The Face of the Waters

1

The first four days of the voyage had been placid, almost suspiciously so. “Real strange is what it is,” said Gabe Kinverson, and solemnly shook his head. “You’d expect some troubles by now, this far out in the middle of nowhere,” he said, looking out over the slow, calm blue-grey swells. The wind was steady. The sails were full. The ships stayed close together, moving serenely across a glassy sea on their route toward the northwest, toward Grayvard. A new home; a new life; for the seventy-eight voyagers, the castaways, the exiles, it was like a second birth. But should any birth, a first one or a second, be as easy as this? And how much longer would it be this easy?

On the first day, when they were still crossing the bay, Lawler had found himself wandering astern again and again to look back at Sorve Island as it receded into invisibility.

In those early hours of the voyage Sorve had risen behind them like a long tawny mound. It still seemed real and tangible then. He was able to make out the familiar central spine and the outcurving arms, the grey spires of the vaarghs, the power plant, the rambling buildings of Delagard’s shipyard. He thought he could even see the sombre line of Gillies who had come down to the shore to watch the six vessels depart.

Then the water began to change colour. The deep rich green of the shallow bay gave way to the ocean colour, which here was a dark blue tinged with grey. That was the true mark of cutting loose from shore, when you had left the bay behind. To Lawler it felt as if a trapdoor had been sprung, catapulting him into free fall. Now that the artificial bottom had dropped away beneath them Sorve began rapidly to shrink, becoming nothing but a dark line on the horizon, and then nothing at all.

Farther out the ocean would be other colours, depending on the microorganisms in it, the surrounding climate, the upwellings of particulate matter from the depths. The different seas were named according to their prevailing hue: the Red Sea, the Yellow, the Azure, the Black. The one to fear was the Empty Sea, the sea that was pale ice-blue, a desert sea. Great tracts of the ocean were like that and almost nothing lived in them. But the route of the expedition would pass nowhere near any of that.

The ships were travelling in a tight pyramid-shaped formation that they would try to hold to day and night. Each vessel was under the command of one of Delagard’s ferry captains except for the one on which the eleven women of the Sisterhood sailed all by themselves. Delagard had offered to give them one of his men to be their pilot, but they had refused, as he had expected them to do. “Sailing a ship’s no problem,” Sister Halla told him. “We’ll watch what you do and we’ll do the same thing.”

Delagard’s flagship, the Queen of Hydros, was in the lead, at the apex of the pyramid, with Gospo Struvin in charge. Then came two side by side, the Black Sea Star commanded by Poilin Stayvol and the Sorve Goddess under Bamber Cadrell, and behind them the other three ships in a broader line, the Sisterhood in the middle aboard the Hydros Cross flanked by the Three Moons under Martin Yanez and the Golden Sun commanded by Damis Sawtelle.

Now, with Sorve altogether gone from view, there was nothing in sight anywhere but sky and sea, the flat horizon, the gentle ocean swells. A curious sort of peace descended over Lawler. He found it surprisingly easy to submerge himself in the vastness of it all, to lose himself completely. The sea was calm and seemed likely to stay that way forever. Sorve could no longer be seen, that was true. Sorve had disappeared. What of it? Sorve no longer mattered.

He moved forward along the deck, savouring the force of the wind against his back as it pushed the ship steadily onward, every minute carrying him farther and farther from anything he had ever known.

Father Quillan was standing by the foremast. The priest wore a dark grey wrap of some unusual light woven material, airy and soft, something he must have brought with him from another world. There were no such fabrics available on Hydros.

Lawler paused by his side. Quillan gestured broadly toward the sea. It was like an enormous blue jewel, sparkling with fierce brilliance, its great glassy curve reaching outward on all sides as if the entire planet were a single shining polished sphere. “Looking at all that, you wouldn’t believe that anything but water exists anywhere in the world, would you?”

“Not here, no.”

“Such an enormous ocean. Such emptiness everywhere.”

“Makes you think there has to be a god, does it? The immensity of it all.”

Quillan looked at him, startled.

“Does it?”

“I don’t know. I was asking you.”

“Do you believe in God, Lawler?”

“My father did.”

“But not you?”

Lawler shrugged. “My father had a Bible. He used to read it to us. It got lost, somewhere, a long time back. Or stolen. I remember a little of it. “And God said, let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters… And God called the firmament Heaven.” That’s Heaven up there, right, Father Quillan? Behind the sky? And the waters that are supposed to be above it, that’s the ocean of space, isn’t it?” Quillan was staring at him in astonishment. “And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear, and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas.”

Quillan said, “You know the whole Bible by heart, do you?”

“Only this little bit. It’s the first page. I couldn’t make any sense out of the rest of it, all those prophets and kings and battles and such.”

“And Jesus.”

“That part was in the back. I never read it that far.” Lawler looked toward the endlessly retreating horizon, blue curving away under blue toward infinity. “Since there’s no dry land here, obviously God meant to create something different on Hydros from what He created on Earth. Wouldn’t you say? “God called the dry land Earth.” And He called the wet land Hydros, I guess. What a job it must have been, creating all those different worlds. Not just Earth, but every single world in the galaxy. Iriarte, Fenix, Megalo Kastro, Darma Barma, Mentirosa, Copperfield, Nabomba Zom, the whole bunch of them, the million and one planets. With a different purpose in mind for each world, or else why bother creating so many? It was all the same god that created them all, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Quillan said.

“But you’re a priest!”

“That doesn’t mean I know everything. That doesn’t even mean I know anything.”

“Do you believe in God?” Lawler asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you believe in anything at all?”

Quillan was silent for a time. His face went completely dead, as if his spirit had momentarily left his body.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

The sea seemed flatter here, for some reason, than it did on the island. Darkness came suddenly, falling almost with a crash. The sun plummeted through the western sky, hovered for a moment just above the sea, and sank. Virtually at once the world turned black behind them and the Cross began to glow overhead.

“Mess call, first watch,” Natim Gharkid yelled, banging on a pan.

The working crew of the Queen of Hydros was divided into two watches, four hours on and four hours off. The members of each watch took their meals together. The first watch was Leo Martello, Gabe Kinverson, Pilya Braun, Gharkid, Dag Tharp and Gospo Struvin; the second watch was Neyana Golghoz, Sundira Thane, Dann Henders, Delagard, Onyos Felk, Lis Niklaus and Father Quillan. There was no special officers” mess: Delagard and Struvin, the owner and captain, took their meals in the galley with the others. Lawler, who had no fixed duty schedule himself but was on call round the clock, was the only one outside the watch system entirely. That suited Lawler’s biological rhythms: he took his morning mess with the second watch at dawn, his evening mess with the first watch at sundown. But it gave him an oddly free-floating sense of not really being part of things. Even here in the earliest days of the voyage the two watches were beginning to develop a kind of team spirit, and he belonged to neither team.

“Greenweed stew tonight,” Lis Niklaus said, as the first watch filed into the galley. “Baked sentryfish fins. Fish-meal cakes, suppleberry salad.” It was the third night of the voyage. The menu had been the same each night; each night Lis had made the same jovial announcement, as though expecting them all to be delighted. She did most of the cooking, with help from Gharkid and occasionally Delagard. The meals were spare, and not likely to get much better later on: dried fish, fish-meal cakes, dried seaweed, seaweed-meal bread, supplemented by Gharkid’s latest haul of fresh algae and whatever live catch had been brought in that day. So far the catch had been nothing but sentryfish. Schools of the alert, eager-looking spear-nosed creatures had been following the fleet ever since Sorve. Kinverson, Pilya Braun and Henders were the chief fishers, working from the gantry-and-reel fishing station aft.

Struvin said, “Easy day today.”

“Too easy,” grunted Kinverson, leaning into his plate.

“You want storms? You want the Wave?”

Kinverson shrugged. “I don’t trust an easy sea.”

Dag Tharp, spearing another fish-meal cake, said, “How are we doing on our water tonight. Lis?”

“One more squirt apiece and that’s it for this meal.”

“Shit. This is thirsty food, you know?”

“We’ll be thirstier later if we drink up all our water the first week,” Struvin said. “You know that as well as I do. Lis, bring out some raw sentryfish fillets for the radio man.”

Before leaving Sorve the villagers had loaded the ships with as many casks of fresh water as they had room for. But even so there was only something like a three-week supply on hand at the time of departure, figuring cautious use. They would have to depend on encountering rain as they went; if there was none, they’d have to find other means of meeting their fresh-water needs. Eating raw fish was one good way. Everybody knew that. But Tharp wasn’t having any.

He looked up, scowling. “Skip it. Fuck raw sentryfish.”

“Takes away your thirst,” Kinverson said quietly.

“Takes away your appetite,” Tharp said. “Fuck it. I’d rather go thirsty.”

Kinverson shrugged. “Suit yourself. You’ll feel different about it in a week or two.”

Lis put a plate of pale greenish meat on the table. The moist slices of uncooked fish had been wrapped in strips of fresh yellow seaweed. Tharp stared morosely at the plate. He shook his head and looked away. Lawler, after a moment, helped himself. Struvin had some also, and Kinverson. The raw fish was cool against Lawler’s tongue, soothing, almost thirst-quenching. Almost.

“What do you think, doc?” Tharp asked, after a time.

“Not half bad,” Lawler said.

“Maybe if I just took a lick of it,” said the radio man.

Kinverson laughed into his plate. “Asshole.”

“What did you say, Gabe?”

“You really want me to repeat it?”

“Go on deck if you’re going to have a fight, you two,” Lis Niklaus said, disgusted.

“A fight? Me and Dag?” Kinverson looked astonished. He could have picked Tharp up with one hand. “Don’t be silly, Lis.”

“You want to fight?” Tharp cried, his sharp-featured little red face turning even redder. “Come on, Kinverson. Come on. You think I’m afraid of you?”

“You ought to be,” Lawler told him softly. “He’s four times your size.” He grinned and looked toward Struvin. “If we’ve used up our water quota for this evening, Gospo, how about brandy all around? That’ll fix our thirst.”

“Right. Brandy! Brandy!” Struvin yelled.

Lis handed him the flask. Struvin studied it for a moment with a sour expression on his face. “This is the Sorve brandy. Let’s save it until we get really desperate. Give me the stuff from Khuviar, will you? Sorve brandy is piss.” From a cupboard Lis took a different flask, long and rounded, with a deep sheen. Struvin ran his hand along its side and grinned appreciatively. “Khuviar, yes! They really understand brandy on that island. And wine. You ever been there, any of you? No, no, I can see you haven’t. They drink all day and all night. The happiest people on this planet.”

“I was there once,” Kinverson said. “They were drunk all the time. They did nothing at all but drink and vomit and drink some more.”

“But what they drink,” said Struvin. “Ah, what they drink!”

“How do they get anything done,” Lawler asked, “if they’re never sober? Who does the fishing? Who mends the nets?”

“Nobody,” Struvin said. “It’s a miserable filthy place. They sober up just long enough to go out into the bay and find a batch of grapeweed, and then they ferment it into wine or distil it into brandy and they’re drunk again. You wouldn’t believe the way they live. Their clothing is rags. They live in seaweed shacks, like Gillies. The reservoir holds brackish water. It’s a disgusting place. But who says all islands have to be alike? Every place is different. One island is nothing like another. That’s the way it always has seemed to me: each island is itself, and no place else. And on Khuviar what they understand is drinking. Here, Tharp. You say you’re thirsty? Have some of my fine Khuviar brandy. My guest. Help yourself.”

“I don’t like brandy,” Tharp said, sounding sullen. “You know that damned well, Gospo. And brandy’ll only make you thirstier, anyway. It dries out the mouth membranes. Doesn’t it, doc? You should realize that.” He let out his breath in an explosive sigh. “What the fuck, give me the raw fish!”

Lawler passed him the platter. Tharp speared a slice with his fork, studied it as if he had never seen a piece of raw fish before, and finally took a tentative bite of it. He moved it around in his mouth with his tongue, swallowed, pondered. Then he took a second bite.

“Hey,” he said. “That’s all right. That isn’t bad at all.”

“Asshole,” Kinverson said again. But he was smiling.

When the meal was over everyone went up on deck for the change of watch. Henders, Golghoz and Delagard, who were scrambling around in the rigging, came down and Martello, Pilya Braun, and Kinverson took their places.

The brilliant gleam of the Cross cut the black sky into quarters. The sea was so still that its reflection could be seen, like a taut line of cool white fire lying across the water and stretching off into the mysterious distances, where it blurred and was lost. Lawler stood by the rail and looked back toward the soft flickering points of light that marked the presence of the other five ships, moving along in their steady tapering formation behind them. Here was Sorve, right out there on the water, the whole little island community packed up in those ships, Thalheims and Tanaminds and Katzins and Yanezes and Sweyners and Sawtelles and all the rest, the familiar names, the old, old names. After dark every night each ship mounted running lights along its rails, long smouldering dried-algae flambeaus that burned with a smoky orange glow. Delagard was fanatically concerned that the fleet should keep together at all times, never breaking formation. Each vessel had its own radio equipment and they stayed in constant touch all through the night, lest any of them stray.

“Breeze coming!” someone called. “Let go the foretack!”

