayvard if we have to, or someplace completely new. And we’ll all stay together and make a new life for ourselves. I’ll see to that. Count on it, doc.”

“Do you have enough ships to carry us?”

“I’ve got six. Thirteen to a ship and we’ll make it without even feeling crowded. Stop worrying, doc. Have another drink.”

“I have one already.”

“Mind if I do, then?”

“Suit yourself.”

Delagard laughed. He was getting drunk, now. He caressed the sea-chart as though it were a woman’s breast; and then he lifted it delicately and stowed it once again in the cabinet. The brandy bottle was nearly empty. Delagard produced another one from somewhere and poured himself a stiff shot. He swayed as he did it, caught himself, chuckled.

He said, slurring his words, “I assure you of one thing, doc, which is that I’m going to bust my ass to find us a new island and get us there safely. Do you believe me when I tell you that, doc?”

“Sure I do.”

“And can you forgive me in your heart for what I did to those divers?” Delagard asked woozily.

“Sure. Sure.”

“You’re a liar. You hate my guts.”

“Come off it, Nid. What’s done is done. Now we simply have to live with it.”

“Spoken like a true philosopher. Here, have another.”

“Right.”

“And another for good old Nid Delagard too. Why not? Another for good old Delagard, yeah. Here you are, Nid. Why, thank you, Nid. Than you very much. By damn, this is fine stuff. Fine—stuff—” Delagard yawned. His eyes closed, his head descended toward the table. “Fine—stuff—” he murmured. He yawned again, and belched softly, and then he was asleep. Lawler finished his own cup and left the building.

It was very silent out there, only the lapping of the wavelets of the bay against the shore, and Lawler was so used to that that he scarcely heard it. Dawn was still an hour or two away. The Cross burned overhead with terrible ferocity, cutting through the black sky from horizon to horizon like a luminous four-armed framework that was up there to keep the world from tumbling freely through the heavens.

A kind of crystalline clarity possessed Lawler’s mind. He could practically hear his brain ticking.

He realized that he didn’t mind leaving Sorve.

The thought astonished him. You’re drunk, he told himself.

Maybe so. But somehow, somewhere in the night, the shock of the expulsion had fallen away from him. Altogether gone or simply temporarily misplaced, Lawler couldn’t say. But at least for now he was able suddenly to look the idea of leaving in the eye, without flinching. Leaving here was something he could handle. It was more than that, even. The prospect of going from here was—

Exhilarating? Could that be it?

Exhilarating, yes. The pattern of his life had been set, frozen—Dr Lawler of Sorve, a First Family man, a Lawler of the Lawlers, getting a day older every day, do your daily work, heal the sick as best you can, walk along the sea-wall, swim a little, fish a little, put in the required time teaching your craft to your apprentice, eat and drink, visit with old friends, the same old old friends you’d had when you were a boy, then go to sleep, wake up and start all over, come winter, come summer, come rain, come drought. Now that pattern was going to change. He would live somewhere else. He might be someone else. The idea fascinated him. He was startled to realize that he was even a little grateful. He had been here so long, after all. He had been himself for so long.

You are very very drunk, Lawler said to himself again, and laughed. Very very very very.

The idea came to him to stroll through the sleeping settlement, a sentimental journey to say his farewells, looking at everything as though this were his last night on Hydros, reliving everything that had happened to him here and there and here and there, every episode of his life. The places where he had stood with his father looking out at sea, where he had listened to old Jolly’s fantastic tales, where he had caught his first fish, where he had embraced his first girl. Scenes associated with his friendships, and with his loves, such as they had been. The side of the bay where he’d been the time he’d come close to spearing Nicko Thalheim. And the place back of the boneyard where he’d spied on grey-bearded Marinus Cadrell screwing Damis Sawtelle’s sister Mariam, who was a nun in the convent now. Which reminded him of the time he’d screwed Mariam himself, a few years later, down in Gillie country, the two of them living dangerously and loving it. Everything came flooding back. The shadowy figure of his mother. His brothers, the one who had died much too young and the one who had gone off to sea and floated out of his life forever. His father, indefatigable, formidable, remote, revered by all, drilling him endlessly in matters of medical technique when he’d much rather have been splashing in the bay: those boyhood days that hadn’t seemed like a boyhood at all, so many hard grim hours of enforced study, cutting him off from the games and fun. You will be the doctor some day, his father saying again and again. You will be the doctor. His wife Mireyl getting aboard the Morvendir ferry. Time was ticking backward. Tick, and it was the day of his trip to Thibeire Island. Tick, and he and Nestor Yanez were running, dizzy with laughter and fear, from the furious female Gillie that they had pelted with ginzo eggs. Tick, and here was the long-faced delegation that had come to tell him that his father was dead, that he was the doctor now. Tick, and he was finding out what it was like to deliver a baby. Tick, and he was dancing drunkenly along the bulwark’s topmost point in the middle of a three-moon night with Nicko and Nestor Lyonides and Moira and Meela and Quigg, a young merry Valben Lawler who seemed to him now like someone else he had once known, long long ago. The whole thing, his forty-plus years on Sorve viewed in reverse. Tick. Tick. Tick. Yes, I’ll take a nice long walk through the past before the sun comes up, he thought. From one end of the island to another. But it seemed like a good idea to go back to his vaargh before setting out, though he wasn’t sure why.

He tripped going through the low entrance and fell sprawling. And was still lying there when morning sunlight came in, hours later to wake him.

For a moment Lawler couldn’t quite remember what he had said or done in the night. Then it all came back. Being hugged by a Gillie. The scent of it was still on him. Then Delagard, brandy, more brandy, the prospect of a voyage to Velmise, Salimil, maybe even Grayvard. And that strange moment of exhilaration at the thought of leaving Sorve. Had it been real? Yes. Yes. He was sober now, and it was still there.

But—my God—my head!

How much brandy, he wondered, had Delagard succeeded in pouring into him last night?

A child’s high voice from outside the vaargh said, “Doctor? I hurt my foot.”

“Just a second,” Lawler said, in a voice like a file.

6

There was a meeting that evening in the community centre to discuss the situation. The air in the centre was thick and steamy, rank with sweat. Feelings were running high. Lawler sat in the far corner opposite the door, his usual place. He could see everything from there. Delagard hadn’t come. He had sent word of pressing business at the yard, messages awaited from his ships at sea.

“It’s all a trap,” Dann Henders said. “The Gillies are tired of us being here, but they don’t want to bother killing us themselves. So they’re going to force us to go out to sea and the rammerhorns and sea-leopards will kill us for them.”

“How do you know that?” Nicko Thalheim asked.

“I don’t. I’m just guessing. I’m trying to figure why they’re making us leave the island over a trivial thing like three dead divers.”

“Three dead divers aren’t so trivial!” Sundira called out. “You’re talking about intelligent creatures!”

“Intelligent?” Dag Tharp said mockingly.

“You bet they are. And if I were a Gillie and I found out that the goddamned humans were killing off divers, I’d want to be rid of them too.”

Henders said, “Well, whatever. I say that if the Gillies succeed in throwing us out of here, we’ll find the whole goddamned ocean rising up against us once we’re out to sea. And not by any accident. The Gillies control the sea animals. Everybody knows that. And they’ll use them against us to wipe us out.”

“What if we simply don’t let the Gillies throw us out?” Damis Sawtelle asked. “What if we fight back?”

“Fight?” said Bamber Cadrell. “Fight how? Fight with what? You out of your mind, Damis?”

They were both ferry-captains, solid practical men, friends since boyhood. Right now they were looking at each other with the dull, glowering look of lifelong enemies.

“Resistance,” Sawtelle said. “Guerrilla warfare.”

“We sneak down to their end of the island and grab something that looks important from that holy building of theirs,” Nimber Tanamind suggested. “And refuse to give it back unless they agree to let us stay.”

“That sounds dumb to me,” Cadrell said.

Nicko Thalheim said, “To me too. Stealing their jujus won’t get us anywhere. Armed resistance is the ticket, just like Damis says. Guerrilla warfare, absolutely. Gillie blood flowing in the streets until they back down on the expulsion order. They don’t even have the concept of war on this planet. They won’t know what the hell we’re doing if we put up a fight.”

“Shalikomo,” somebody said from the back. “Remember what happened there.”

“Shalikomo, yes,” another voice called. “They’ll slaughter us the same way they did them. And there won’t be a damned thing we can do to stop it.”

“Right,” Marya Hayn said. “We’re the ones who don’t have the concept of war, not them. They know how to kill when they want to. What are we going to attack them with, scaling knives? Hammers and chisels? We aren’t fighters. Our ancestors were, maybe, but we don’t even know what the idea means.”

“We have to learn,” said Thalheim. “We can’t let ourselves be driven from our homes.”

“Can’t we?” Marya Hain asked. “What choice do we have? We’re here only by their sufferance. Which they have now withdrawn. It’s their island. If we try to resist, they’ll pick us up one by one and throw us into the sea, the way they did on Shalikomo.”