Lawler admired the art of turning the sails to catch the wind. He wished he understood a little more about it. Sailing seemed almost magical to him, an arcane and bewildering mystery. On Delagard’s ships, more imposing than the little fishing skiffs that the islanders had used in the bay and on their wary journeys just beyond its mouth, each of the two masts bore a great triangular sail made of tightly woven strips of split bamboo, with a smaller quadrangular sail rigged above it, fastened to a yard. Another small triangular sail was fixed between the masts. The mainsails were tied to heavy wooden booms; arrangements of ropes fitted with threaded beads and pronged jaws held them in place, and they were manipulated by halyards running through block-and-tackle devices.

Under ordinary conditions it took a team of three to move the sails around, and a fourth at the helm to give the orders. The Martello-Kinverson-Braun team worked under Gospo Struvin’s command, and when the other watch was on duty it was Neyana Golghoz, Dann Henders and Delagard himself handling the sails, with Onyos Felk, the mapkeeper and navigator, taking Struvin’s place in the wheel-box. Sundira Thane worked relief on Struvin’s watch, and Lis Niklaus on Felk’s. Lawler would stand to one side, looking on as they ran about shouting things like “Square the braces!” and “Wind abaft the beam!” and “Hard alee! Hard alee!” Again and again, as the wind changed, they lowered the sails, swung them around, rehoisted them in their new positions. Somehow, no matter whether the wind was blowing toward the ship or against it, they managed to keep the vessel heading in the same direction.

The only ones who never took part in any of this were Dag Tharp, Father Quillan, Natim Gharkid and Lawler. Tharp was too light and flimsy to be of much use on the ropes, and most of the time he was busy belowdecks anyway, operating the communications network that kept the ships of the fleet in contact. Father Quillan was generally regarded as exempt from all shipboard labour; Gharkid’s responsibilities were limited to galley duty and trawling for drifting seaweed; and Lawler, though he would gladly have lent a hand in the rigging, felt abashed about asking to be taught the art and hung back, waiting for an invitation that didn’t get offered.

As he stood by the rail watching the crew at work in the rigging something came whirring through the air out of the dark sea and struck him in the face. Lawler felt a stinging blow on his cheek, a painful hot rasping sensation as of rough scales scraping against his skin. An intense, unpleasantly sour sea-fragrance, becoming bitter and painful as it got deeper in his nostrils, rose up about him. There was a flopping sound at his feet.

He looked down. A winged creature about the length of his hand was flailing around on the deck. Lawler had thought in the first moment of impact that it might have been an air-skimmer, but air-skimmers were graceful elegant things, rainbow-hued, taut-bodied, streamlined for maximum aerodynamic lift, and they never went aloft after dark. This little night-flying monstrosity was more like a worm with wings, pallid and slack and ugly, with small beady black eyes and a writhing ridge of short, stiff red bristles along its upper back. It had been the bristles that had scraped Lawler as the creature smacked into him.

The wrinkled sharp-angled wings that sprouted from the thing’s sides moved in a disagreeable pulsing way, slower and slower. It was leaving a wet trail of blackish slime behind it as it jerked about. Loathsome though it was, it seemed harmless enough now, pitiful, dying here on board.

The very hideousness of it fascinated Lawler. He knelt to give the thing a close look. But an instant later Delagard, just down from the rigging, came up next to him and hooked the tip of one booted foot under the creature’s body. In a single deft motion he scooped it up atop his boot and with a quick kick flipped it on a high arc over the rail into the water.

“Why’d you do that?” Lawler asked.

“So it couldn’t jump up and bite your silly nose, doc. Don’t you know a hagfish when you see one?”

“Hagfish?”

“A baby one, yes. They get about this big when they’re full grown, and they’re mean sons of bitches.” Delagard held his hands about half a metre apart. “If you don’t know what something is, doc, don’t get within biting range of it. Good rule out here.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

Delagard leaned back against the rail and gave him a toothy grin, perhaps meant to be ingratiating. “How are you enjoying life at sea so far?” He was sweaty from his stint aloft, flushed, keyed up in some way. “Isn’t the ocean a wonderful place?”

“It’s got its charm, I suppose. I’m working hard at trying to find it.”

“Not happy, are you? Cabin too small? Company not stimulating enough? Scenery dull?”

Lawler wasn’t amused.

“Piss off, why don’t you, Nid?”

Delagard rubbed a little patch of hagfish slime off his boot.

“Hey,” he said. “Just trying to have a little friendly conversation.

Lawler went below and made his way toward his cabin in the stern. A narrow musty passage lit by the greasy, sputtering light of fish-oil lamps mounted in bone sconces ran the length of the ship on this level. The thick smoky air caused his eyes to sting. He could hear the thud of surface swells lapping against the hull, echoing through the ship’s ribs in a distorted, resonant way. From overhead came the heavy sound of the masts creaking in their sockets.

As ship’s doctor Lawler was entitled to one of the three small private cabins near the stern. Struvin had the cabin next to his on the port side. Delagard and Lis Niklaus shared the biggest of the three cabins, farther over against the starboard bulkhead. Everyone else lived in the forecastle, jammed together in two long compartments that were usually used to house passengers when the ship was serving as an inter-island ferry. The first watch had been given the port compartment, the second watch parked their gear on the starboard side.

Kinverson and Sundira had landed in different watches, and therefore bunked in different compartments. Lawler was surprised at that. Not that it mattered much who slept where, really: there was so little privacy in those crowded bunks that anybody interested in a bit of screwing around would have to go creeping down into the cargo hold on the next level below and do their coupling sandwiched between the crates. But were they a couple, as Delagard had said, or not? Apparently not, Lawler was beginning to realize. Or if they were, they were a damned loose-knit one. They had hardly even seemed to notice each other since the start of the voyage. Perhaps whatever had happened between them on Sorve, if anything had, had been nothing more than a quick meaningless fling, a random casual meeting of bodies, a way of passing the time.

He pushed open the door of his cabin with his shoulder and went inside. The cabin wasn’t much bigger than a closet. It held a bunk, a basin, and a little wooden chest in which Lawler kept the few personal possessions he had brought with him from Sorve. Delagard hadn’t let them bring much. Lawler had taken a few articles of clothing, his fishing gear, some pots and pans and plates, a mirror. The artifacts from Earth had come with him, too, of course. He kept them on a shelf opposite his bunk.

The rest of his things, such as they were, his modest furniture and his lamps and some ornaments that he had fashioned out of pretty sea-drift, he had bequeathed to the Gillies. His medical equipment and most of his supplies and his meagre library of handwritten medical texts were up front, off the galley, in a cabin that was serving as the ship’s infirmary. The main medical stores were below, in the cargo hold.

He lit a taper and examined his cheek in the mirror. It was a rough, lumpy piece of sea-glass that Sweyner had made for him years ago, and it provided a rough, lumpy reflection, cloudy and indistinct. Glass of high quality was a rarity on Hydros, where the only source of silica was the heaped-up shells of diatoms from the bottom of the bay. But Lawler was fond of the mirror, bubbled and murky though it was.

The collision with the hagfish didn’t seem to have done any serious damage. There was a little abraded patch just above his left cheekbone, mildly sore where a few of the reddish bristles had broken off in his skin, and that was all. Lawler swabbed it down with a little of Delagard’s grapeweed brandy to protect himself against infection. His medical sixth sense told him that there was nothing to worry about.

The numbweed flask stood next to the brandy. He pondered it for a moment or two.

He had had his usual ration of it already today, before breakfast. He didn’t need any more just now.

But what the hell, he thought. What the hell.

Later Lawler found himself wandering up to the crew compartments, looking for companionship, he wasn’t sure whose.

The shift had changed again. The second watch was on duty now, and the starboard compartment was empty. Lawler peered into the other compartment and saw Kinverson asleep on his bunk, Natim Gharkid sitting up crosslegged with his eyes closed as though in some kind of meditation, and Leo Martello scribbling away, writing by feeble lamplight with his pages spread out on a low wooden chest. Working on his interminable epic poem, Lawler supposed.

Martello was about thirty, strongly built, full of energy, usually jigging around as if on springs. He had large brown eyes and a lively, open face, and liked to keep his head shaved. His father had come voluntarily to Hydros, a self-exiled drop-capsule man. He had turned up on Sorve when Lawler was a boy and had married Jinna Sawtelle, Damis” elder sister. They were both gone now, swept away by the Wave while out in a small boat at the wrong time.

Since he was fourteen or so Martello had worked in Delagard’s shipyard, but his chief claim to distinction was the immense poem he claimed to be writing, a retelling of the great migration from doomed Earth to the worlds of the galaxy. He had been busy with it for years, so he said. No one had ever seen more than a few lines of it.

Lawler stood in the doorway, not wanting to disturb him.

“Doctor,” Martello said. “Just the man I want to see. I need some sunburn medicine. I did a really good job on myself today.”

“Let’s have a peek at it.”

Martello shrugged out of his shirt. Though deeply tanned, he was reddened now beneath the tan. Hydros” sun was stronger than the one under which the ancestral race of humans had evolved. Lawler was kept busy all the time treating skin cancers, sun poisoning, all sorts of dermatological miseries.

“Doesn’t look so terrible,” Lawler told him. “Come around to my cabin in the morning and I’ll take care of it, all right? If you think you’ll have trouble sleeping, I can give you something now.”

“I’ll be okay. I’ll sleep on my belly.”

Lawler nodded. “How’s the famous poem going?”

“Slowly. I’ve been rewriting Canto Five.”

A little to his own surprise Lawler heard himself say, “Can I have a look?”

Martello seemed surprised too. But he pushed one of the curling algae-paper sheets toward him. Lawler held it open with both hands to read it. Martello’s handwriting was boyish and crude, all great looping whorls and swirls.

“And our mothers too,” Lawler pointed out.

“Them too,” Martello said, looking a little annoyed. “They get a canto of their own a little farther on.”

“Right,” Lawler said. “It’s very powerful poetry. Of course, I’m no real judge. You don’t like poems that rhyme?”

“Rhyme’s been obsolete for hundreds of years, doctor.”

“Has it? I didn’t know that. My father used to recite poems sometimes, ones from Earth. They liked using rhymes back then. It is an ancient Mariner / And he stoppeth one of three./“By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,/ Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?"”

“What poem was that?” Martello asked.

“It’s called “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". It’s about a sea voyage—a very troubled voyage. The very deep did rot: O Christ! / That ever this should be!/Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs/ Upon the slimy sea.”

“Powerful stuff. Do you know the rest of it?”

“Just stray fragments here and there,” Lawler said.

“We ought to get together and talk about poetry some time, doctor. I didn’t realize you knew any.” Martello’s sunny expression darkened for a moment. “My father loved the old poems too. He brought a book of Earth poetry with him from the planet where he lived before he came here. Did you know that?”

“No,” Lawler said, excited. “Where is it?”

“Gone. It was with him when he and my mother drowned.”

“I would have wanted to see it,” said Lawler sadly.

“There are times I think I miss that book as much as I do my mother and father,” Martello said. He added ingenuously, “Is that a horrible thing to say, doctor?”

“I don’t think so, I think I understand what you mean.” Water, water, every where, Lawler thought. And all the boards did shrink. “Listen, come around to see me first thing after your morning shift, will you, Leo? I’ll fix up that sunburned back of yours then.”

Water, water, every where/Nor any drop to drink.

Still later Lawler found himself alone on deck again, under the night sky, throbbing blackness above him, a cool steady breeze blowing out of the north. It was past midnight. Delagard, Henders and Sundira were in the rigging, calling arcane cryptic things to one another. The Cross was perfectly centred overhead.

Lawler looked up at it, neatly arranged there in its crisscross way, thousands of unthinkably huge balls of exploding hydrogen lined up so very cleanly in the sky, one row this way and one row that. Martello’s unskilful verses were still in his mind. Now speared the long ships outward/Into the dark of darks. Was one of the suns in that formidable constellation the sun of Earth? No. No. They said you couldn’t see that star from Hydros. These were other stars, the ones that made up the Cross. But somewhere farther out in the darkness, hidden from his view by the great right-angled blast of light that was the Cross, lay that smallish yellow sun under whose mild rays the whole human saga had begun. Golden worlds gleaming, calling/As our fathers went forth. And our mothers, yes. That sun whose swift unexpected ferocity, in a few minutes of cosmic cruelty, had cancelled out that earlier gift of life. Turning ultimately against its own creations, sending implacable gusts of hard radiation, instantly transforming humanity’s mother world to a blackened crisp.

He had dreamed about Earth all his life, ever since his grandfather first had told him tales of the ancestral world, and yet it was still a mystery to him. And always would be, he knew. Hydros was too isolated, too backward, too remote from whatever centres of scholarship might still exist. There was no one here to teach him what Earth had been like. He understood hardly anything about it, its music, its books, its art, its history. Only dribbets and drabbets of data had come down to him, usually only the container, not the thing contained. Lawler knew that there had been a thing called opera, but it was impossible for him to visualize what it had been like. People singing a story? With a hundred musicians playing at the same time? He had never seen a hundred human beings in one place all at once, ever. Cathedrals? Symphonies? Suspension bridges? Highways? He had heard the names of those things; the things themselves were unknown to him. Mysteries, all mysteries. The lost mysteries of Earth.

That little ball—significantly smaller than Hydros, so they said—which had spawned empires and dynasties, kings and generals, heroes and villains, fables and myths, poets, singers, great masters of the arts and the sciences, temples and towers, statues and walled cities. All those glorious mysterious things whose nature he could barely imagine, living as he had all his life on pitiful impoverished watery Hydros. Earth which had spawned us and had sent us forth after centuries of striving into the dark of darks, toward the remote worlds of the indifferent galaxy. And then the door had been slammed shut behind us in one blast of furious radiation. Leaving us stranded out here, lost among the stars.