“We’ll take plenty of them with us,” Damis Sawtelle said, with heat in his voice.

Dann Henders burst into laughter. “Into the sea? Right. Right. We’ll hold their heads under water until they drown.”

“You know what I meant,” Sawtelle grumbled. “They kill one of us, we kill one of them. Once they start dying they’ll change their minds pretty damn fast about making us leave.”

“They’ll kill us faster than we could kill them,” said Poitin Stayvol’s wife Leynila. Stayvol was Delagard’s second most senior captain, after Gospo Struvin. He was off sailing the Kentrup ferry just then. Leynila, short and fiery, could always be counted on to speak up against anything that Damis Sawtelle favoured. They had been that way since they were children. “Even one for one, where’s that going to get us?” Leynila demanded.

Dana Sawtelle nodded. She crossed the room to stand next to Marya and Leynila. Most of the women were on one side of the room and the handful of men who constituted the war faction were on the other. “Leynila’s right. If we try to fight we’ll all be killed. What’s the sense of it? If there’s a war and we fight like terrific heroes and at the end of it we’re all dead, how will we be better off than if we had simply got into a ship and gone somewhere else?”

Her husband swung around to face her. “Keep quiet, Dana.”

“The hell I will, Damis! The hell I will! You think I’m going to sit here like a child while you people talk about launching an attack on a physically superior group of alien beings who outnumber us about ten to one? We can’t fight them.”

“We have to.”

“No. No.”

“This is all foolishness, this talk of fighting. They’re only bluffing,” Lis Niklaus said. “They won’t really make us go.”

“Oh, yes, they will—”

“Not if Nid has anything to say about it!”

“It’s your precious Nid that got us into this in the first place!” Marya Hain yelled.

“And he’ll get us out of it. The Gillies are angry just now, but they won’t—”

“What do you think, doc?” someone called out.

Lawler had kept silent during the debate, waiting for emotions to play themselves out. It was always a mistake to jump into these things too soon.

Now he rose. Suddenly it was very quiet in the room. Every eye was on him. They wanted The Answer from him. Some miracle, some hope of reprieve. They were confident he’d deliver it. Pillar of the community, descendant of a famous Founder; the trusted doctor who knew everyone’s body better than they did themselves; wise and cool head, respected dispenser of shrewd advice.

He looked around at them all before he began to speak.

“I’m sorry, Damis, Nicko. Nimber. I think all this talk of resistance gets us nowhere useful. We need to admit to ourselves that that isn’t an option.” There was grumbling at once from the war faction. Lawler silenced it with a cool glare. “Trying to fight the Gillies is like trying to drink the sea dry. We’ve got no weapons. We’ve got maybe forty able-bodied fighters at best, against hundreds of them. It isn’t even worth thinking about.” The silence became glacial. But he could see his calm words sinking in: people exchanging glances, heads nodding. He turned toward Lis Niklaus. “Lis, the Gillies aren’t bluffing and Nid doesn’t have any way of getting them to take back their order. He spoke to them and so did I. You know that. If you still think the Gillies are going to change their minds, you’re dreaming.”

How solemn they all looked, how sombre! The Sweyners, Dag Tharp, a cluster of Thalheims, the Sawtelles. Sidero Volkin and his wife Elka, Dann Henders, Martin Yanez. Young Josc Yanez. Lis. Leo Martello. Pilya Braun. Leynila Stayvol. Sundira Thane. He knew them all so well, all but just a few. They were his family, just as he had told Delagard that boozy night. Yes. Yes. It was so. Everyone on this island.

“Friends,” he said, “we’d better face the realities. I don’t like this any more than you do, but we have no choice. The Gillies say we have to leave? Okay. It’s their island. They have the numbers, they have the muscle. We’re going to be living somewhere else soon and that’s all there is to it. I wish I could offer something more cheery, but I can’t. Nobody can. Nobody.”

He waited for some fiery rejoinder from Thalheim or Tanamind or Damis Sawtelle. But they had nothing more to say. There wasn’t anything anyone could say. All this talk of armed resistance had been only whistling in the wind. The meeting broke up inconclusively. There was no choice but to submit: everyone saw that now.

Lawler was standing by the sea-wall between Delagard’s shipyard and the Gillie power plant, looking out at the changing colours in the bay late one afternoon in the second week since the ultimatum, when Sundira Thane went swimming by below. In mid-stroke she glanced up quickly and nodded to him. Lawler nodded back and waved. Her long slender legs flashed in a scissor kick, and she surged forward, torso bending in a sudden swift surface dive.

For a moment Lawler saw Sundira’s pale boyish buttocks gleaming above the water; then she was travelling rapidly just beneath the surface, a lean naked tawny wraith swimming away from shore in steady, powerful strokes. Lawler followed her with his eyes until she was lost to his sight. She swims like a Gillie, he thought. She hadn’t come up for air in what felt to him like three or four minutes. Didn’t she need to breathe at all?

Mireyl had been been a strong swimmer like that, he thought.

Lawler frowned. It surprised him to have his long-ago wife come floating up unsummoned out of the past like this. He hadn’t thought of her for ages. But then he remembered that he had thought of her only last night, in his drunken ramble. Mireyl, yes. Ancient history.

He could almost see her now. Suddenly he was twenty-three again, the young new doctor, and there she was, fair-haired, fair-skinned, compact, wide through the shoulders and the hips, a low centre of gravity: a powerful little projectile of a woman, round and muscular and sturdy. Her face wasn’t clear to him, though. He couldn’t remember her face at all, somehow.

She was a wonderful swimmer. In the water she moved like a javelin. She never appeared to tire and she could remain submerged for ever and ever. Strong and active as he was, Lawler was always hard pressed to keep up with her when they swam. She would turn, finally, laughing, and wait for him, and he would swim up against her, clasp her tight, hold her close against him.

They were swimming now. He came up to her and she opened her arms to him. There were little glistening things swimming around them in the water, lithe and friendly.

“We should get married,” he said.

“Should we?”

“We should, yes.”

“The doctor’s wife. I never thought I’d be the doctor’s wife.” She laughed. “But somebody has to be.”

“No, nobody has to be. But I want you to be.”

She wriggled away from him and started swimming. “Catch me and I’ll marry you!”

“No fair. You had a head start.”

“Nothing’s ever fair,” she called to him.

He grinned and went after her, swimming harder than he ever had before, and this time he caught up with her, halfway across the bay. He couldn’t tell whether it was because he had been swimming beyond his capabilities or because she had deliberately let him catch her. Probably both, he decided.

The doctor had a wife, then.

“Are you happy?” he would ask.

“Oh, yes, yes.”

“So am I.”

A strong marriage. So he supposed, anyway. But she was restless. She had come to Sorve from another island in the first place, and now she wanted to move along, she wanted to see the world, but he was tied to Sorve by his profession, by his staid disciplined temperament, by a million invisible bonds. He didn’t understand how much of a wanderer she really was: he had thought this longing for other islands was only a phase, that she would grow out of it as she settled into married life with him on Sorve.

Another scene, now. Down at the harbour, eleven months after their wedding. Mireyl getting aboard a Delagard inter-island ferry bound for Morvendir, pausing to glance behind her at the pier, waving to him. But not smiling. Neither was he, uncertainly returning her wave. And then she turned her back and was gone.

Lawler had never heard anything from her or about her again. That had been twenty years ago. He hoped she was happy, wherever she was.

Far off in the distance Lawler saw schools of air-skimmers breaking from the water and launching themselves into their fierce finny flights. Their scales glinted in tones of red and gold, like the precious gems in the storybooks of his childhood. He had never seen actual gems—nothing of the sort existed on Hydros—but it was hard to imagine how they could be more beautiful than air-skimmers in flight at sunset. Nor could he imagine a scene more beautiful than Sorve Bay when it showed its evening colours. What a glorious summer evening! There were other times of the year when the air wasn’t this soft and mild—the seasons when the island was in polar waters, hammered by black gales, swept by knife-sharp sleet. Times would come when the weather was too stormy to allow anyone to venture even so far as the edge of the bay for fish and plants, and they all ate dried fish-meat, powdered algae-meal, and dried seaweed strands, and huddled in their vaarghs waiting miserably for the time of warmth to return. But summer! Ah, summer, when the island moved in tropical waters! There was nothing better. Being evicted from the island in midsummer like this made the expulsion all the more painful: they were being cheated out of the finest season of the year.

But that’s been the story of mankind from the beginning, hasn’t it? he thought. One eviction after another, starting with Eden. Exile after exile.

Looking now at the bay in all its beauty, Lawler felt a sharp new pang of loss. His life on Sorve was fleeing irretrievably from him moment by moment. That strange exhilaration at the thought of starting a new life somewhere else that he had felt the first night still was with him. But not all the time.

He wondered about Sundira. What it would be like to sleep with her. There was no sense trying to pretend he wasn’t attracted to her. Those long sleek legs, that agile, slender, athletic frame. Her energy, her crisp confident manner. He imagined his fingers moving along the inside of her thighs, over smooth, cool skin. His head nuzzling into the hollow between her shoulder and her throat. Those small hard breasts in his hands, the little nipples rising against his palms. If Sundira made love with half the vigour that she put into swimming, she’d be extraordinary.