Golden worlds gleaming, calling—

And here we are now, aboard a little wandering white speck in the great sea, on a planet which itself is no more than a speck in the larger black sea that engulfs us all.

Alone, alone, all, all alone,/Alone on a wide wide sea!

Lawler couldn’t remember the next line. Just as well, he suspected.

He went belowdecks to see about getting some sleep.

A new dream came to him, an Earth-dream but not one like the ones he had had for so many years. This time he dreamed not of the death of Earth but of the leaving of it, the great diaspora, the flight to the stars. Once again he hovered above the familiar blue-green globe of his dream; and as he looked down he saw a thousand slender shining needles rising from it, or perhaps a million, too many for him to begin to count, all of them climbing toward him, surging outward, outward, streaming into space, a steady outward flow of them, a myriad tiny points of light penetrating the blackness that surrounded the blue-green planet. They were the ships of the spacefarers, he knew, the ones who had chosen to leave Earth, the explorers, the wanderers, the settlers, going forth into the great unknown, making their way outward from the mother world to the innumerable stars of the galaxy. He followed their courses across the heavens, tracking them to their destinations, to the many worlds whose names he had heard, worlds as mysterious and magical and unattainable to him as Earth itself: Nabomba Zom where the sea is scarlet and the sun is blue, and Alta Hannalanna where the great sluggish worms with nuggets of precious yellow jade in their foreheads tunnel through the spongy ground, and Galgala the golden, and Xamur where the air is perfume and the electrified atmosphere shimmers and crackles with beauty, and Marajo of the sparkling sands, and Iriarte, and Mentiroso, and Mulano of the double suns, and Ragnarok, and Olympus, and Malebolge, and Ensalada Verde, and Sunrise—

And even Hydros, the dead-end world, from which there was no returning—

The starships pouring outward from Earth went everywhere that there was to go. And somewhere along the way the light that was Earth winked out behind them. Lawler, tossing in turbulent sleep, saw yet again that terrible last blaze of fire, and after it the final blackness closing in, and he sighed for the world that had been. But no one else seemed to notice its passing: they were too busy moving outward, outward, outward.

The next day was the day when Gospo Struvin, making his way along the deck, kicked at an untidy pile of what looked like damp yellow rope and said, “Hey, who left this net here?”

“I told you,” Kinverson said afterward, a dozen times that day. “I don’t trust an easy sea.”

And Father Quillan said, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”

2

Struvin’s death had been too sudden, and it had come too soon in the voyage, for it to be in any way acceptable or even comprehensible. On Sorve death had always been a possibility: you took a fishing-boat too far out into the bay and a storm came out of nowhere, or you were strolling along the waterfront rampart of the island and the Wave rose up without warning and got you, or you found some nice tasty-looking shellfish growing in the shallows and they turned out not to be so nice after all. The ship, though, had seemed to offer a little zone of invulnerability. Perhaps because it was so vulnerable, perhaps because it was nothing more than a tiny hollow wooden shell, a mere speck floating in the midst of an unthinkable immensity, they had all perversely come to believe they were safe aboard it. Lawler had expected that there would be difficulties, and strain and privation, and a serious injury or two somewhere along the way to Grayvard, a challenge to his sometimes tenuous medical skills. But a death? Here in these calm waters? The death of the captain? And only five days out of Sorve. Just as the eerie tranquillity of the first few days had been troublesome and suspicious, Struvin’s death seemed ominous, a terrible foretaste of more calamities inescapably to come.

The voyagers closed around it the way pink new skin closes around a wound. Everyone became resolutely positive-minded, studiedly hopeful, ostentatiously considerate of the boundaries of everybody else’s overstressed psyche. Delagard announced that he would take command of the ship himself. To even out the shifts, Onyos Felk was moved to the first watch: he would direct the Martello-Kinverson-Braun team in the rigging, and Delagard would direct the new team of Golghoz-Henders-Thane.

After that first lapse of control upon hearing of Struvin’s death, Delagard presented now a facade of cool competence, utter undauntedness. He stood staunch and upright on the bridge, looking on as the watch of the day mounted the rigging. The wind stood fair from the east. The voyages continued onward.

Four days later the palms of Lawler’s hands were still smarting from the sting of the net-creature, and his fingers continued to be very stiff. The elaborate pattern of red lines had faded to a dull brown now, but perhaps Pilya was right that he’d have scars after all. That part didn’t bother him much: there were scars aplenty on him already, from this bit of carelessness or that over the years. But the stiffness troubled him. He needed delicacy in his fingers, not only for the surgery that he was occasionally required to perform, but because of the judicious probing and palpating of his patients” flesh that was an inherent part of the process of diagnosis. He couldn’t read the messages of their bodies with fingers that were like sticks.

Pilya seemed worried about Lawler’s hands also. As she came up on deck for her turn in the rigging she saw him and took them gently in hers, as she had in the moments after Gospo Struvin’s death.

“They don’t look good,” she said. “Are you putting on your salve?”

“Faithfully. Although they’re healed beyond the point where the salve can do much good.”

“And the other medicine, the pink drops? The painkiller?”

“Oh, yes. Yes. I wouldn’t think of being without it.”

She rubbed her fingers lightly over his. “You are such a good man, such a serious man. If anything happened to you it would break my heart. I was frightened for you when I saw you fighting with that thing that killed the captain. And when I knew that your hands were hurt.”

A look of purest devotion spread like a sunrise over her sharp-planed snub-nosed face. Pilya’s features were coarse and unbeautiful, but her eyes were warm and shining. The contrast between her golden hair and her sleek olive-toned skin was very appealing. She was a strong, uncomplicated girl, and the emotion she was projecting now was the strong and uncomplicated one of unconditional love. Warily, not wanting to rebuff her too cruelly, Lawler withdrew his hands from her grasp while at the same time giving her a benevolent, noncommittal smile. It would have been easy enough to accept what she was offering, find some secluded nook in the cargo hold, enjoy the simple pleasures that he had denied himself so long. He was no priest, he reminded himself. He had taken no vow of celibacy. But he had lost faith somehow in his own emotions. He was unwilling to trust himself even in so unthreatening an adventure as this one would probably turn out to be.

“Do you think we will live?” she asked him suddenly.

“Live? Of course we’ll live.”

“No,” she said. “I still am afraid that we will die at sea, all of us. Gospo was only the first.”

“We’ll be all right,” said Lawler. “I told you that the other day and I’ll tell you again. Gospo had bad luck, that’s all. There’s always someone whose luck is bad.”

“I want to live. I want to get to Grayvard. There will be a husband waiting for me on Grayvard. Sister Thecla told me that, when she read my future, before we left. She said that when I come to the end of the voyage I will find my husband.”

“Sister Thecla told a lot of people a lot of crazy things about what was going to happen to us at the end of the voyage. You mustn’t pay any attention to fortune-tellers. But if a husband is what you want, Pilya, I hope that Sister Thecla told the truth for you.”

“An older man is what I want. Someone wise and strong, who will teach me things as well as love me. No one ever taught me anything, you know. Except how to work on a ship, and so I have worked on ships, and sailed here and there and here and there for Delagard, and I have never had a husband. But now I want one. It is my time. I am nice to look at, is that not so?”

“Very nice,” Lawler said.

Poor Pilya, he thought. He felt guilty for not loving her.

She turned away from him, as if recognizing that they were not heading in the direction she wanted this conversation to go. After a moment she said, “I was thinking about the little things from Earth that you showed me, the things you have in the cabin. The beautiful little things. How pretty they were! I told you I wanted one, and you said no, you couldn’t give me one, but now I have changed my mind anyway. I don’t want one. They are the past. I want only the future. You live in the past too much, doctor.”

“It’s a bigger place than the future, for me. There’s more room to look around.”

“No. No. The future is very big. The future goes on forever and ever. You wait and see if I am not right. You should throw those old things away. I know that you will never do it, but you should.” She gave him a shy, tender smile. “I need to go aloft now,” she said. “You are a very fine man. I thought I should tell you that. I just want you to know that you have a friend if you want one.” And then she turned and darted away.

Lawler watched her climb the rigging. Poor Pilya, he thought again. What a sweet girl you are. I could never love you, not in the way I would need to love you. But in your own way you are very fine.

She climbed lithely and swiftly, and in a moment she was high overhead. She climbed like one of the monkeys he remembered from his childhood storybooks, those books so full of tales of the incomprehensible land-world that Earth had been, that place of jungles, deserts, glaciers, monkeys and tigers, camels and swift horses, polar bears, walruses, goats that skipped from crag to crag. What were crags? What were goats? He had had to invent them for himself, from the sketchy hints in the stories. Goats were shaggy and lanky, with enormously long legs that had the spring of steel in them. Crags were rough upturned slabs of rock, which was something like wood-kelp timber only unimaginably harder. Monkeys were like ugly little men, brown and hairy and sly, and scrambled through the treetops, screeching and chattering. Well, Pilya was nothing at all like that. But she moved about up there as though it were her natural element.

It struck Lawler then that he wasn’t able to remember what it had been like making love to Pilya’s mother Anya, back there twenty years in the past. He recalled only that he had. But all the rest, the sounds Anya made, the way she moved, the shape of her breasts—gone. As gone as Earth itself, those sounds of hers. As though nothing had ever happened between them. Anya had had the same golden hair and dark smooth skin as Pilya, he recalled, but it seemed to him that her eyes had been blue. Lawler had been miserable, then, bleeding from a thousand wounds after Mireyl’s disappearance, and Anya had wandered along and offered a little comfort. Like mother, like daughter. Did mothers and daughters make love the same way also, driven unconsciously by some power of the genes? Would Pilya, in his arms, shift and blur and transform herself in his eyes into her mother? If he embraced Pilya, would he recapture his lost memories of Anya? Lawler pondered that, wondering if it was worth making the experiment to find out. No, he decided. No.

“Studying the water-flowers, doctor?” Father Quillan said, just at his side.

Lawler glanced around. Quillan had an odd slithery way of approaching: he would materialize out of the air as though he were a thing of ectoplasm and move up the rail toward you without seeming to move at all. And then he was there beside you, shimmering with metaphysical uneasiness.

“Water-flowers?” Lawler said abstractedly, half amused at having been caught in the midst of such lascivious speculations. “Oh. There. Yes, I see.”

How could he not have seen? On this brilliant sunny morning bobbing water-flowers were strewn everywhere on the bosom of the ocean. They were erect fleshy stalks about a metre high with bright fist-sized sporing structures at their top ends, very gaudily coloured, bright scarlet with yellow petals striped with green, and curious swollen black air-bladders below. The air-bladders hung just below the surface, keeping the water-flowers afloat. Even when slapped by a passing high swell the plants would pop up immediately, back into the perpendicular like tireless clowns that could be knocked down again and again without ever failing to rebound.

“A miracle of resilience,” Quillan said.

“A lesson to us all, yes,” said Lawler, suddenly inspired to a sermon. “We must try at all times to emulate them. In this life we get hit and hit and hit and each time we have to bounce right back. The water-flower should be our model: invulnerable to everything, completely resistant, capable of enduring all blows. But in fact we aren’t as bouncy as water-flowers, are we, Father?”

“I’d say that you are, doctor.”

“Am I?”

“You’re very highly regarded, do you know that? Everyone I’ve spoken to has great praise for your patience, your endurance, your wisdom, your strength of character. Especially your strength of character. They tell me that you’re one of the toughest and strongest and most resilient people in the community.”

It sounded like a description of someone else entirely, someone far less brittle and inflexible than Valben Lawler. Lawler chuckled. “I may seem that way from the outside, I suppose. How wrong they all are.”

“I’ve always believed that a person is what he seems to others to be,” the priest said. “What you happen to think about yourself is completely unreliable and irrelevant. Only in the estimation of others can your true worth be validly determined.”

Lawler flicked an astonished glance at him. His long, austere face looked absolutely serious.

“Is that what you believe?” Lawler asked. He noticed that a note of irritation had crept into his voice. “I haven’t heard anything quite so crazy in a long time. But no, no, you’re just playing games with me, aren’t you? You like playing games of that sort.”

The priest offered no response. They fell silent, side by side in the cool morning sunlight. Lawler stared into the emptiness beyond. It lost focus and became a great blur of bobbing colours, an aimless ballet of water-flowers.

Then after a few moments he looked more closely at what was going on out there.

“I guess even the water-flowers aren’t completely invulnerable, eh?” he said, pointing out across the water. Some huge submerged creature’s mouth was visible on the far side of the field of flowers now, moving slowly among them just below the surface, creating a gaping dark cavern into which the bright-hued plants were tumbling by the dozens. “You can be as resilient as you like, but there’s always something coming along eventually to gobble you up. Isn’t that so, Father Quillan?”

Quillan’s reply was lost in a sudden gusting breeze.

There was another long cool silence. Lawler could still hear Quillan saying, “A person is what he seems to others to be. What you happen to think about yourself is completely unreliable and irrelevant.’ Total nonsense, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? Of course it was.

And then Lawler heard his own voice saying, without giving him any warning, “Father Quillan, why did you decide to come to Hydros in the first place?”

“Why?”

“Yes, why. This is a damned inhospitable planet, if you happen to be human. It wasn’t designed for us and we manage to live here only in uncomfortable circumstances and it isn’t possible to leave once you get here. Why would you want to maroon yourself forever on a world like that?”