It was strange to be wanting a woman again. Lawler had been self-sufficient so long: to give way to desire meant forfeiting some of his carefully constructed armour. But the prospect of leaving the island had churned up all manner of things that had been lying quiescent in his soul.

After a while Lawler became aware that at least ten minutes had gone by, maybe even more, and he hadn’t seen Sundira come up for air. Not even a strong swimmer could manage that, not if she was human. Suddenly worried, Lawler scanned the water for her.

Then he saw her walking toward him along the sea-wall promenade to his left. Her dark moist hair was pulled tight behind her head, and she had put on a blue crawlweed wrap that was hanging casually open in front. She must have circled around to the south and come ashore by the sea-ramp just next to the shipyard without his noticing it.

“Mind if I join you?” she asked.

Lawler made an open-handed gesture. “Plenty of room here.”

She came up alongside him and took the same position as his, leaning forward, looking out toward the water, elbows against the railing.

She said, “You looked so serious when I came swimming past here a little while back. So deep in thought.”

“Did I?”

“Were you?”

“I suppose.”

“Thinking the big thoughts, doctor?”

“Not really. Just thinking.” He wasn’t quite up to telling her what had been on his mind a moment before. “Trying to come to terms with leaving here,” he said, improvising quickly. “Having to go into exile again.”

“Again?” she said. “I don’t understand. What do you mean, again? Did you have to leave some island before this one? I thought you’ve always lived on Sorve.”

“I have. But this is the second exile for all of us, isn’t it? I mean, first our ancestors were exiled from Earth. And now we’re exiled from our island.”

She swung around to face him, looking puzzled. “We aren’t exiles from Earth. Nobody who was born on Earth ever settled on Hydros. Earth was destroyed a hundred years before the first humans ever came here.”

“That doesn’t matter. We were all from Earth originally, if you go back to the starting point. And we lost it. That’s a kind of exile. I mean everyone, all the humans living on all the worlds of space.” Suddenly the words came pouring out of him. “Look, we had a mother world once; we had a single ancestral planet, and it’s gone, ruined, destroyed. Finished. Nothing but a memory, a very hazy memory at that, nothing left but a handful of tiny fragments like the ones that you saw in my vaargh. My father used to tell us that Earth was one tremendous wonderful place of miracles, the most beautiful planet that ever existed. A garden world, he said. A paradise. Maybe it was. There are some who say it wasn’t anything like that at all, that it was a horror of a place, a place that people fled from because they couldn’t stand living there, it was so awful. I don’t know. It’s all become mythology now. But either way it was our home, and we went away from it and then the door was closed behind us for good.”

“I don’t ever think about Earth at all,” Sundira said.

“I do. All the other galactic races have a home world, but not us. We have to live scattered across hundreds of worlds, five hundred of us living here and a thousand of us there, settling in strange places. Tolerated, more or less, by the various alien creatures on whose planets we’ve managed to find a bit of a foothold. That’s what I mean by exile.”

“Even if Earth still existed, we wouldn’t be able to go back to it. Not from Hydros. Hydros is our home, not Earth. And nobody’s exiling us from Hydros.”

“Well, they are from Sorve. At least you can’t argue that away.”

Her expression, which had grown quizzical and a little impatient, softened. “It seems like exile to you because you’ve never lived anywhere else. To me an island is just an island. They’re all more or less alike, really. I live on one for a while, and then somehow I feel like moving along, and I go somewhere else.” Sundira let her hand rest on his for an instant. “I know it must be different for you. I’m sorry.”

Lawler found himself desperately wanting to change the subject.

This one was all wrong. He was getting her pity now, which meant that she was responding to what she must see as his own self-pity. The conversation had got off on the wrong foot and kept on marching. Instead of talking about going into exile, and about the poignant plight of the poor homeless humans strewn like scattered grains of sand across the galaxy, he should simply have told her how terrific she had looked to him when she did that ass-high jackknife dive in the water, and would she like to come up to his vaargh right now for a little jolly grappling before dinner? But it was too late to start off on that tack now. Or was it?

He said, after a while, “How’s the cough?”

“It’s fine. But I could use some more of your medicine. I’ve got just a couple of days” worth left.”

“Come up to the vaargh when it’s all gone and I’ll give you some more.”

“I will,” she said. “And I’d like to look at those things from Earth that you have, too.”

“If you want to, sure. If they interest you, I’ll tell you what I know about them. Such that it is. But most people lose interest fast when I do.”

“I didn’t realize you were so fascinated by Earth. I’ve never known anyone who gave it much of a thought. To most of us Earth is just the place where our ancestors used to live long ago. But it’s beyond our comprehension, really. Beyond our reach. We don’t think about it any more than we think about what our great-great-great-great-great-grandparents might have looked like.”

“I do,” Lawler said. “I can’t tell you why. I think of all sorts of things that are beyond my reach. Like what it is to live on a land world, for instance. A place where there’s black soil underneath your feet, and plants growing out of it, right there in the open air, plants twenty times as tall as a man.”

“Trees, you mean?”

“Trees, yes.”

“I know about trees. What fantastic things they are. Stems so thick you can’t put your arms all the way around them. Hard rough brown skin all up and down them. Incredible.”

“You talk as if you’ve seen some,” Lawler said.

“Me? No, how could I? I’m Hydros-born just like you. But I’ve known people who lived on land worlds. When I was on Simbalimak I spent a lot of time with a man from Sunrise, and he told me about forests, and birds, and mountains, and all the other things we don’t have here. Trees. Insects. Deserts. It all sounded amazing.”

“I imagine so,” Lawler said. This conversation was making him no happier than the last. He didn’t want to hear about forests or birds or mountains, or about the man from Sunrise with whom she had spent a lot of time on Simbalimak.

She was looking at him oddly. There was a long sticky pause, a pause with a subtext, though he was damned if he knew what it was.

Then she said, in a new abrupt tone, “You’ve never been married, have you, doctor?” The question was as unexpected as a Gillie turning handsprings.

“Once. Not for very long. It was quite a while ago, a bad mistake. And you?”

“Never. I don’t understand how to do it, I guess. Tying yourself down to one person forever—it seems so strange to me.”

“They say it’s possible,” Lawler remarked. “I’ve seen it done, right before my very eyes. But of course I’ve had very little personal experience of it.”

She nodded vaguely. She seemed to be wrestling with something. So was he, and he knew what it was: his reluctance to step across the self-imposed boundaries that he had drawn around his life after Mireyl had left him, his unwillingness to expose himself to the risks of renewed pain. He had grown accustomed to his monastic, disciplined life. More than accustomed: it seemed to be what he wanted, it seemed to be what met his deepest needs. Nothing ventured, nothing lost. Was she waiting for him to make his move? So it appeared, yes. So it appeared. But would he? Could he? He had trapped himself in inflexible indifference and there seemed to be no way that he could allow himself to get out of it.

The mild summer breeze, coming up from the south, brought the fragrance of her sea-moist hair to him, and fluttered her wrap, reminding Lawler that she was naked underneath it. The orange light of the setting sun, gleaming against her bare skin, turned the faint, fine, almost invisible hairs that covered it to gold, so that her breasts glistened where they showed through the open front. Her body was still damp from her swim. Her small pale nipples were hard in the evening’s gentle coolness. She looked supple, trim, enticing.

He wanted her, no doubt of that.

Okay. Go on, then. You aren’t fifteen years old any more. The thing to do is to say to her, “Instead of waiting for morning, come on up to my vaargh right now, and I’ll give you the medicine. And afterward let’s have dinner together and a drink or two. You know. I’d like to get to know you better.” And take it from there. Lawler could hear the words in the air almost as though he had actually spoken them already.

But just then Gabe Kinverson came up the path, fresh from his day at sea. He was still wearing his fishing gear, heavy tentlike garments designed to protect him against the slash of meatfish tentacles. Under one arm he carried a folded-up sail. He paused and stood looming for a moment, a dozen or so metres away, a bulky presence, rugged as a reef, emanating that curious ever-present sense of great strength contained with the greatest difficulty, of hidden violence, of danger.

“There you are,” he said to Sundira. “Been looking for you. Evening, doc.” His tone was calm, bland, enigmatic. Kinverson never sounded as threatening as he looked. He beckoned to her, and she went to him without hesitation.

“Nice talking to you, doctor,” Sundira said, looking back over her shoulder at Lawler.

“Right,” he said.

Kinverson just wants her to mend that sail for him, Lawler told himself.

Sure. Sure.

One of the Earth-dreams came to him again. There were two of them, one very painful and the other one not so bad. Lawler had one of them at least once a month, sometimes both.

This was the easier one, the one where he was actually on Earth himself, walking on solid soil. He was barefoot and there had been rain just a little while before and the ground was soft and warm, and when he wiggled his toes and dug them into it he saw tendrils of soil come spurting up between them, the way sand did when he walked in the shallows of the bay. But the soil of Earth was darker stuff than sand, and much heavier. It yielded slightly underfoot in a way that was very strange.

He was walking through a forest. Trees rose about him on all sides, things like wood-kelp plants with long trunks and dense crowns of leaves far overhead, but they were much more massive than any wood-kelp he had ever seen, and the leaves were so far above him that he was unable to make out their shapes. Birds fluttered in the tree-tops. They made odd melodic sounds, a music he had never heard before and could never remember when he awakened. All manner of strange creatures loped through the forest, some walking on two legs like a human, some crawling on their bellies, some standing on six or eight little stilts. He nodded to them and they acknowledged his greeting as they went by, these creatures of Earth.

He came to a place where the forest opened up and he saw a mountain rising before him. It looked like dark glass, speckled with mirror-bright irregularities, and in the warm golden sunlight it had a wonderful brilliance. The mountain filled half the sky. Trees were growing on it. They looked so small that he could pick one up in his hand, but he knew that they only seemed that way because the mountain was so far from him, that in fact those trees were at least as big as the ones in the forest he had just left, perhaps even bigger.

Somehow he walked around the mountain’s base. There was a long sloping place on the other side, a valley, and beyond the valley he saw a dark sprawling thing that he knew was a city, full of people, more people than he could easily imagine. He went toward it, thinking that he would go among the people of Earth and tell them who he was and where he had come from, and ask them about the lives they led, and whether they knew his great-great-grandfather Harry Lawler or maybe Harry Lawler’s father or grandfather.

But though he walked and walked, the city never grew any closer. It remained forever on the horizon, down there at the far side of the valley. He walked for hours; he walked for days; he walked for weeks. And always the city was out of reach, forever retreating from him as he walked toward it; and when he woke at last he was weary and cramped, as though from a great exertion, and he felt as though he had had no sleep at all.

In the morning Josc Yanez, Lawler’s young apprentice, came to his vaargh for the regular instruction session. The island had a strict apprentice system: no skill must be allowed to die out. This was the first time since the beginning of the settlement that the apprentice doctor had been anyone but a Lawler. But the Lawler line was going to end with him; some other family would have to carry the responsibility after he was gone.

“When we leave,” Josc asked, “will we be able to take all the medical supplies with us?”

“As much as there’s room for aboard the ships,” Lawler told him. “The equipment, most of the drugs, the book of recipes.”

“The patients” records?”

“If there’s room. I don’t know.”

Josc was seventeen, tall and gangling. A sweet-souled boy with an easy smile, an open face, a good way with people. He seemed to have an aptitude for doctoring. He loved the long hours of studying in a way that Lawler himself, fidgety and rebellious as a boy, never really had. This was the second year of Josc’s instruction and Lawler suspected he already knew half of the basic technical principles; the rest, and the skill of diagnosis, would be his in time. He came from a family of sailors; his older brother Martin was one of Delagard’s ferry captains. It was very much like Josc to worry about the patients” medical records. Lawler doubted that they’d be able to take them along: those ships of Delagard’s didn’t seem to have much space for cargo, and there were other things with higher priority than old medical records. He and Josc between them would have to commit everyone’s medical history to memory before they left the island. But that wouldn’t be a big problem. Lawler had most of it in his memory already. And so, he suspected, did Josc.

“I hope I get to go on the same ship you do,” the boy said. Lawler, next to his brother Martin, was Josc’s greatest hero.

“No,” Lawler told him. “We’ll have to be on separate ships. If the one I’m on is lost at sea, at least you’ll still be around to be the doctor.”

Josc looked thunderstruck. At what? At the idea that Lawler’s ship might be lost at sea and his hero would perish? Or at the idea that he was really going to be the community doctor some day, and perhaps some day very soon?

Probably that was it. Lawler remembered how he had felt when it had first come home to him that his own apprenticeship actually had a serious purpose, this gruelling, endless study and drilling: that he would one day be expected to take his father’s place in this office and do all the things that his father did. He had been about fourteen then. And by the time he was twenty his father was dead and he was the doctor.

“Listen, don’t worry about it,” Lawler said. “Nothing’s going to happen to me. But we have to think of worst possible cases, Josc. You and I, we have all the medical knowledge this settlement has, between us. We have to protect it.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Okay. That means we travel in separate ships. You see what I’m saying?”

“Yes,” the boy said. “Yes, I understand. I’d prefer to be with you, but I understand.” He smiled. “We were going to talk about inflammations of the pleura today, weren’t we?”

“Inflammations of the pleura, yes,” said Lawler. He unfolded his worn, blurred anatomical chart. Josc sat forward, alert, attentive, eager. The boy was an inspiration. He reminded Lawler of something he had begun lately to forget, that his profession was more than a job: it was a calling. “Inflammations and pleural effusions, both. Symptomatology, causation, therapeutic measures.” He could hear his own father’s voice, deep, measured, inexorable, tolling in his mind like a great gong. “A sudden sharp pain in the chest, for example—”

Delagard said, “I’m afraid the news isn’t so good.”

“Oh?”

They were in Delagard’s office in the shipyard. It was midday, Lawler’s usual break from doctoring. Delagard had asked him to stop in. There was an open bottle of grapeweed brandy on the wood-kelp table, but Lawler had declined a drink. Not during working hours, he said. He had always tried to keep his mind clear when he was doctoring, except for the numbweed; and he told himself that the numbweed did no harm in that way. If anything it made his mind more clear.

“I’ve got some results. So far they aren’t good results. Velmise isn’t going to take us in, doc.”

It was like a kick in the belly.

“They told you that?”

Delagard shoved a sheet of message-parchment across the table. “Dag Tharp brought me this about half an hour ago. It’s from my son Kendy, on Velmise. He says they had their council meeting last night and they voted us down. Their immigration quota for the year is six, and they’re willing to stretch it to ten, considering the unusual circumstances. But that’s all they’ll take.”

“Not seventy-eight.”

“Not seventy-eight, no. It’s the old Shalikomo thing. Every island afraid of having too many people and getting the Gillies upset. Of course, you could say that ten is better than none. If we sent ten to Velmise, and ten to Salimil, and ten more to Grayvard—”

“No,” Lawler said. “I want us all to stick together.”

“I know that. All right.”

“If we don’t go to Velmise, what’s the next best possibility?”

“Dag’s talking to Salimil right now. I’ve got a son there too, you know. Maybe he’s a little more persuasive than Kendy. Or maybe the Salimil people aren’t quite as tight-assed. Christ, you’d think we were asking Velmise to evacuate their whole goddamned town to make room for us. They could fit us in. It might be tough for a time, but they’d manage. Shalikomos don’t happen twice.” Delagard riffled through a sheaf of parchment sheets in front of him and handed them across to Lawler. “Well, fuck Velmise. We’ll come up with something. What I want is for you to look at these.”

Lawler glanced at them. Each page held a list of names, scrawled in Delagard’s big, bold script.

“What are these?”

“I told you a couple of weeks ago, I’ve got six ships, and that divides out to thirteen to a ship. Actually, the way it works out, we’ll have one ship with eleven, two each with fourteen, the other three with thirteen apiece. You’ll see why in a minute. These are the passenger manifests I’ve drawn up.” Delagard tapped the top one. “Here. This is the one that ought to interest you the most.”

Lawler scanned it quickly. It read:

“Nice?” Delagard asked.

“What is this?”

“I told you. The passenger manifest. That’s our ship, the Queen of Hydros. I think it’s a pretty good group.”

Lawler stared at Delagard in astonishment. “You bastard, Nid. You really know how to look after yourself.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about the terrific job you’ve done ensuring your own safety and comfort while we’re at sea. You aren’t even embarrassed to show this to me, are you? No, I bet you’re proud of it. You’ve got the only doctor in the community on your own ship, and the most skilled communications man, and the closest thing we have to an engineer, and the mapkeeper. And Gospo Struvin’s the number one captain of your fleet. Not a bad basic crew, for a voyage of God knows how long taking us to God knows where. Plus Kinverson the sea-hunter, who’s so strong he doesn’t even seem human and knows his way around the ocean the way you do around your shipyard. That’s a damned fine team. And no annoying children, no old people, nobody who’s in poor health. Not bad, friend.”

Anger showed for a moment, but only a moment, in Delagard’s glittering little eyes.

“Look, doc, it’s the flagship. This may not be such an easy voyage, if we wind up having to go all the way to Grayvard. We need to survive.”

“More than the others?”

“You’re the only doctor. You want to be on all the ships at once? Try it. I figured, you have to be on one ship or another, you might as well be on mine.”

“Of course.” Lawler ran his finger along the edge of the sheet. “But even applying the Delagard-first rule, I can’t figure a few of these choices. What good is Gharkid to you? He’s a complete cipher of a human being.”

“He knows seaweed. That’s the one thing he does know. He can help us in finding food.”

“Sounds reasonable.” Lawler glanced at Delagard’s plump belly. “We wouldn’t want to go hungry out there, would we? Eh? Eh?” Looking at the list again, he said, “And Braun? Golghoz?”