Quillan’s eyes became curiously animated. With some fervour he said, “I came here because I found Hydros irresistibly attractive.”

That’s not really an answer.”

“Well, then.” There was a new edge on the priest’s voice, as though he felt that Lawler was pushing him into saying things he would just as soon not say. “Let’s put it that I came because it’s a place where all galactic refuse ultimately winds up. It’s a world populated entirely by discards, rejects, the odds and ends of the cosmos. That’s what it is, isn’t it?”

“Of course not.”

“All of you are the descendants of criminals. There aren’t any criminals in the rest of the galaxy any more. On the other worlds everyone is sane now.”

“I doubt that very much.” Lawler couldn’t believe that Quillan was serious. “We’re the descendants of criminals, yes, some of us. That isn’t any secret. People who were said to be criminals, at any rate. My great-great-grandfather, for instance, was sent here because he had some bad luck, that was all. He accidentally killed a man. But let’s say that you’re right, that we’re merely so much debris and the descendants of debris. Why would you want to live amongst us, then?”

The priest’s chilly blue eyes gleamed. “Isn’t it obvious? This is where I belong.”

“So you could do your holy work among us, and lead us to grace?”

“Not in the slightest. I came here for my needs, not yours.”

“Ah. So you came out of pure masochism, some kind of need to punish yourself. Is that it, Father Quillan?” Quillan was silent. But Lawler knew that he must be right. “Punishment for what? A crime? You just told me there aren’t any more criminals.”

“My crimes have been directed against God. Which makes me one of you fundamentally. An outcast, an exile by my inherent nature.”

“Crimes against God,” Lawler said, musing. God was as remote and mysterious a concept to him as monkeys and jungles, crags and goats. “What kind of crime could you possibly commit against God? If he’s omnipotent, presumably he’s invulnerable, and if he isn’t omnipotent how can he be God? Anyway, you told me only a week or two ago that you didn’t even know whether or not you believed in God.”

“Which in itself is a crime against Him.”

“Only if you believe in him. If he doesn’t exist, you certainly can’t do him any injury.”

“You have a priest’s way with a sneaky argument,” Quillan said approvingly.

“Were you serious, that other time, when you said you weren’t sure of your faith?”

“Yes.”

“Not playing verbal games with me? Not just offering me a little dollop of quick cheap cynicism for the sake of a moment’s quick amusement?”

“No. Not at all. I swear it.” Quillan reached out and put his hand across Lawler’s wrist, an oddly intimate, confiding sort of gesture which at another time Lawler might have regarded as an unacceptable encroachment but which now seemed almost endearing. In a low, clear voice he said, “I dedicated myself to the service of God when I was still a very young man. That sounds pretty pompous, I know. But in practice what it’s meant has been a lot of hard and disagreeable work, not just long sessions of prayer in cold draughty rooms at unlikely hours of the morning and night, but also the doing of chores so nasty that only a doctor, I suppose, would understand. The washing of the feet of the poor, so to speak. All right, so be it. I knew that that was what I was volunteering for, and I don’t want any medals for it. But what I didn’t know, Lawler, what I never remotely imagined at the outset, was that the deeper I got into serving God through serving suffering humanity, the more vulnerable I’d become to periods of absolute spiritual deadness. To long stretches when I felt cut off from all connection with the universe about me, when human beings became as alien to me as aliens are, when I didn’t have the slightest shred of belief in the higher Power to which I had pledged to devote my life. When I felt so completely alone that I can’t even begin to describe it to you. The harder I worked, the more pointless it all became. A very cruel joke: I was hoping to earn God’s grace, I suppose, and instead He’s given me some good stiff doses of His absence. Are you following me, Lawler?”

“And what causes this deadness in you, do you think?”

“That’s what I came here to find out.”

“Why here, though?”

“Because there’s no Church here. Because there are only the most fragmentary human communities. Because the planet itself is hostile to us. And because it’s a place of no return, like life itself.” Something beyond Lawler’s comprehension was dancing in Quillan’s eyes now, something as baffling as a candle flame that burned downward instead of up. He seemed to be staring at Lawler out of some deep annihilating eternity from which he knew he had come and to which he yearned to return. “I wanted to lose myself here, do you see? And in that way maybe to find myself. Or at least to find God.”

“God? Where? Someplace down there at the bottom of this enormous ocean?”

“Why not? He doesn’t seem to be anywhere else, does He?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Lawler began to say. But then from high overhead came a startling cry.

“Land ho!” Pilya Braun sang out. She was in the foremast rigging, standing on the yard. “Island to the north! Island to the north!”

There were no islands in these waters, neither to the north or south, nor to the east or west. If there were, everyone aboard would have been looking forward to the sighting for days. But no one had said a word about islands here.

Onyos Felk, in the wheel-box, let loose a bellow of disbelief. Shaking his head, the mapkeeper came stumping toward Pilya on his short bandy legs. “What are you saying, girl? What island? What would an island be doing in this part of the sea?”

“How would I know?” Pilya called. She held on to the ropes with one hand and swung herself far out over the deck. “did I put it there?”

“There can’t be an island.”

“Come up here and see for yourself, you dried-up old fish!”

“What? What?”

Lawler shaded his eyes and peered into the distance. All he saw were the bobbing water-flowers. But Quillan tugged eagerly at his arm. “There! Do you see?”

Did he? Yes, yes, Lawler thought he saw something: a thin yellow-brown line, perhaps, on the northern horizon. An island, though? How could he tell?

Everyone was on deck, now, milling around. In the midst of it all was Delagard, carrying the precious sea-chart globe cradled in one arm and a stubby spy-glass fashioned of a yellowish metal in the other. Onyos Felk went scurrying up to him and reached for the globe. Delagard gave him a poisonous look and shook him off with a hiss.

“But I need to look at—”

“Keep your hands away, will you?”

“The girl says there’s an island. I want to prove to her that that’s impossible.”

“She sees something, doesn’t she? Maybe it is one. You don’t know everything, Onyos. You don’t know anything.” With furious demonic energy Delagard pushed his way past the gawping mapkeeper and began to mount the rigging, climbing with his elbows and his teeth, still cradling the globe in his right arm and gripping the spy-glass with the left. He reached the yard somehow, wedged himself in, put the glass to his eye. There was a tremendous silence below him on the deck. After an infinitely long time Delagard looked down and said, “Damned if there isn’t!” The ship-owner handed the spy-glass to Pilya and feverishly pored over the globe, tracing the movements of neighbouring islands with exaggerated elbows-out excursions of his fingers. “Not Velmise, no. Not Salimil. Kaggeram? No. No. Kentrup?” He shook his head. Everyone was watching him. It was quite a performance, Lawler thought. Delagard passed the sea-chart to Pilya, took back the glass from her, gave her a little pat on the rump. He stared again. “God fuck us all! A new one, that’s what it is! They’re building it right now! Look at that! The timbers! The scaffolding! God fuck us all!” He tossed the spy-glass toward the deck. Dann Henders caught it deftly before it struck and put it to his eye, while the others crowded around him. Delagard was on his way down from the rigging, muttering to himself. “God fuck us all! God fuck us all!”

The spy-glass went from hand to hand. In a few minutes, though, the ship was close enough to the new island so that it could be seen without the aid of the glass. Lawler stared, fascinated and awed.

It was a narrow structure, perhaps twenty or thirty metres wide and a hundred metres long. Its highest point rose just a couple of metres out of the water, a ridge that looked like the humped spine of some colossal sea-creature basking just below the surface. Gillies, about a dozen of them, were moving ponderously about on it, hauling logs into place, bracing them up, cutting notches with strange Gillie tools, wrapping fibrous bindings about them.

The sea nearby was boiling with life and activity. Some of the creatures in it were Gillies, Lawler saw, Gillies by the score. The little domes of their heads were popping up and down in the tranquil waves like the tops of water-flowers. But he recognized also the long, sleek, shining forms of divers moving among them. They were fetching wood-kelp timbers up from the depths, it seemed, delivering them to the Gillies in the water, who were hewing them, squaring them off, passing them along an underwater chain to the shore of the new island, where other Gillie workers dragged them up into the air and set about preparing them for installation.

The Black Sea Star had pulled up to starboard. Figures were moving around on its deck, pointing, waving. On the other side, the Sorve Goddess was coming up fast, with the Three Moons not far behind it.

“That’s a platform over there,” Gabe Kinverson said. “North side of the island, to the left.”

“Jesus, yes!” Delagard cried. “Will you look at the size of it!”

Immobile just beyond the island, drifting alongside it as though moored, was what looked like a second island but which was in fact the enormous sea-creature that the island itself had for a moment seemed to be. Platforms were the largest animals of the seas of Hydros that any human had ever heard of, larger even than the all-devouring whale-like beasts known as mouths: huge flat blocky things, vaguely rectangular in shape, so inert they might just as well have been islands. They drifted casually in all seas, passively straining microorganisms from the water through screenlike apertures around their perimeters. How they managed to take in enough food in the course of a day to sustain themselves, even feeding round the clock as they did, was beyond anyone’s comprehension. Lawler imagined that they must be as sluggish as driftwood, metabolically—mere giant lumps of barely sentient meat. And yet their vast purple eyes, set in triple rows of six along their backs, each one wider across than a man’s shoulders, seemed to hold some sort of sombre intelligence. Now and then a platform had come wandering into Sorve Bay, floating with its belly just above the submerged planks of the bay floor. One time Lawler, out in the bay fishing from a small boat, had rowed unknowingly right over one, and found himself looking down in utter amazement into a set of those great sad eyes that stared back up at him through the transparent water with a sort of godlike detachment and even, he imagined, a weird kind of compassion.

This platform seemed to be in use as nothing more or less than a work-table. Bands of Gillies were toiling industriously on its back. They were moving about in knee-deep water, coiling and twining long strands of algae fibres that were being pushed up onto the platform from below by shining green tentacles. The tentacles were as thick as an arm, very supple, with fingerlike projections at their ends. No one, not even Kinverson, had any idea what kind of creature they might belong to.

Father Quillan said, “How marvellous it is, the way they all work together, those different animals!”

Lawler turned to the priest. “No one’s ever seen an island under construction before, not that I’ve ever heard of. So far as we’ve known, all the islands are hundreds or even thousands of years old. So this is how they do it! What a sight!”

“Some day,” Quillan said, “this whole planet will have real land like other worlds. The sea floor will rise, millions of years from now. By building these artificial islands and coming up out of the sea to live, the Gillies are preparing themselves for their next evolutionary phase.”

Lawler blinked. “How do you know that?”

“I studied geology and evolution at the seminary on Sunrise. Don’t you think priests are taught anything but rituals and scriptures? Or that we take the Bible literally? This place has a very quiet geological history, you know. There weren’t any dynamic crustal movements that pushed mountain ranges and whole continents up out of the primordial sea the way it happened on land worlds, and so everything remained on the same level, most of it submerged. In time the sea was able to erode away any land formations that did project above the water. But all that’s due to change. Pressure’s building up at the planet’s core. Internal gravitational stresses are slowly creating turbulence, and in thirty million years, forty million, fifty—”

“Hold it,” Lawler said. “What’s happening over there?”

Delagard and Dag Tharp were yelling at each other, suddenly. Dann Henders was mixed up in it too, red-faced, a vein standing out on his forehead. Tharp was a jittery, excitable man, always quarrelling with somebody about something; but the sight of the usually soft-spoken Henders in a high temper got Lawler’s attention right away.

He went over to them.

“What’s going on?”

Delagard said, “A little insubordination, that’s all. I can take care of it, doc.”

Tharp’s beak of a nose had turned crimson. The baggy flesh of his throat was quivering.

“Henders and I have suggested sailing over to the island and asking the Gillies to give us refuge,” he said to Lawler. “We can anchor nearby and help them build their island. It’ll be a partnership right from the start. But Delagard says no, no, we’re going to go on all the way to Grayvard. Do you know how long it’ll take to get to Grayvard? How many tricksy net-things can crawl up on board before we reach it? Or God knows what else that’s out here? Kinverson says we’ve been tremendously lucky so far, not encountering anything hostile to speak of, but how much longer can we—”

“Grayvard is where we’re going,” said Delagard icily.

“You see? You see?”

Henders said, “We should at least put it to a vote, don’t you think, doc? The longer we remain at sea, the greater the risks are of our running into the Wave, or some of the nasty critters that Gabe’s been telling us about, or some killer storm, or almost anything else. Here’s an island actually under construction. If the Gillies are using divers and what-all else to help them build it, even a platform, why wouldn’t they accept human help besides? And be grateful for it? But he won’t even consider it!”

Delagard gave the engineer a truculent glare. “Since when have Gillies ever wanted our help? You know how it was on Sorve, Henders.”

“This isn’t Sorve.”

“It’s all the same everywhere.”

“How can you be sure of that?” Henders snapped. “Listen, Nid, we’ve got to talk to the other ships, and that’s all there is to it. Dag, you go call Yanez and Sawtelle and the rest, and—”

“Stay right where you are, Dag,” Delagard said.

Tharp looked from Delagard to Henders and back again, and didn’t move. His wattles shook with anger.

Delagard said, “Listen to me! Do you want us to have to live on a miserable little flat island that’s months or years away from being finished? In what? Seaweed huts? Do you see any vaarghs there? Is there any bay that we can bring up useful materials from? And they won’t take us, anyway. They know we were tossed out of Sorve on our asses. Every Gillie on this planet knows that, believe me.”