“Hard workers. Mind their own business.”

“Martello? A poet? ”

“He isn’t just a poet. He knows what to do aboard a ship. Anyway, why not a poet? This is going to be like an odyssey. A fucking odyssey. A whole island emigrates. We’ll have somebody to write down our story.”

“Very nice,” said Lawler. “Bring your own Homer along, so posterity gets to hear all about the great voyage. I like that.” He checked the list again. “I notice you’ve got only four women here, to ten men.”

Delagard smiled. “The proportion of women to men isn’t much in my control. We’ve got thirty-six females on this island and forty-two males. But eleven of the ladies belong to the fucking Sisterhood, don’t forget. I’m sending them off on a ship by themselves. Let them figure out how to sail it, if they can. So we’ve got only twenty-five women and girls otherwise, five ships, mothers need to stay with their children, et cetera, et cetera. I calculated we had room for four on our ship.”

“Picking Lis I understand. How’d you choose the other three?”

“Braun and Golghoz have both worked in my crews already, on the Velmise and Salimil runs. If I’m going to have women on board, I might as well have women who can do what needs to be done.”

“And Sundira? Well, she’s a skilled equipment mender. That makes sense.”

“Right,” Delagard said. “And also she’s Kinverson’s woman, isn’t she? If she’s useful, and they’re a couple besides, why separate them?”

“They aren’t a couple, as far as I know.”

“Aren’t they? Looks that way to me,” Delagard said. “I see them together a hell of a lot. Anyway, there’s our shipload, doc. In case the fleet gets separated at sea, we’ve got some good people with us to see us through. Now, ship number two, the Sorve Goddess, we’ll have Brondo Katzin and his wife, all the Thalheims, the Tanaminds—”

“Wait a second,” said Lawler. “I’m not through with this first one. We haven’t talked about Father Quillan yet. Another very useful choice. You picked him to keep yourself on the safe side with God, I suppose?”

Delagard was impervious to the thrust. He let loose a thunderous guffaw. “Son of a bitch! No, that never crossed my mind. That would be a good idea, yeah, take a priest along with you. If anyone’s got any pull upstairs, it would be him. But the reason I picked Father Quillan was just that I enjoy his company so much. I find him a terrifically interesting man.”

Of course, Lawler thought.

It was always a mistake to expect Delagard to be consistent about anything.

In the night came the other Earth-dream, the one that hurt, the one he wished he always wished he could hide from. It was a long time since he had had the two dreams on consecutive nights, and he was caught by surprise, for he had thought that last night’s dream would exempt him from having the other one for some time to come. But no; no. There was no escaping it. Earth would pursue him always.

There it was in the sky above Sorve, a wondrous radiant blue-green ball, slowly turning to display its shining seas, its splendid tawny continents. It was beautiful beyond all measure, a huge jewel gleaming overhead. He saw the mountains running along the spines of the continents like jagged grey teeth. There was snow, white and pure, along their crests. He stood at the top ridge of the wooden sea-wall of his little island and let himself float up into the sky, and kept on floating until he had left Hydros and was well out in space, hovering over the blue-green ball that was Earth, looking down at it like a god. He saw the cities now: building after building, not pointy-topped like vaarghs but broad and flat, one next to another to another across immense distances, with wide pathways between them. And people moving along the pathways, thousands of them, many thousands, walking swiftly, some of them riding in little carriages that were like boats that travelled on land. Above them in the sky were the winged creatures called birds, like air-skimmers and the other fish of Hydros that he knew that were capable of bursting up out of the water for short spurts of flight; but these stayed aloft forever, soaring splendidly, circling and circling the planet in great tireless sweeps. Amongst the birds were machines, too, that were able to fly. They were made of metal, sleek and bright, with little wings and long tubular bodies. Lawler saw them coming up from Earth’s surface and moving at unthinkable speeds across great distances, carrying the people of Earth from island to island, from city to city, from continent to continent, a commerce so vast that it made his soul spin to contemplate it.

He drifted through the darkness, high above the shining blue-green world, watching, waiting, knowing what would happen next, wondering if perhaps this time it wouldn’t happen.

But of course it did. The same thing as before, the thing he had lived through so many times, the thing that brought sweat bursting from his pores and made his muscles writhe with shock and anguish. There was never any warning. It simply began: the hot yellow sun suddenly swelling, growing brighter, becoming misshapen and monstrous—the jagged tongues of fire licking out across the sky—

The flames rising from the hills and valleys, from the forests, from the buildings. The boiling seas. The charred plains. The clouds of black ash darkening the air. The blackened land splitting open. The gaunt naked mountains rising above the ruined fields. The death, the death, the death, the death.

He always wished he could wake up before that moment came. But he never did, not until he had seen it all, not until the seas had boiled, not until the green forests had turned to ash.

The first patient the next morning was Sidero Volkin, one of Delagard’s shipwrights, who had taken a flameworm’s prong in the calf of his leg while standing in shallow water trimming excess sea-finger growth from the keel of one of the ships. Something like a third of Lawler’s work involved wounds that people got while in the gentle, shallow waters of the bay. Those gentle, shallow waters all too often were visited by creatures that liked to sting, bite, slice, stab, infiltrate or otherwise bedevil human beings.

“Son of a bitch swam right up to me alongside the ship and reared up and looked me in the eye,” Volkin said. “I went for its head with my hatchet and its tail came around from the other side and pronged me. Son of a bitch. I cut it in half, but a fucking lot of good that does me now.”

The wound was narrow but deep, and already infected. Flameworms were long wriggling creatures that seemed to be nothing more than tough, flexible tubes with a nasty little mouth on one end and a vicious stinger on the other. It didn’t much matter which end they got you with: they were full of microorganisms that were symbiotic with the flameworm and hostile to humankind, and the bugs the worms carried caused immediate distress and complication when they encountered human tissue. Volkin’s leg was bloated and reddened, and delicate, fiery-looking traceries of inflammation ran outward along the skin from the point of entry like the cicatrices of some sinister cult.

“This is going to hurt,” Lawler said, dipping a long bamboo needle into a bowl of strong antiseptic.

“Don’t I know it, doc.”

Lawler probed the wound with the needle, pricking it here and there, getting as much of the antiseptic into the swollen flesh as he thought Volkin could endure. The shipwright remained motionless, cursing under his breath once in a while, as Lawler poked around in him with what must surely be agonizing effect.

“Here’s some pain-killer,” Lawler said, offering him a packet of white powder. “You’ll feel lousy for a couple of days. Then the inflammation will subside. You’ll be feverish this afternoon, too. Take the day off from work.”

“I can’t. Delagard won’t let me. We’ve got to get those ships ready to go. There’s a hell of a lot that needs to be done on them.”

“Take the day off,” Lawler said again. “If Delagard gives you any shit, tell him I’m the one he ought to complain to. In half an hour you’ll be too dizzy to do any worthwhile work anyway. Go on, now.”

Volkin hesitated a moment at the door of Lawler’s vaargh.

“I sure appreciate this, doc.”

“Go on. Get off that leg before you fall down.”

Another patient was waiting outside: another of Delagard’s people, Neyana Golghoz. She was a placid, stocky woman of about forty, with hair of an unusual orange colour and a broad flat face covered with reddish freckles. Originally she was from Kaggeram Island, but she had come to Sorve five or six years back. Neyana worked in some maintenance capacity on board the ships of Delagard’s fleet, constantly journeying back and forth between the neighbouring islands. Six months ago a skin cancer had sprouted between her shoulderblades, and Lawler had removed it chemically, by slipping solvent-bearing needles under it until the malignancy dissolved and could be lifted away. The process hadn’t been fun for either of them. Lawler had ordered her to return every month so that he could see whether any recurrence had developed.

Neyana stripped off her work-shirt and turned her back to him, and Lawler investigated the scar with his fingers. It was probably still tender, but she didn’t react at all. Like most of the islanders, she was stolid and patient. Life on Hydros was simple, sometimes harsh, never very amusing for its human population. There weren’t many choices, not a lot of options about what you did, who you married, where you could live. Unless you felt like trying your luck on some other island, most of the essential facts of your life were defined for you by the time you reached adulthood. If you went somewhere else, you were likely to find that your choices there were limited by many of the same factors. That tended to breed a certain stoicism.

“Looks fine,” Lawler told her. “You keeping out of the sun, Neyana?”

“Damn right I am.”

“Putting the ointment on?”

“Damn right.”

“You won’t have any problem with this again, then.”

“You’re one hell of a good doctor,” Neyana told him. “I knew someone once on the other island, he had a cancer like this and it ate right through his skin and he died. But you look out for us, you watch over us.”

“I do what I can.” It always embarrassed Lawler when the patients were grateful. Most of the time he felt like a butcher, hacking away at them with such prehistoric methods, when on other planets—so he had heard from those who had come to Hydros from elsewhere—doctors had all manner of absolutely miraculous treatments at their command. They used sound waves and electricity and radiation and all sorts of things he scarcely understood, and they had drugs that could cure anything in five minutes. Whereas he had to make do with home-made salves and potions compounded from seaweed, and improvised tools made of wood and the odd bit of iron or nickel. But he had told her the truth, at least: he did what he could.

“Any time I can do something for you, doc, just ask.”

“That’s very kind of you,” Lawler said.

Neyana went out and Nicko Thalheim came in. Thalheim was Sorve-born like Lawler. Like Lawler, too, he was First Family, a five-generation pedigree, right back to the penal-colony days: one of the island leaders, a bluff, ruddy-faced man with a short, thick neck and powerful shoulders. He and Lawler had been boyhood playmates and they were still good friends. Seven of the island’s people all told were Thalheims, a tenth of the entire population: Nicko’s father, his wife, his sister, his three children. Families rarely had as many as three children. Thalheim’s sister had joined the group of women down at the far end of the island a few months before: she was known as Sister Boda now to everyone. Thalheim hadn’t been pleased when she joined.

Lawler said, “That abscess still draining okay?”

Thalheim had an infection in his left armpit. Lawler thought he had probably been stung by something in the bay, but Thalheim denied it. The abscess was a messy one, pus constantly pouring out. Lawler had lanced it three times already and tried to clean it, but it had reinfected each time. The last time, he had had the weaver Harry Travish make up a little catch-tube of sea-plastic and had stitched it to Thalheim’s side to collect the pus and carry it away from the trouble-spot.

Lawler lifted the dressing now, snipped the stitches that held the catch-tube in place, and peered at the infection. The skin all around was red, and hot to the touch.

“Hurts like a bastard,” Thalheim said.

“Looks pretty lousy, too. You putting the medicine I gave you on it?”

“Sure I am.”

He didn’t sound convincing. Lawler said, “You can do it or not, as it pleases you, Nicko. But if that infection spreads down your arm, I may wind up having to take the arm off you. You think you can work okay with just one arm?”

“It’s only my left one, Val.”

“You don’t really mean that.”

“No. No, I don’t.” Thalheim grunted as Lawler touched the wound again. “I might have missed a day or two with the medicine. I’m sorry, Val.”

“You’ll be sorrier in a little while.”

Coolly, unsparingly, Lawler cleaned the site as though he were carving a piece of wood. Thalheim remained silent and motionless as Lawler worked.

As Lawler was reattaching the catch-tube, Thalheim said suddenly, “We’ve known each other a long time, haven’t we, Val?”

“Close to forty years, yes.”

“And neither of us ever felt like going to some other island.”

“It never occurred to me,” Lawler said. “And in any case I was the doctor.”

“Yes. And I just liked it here.”

“Yes,” Lawler said. Where was all this leading?

“You know, Val,” Thalheim said, “I’ve been thinking about this business of having to go. I hate it. It’s making me absolutely sick inside.”

“I don’t like it much myself, Nicko.”

“No. But you seem resigned to it.”

“What other choice do I have?”

“Maybe there is one, Val.”

Lawler looked at him, waiting.

Thalheim said, “I heard what you said at the town meeting. When you told us that trying to fight the Gillies wouldn’t work. I didn’t agree with you that night, but when I thought things over I saw you were right. Still, I’ve been wondering if maybe there’s some way a few of us can stay here.”

“What?”

“I mean, say ten or twelve of us hide out down at the far end where the Sisters have been living. You, me, my family, the Katzins, the Hains—that’s a dozen. A pretty decent group, too, no frictions, everybody friends. We lay low, keep out of the way of the Gillies, do our fishing off the back side of the island, and try to go on living the way we lived before.”

The idea was so wild that it caught Lawler in an unprotected place. For a crazy fraction of a second he actually was tempted. Stay here after all? Not have to give up the familiar paths, the familiar bay? The Gillies never went down to the far end. They might not notice if just a few of the island’s people remained behind when—

No.

The nonsensical nature of the plan came crashing in like the fist of the Wave. The Gillies wouldn’t need to go down to the far end to know what was happening there. The Gillies somehow always knew everything that happened anywhere on the island. They would find them in five minutes and toss them over the rear bulwark into the sea, and that would be that. Besides, even if a few people did manage to evade Gillie surveillance, how could they think that they could live as they had lived before, with most of the community somewhere else? No. No. Impossible, absurd.

“What do you think?” Thalheim asked.

Lawler said, after a moment’s pause, “Forgive me, Nicko. But I think it’s as goofy as Nimber’s notion the other night about stealing one of their idols and holding it for ransom.”

“Do you?”

“Yeah.”

Thalheim was silent, studying the swelling under his arm as Lawler bandaged it.

Then he said, “You always did have a practical way of looking at things. Kind of cold-blooded, Val, but practical, always practical. You just don’t like taking risks, I guess.”

“Not when the odds are a million to one against me.”

“You think it’s that bad?”

“It can’t work, Nicko. No way. Come on: admit it. Nobody puts anything over on the Gillies. The idea’s poison. It’s suicide.”

“Maybe so,” Thalheim said.

“Not maybe.”

“It sounded pretty good for a moment.”

“We wouldn’t stand a chance,” said Lawler.

“No. No. We wouldn’t, would we?” Thalheim shook his head. “I really want to stay here, Val. I don’t want to go. I’d give everything I have not to have to go.”

“Me too,” Lawler said. “But we’re going. We have to.”

Sundira Thane came to see him when her supply of the numbweed tranquillizer was all gone. Her vivid, energetic presence filled the little reception room of his vaargh like a trumpet-blast.

But she was coughing again. Lawler knew why, and it wasn’t because alien fungi had invaded her lungs. She looked drawn, tense. The brightness that gave her eyes such intense life was the brightness of anxiety today, not simply that of inner force.

Lawler filled the little storage gourd he had given her with a new supply of the pink drops, enough to last her until the day of departure. After that, if the cough was still with her when they were out at sea, she could share his supply.

She said, “One of those crazy women from the Sisterhood was in town just now, did you know? She was telling everyone that she’s cast our horoscope and none of us will survive the voyage to the new island. Not a single one, she said. Some of us are going to be lost at sea and the rest are going to sail right off the edge of the world and end up in heaven.”

“That’s Sister Thecla, I’d guess. She claims to be clairvoyant.”

“And is she?”

“She once did a horoscope on me, back in the days before the Sisterhood when she was still speaking to men. She said I’d live to a ripe old age and have a happy, fulfilled life. Now she says we’re all going to die at sea. One of those two horoscopes has to be wrong, wouldn’t you think? Here, open your mouth. Let me stare at your larynx for a minute.”

“Maybe Sister Thecla meant that you would be one of the ones who’s going to sail straight to heaven.”

“Sister Thecla is not a reliable source of information,” Lawler said. “Sister Thecla is a seriously disturbed woman, as a matter of fact. Open up.”

He looked down her throat. There was a little mild irritation of the tissues, nothing special: just about what an occasional psychosomatic cough would be expected to produce.

“If Delagard knew how to sail to heaven, he’d have done it already,” Lawler said. “He’d be running a ferry service back and forth. He’d have shipped the Sisters there a long time ago. As for your throat, it’s the same story as before. Tension, nervous coughing, irritation. Just try to relax. Keeping away from Sisters who want to forecast your future for you would be a good idea.”

Sundira smiled. “Those poor silly women. I feel sorry for them.” Though the consultation was over, she seemed in no hurry to leave. She wandered over to the shelf where he kept his little collection of Earth artifacts and studied them for a moment. “You said you’d tell me what these things are.”

He came up alongside her. “The metal statuette’s the oldest one. It’s a god that they worshipped in a land called Egypt, thousands of years ago. Egypt was a land beside a river, one of the most ancient places on Earth, where civilization started. He’s either the sun-god or the god of death. Or both. I’m not certain.”

“Both? How can a sun-god also be a death-god? The sun’s the source of life, it’s bright and warm. Death is something dark. It’s—” She paused. “But Earth’s sun was the bringer of death, wasn’t it? You mean to say they knew that in this place called Egypt thousands of years before it happened?”

“I doubt it very much. But the sun dies every night. And is reborn the next morning. Maybe that was the connection.” Or maybe not. He was only guessing. He knew so little.

She picked up the small bronze figurine and held it in her palm as though weighing it.

“Four thousand years. I can’t imagine four thousand years.”

Lawler smiled. “Sometimes I hold it the way you’re holding it now, and I try to let it take me back to the place where it was made. Dry sand, hot sun, a blue river with trees along its banks. Cities with thousands of people. Huge temples and palaces. But it’s so hard to keep the vision clear. All I can really see in my mind is an ocean and a little island.”

She put the statuette down and pointed to the potsherd. “And this piece of hard painted material, that’s from Greece, you said?”

“Greece, yes. It’s pottery. They made it out of clay. Look, you can see a bit of a picture on it, a figure of a warrior, and a spear that he must have been holding.”

“How beautiful the outline is. It must have been a marvellous piece of work. But we’ll never know, will we? When was Greece? After Egypt?”

“Much later. But still very ancient. They had poets and philosophers there, and great artists. Homer was a Greek.”