“If these Gillies don’t want us,” said Tharp, “how can you be so sure the Grayvard Gillies will?”

Delagard’s face crimsoned. For a moment he seemed stung by that. Lawler realized that Delagard hadn’t said anything at all up till now about having cleared their arrival on Grayvard with the real owners of the island. It was only the human settlers on Grayvard that had agreed to provide sanctuary.

But Delagard made a quick recovery. “Dag, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. Since when do we have to ask permission of Gillies for emigration between islands? Once they let humans onto an island, they don’t give a shit which humans they are. They can hardly tell one batch of us from another as it is. So long as we don’t slop over onto the Gillie part of Grayvard, there won’t be any problem.”

“You’re very sure of yourself,” Henders said. “But why go all the way to Grayvard if we don’t have to? We still don’t know that it’s impossible for us to latch on at some closer island that doesn’t have a human settlement yet. These Gillies here might just be willing to take us in. And yes, maybe they’d be glad to get a little help from us building it, too.”

“Sure,” said Delagard. “They’d especially like to have a radio operator and an engineer. That would be just what they need. Okay: you two want to live on that island? Swim for it, then. Go on! The two of you, over the side, right now!” He grabbed Tharp by the arm and began to tug him toward the rail. Tharp gaped at him, pop-eyed. “Go on! Get going!”

“Hold it,” Lawler said quietly.

Delagard let go of Tharp and leaned forward, rocking on the balls of his feet. “You have an opinion, doc?”

“If they go over the side, I go too.”

Delagard laughed. “Fuck, doc! Nobody’s going over the side! What the hell do you think I am?”

“You really want an answer to that, Nid?”

“Look,” Delagard said, “what this comes down to is one simple thing. These are my ships. I’m the captain of this ship now and I’m also the head of the whole expedition, and nobody’s going to dispute that. Out of the generosity of my spirit and the greatness of my heart I’ve invited everyone who used to live on Sorve to sail with me to our new home on Grayvard Island. That’s where we’re going. A vote on whether we ought to try to settle on this little sliver of a new island here is altogether out of line. If Dag and Dan want to live there, fine, I’ll escort them over to it myself in the water-strider. But there won’t be any votes and there won’t be any change in the basic plan of the voyage. Is that clear? Dann? Dag? Is that clear, doc?”

Delagard’s fists were balled. He was a fighter, all right.

Henders said, “As I remember it, you were the one who got us into this fix in the first place, Nid. Was that out of the generosity of your spirit and the greatness of your heart too?”

“Shut up, Dann,” Lawler said. “Let me think.”

He glanced toward the new island. They were so close to it now that he could make out the yellow glint of Gillie eyes. The Gillies appeared to be going about their business without taking the slightest note of the approaching flotilla of human-occupied ships.

Lawler realized suddenly that Delagard was right and Henders and Tharp were wrong. Glad though he’d be to end the voyage right here and now, Lawler knew that trying to settle here wasn’t an idea worth thinking about. The island was tiny, a mere sliver of wood barely rising above the waves. Even if the Gillies were willing to let them in, there would be no room for them here.

Quietly he said, “All right. For once I’m with you, Nid. It isn’t any place for us, this little island.”

“Good. Good. Very sensible of you. I can always count on you to take a reasonable position, can’t I, doc?” Delagard cupped his hand to his mouth and shouted up to Pilya, in the rigging. “Cut to windward! Let’s get out of here!”

“We should have voted,” Dag Tharp said sullenly, rubbing his arm.

“Forget it,” Lawler told him. “This is Delagard’s party. We’re only his guests.”

3

The weather began to change in a fundamental way at the beginning of the week that followed. As the ships followed their northwesterly course toward Grayvard they were starting to leave tropical waters behind, and the strong sun and clear blue skies of the perpetual summer that reigned in the middle latitudes. These were temperate seas here. The water was cool, and dank chilling fogs rose from it when warm breezes blew from the equator. By midday the fog was gone; but the broad vault of the sky was often dappled with fleecy patches of cloud much of the time, or even a dull, lingering low overcast. One thing remained the same, though. There was still no rain. There had been none since the little fleet had left Sorve, and that was becoming cause for concern.

The look of the sea itself was different here. Home Sea’s familiar waters were well behind them now. This was the Yellow Sea, set off from the blue waters to the east by a sharp line of demarcation. A thick disagreeable scum of microscopic algae, puke-yellow with long red streaks running through it like dark gouts of blood, covered the surface in every direction as far as the horizon.

It was ugly stuff, but fertile. The water swarmed with life, much of it new and strange. Bulky ungraceful broad-headed fishes as big as a man, with dull blue scales and black blind-looking eyes, nosed around the ships like floating logs. Occasionally a beautiful velvety sea-leopard would come up with terrific velocity from straight below and swallow one in a single lunging gulp. One afternoon a stocky tubular thing twenty metres long with a jaw like a hatchet appeared from nowhere between the flagship and the bow of Bamber Cadrell’s ship and went slamming thunderously across the flagship’s wake, rising up and pounding the water frenziedly with its chin, and when it had passed by there were severed chunks of the broad-headed blue fish scattered everywhere on the yellow waves. Smaller versions of the hatchet-jaw now emerged from below and began to feed. Meatfish abounded here too, swimming in whirling circles with their sharp-tipped tentacles flashing like blades, but they stayed maddeningly out of the reach of Kinverson’s fishing lines.

Armies made up of millions of little many-legged things with glistening transparent bodies cut through the yellow scum like scythes, opening wide boulevards that closed immediately behind them. Gharkid brought up a net-load of them—they scrambled and thrashed wildly against the meshes, panicky in the open sunlight, trying to get back to the water—and when Dag Tharp, not at all serious, suggested that they might be good to eat, Gharkid promptly stewed a batch of them in their own yellow-stained sea-water and ate them with a show of complete unconcern.

“Not so bad,” he said. “Try some.”

Two hours later he still seemed to be all right. Others took the risk, Lawler among them. They ate them legs and all. The little crustaceans were crunchy, vaguely sweet, apparently nourishing. No one reacted badly to them. Gharkid spent the day at the gantry, pulling them up in his net by the thousand, and that night there was a great feast.

Other life-forms of the Yellow Sea were less rewarding. Ambulatory green jellyfish, harmless but messy, found a way of crawling up the sides of the hull onto the deck in great numbers, where they rotted within minutes. They all had to be swept back over the side, a task that took nearly an entire day. In one region the rigid black fruiting-towers of some large alga rose to heights of seven or eight metres above the water in the mornings and exploded in the warmth of midday, bombarding the ships with thousands of hard little pellets that sent people scattering for cover. And there were hagfish in these waters, too. By tens and twenties platoons of the worm-like things went whizzing and buzzing above the waves on flights of hundred metres or so, desperately flapping their sharp-angled leather wings with a weird dreadful purposefulness until at last they fell back into the water. Sometimes they passed close enough to the ship so that Lawler could see the ridges of hard red bristles on their backs, and he would touch his hand to his left cheek, where some abrasions still lingered from his own encounter with one.

“Why do they fly like that?” he asked Kinverson. “Are they trying to catch something that lives in the air?”

“Isn’t anything that lives in the air,” Kinverson said. “Something’s trying to catch them, more likely. They see a big mouth opening behind them and they take off. It’s a pretty good way to escape. The other time they fly is when they’re mating. The females go up ahead a ways, and the males come flying after them. The guys that fly the fastest and longest are the ones that get the girls.”

“Not a bad selection system. If you’re breeding for speed and endurance.”

“Let’s hope we don’t get to see it in action. The fuckers come out by the thousands. They can really fill the air, and they’re absolutely crazed.”

Lawler indicated the rough place on his cheek. “I can imagine. A little one smacked into me right here last week.”

“How little?” Kinverson said incuriously.

“Maybe fifteen centimetres.”

“Lucky thing for you it was so small,” Kinverson said. “Lot of real bitchy things out there.”

“You live in the past too much, doctor,” Pilya had said. But how could he not? The past lived in him. Not only Earth, that remote and mythical place; but Sorve, especially Sorve, where his blood and body and mind and soul had been put together. The past rose up in him all the time. It rose up in him now, as he stood by the rail looking out at the strangeness of the Yellow Sea.

He was ten years old, and his grandfather had called him to his vaargh. His grandfather had retired from doctoring three years before and spent his days walking by the sea-wall, and he was shrunken and yellowish-looking now and it was clear that he didn’t have much longer to live. He was very old, old enough to remember even some of the first-generation settlers, even his own grandfather, Harry Lawler, Harry the Founder.

“I have something for you, boy,” his grandfather said. “Come here. Come closer. You see that shelf, there, Valben? Where the Earth things are? Bring them over to me.”

There were four Earth things there, two flat round metal ones, and a large rusted metal one, and a painted piece of pottery. Once there had been six, but the other two, the little statuette and the piece of rough stone, were in Valben’s father’s vaargh now. Valben’s grandfather had already begun passing his possessions on.

“Here, boy,” his grandfather said. “I want you to have this. It belonged to my grandfather Harry, who got it from his grandfather, who brought it with him from Earth when he went to space. And now it’s yours.” And he gave him the piece of pottery, painted orange and black.

“Not my father? Not my brother?”

“This is for you,” his grandfather said. “To remember Earth by. And to remember me by. You’ll be careful not to lose it, won’t you? Because there are only six Earth things that we have, and if we lose them, we won’t be getting any more. Here. Here.” He pressed it into Valben’s hand. “From Greece, it is. Maybe Socrates once owned it, or Plato. And now it’s yours.”

That was the last time he ever spoke to his grandfather.

For months afterward he carried the piece of painted pottery with him wherever he went. And when he rubbed its jagged rough-edged surface it seemed to him that Earth was alive again in his hand, that Socrates himself was speaking to him out of the bit of pottery, or Plato. Whoever they might have been.

He was fifteen. His brother Coirey, who had run off to sea, was home for a visit. Coirey was nine years older than he was, the oldest of what once had been three brothers, but the middle one, young Bernat, had died so long ago that Valben scarcely remembered him. Coirey was to have been the island’s next doctor, some day; but Coirey had no interest in doctoring. Doctoring would tie him down to a single island. The sea, the sea, the sea, that was what Coirey wanted. And so Coirey had gone off to sea, and letters had come from him from places that were only names to Valben, Velmise and Sembilor and Thetopal and Meisa Meisanda; and now Coirey himself was here, just for a short while, stopping off at Sorve on a voyage to a place called Simbalimak, in a sea known as the Azure Sea that was so far away it seemed like another world.

Valben hadn’t seen him for four years. He didn’t know what to expect. The man who came in had the same face as his father, the face that he was beginning to have also, with strong features, a powerful jaw, a long straight nose; but he was so tanned by sun and wind that his skin looked like an old piece of rugfish hide, and there was an angry slash across his cheek, a purpling scar that ran from the corner of his eye to the corner of his mouth. “Meatfish got me,” he said. “But I got him, too.” He punched Valben’s arm. “Hey, you’re big! Just as big as I am, you are. But lighter. You need some flesh on your bones.” Coirey winked. “Come with me to Meisa Meisanda sometime. They know food, there. It’s a feast day every day. And the women! The women, boy!” He frowned and said, “You go for women, don’t you? Sure, of course you do. Right? Right. What about it, Val? When I get back from Simbalimak, will you take a trip to Meisa Meisanda with me?”

“You know I can’t leave here, Coirey. I have studying to do.”

“Studying.”

“Father’s teaching me doctoring.”

“Oh. Right. Right. I forgot that, didn’t I? You’re going to be the next Dr Lawler. But you can come away to sea with me for a little while first, can’t you?”

“No,” Valben said. “No, I can’t.”

And then he understood why his grandfather had given the little bit of pottery from Earth to him, and not to his older brother Coirey.

His brother never returned to Sorve again.

He was seventeen, and deep in his medical studies.

“High time you did an autopsy with me, Valben,” his father said. “It’s all just theory for you so far. But you’ve got to find out what’s inside the package sooner or later.”

“Maybe we ought to wait until I’ve finished my anatomy lessons,” he said. “So I have a better idea of what I’m seeing.”

“This is the best kind of anatomy lesson there is,” his father said.

And took him inside, to the surgical room, where someone was lying on the table under a light blanket of water-lettuce cloth. He drew the blanket aside and Valben saw that it was an old woman with grey hair and flabby breasts that fell aside toward her armpits; and then a moment later he realized that he knew her, that he was looking at Bamber Cadrell’s mother, Samara, the wife of Marinus. Of course he would know her, he realized: there were only sixty people on the island, and how could any of them be strangers? But still—Marinus” wife, Bamber’s mother—naked like this, lying dead on the surgical table—

“She died this morning, very quickly, just fell down in her vaargh. Marinus brought her in. Most likely her heart, but I want to see for certain, and you should see too.” His father picked up his case of surgical tools. Then he said, softly, “I didn’t enjoy my first autopsy either. But it’s a necessary thing, Valben. You’ve got to know what a liver looks like, and a spleen, and lungs, and a heart, and you can’t learn it by reading about them. You have to know the difference between healthy organs and diseased ones. And we don’t get that many bodies to work on, here. This is an opportunity I can’t let you pass up.”

He selected a scalpel, showing Valben the proper grip, and made the first incision. And began to lay bare the secrets of Samara Cadrell’s body.

It was bad at first, very bad.

Then he found he could tolerate it, that he was getting used to the awfulness of it, the shock of taking part in this bloody violation of the sanctuary of the body.

And after a time it actually became fascinating, when he had managed to forget that this was a woman he had known all his life, and was thinking of her only as an arrangement of internal organs of various colours and textures and shapes.

But that night, when he was done with the last of his studying and was out behind the reservoir with Boda Thalheim and sliding his hands across her smooth flat belly, he couldn’t keep from thinking that behind this tight drum of taut lovely skin there also was an arrangement of internal organs of various colours and textures and shapes very much like those he had seen this afternoon, the shining coils of intestines and all the rest, and that within these firm round breasts were intricate glands scarcely different from those within the flabby breasts of Samara Cadrell, which his father had demonstrated for him a few hours before with deft strokes of his scalpel. And he pulled his hands back from Boda’s sleek body as though it had turned into Samara’s under his caresses.

“Is something wrong, Val?”

“No. No.”

“Don’t you want to?”

“Of course I do. But—I don’t know—”

“Here. Let me help you.”

“Yes. Oh, Boda. Oh, yes!”

And in moments everything was all right. But he wondered if he would ever touch a girl again without having vivid images of her pancreas and kidneys and fallopian tubes rise unbidden and unwanted in his mind, and it occurred to him that being a doctor was a very complex business indeed.

Images out of bygone times. Phantoms that would never leave him.

Three days later Lawler went down to the cargo hold in the ship’s belly for some medical supplies, carrying only a small taper to light his way. In the dimness he nearly walked into Kinverson and Sundira, who were coming out from between the crates. They looked sweaty and dishevelled and a little surprised to see him, and there wasn’t much doubt of what they had been up to.

Kinverson, unabashed, looked at him straight on and said, “Morning, doc.”

Sundira didn’t say a thing. She tugged her wrap together in front, where it was parted, and went on past, expressionless, meeting Lawler’s eyes only for a moment and quickly looking away. She seemed not so much embarrassed as simply retreating into a self-containing sphere. Stung, Lawler nodded as if this were a completely neutral encounter in a completely neutral part of the ship, and continued forward to the medical storage area.

It was the first real evidence he had ever had that Kinverson and Thane were lovers, and it hit him harder than he would have expected. Kinverson’s words about the mating habits of hagfish, a few days earlier, came back to him now. He wondered whether they had been aimed at him in some sly, mocking way. The guys that fly the fastest get the girls.

No. No. Lawler knew that he had had plenty of opportunities of his own back on the island to get something going with Sundira. He had chosen not to, for reasons that had seemed to make sense at the time.

So why was he so hurt now?

You want her more than you’ll admit even to yourself, don’t you?

Yes. He did. Especially right now.

Why? Because she’s involved with somebody else?

What did it matter? He wanted her. Lawler had known that before, and had done nothing about it. Maybe it was time to start thinking harder about why he hadn’t.

He saw them together again later in the day in the stern, up by the gantry bridge. From the looks of things Kinverson had caught something unusual, and he was showing it to her, the proud huntsman displaying his catch to his woman.

“Doc?” Kinverson called, poking his head over the edge of the bridge. He smiled in a way that was either blandly amiable or casually condescending, Lawler wasn’t sure which. “Come up here for a minute, will you, doc? Something here that might interest you.”

Lawler’s first impulse was to shake his head and keep on going. But he didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of avoiding them. What was he afraid of? That he’d see Kinverson’s paw-prints all over her skin? He told himself not to be so stupid and scrambled up the little ladder to the gantry.

Kinverson had all manner of fishing equipment bolted to the deck, gaffs and hooks and lines and such. Here, too, were the nets Gharkid used in trawling for algae.

A graceful greenish creature that looked a little like a diver, but smaller, was lying limply on the gantry-bridge floor in a yellow puddle, as though Kinverson had just pulled it aboard. Lawler didn’t recognize it. Some sort of a mammal, most likely. Air-breathing, like so many other inhabitants of Hydros” ocean.

“What’s that you have there?” he asked Kinverson.

“Well, now, we’re not so sure, doc.”

It had a low, sloping forehead, an elongated muzzle tipped with stubby grey whiskers, and a slender streamlined body ending in a three-vaned tail. There was a pronounced spinal ridge. Its forelimbs were flattened into narrow flippers somewhat like those of Gillies. Curved grey claws, short and sharp, protruded from them. Its eyes, black and round and shining, were open.

It didn’t appear to be breathing. But it didn’t look dead, either. The eyes held an expression. Fear? Bewilderment? Who could say? They were alien eyes. They seemed to be worried ones.

Kinverson said, “This was fouled in one of Gharkid’s nets, and I pulled it in to clear it. You know, you can spend your whole life out on this ocean and even so you never stop seeing new critters.” He prodded the animal’s side. It responded with a weak, faint motion of its tail. “This one’s a goner, wouldn’t you say? Pretty little thing.”

“Let me have a closer look,” Lawler said.

He knelt beside it and cautiously put his hand on its flank. The skin was warm, clammy, perhaps feverish. He was able now to detect the sounds of faint breathing. The animal rolled its eyes downward to follow what Lawler was doing, but without any sign of great interest. Then its mouth sagged open and Lawler was startled to see a peculiar woody network just within it, a spherical structure of loosely tangled white fibrous strands blocking the animal’s entire mouth and gullet. The strands coalesced into a thick stem that disappeared down the creature’s throat.

He pressed his hands along the animal’s abdomen and felt rigidity within, lumps and bumps where all should have been smooth. His hands had finally begun to lose their stiffness by this time, and he was able to read the topography of the creature’s interior as though he had laid it bare with a scalpel. Wherever he touched it he could feel the signs of something invasive growing inside. He rolled the creature over and saw strands of the same woody network emerging from its anus, just above the tail.

Suddenly the animal uttered a dry, hacking, ratcheting sound. Its mouth opened wider than Lawler would have believed possible. The woody tangle within it rose into view, jutting far out of the animal’s mouth as if on a pedestal, and started to weave from side to side. Quickly Lawler rose to a standing position and stepped back. Something that looked like a little pink tongue detached itself from the fibrous sphere and zipped madly about on the deck, darting back and forth with manic energy. Lawler brought his boot down on it just as it went past him heading toward Sundira. A second autonomous tongue erupted from the sphere. He smashed that too. The sphere waggled around sluggishly as if gathering the energy to emit a few more.

To Kinverson he said, “Throw this thing into the sea, fast.”

“Huh?”

“Pick it up and heave it. Go on.”

Kinverson had been watching the examination in a baffled, remote way. But the urgency of Lawler’s tone got through to him. He slipped one big hand under the animal’s middle, lifted, tossed, all in one swift movement. The creature went plummeting inertly toward the water like a mere inanimate sack. At the last moment it managed to right itself and hit the surface smoothly, head first, as though by inherent reflexes still partially functioning. It managed one powerful kick of its tail and glided out of sight underwater in an instant.

“What the hell was that all about?” Kinverson asked.

“Parasite infestation. That animal was loaded from its snout to its tail with some kind of plant growth. Its mouth was full of it, didn’t you see? And all the way down its body. It’s been completely taken over by it. And those little pink tongues—my guess is that they were offshoots looking for new hosts.”

Sundira shivered. “Something like killer fungus?”

“Something like that, yes.”

“You think it could have infected us?”

“It sure was going to try,” Lawler said. “In an ocean the size of this one, the parasites can’t afford to be host-specific. They’ll take root in whatever they can.” He stared over the side, half expecting to see scores of parasite-ridden animals drifting helplessly all about the ship. But there was nothing down there except yellow scum streaked with red. Turning back to Kinverson, he said, “I want you to suspend all fishing operations until we get clear of this part of the sea. I’ll find Dag Tharp and tell him to send the same order to the other ships.”

“We need fresh meat, doc.”

“You want to have the personal responsibility of examining everything that’s caught to see if it’s carrying that parasitic plant?”

“Hell, no!”

Then we don’t haul anything in around here. It’s that simple. I’d rather live on dried fish for a while than have one of those things growing in my gut, wouldn’t you?”

Kinverson nodded solemnly.

“Such a pretty little thing, it was.”

A day later, still sailing through the Yellow Sea, they ran into their first tidal surge. The only surprise was that it had been so long in coming, considering that they had been at sea for several weeks now.

It was impossible to escape the surges altogether. The planet’s three moons, small and fast-moving, swung round and round in intricately intersecting orbital patterns, and at regular intervals they were lined up in such a way as to exert a powerful combined gravitational effect on the great ball of water they orbited. That lifted a great tidal bulge which continually travelled around Hydros” midsection as the planet turned. Smaller tidal effects, the products of the gravitational fields of the individual moons, moved at angles to it. The Gillies had designed their islands to withstand those inevitable times when a tidal surge would come their way. On certain exceptional occasions the lesser tidal surges crossed the path of the great one, setting up the massive turbulence known as the Wave. The Gillie islands were built to resist even the Wave; but individual boats and ships were helpless against it. The Wave was what every mariner feared more than anything.

The first tidal surge was one of the mild ones. The day was leaden and humid, the sun pale, indistinct, bloodless. The first watch was on duty, Martello, Kinverson, Gharkid, Pilya Braun. “Choppy sea ahead,” Kinverson called from aloft. Onyos Felk, in the wheel-box, reached for his spy-glass. Lawler, who had just emerged on deck after his morning medical call to the other ships, felt the deck plunge and buck beneath him as if the vessel had put its foot down on something solid. Yellowish spray came whirling up into his face.

He looked up toward the wheel-box. Felk was signalling to him with brusque gestures.

“Surge coming,” the mapkeeper called. “Get inside!”

Lawler saw Pilya and Leo Martello securing the ropes that held the sails. A moment later they dropped down out of the rigging. Gharkid had already gone below. Kinverson came trotting past, beckoning. “Come on, doc. You don’t want to be out here now.”

“No,” Lawler said. But still he lingered a moment more by the rail. He saw it, now. It was heading toward them out of the northwest like a little message of welcome from distant Grayvard—a fat grey wall of water that lay at a sharp angle across the horizon, rolling down on them with impressive speed. Lawler imagined some sort of rod sweeping through the sea just beneath the surface, pushing up this inexorable distended ridge. A cold salty wind preceded it, a cheerless harbinger.

“Doc,” Kinverson said again, from the hatch. “Sometimes they sweep the deck when they hit.”

“I know,” said Lawler. But the power of the oncoming surge fascinated him and held him. Kinverson vanished with a shrug into the ship’s interior. Lawler was alone now on deck. He realized they might well close the hatch and leave him out here. He took one last look at the surge, and then he ran for it. Below, everyone but Henders and Delagard was gathered in the companionway, bracing themselves against the imminent impact.

Kinverson slammed the hatch shut behind him and dogged it.

An odd grinding sound rose from the depths of the ship, somewhere aft.

“Magnetron’s coming on,” Sundira Thane said.

Lawler turned to her. “You’ve been through these before?”

“Too often. But this one won’t be much.”

The grinding sound grew louder. The magnetron sent down a shaft of force that pressed against the ball of molten iron at world’s core and provided a lever capable of lifting the ship a metre or two out of the water, or a bit more if necessary, just enough to carry it over the worst force of the surge. The magnetic displacement field was the one piece of super-technology that the humans of Hydros had managed to bring with them from the worlds of the galaxy. Dann Henders once had said that a device as powerful as the magnetron would have other applications far more useful to the settlers than keeping Delagard’s ferries afloat on turbulent seas, and very probably Henders was right about that; but Delagard kept the magnetrons sealed aboard his ships. They were his private property, the crown jewels of the Delagard maritime empire, the foundation of the family fortune.

“Are we up yet?” Lis Niklaus asked uneasily.

“When the grinding stops,” Neyana Golghoz said. “There. Now.”

All was silent.

The ship was floating just above the crest of the surge.

Only for a moment: the magnetron, potent though it was, had its limits. But a moment was long enough. The surge passed by and the ship drifted gently over it and down its far side, landing lightly in the pocket of displaced water beyond. As it resumed its place in the water it swayed and shuddered and shook. The impact of the descent was greater than Lawler had expected, and he had to fight to keep from being thrown down.

Then it was all over. They were afloat on an even keel again.

Delagard emerged from the hatch that led to the cargo hold, grinning in warm self-congratulation. Dann Henders was right behind him.

“That’s it, folks,” the ship-owner announced. “Back to your posts. Onward we go.”

The sea, in the wake of the surge, was gently perturbed, rocking like a cradle. When he went back up on deck Lawler could see the surge itself retreating to the southeast, a diminishing ripple cutting across the scummy surface of the water. He saw the yellow flag of the Golden Sun, the red one of the Three Moons, the green and black of the Sorve Goddess. Farther beyond he was able to make out the remaining two vessels, safe and apparently sound.

“Wasn’t so bad,” he said to Dag Tharp, who had come up just behind him.

“Wait,” Tharp said. “Just wait.”

4

The sea changed again. A fast cold current was sweeping through it here, coming out of the south, cutting a swathe through the yellow algae. At first there was only a narrow band of clear water through the scum, then a wider strip, and then, as the flotilla entered the main body of the current, all the water around them was a pure, clean blue again.

Kinverson asked Lawler if he thought the marine life here would be free of the parasitic plant. The voyagers had had no fresh fish for days. “Bring something up and let’s see,” Lawler told him. “Just be careful when you get it on deck.”