“Homer?”

“He wrote The Odyssey. The Iliad.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t—”

“Famous poems, very long ones. One was about a war and one about a sea voyage. My father used to tell me stories that came from them, the bits and pieces that he remembered from his father. Who learned them from his grandfather Harry, whose grandfather was born on Earth. It was only seven generations ago that Earth still existed. Sometimes we forget that: sometimes we forget that Earth ever existed at all. You see that round brown medallion there? That’s a map of Earth. The continents and seas.”

Of all his treasures, Lawler often thought that was the most precious. It was neither the most ancient nor the most beautiful; but the portrait of Earth itself was inscribed on it. He had no idea who had made it, or when, or why. It was a flat hard disc, larger than his coin from the United States of America but still small enough to fit in the palm of his hand. There was lettering around its edges that nobody was able to understand, and in the centre were two overlapping circles in which the map of Earth had been engraved, two continents in one hemisphere and two in the other, with a fifth continent at the bottom of the world in both circles and some large islands breaking the great expanse of the seas. Perhaps they were continents too, some of them: Lawler didn’t quite understand where the boundary was between being an island and being a continent.

He pointed to the left-hand circle. “Supposedly Egypt was here, in the middle of this place. And Greece somewhere up here. And this may have been the United States of America, over on the other side, up here. This little metal piece is a coin that they used there, in the United States of America.”

“For what?”

“Money,” Lawler said. “Coins were money.”

“And this rusted thing?”

“A weapon. A gun, it was called. It fired little darts called bullets.”

She made a little shivering gesture. “You have just these six things of Earth, and one of them has to be a weapon. But they were like that, weren’t they? Making war on each other all the time? Killing each other, hurting each other?”

“Some of them were like that, especially in the ancient days. Later it changed, I think.” Lawler indicated the rough chunk of stone, his final artifact. “This was from some wall they had, a wall between countries, because there was war. That would be like a wall between islands here, if you can imagine such a thing. Eventually peace came and they tore the wall down and everyone celebrated, and pieces of it were saved so no one would forget it had once existed.” Lawler shrugged. “They were people, that’s all. Some were good and some weren’t. I don’t think they were that different from us.”

“But their world was.”

“Very different, yes. A strange and wonderful place.”

“There’s a special look that comes into your eyes when you speak about Earth. I saw it the other night, down by the bay, when you were talking of how we all live in exile. A kind of glow; a look of longing, I guess. You said that some people think Earth was a paradise, and some that it was a place of horror that everyone wanted to escape from. You must be one of those who think it was a paradise.”

“No,” Lawler said. “I told you. I don’t know what kind of place it really was. I suppose it was pretty crowded and shabby and dirty toward the end, or there wouldn’t have been such a big emigration from it. But I can’t say. I suppose we’ll never know the truth.” He paused and looked at her closely. “The only thing I know is that it was our home once. We should never forget that. Our real and true home. However much we try to fool ourselves into believing that Hydros is our home, we’re all really just visitors here.”

“Visitors?” Sundira said.

She was standing very close to him. Her grey eyes were bright, her lips were moist. It seemed to Lawler that her breasts were rising and falling more rapidly than usual beneath her light wrap. Imagination? Or was she coming on to him?

“Do you feel at home on Hydros?” Lawler asked her. “Really, really, feel at home?”

“Of course. Don’t you?”

“I wish I did.”

“But you were born here!”

“So?”

“I don’t underst—”

“Am I a Gillie? Am I a diver? Am I a meatfish? They feel at home here. They are at home here.”

“So are you.”

“You still don’t understand,” he said.

“I’m trying, though. I want to.”

This was the moment to reach out to her, Lawler thought. Pull her close, caress her, do this and that, hands, lips, make things happen. She wants to understand you, he told himself. Give her her chance.

And then he heard Delagard’s voice in his head, saying, And also she’s Kinverson’s woman, isn’t she? If she’s useful, and they’re a couple besides, why separate them?

“Yes,” he said, his tone suddenly short. “Lots of questions, not many answers. Isn’t it always that way?” Abruptly he wanted to be alone. He tapped the flask of numbweed tincture. “This supply should last you another couple of weeks, right up to the time we leave. If the cough doesn’t clear up again, let me know.”

She looked a little startled at the brusque dismissal. But then she smiled and thanked him and went out.

Shit, he thought. Shit. Shit. Shit.

Delagard said, “The ships are just about in shape, and we’ve still got a week. My people have really been breaking their balls getting them ready.”

Lawler, at the shipyard, glanced out toward the water, where the entire Delagard fleet was at anchor in the harbour except for one ship that was up in drydock having its hull patched. Two carpenters were busy at it. Three men and four women were at work aboard the two nearest seaborne vessels, hammering and planing. “I assume you mean that figuratively, of course.”

“What? Oh. Oh. Very funny, doc. Listen, everybody who works for me has balls, even the women. It’s just my vulgar way of speaking. Or one of my quaint little figures of speech, whichever you prefer. Do you want to see what we’ve been doing?”

“I’ve never been aboard a ship, you know? Only little fishing boats, coracles, things like that.”

“There’s always a first time. Come on. I’ll show you the flagship.”

It looked smaller, once Lawler was aboard, than Delagard’s ships seemed when riding at anchor in the bay. Still, it looked big enough. It was almost like a miniature island. Lawler could feel it rolling lightly beneath his feet, even here in the shallows. Its keel was made of the same tough hard yellow wood-kelp timber as the island itself, long sturdy fibres tightly lashed together and caulked with pitch. The exterior of the hull had a different sort of caulking. Just as the island’s bulwarks wore a covering mesh of live sea-finger weed that constantly repaired and rewove itself as the ocean battered against the island wall, just as the wooden timbers of the bay floor were reinforced by a layer of protective algae, so too did a dense green network of sea-finger festoon the sides of the hull, coming clear up almost to the railing. The stubby little blue-green tubules of the weed, which had always looked more like tiny bottles than fingers to Lawler, gave the ship a thick bristling coating, jutting out in intricate tangles just below the water-line. The deck was a flat, tight expanse of some lighter wood, carefully sealed to keep the interior of the ship dry when waves came over the bow. Two masts rose at mid-deck. Hatches fore and aft led to mysterious deeper regions.

Delagard said, “What we’ve been doing is resealing the deck and resurfacing the hull. We want to be water-tight all around. We may see some ugly storms and we’ll sure as hell be run down by the Wave somewhere out there. On an inter-island voyage we can try to steer around lousy weather, and if things go the right way for us we can hope to avoid the worst of the Wave, but we may not have it so easy on this trip.”

“Isn’t this an inter-island voyage?” Lawler asked.

“It may not be inter the islands we’d prefer. Sometimes, a voyage like this, you have to take the long way around.”

Lawler didn’t quite follow that, but Delagard didn’t amplify and he let the point go by. Delagard hauled him briskly around the ship, reeling off technical terms: this is the cabinhouse, this the deckhouse, the bridge, the forecastle, the quarterdeck, the bowsprit, the windlass, the water-strider, the gantry and reel. These are gaffing rods, this is the wheel-box, that’s the binnacle. Down below we have the crew quarters here, the hold, the magnetron room, the radio room, the carpenter’s shop, the this, the that. Lawler was scarcely listening. Most of the terms meant nothing to him. What struck him mainly was how everything below was so incredibly close together, one thing jammed up against another. He was accustomed to the privacy and solitude of his vaargh. They would all be in each other’s pockets here. He was trying to imagine himself living on this crowded boat for two, three, four weeks, out there on the open ocean with no land anywhere in sight.

Not a boat, he told himself. A ship. An ocean-going sailing ship.

“What’s the latest word from Salimil?” Lawler asked, when Delagard finally led him up from the claustrophobic depths.

“Dag’s talking to them right now. They were supposed to have the council meeting this morning. My guess is we’re in like a breeze. They’ve got plenty of room there. My son Rylie called me from Salimil last week and told me that four members of the council are definitely for us and two more are leaning our way.”

“Out of how many?”

“Nine.”

“Sounds good,” Lawler said. So they would go to Salimil, then. All right. All right. So be it. He summoned an image of Salimil Island as he imagined it to be—much like Sorve, of course, but somehow bigger, grander, more lavish—and pictured himself arranging his medical equipment in a vaargh by the Salimil shore that his colleague, Dr Nikitin of Salimil, had made ready for him. Lawler had spoken with Nitikin many times by radio. He wondered what the man actually looked like. Salimil, yes. Lawler wanted to believe that Rylie Delagard knew what he was talking about, that Salimil was going to take them in. But Lawler remembered that Delagard’s other son Kendry, who lived on Velmise, had been just as confident that Velmise would accept the refugees from Sorve.

Sidero Volkin came limping up on deck and said to Delagard, “Dag Tharp’s here. He’s in your office.”

Delagard grinned. “Here’s our answer. Let’s go ashore.”

But Tharp was already on his way down to the edge of the water to meet them as they clambered off the ship, and the moment Lawler saw the stricken look on the little radio operator’s red sharp-featured face he knew what the answer from Salimil had been.