But there was no catch for Kinverson to be careful with. His nets came up empty, his hooks went untaken. Fish lived in these waters, plenty of them. But they kept their distance from the ship. Sometimes schools of them could be seen, swimming vigorously away. The other ships reported the same thing. They might as well have been sailing through desert waters.

At mealtimes there was grumbling in the galley.

“I can’t cook ”em if nobody catches ”em,” Lis Niklaus said. “Talk to Gabe.”

Kinverson was indifferent. “I can’t catch ”em if they won’t come near us. You don’t like it, go out there and swim after them and grab ”em with your hands. Okay?”

The fish continued to stay away, but now the ships entered a zone that was rich with algae of several new kinds, floating masses of an intricate tightly-woven red species mingled with long strips of a wide-leafed, highly succulent blue-green type. Gharkid had a glorious time with them. “They will be fine to eat,” he announced. “This I know. We will get much nourishment from them.”

“But if you’ve never seen these kinds before—” Leo Martello objected.

“I can tell. These will be good for eating.”

Gharkid tested them on himself in that innocent unfearing way of his that Lawler found so extraordinary. The red alga, he reported, would be suitable for salads. The blue-green one was best cooked in a little fish oil. He spent his days on the gantry bridge, reeling in load upon load, until half the deck was covered with piles of soggy seaweed.

Lawler went up to him as he sat sorting through the slimy mess, which still was streaming with water. Small creatures that had come up in the net wandered amidst the tangled algae: little snails and crablets and tiny crustaceans with very bright red shells that looked like fairy castles. Gharkid seemed unperturbed by the possibility that any of these minute passengers might have poisonous stingers, little jaws that could deliver big nips, toxic excretions, perils of unknown sorts. He was brushing them away from his algae with a comb made of reeds, and using his hands where that was quickest.

As Lawler approached, Gharkid gave him a broad smile, white teeth shining brilliantly against the dark background of his face, and said, “The sea has been good to us today. It has sent us a fine harvest.”

“Where’d you learn all that you know about the sea plants, Natim?”

Gharkid looked puzzled. “In the sea, where else? From the sea comes our life. You go into it, you find what is good. You try this and you try that. And you remember.” He plucked something from a knotted clump of the red weed and held it up delightedly for Lawler to inspect. “So sweet, it is. So delicate.” It was a kind of sea-slug, yellow with little red speckles, almost like an animated chunk of the yellow scum in the sea that lay behind them. A dozen curiously intense black eyes the size of fingertips waved on stubby stalks. Lawler failed to see either sweetness or delicacy in the blobby yellow thing, but Gharkid seemed charmed by it. He brought it close to his face and smiled at it. Then he flipped it over the side into the water.

“The sea’s blessed creature,” Gharkid said, in a tone of such all-loving benevolence that it made Lawler feel sour and irritable.

“You wonder what purpose it was made for,” he said.

“Oh, no, doctor-sir. No, I never wonder. Who am I to ask the sea why it does what it does?”

From his reverent tone it seemed almost as though he regarded the sea as his god. Perhaps he did. One way or another it was a question that required no answer, an impossible question for anyone of Lawler’s cast of mind to deal with. He had no wish to patronize Gharkid and certainly none to offend him. Feeling almost unclean in the face of Gharkid’s innocence and delight, Lawler smiled quickly and moved along. Farther up the deck he caught sight of Father Quillan studying them from a distance.

“I’ve been watching him work,” the priest said as Lawler came by. “Picking through all that seaweed, pulling it apart, stacking it up. He never stops. He seems so gentle, but there’s a fury inside that man somewhere. What do you know about him, anyway?”

“Gharkid? Not very much. Keeps to himself, doesn’t say a lot. I’m not sure where he lived before he showed up on Sorve a few years back. Nothing seems to interest him except algae.”

“A mystery.”

“Yes, a mystery. I used to think he was a thinker, working out the Lord only knows what philosophical problem in the privacy of his own head. But now I’m not so sure that anything goes on in there except contemplating the different kinds of seaweed. It’s easy enough to mistake silence for profundity, you know. I’m coming around these days to the view that he’s every bit as simple as he appears to be.”

“Well, that could be,” the priest said. “But I’d be very surprised. I’ve never actually met a truly simple man.”

“Do you mean that?”

“You may think they are, but you’re always wrong. In my line of work you eventually get a chance to see into people’s souls, when they finally come to trust you, or when they finally begin to believe that a priest is nothing but a thin curtain that stands between them and God. And then you discover that even the simple ones aren’t simple at all. Innocent, perhaps, but never simple. The human mind at its most minimal is too complex ever to be simple. So forgive me, doctor, if I suggest that you return to your first hypothesis about Gharkid. I believe that he thinks. I believe that he is a seeker after God, just like all the rest of us.”

Lawler smiled. Believing in God was one thing, seeking after God something else entirely. Gharkid might well be a believer, on some basic unquestioning level, for all Lawler knew. But it was Quillan who was the seeker. It always amused Lawler the way people projected their own needs and fears on the world about them and elevated them to the status of fundamental laws of the universe.

And was finding God really what they were all trying to do, every one of them? Quillan, yes. He had a professional need, so to speak. But Gharkid? Kinverson? Delagard? Lawler himself?

Lawler took a long close look at Quillan. By this time he had learned how to read the priest’s face. Quillan had two modes of expression. One was the pious and sincere one. The other was the cold, dead, cynical, God-empty one. He shifted from one to the other in accordance with whatever spiritual storms were raging within his troubled mind. Right now Lawler suspected he was getting the pious Quillan, the sincere Quillan.

He said, “You think I’m a seeker after God too?”

“Of course you are!”

“Because I can quote a few lines of the Bible?”

“Because you think that you can live your life in His shadow and not for a moment accept the fact of His existence. Which is a situation that automatically calls its own opposite into being. Deny God and you are doomed to spend your life searching for Him, if only for the sake of finding out whether you’re right about His nonexistence.”

“Which is your situation exactly, Father.”

“Of course.”

Lawler glanced down the deck toward Gharkid, who was patiently sorting through his latest catch of algae, trimming away the dead strands and flinging them over the side. He was singing to himself, a little tuneless song.

“And if you neither deny God nor accept him, what then?” Lawler asked. “Wouldn’t you then be a truly simple person?”

“I suppose you would, yes. But I’m yet to find any person like that.”

“I suggest you have a chat with our friend Gharkid, then.”

“Oh, but I have,” the priest said.

Still there was no rain. The fish decided to come back within reach of Kinverson’s fishing gear, but the skies remained unyielding. The voyage was well into its third week, and the water they had brought with them from Sorve was seriously depleted now. What was left of it had begun to take on a dank, brackish taste. Rationing was second nature to them all, but the prospect of struggling through the entire eight-week journey to Grayvard on what was presently in their storage tubs was a grim one.

It was still too soon to start living on the eyeballs and blood and spinal fluid of sea-creatures—techniques which Kinverson cited as things he had done during long solitary rainless voyages—and the situation wasn’t yet critical enough to get out the equipment by which fresh water could be distilled from the sea. That was a last resort, inefficient and wearisome, a matter of the slow, steady accumulation of single drops, good only for a desperation supply.

But there were other things they could do. Raw fish, full of moisture and relatively low on salt, was part of everyone’s daily diet now. Lis Niklaus did her best to clean and trim it into neat appealing fillets; but even so it quickly became a tiresome regimen and sometimes a nauseating one. Wetting one’s skin and clothing down with sea water was useful also. It was a way of reducing body temperature and thereby cutting back on the internal need for water. And it was the only way to keep clean, since the fresh water on board was too precious to use for washing.

Then one afternoon the sky darkened unexpectedly and a cloudburst broke over them. “Buckets!” Delagard yelled. “Bottles, casks, flasks, anything! Get them out on deck!”

Like demons they ran up and down the ladders, hauling out anything that might hold water until the deck was covered with receptacles of all sorts. Then they stripped, every one of them, and danced naked in the rain like lunatics, washing the salt crusts from their skins and from their clothes. Delagard cavorted on the bridge, a burly satyr with a hairy chest as fleshy as a woman’s. With him was Lis, laughing and shouting and jumping beside him, her long yellow hair pasted to her shoulders, her big globular breasts bouncing like planets threatening to leave their orbits. Emaciated little Dag Tharp danced with sturdy Neyana Golghoz, who looked strong enough to flip him over her shoulder. Lawler was savouring the downpour by himself near the rear mast when Pilya Braun came dancing by, eyes shining, lips drawn back in a fixed grin of invitation. Her olive skin was glossy and splendid in the rain. Lawler danced with her for a minute or so, admiring her strong thighs and deep bosom, but when by her motions Pilya seemed to indicate dancing off with him to some snug place belowdecks, Lawler pretended not to understand what she was trying to communicate, and after a time she moved away.

Gharkid capered on the gantry-bridge next to his pile of seaweed. Dann Henders and Onyos Felk had joined hands and were prancing around near the binnacle. Father Quillan, bony and pale with his robe cast aside, seemed to be in a trance, head turned to the sky, eyes glassy, arms outstretched, shoulders working rhythmically. Leo Martello was dancing with Sundira, the two of them looking good together, slim, agile, vigorous. Lawler glanced around for Kinverson and found him up by the bow, not dancing at all, just standing matter-of-factly naked in the rain letting the water stream down his powerful frame.

The storm lasted no more than fifteen minutes. Lis calculated afterward that it had provided them with half a day’s additional supply of water.

There was constant doctoring for Lawler to do, the shipboard accidents, the blisters, the sprains, some mild dysentery, one day a broken collarbone aboard Bamber Cadrell’s ship. Lawler felt the strain of trying to spread himself over the entire fleet. Much of what he had to do he did by radio, crouching in front of Dag Tharp’s incomprehensible jumble of equipment in the Queen of Hydros ” radio room. But broken bones couldn’t be set by radio. He went by water-strider to Cadrell’s Sorve Goddess to handle the job.

Riding in the strider was an uneasy business. The thing was a lightweight human-powered hydrofoil, as flimsy as one of the long-legged giant crabs that Lawler sometimes had seen delicately picking their way across the floor of Sorve Bay: a mere shell made of laminated strips of the lightest wood, equipped with pedals, pontoon floats, underwater outrigger wings to provide lift, and a high-efficiency propeller. A semi-live coating of slimy microorganisms that minimized frictional drag grew on its skin.

Dann Henders rode with Lawler on his trip over to the Sorve Goddess. The strider was lowered into the water by davits and they descended to it by ropes, hand over hand. Lawler’s feet rested at a distance of no more than centimetres from the surface of the sea when he took his place on the frontmost of the strider’s two seats. The fragile little vehicle rocked lightly on the gentle swells. It felt as though only a thin film protected him from a yawning abyss. Lawler imagined tentacles rising from the depths, mocking eyes big as platters staring at him out of the waves, silvery jaws opening to bite.

Henders settled in behind him. “Ready, doc? Let’s go.”

Together, pedalling flat out, they were just strong enough to get the strider up to takeoff speed. The first moments were the hardest. Once they had come up to speed the uppermost set of hydrofoils that had launched them on their way rose up out of the water, reducing drag, and the smaller pair of high-speed foils beneath was able to carry them swiftly along.

But there was no easing off once they had begun. Like any swift vessel, the strider had to climb constantly through its own bow wave: if they slackened the pace even a moment, wave drag would carry them under. No tentacles slithered toward them during the short journey, though. No toothy jaws nibbled at their toes. Friendly ropes were waiting to pull them onto the deck of the Sorve Goddess.

The broken collarbone belonged to Nimber Tanamind, an egregious hypochondriac whose medical problem this time, for once, was unequivocably genuine. A falling boom had cracked his left clavicle, and the whole upper side of his stocky body was swollen and blue. For once, also, Nimber wasn’t uttering any complaints. Perhaps it was shock, perhaps fear, perhaps he was dazed by the pain; he sat quietly against a heap of netting, looking stunned, his eyes out of focus, his arms trembling, his fingers doing odd little jerking things. Brondo Katzin and his wife Eliyana stood beside him, and Nimber’s wife Salai was nearby, fretfully pacing.

“Nimber,” Lawler said, with some affection. They were almost the same age. “You damned idiot, Nimber, what have you done to yourself now?”

Tanamind raised his head a little. He looked frightened. He said nothing, only moistened his lips. A glossy line of sweat lay across his forehead, though the day was cool.

“How long ago did this happen?” Lawler asked Bamber Cadrell.

“Maybe half an hour,” the captain said.

“He’s been conscious the whole time?”

“Yes.”

“You give him anything? A sedative?”

“Just a little brandy,” Cadrell said.

“All right,” said Lawler. “Let’s get to work. Lay him out on his back—that’s it, stretch him out flat. Is there a pillow or something we can stick under him? There, yes, right between his shoulderblades.” He took a paper packet of pain-killer from his kit. “Get me some water to put this in. I need some cloth compresses, too. Eliyana? About this long, and heat them in warm water—”

Nimber groaned only once, when Lawler spread his shoulders out so that his clavicles would flex and the fracture drop back into its proper place. After that he closed his eyes and seemed to disappear into meditation while Lawler did what he could to reduce the swelling and immobilize Nimber’s arm to keep him from reopening the break.

“Give him some more brandy,” Lawler said when he was done. He turned to Nimber’s wife. “Salai, you’ll have to be the doctor now. If he starts running a fever, let him have one of these every morning and night. If the side of his face swells up, call me. If he complains about numbness in his fingers, let me know that too. Anything else that might bother him is likely not to be very important.” Lawler looked toward Cadrell. “Bamber, I’ll have a little of that brandy myself.”