“Well?” Delagard asked, all the same.

“Turned us down. Five to four vote. They’re low on water, they said. Because the summer’s been so dry. Offered to take six people, though.”

“The bastards. Well, fuck them.”

“That what you want me to tell them?” Tharp asked.

“Don’t tell them anything. I wouldn’t waste the time on them. We aren’t going to send them six. It’s all or none, wherever we go.” He looked at Lawler.

“What’s next?” Lawler asked. “Shaktan? Kaggeram?” The island names came easily to his lips. But he had no idea where they were, or what they might be like.

“They’ll give us the same crap,” Delagard said.

“I could try Kaggeram anyway,” said Tharp. “They’re pretty decent over there, I remember. I was there about ten years ago, when—”

“Fuck Kaggeram,” Delagard said. “They’ve got one of those council deals too. They’ll need a week to debate it, and then a public meeting, and a vote, and all that. We don’t have that much more time.” Delagard seemed to disappear into thought. He might have been a world away. He had the look of someone who was making abstruse calculations with the most intense mental effort. Delagard’s eyes were half shut, his thick black brows were close together. A heavy shell of silence surrounded him. “Grayvard,” he said finally.

“But Grayvard’s eight weeks from here,” said Lawler.

“Grayvard?” Tharp said, looking startled. “You want me to call Grayvard?”

“Not you. Me. I’ll make the call myself, right from this ship.” Delagard was silent again a moment. Once more he seemed very distant, working out mental sums. Then he nodded as if satisfied with his answer and said, “I’ve got cousins on Grayvard. I know how to bargain with my own cousins, for Christ’s sake. What to offer. They’ll take us. You can be damn sure of that. There won’t be any problem. Grayvard it is!”

Lawler stood watching as Delagard went striding back toward the ship.

Grayvard? Grayvard?

He knew almost nothing about it: an island at the far edge of the island group in which Sorve moved, an island which spent as much time in the adjacent Red Sea as it did in Home Sea. It was about as distant as an island could be and still have any sort of real relationship with Sorve.

Lawler had been taught in school that forty of the islands of Hydros had human settlements on them. Maybe the official number was up to fifty or sixty by now: he didn’t know. The true total was probably a good deal higher than that, since everyone lived in the shadow of the Shalikomo massacre that had happened in the time of the third generation, and whenever an island’s population began to grow too large, ten or twenty people would leave to seek a new life somewhere else. The settlers who moved to those new islands didn’t necessarily have the means to establish radio contact with the rest of Hydros. So it was easy to lose count. Say, eighty islands with humans, by this time, or even a hundred. Scattered over an entire planet, a planet said to be bigger than Earth itself had been. Communication between the islands was spotty and difficult beyond one’s own little island group. Hazy inter-island alliances formed and dissolved as the islands travelled around the world.

Once, long ago, some humans had attempted to build an island of their own, so they wouldn’t have to live all the time under the eyes of Gillie neighbours. They had figured out how it was done and had begun weaving the fibres, but before they got very far the island was attacked by huge sea creatures and destroyed. Dozens of lives were lost. Everyone assumed the monsters had been sent by the Gillies, who obviously hadn’t liked the idea of humans setting up a little independent domain of their own. No one had ever tried it again.

Grayvard, Lawler thought. Well, well, well.

One island is as good as another, he told himself. He’d manage to adapt, somehow, wherever they landed. But would they be really welcome on Grayvard? Would they even be able to find it, somewhere out there between Home Sea and the Red Sea? What the hell. Let Delagard worry about it. Why should he care? It was all out of his hands.

Gharkid’s voice, thin and husky and piping, came to Lawler as he was walking slowly back up to his vaargh.

“Doctor? Doctor-sir?”

He was heavily laden, staggering under the weight of two immense dripping baskets stuffed with algae that he carried in a shoulder-harness. Lawler halted to wait for him. Gharkid came lurching toward him and let the baskets slide from his shoulders practically at Lawler’s feet.

Gharkid was a small wiry man, so much shorter than Lawler that he had to crane his head far back in order to look at him straight on. He smiled, showing brilliant white teeth against the dusky backdrop of his face. There was something earnest and very appealing about him. But the childlike simplicity that the man affected, that cheerful peasant innocence, could be a little cloying sometimes.

“What’s all this?” Lawler asked, looking down at the tangle of weeds spilling out of the baskets, green ones and red ones and yellow ones streaked with gaudy purple veins.

“For you, doctor-sir. Medicines. For when we leave, to take with us.”

Gharkid grinned. He seemed very pleased with himself.

Lawler, kneeling, poked through the sopping mess. He was able to recognize some of the seaweeds. This bluish one was the painkiller, and this with the dark strap-shaped lateral leaves yielded the better of the two antiseptics, and this one—yes, this one was numbweed. Unquestionably numbweed. Good old Gharkid. Lawler looked up and as his gaze met Gharkid’s there was for just a moment a flash of something not all that naive and childlike in Gharkid’s dark eyes.

“To take with us on the ship,” Gharkid said, as though Lawler hadn’t comprehended before. “These are the good ones, for the drugs. I thought you’d want them, some extras.”

“You’ve done very well,” Lawler said. “Here. Let’s carry this stuff up to my vaargh.”

It was a rich haul. The man had gathered some of everything that had any medicinal use. Lawler had been putting it off and putting it off and at last Gharkid had simply gone out into the bay and loaded up on the whole pharmacopoeia. Well done indeed, Lawler thought. Especially the numbweed. There’d be just enough time to process all this before they sailed, get it all refined down into powders and salves and ointments and tinctures. And then the ship would be nicely stocked with medicines for the long pull to Grayvard. He knew his algae, Gharkid did. Once again Lawler wondered if Gharkid was really as much of a simpleton as he seemed, or if that was merely some sort of defensive pose. Gharkid often seemed like a blank soul, a tabula rasa on which anyone was free to write anything at all. There had to be more to him than that, somewhere inside. But where?

The final days before sailing were bad ones. Everyone admitted the necessity to go, but not everybody had believed it would really happen, and now reality was closing in with terrible force. Lawler saw old women making piles of their possessions outside their vaarghs, staring blankly at them, rearranging them, carrying things inside and bringing other things out. Some of the women and a few of the men cried all the time, some of them quietly, some not so quietly. The sounds of hysterical sobbing could be heard all through the night. Lawler treated the worst cases with numbweed tincture. “Easy, there,” he kept saying. “Easy, easy.” Thorn Lyonides was drunk three days straight, roaring and singing, and then he started a fight with Bamber Cadrell, saying that nobody was going to make him get on board one of those ships. Delagard came by with Gospo Struvin and said, “What the fuck is this,” and Lyonides jumped at him, snarling and screeching like a lunatic. Delagard hit him in the face, and Struvin caught him around the throat and throttled him until he calmed down. “Put him on his ship,” Delagard said to Cadrell. “Make sure he stays there until we sail.”

On the next-to-last day, and the last day also, parties of Gillies came right down to the border between their territory and the human settlement and stood there watching in their inscrutable way, as if making sure the humans were making ready to clear out. Everyone on Sorve knew now that there would be no reprieve, no revocation of the order of expulsion. The last doubters, the last deniers, had had to cave in under the pressure of those fishy, staring, implacable eyes. Sorve was lost to them forever. Grayvard would be their new home. That much was settled.

Just before the end, hours from departure, Lawler climbed the island to its rearmost point, on the side opposite the bay, where the high bulwark faced the ocean. It was noon, and the water was ablaze with reflected light.

From his vantage point on the bulwark Lawler looked out across the open sea and imagined himself sailing on it, far from any shore. He wanted to find out if he still feared it, that endless world of water on which he would embark not very long from now.

No. No. All the fear seemed to have gone from him that drunken night at Delagard’s place. It hadn’t returned. Lawler stared into the distance and saw nothing but ocean, and that was all right. There wasn’t anything to fear. He would be exchanging the island for a ship, which was nothing more than a miniature island, really. What was the worst-case possibility, then? That his ship would sink in a storm, he supposed, or be smashed by the Wave, and he’d die. All right: he had to die sooner or later. That wasn’t news. But ships weren’t lost at sea all that often. The odds were that they would reach Grayvard safely. He would go ashore once again and begin a new life.

What Lawler still felt, rather than fear of the voyage that lay ahead, was the occasional sharp stab of grief for all he would be leaving behind. The longing arose quickly and just as quickly went, unsatisfied.

But now, strangely, the things he was leaving behind began to leave him. As Lawler stood with his back to the settlement, staring into the great dark expanse of the water, they all seemed to depart on the breeze that was blowing past him out to sea: his awesome father, his gentle elusive mother, his almost forgotten brothers. His whole childhood, his coming of age, his brief marriage, his years as the island doctor, as the Dr Lawler of his generation. Everything going away, suddenly. Everything. He felt weirdly light, as if he could simply mount the breeze and float through the air to Grayvard. All the shackles seemed to have broken. Everything that held him here had fallen from him in a moment. Everything.