“Everything going well for you guys?” Cadrell asked.

“Other than losing Gospo, yes. And here?”

“We’re doing just fine.”

“That’s good to hear.”

It wasn’t much of a conversation. But the reunion had been a strangely stilted one from the moment he had come on board. How are you, doc, nice to see you, welcome to our ship, yes, but nothing in the way of real contact, no exchange of inner feelings offered or solicited. Even Nicko Thalheim, coming on deck a little belatedly, had simply smiled and nodded. It was like being among strangers. These people had become unfamiliar to him in just a few weeks. Lawler realized how thoroughly he had become embedded in the insular life of the flagship. And they in the microcosm of the Sorve Goddess. He wondered what the island community was going to be like when it finally reconstituted itself in its new home.

His return to the flagship was uneventful. He went straight to his cabin.

Seven drops of numbweed tincture. No, make it ten.

Thoughts of lost Earth came to Lawler often as he stood by the rail by night, listening to the heavy mysterious sounds of the sea and staring into the empty impenetrable darkness that pressed down on them. His obsession with the mother world seemed to be growing as the six ships made their daily way across the vast face of the water-planet. For the millionth time he tried to imagine what it was like when it was alive. The large islands called countries, ruled by kings and queens, wealthy and powerful beyond all comprehension. The fierce wars. Spectacular weapons, capable of wrecking worlds. And then that great migration into space, when they had sent the myriad starships outward, bearing the ancestors of all the human beings who lived anywhere in the galaxy today. Everyone. All had sprung from a single source, that one small world that had died.

Sundira, wandering the deck by night, appeared beside him.

“Pondering the destiny of the cosmos again, doctor?”

“As usual. Yes.”

“What’s tonight’s theme?”

“Irony. All those years that the Earth people worried about destroying themselves in one of their feverish nasty little wars. But they never did. And then their own sun went and did it for them in a single afternoon.”

“Thank God we were already out here settling among the stars.”

“Yes,” said Lawler, with a cool glance at the dark monster-infested sea. “How fine for us that was.”

Later in the night she returned. He hadn’t moved from his place by the rail.

“That you still there, Valben?”

“Still me, yes.” She had never called him by his first name before. It seemed odd to him for her to be doing it now: inappropriate, even. He couldn’t remember when anyone had last addressed him as “Valben’.

“Can you tolerate some company again?”

“Sure,” he said. “Can’t get to sleep?”

“Haven’t tried,” she said. “There’s a prayer meeting going on down below, did you know that?”

“And who are the holy ones taking part in it?”

“The Father, naturally. Lis. Neyana. Dann. And Gharkid.”

“Gharkid? Finally coming out of his shell?”

“Well, he’s just sitting there, actually. Father Quillan’s doing all the talking. Telling them how elusive God is, how difficult it is for us to sustain our faith in a Supreme Being who never speaks to us, never gives us any proof that he’s really there. What an effort it is for anyone to have faith, and that that’s not right, it shouldn’t be an effort at all, we ought to be able simply to make a blind leap and accept God’s existence, only that’s too hard for most of us. Et cetera, et cetera. And the others are drinking it all in. Gharkid listens and now and then he nods. A strange one, he is. You want to go below and hear what the Father’s saying?”

“No,” Lawler said. “I’ve already had the privilege of hearing him hold forth on the topic, thanks.”

They stood together in silence for a time.

Then after a while Sundira said, apropos of nothing at all, “Valben. What kind of name is Valben?”

“An Earth name.”

“No, it isn’t. John, Richard, Elizabeth, those are Earth names. Leo, he’s got an Earth name. I never heard of any name like Valben.”

“Does that mean it isn’t an Earth name, then?”

“I just know that I know what Earth names are like, and I never heard of a Valben.”

“Well, maybe it isn’t an Earth name, then. My father said it was. He could have been wrong.”

“Valben,” she said, playing with the sound of it. “A family name, maybe, a special name. It’s a new one to me. Would you prefer that I call you Valben?”

“Prefer? No. Call me Valben if you want to. But in fact nobody does.”

“What do they call you that you like, then? Doc, isn’t it?”

He shrugged. “Doc’s okay. Some call me Lawler. A few call me Val. Just a very few.”

“Val. I like the sound of that better than Doc. Is it all right if I call you Val?”

Only his oldest friends called him Val, men like Nicko Thalheim, Nimber Tanamind, Nestor Yanez. It didn’t sound at all right on her lips. But why should that matter? He could get used to it. And “Val” was better than “Valben’, at least.

“Whatever you like,” he said.

Another tidal surge arrived three days later, this one coming from due west. It was stronger than the first one, but the magnetrons had no problem dealing with it. Up and over, and down the far side, a little bump upon landing, and that was that.

The weather stayed cool and dry. The voyagers went onward.

In the depths of the night there was a loud muffled thump against the hull, as though the ship had struck a reef. Lawler sat up in his bunk, yawning, thumbing his eyes, wondering if he had dreamed it. Everything was silent for a moment. Then came another thump, a harder one. No dream, then. He was still half asleep, yes, but he was half awake also. He counted off a minute, a minute and a half. Another thump. He heard the timbers of the hull creak and shift.

He wrapped something around his middle and went out toward the companionway, fully awake now. Lights had been lit; people were streaming out of the portside cabin, blurry-faced, a couple of them still naked, no doubt just as they had slept. Lawler went up on deck. The night watch—Henders, Golghoz, Delagard, Niklaus, Thane—was running around in an agitated way, speeding from one side of the ship to the other as though following the movements of some enemy attacking from below.

“Here they come again!” someone called.

Thump. Up here, the impact was greater—the ship seemed to shiver and jump to one side—and the sound of the hull’s being struck was sharper, a clear startling hard-edged sound.

Lawler found Dag Tharp near the rail.

“What’s going on?”

“Look out there and you’ll see.”

The sea was calm. Two moons were aloft, at opposite ends of the sky, and the Cross had begun its nightly slide toward dawn, hanging in an off-centre position a little toward the east. The six ships of the flotilla had wandered somewhat from their usual three-ranks formation and were arrayed in a wide loosely-drawn circle. Perhaps a dozen long streaks of brilliant blue phosphorescence were visible in the open water in the centre of the group, like fiery arrows of light cutting through the ocean not far below the surface. As Lawler watched, perplexed, one of the phosphorescent streaks extended itself at a startling pace, shooting swiftly in a straight line toward the ship just to the left of theirs, travelling on a collision course, a bright needle in the darkness. From somewhere came an ominous high-pitched pinging sound, steadily growing in intensity as the streak of light approached the vessel.

The collision came. Lawler heard the crack of impact and saw the other ship heel over a little way. Faintly across the water came the sound of shouts.

The phosphorescent streak backed off, sped away, back toward the open central water.

“Rammerhorns,” Tharp said. “They’re trying to sink us.”

Lawler grasped the rail and looked down. His eyes were more accustomed to the dark now. He could see the attackers clearly by the light of their own phosphorescence.

They looked like living missiles, narrow-bodied, ten or fifteen metres long, propelled by strong double-fluked tails. From their blunt foreheads sprouted a single thick yellow horn, perhaps five metres in length and sturdy as a kelp-trunk, that terminated in a blunt but dangerous-looking point. They were swimming at a furious rate across the open zone between the ships, getting up to immense speeds by furious lashing movements of their tails and bashing their horns into the sides of the vessels in the obvious hope of breaching them. Then, with a kind of insane persistence, they turned around, swam off to a distance, and charged again even more fiercely. The faster they swam the more intense was the luminescence that streamed from their flanks, and the louder was the sharp pinging sound that they emitted.

Kinverson appeared from somewhere, lugging something that looked like a heavy iron kettle bound in algae fibre. “Give me a hand with this, will you, doc?”

“Where are you taking it?”

“The bridge. It’s a sonic.”

The kettle, or whatever it was, was almost too heavy for Kinverson to manage by himself. Lawler caught hold of it by a knotted cord that dangled from the side nearest him. Together he and Kinverson were able to struggle it down the deck toward the bridge. Delagard joined them there and the three of them hauled it up to the higher level.

“Fucking rammerhorns,” Kinverson muttered. “I knew they were bound to turn up sooner or later.”

There was another thump below. Lawler saw a streak of dazzling blue light rebound from the ship and go scuttering off in the other direction.

Of all the strange creatures that the sea had sent against them thus far in the voyage, these things that were blindly battering into them seemed to Lawler to be the most frightening. You could stomp some, duck others, keep a watchful eye on odd-looking netting. But how could you deal with these spears coming at you from below in the night, these huge creatures determined to sink you, and capable of doing it?

“Are they strong enough to pierce the hull?” Lawler asked Delagard.

“It’s been known to happen. Jesus. Jesus!”

Kinverson’s giant form, outlined by the moonlight, rose high above the big kettle, which he had installed by this time at the front end of the bridge. He had unfastened a long padded stick that had been tied to the kettle’s side and now he grasped it in both hands and brought it down on the kettle’s drum-like top. A heavy booming sound rumbled out across the waters.

He struck again, again, again.

“What’s he doing?” Lawler asked.

“Sending a countersonic. Rammerhorns can’t see. They do it all by bouncing sound waves off their target. Gabe’s screwing up their directional senses.”

Kinverson pounded on his drum with phenomenal energy and zeal. The air was thick with the booming sounds that he made. Could they penetrate the water? Apparently so. Down below, the rammerhorns were rushing back and forth in the space between the ships even more swiftly than before, so that the dazzling streaks of blue light that marked their trails were intricately interwoven. But the patterns were getting erratic. A chaotic jerkiness seemed to be entering the movements of the rammerhorns as Kinverson continued to beat his drum. They moved in wild lunging leaps, now and then breaking the surface of the water, soaring aloft for a moment or two, landing with great splashing impacts. One of them struck the ship, but it was only a weak glancing blow. The pingings they made grew arrhythmic and discordant. For a moment Kinverson paused, as though he were getting tired, and it appeared as if the rammerhorns might regroup. But then he resumed his booming with even more fervour than before, hammering away with his stick, on and on and on. Suddenly there was a great flurry down below and two of the huge attackers leaped from the water at the same moment. By the light of the others, swimming in ragged circles around them, Lawler saw that the horn of one had penetrated the gill-slits of the other, was in fact impaled deep within the other rammerhorn’s skull; and both creatures, falling back to the water still linked in that terrible way, now began to sink. Their path into the depths was revealed for a moment or two more by the trail of phosphorescence that they left behind. Then they could no longer be seen.

Kinverson struck the drum three last slow blows, widely spaced—boom—boom—boom—and lowered his arm.

“Dag? Dag, where the hell are you?” It was Delagard’s voice, coming out of the darkness. “Start calling around the fleet. Make sure nobody’s sprung a leak.”

All was dark and quiet in the water. But when Lawler closed his eyes it seemed to him that searing streaks of blue light were flashing back and forth against his lids.

The next tidal surge was the most powerful one yet. It came upon them two days before they were expecting it, evidently because Onyos Felk had got his numbers wrong; and it struck with great enthusiasm and really jubilant malevolence, whacking the ships broadside as they lolled becalmed in a sleepy sea where drifting grey weeds belched a strangely seductive perfume upward into the air. Lawler was working belowdecks to reorganize his inventory of medicines. He thought at first that the rammerhorns had returned, so sharp was the impact. But no, no, this was nothing like the single point-source of a rammerhorn blow: it was more like the flat of a giant hand striking the hull and pushing the ship backward along its own course. He heard the magnetron kick in and waited for the sensation of lift, the sudden silence that meant they were riding the displacement field above the angry water. But the silence didn’t come, and Lawler had to make a quick desperate grab for the side of his bunk as the ship heeled up at a startling angle, throwing him toward the bulkhead. Things fell from his shelves and sped in one quick whoosh along the floor, fetching up in a scrambled heap on the far side of the cabin.

Was this it? The Wave, at last? And would they be able to withstand it?

He held tight and waited. The ship rocked back, fell with what sounded like a colossal crash into the cavity that the surge had left behind, and heeled over the other way, sending everything that had fallen from the shelves sliding back across the cabin. Then it righted itself. All was still. He picked up the Egyptian god and the Greek potsherd and put them back where they had been.

More? Another blow?

No. Still and steady.

Are we sinking, then?

Apparently not. Cautiously Lawler made his way out of the cabin and cocked an ear. Delagard was yelling something. They were all right, he said. It had been a good hard smack, but they were all right.

The force of the big surge had carried them along with it, though, and it had pulled them off course, sweeping them eastward half a day’s journey. But all six vessels had been swept, miraculously, as a single unit. There they were, out of formation but still within sight of one another, drifting on the now tranquil sea. It took an hour to rebuild the formation, six hours more to regain the position they had held when the surge had hit them. Not so bad, really. They went onward.

5

Nimber Tanamind’s collarbone seemed to be healing properly. Lawler didn’t go back over to the Sorve Goddess to check it out, since nothing that Nimber’s wife Salai told him about his condition indicated that problems were developing. Lawler described to her how she should change the bandage and what to look for in the vicinity of the fracture.

Martin Yanez of the Three Moons called in to say that old Sweyner the glassblower had been struck in the face by a fast-flying hagfish, and now his neck was so sore that he couldn’t hold his head straight. Lawler told Yanez what to do about that. From the Sisterhood ship, the Hydros Cross, came a rare query: Sister Boda was having shooting pains in her left breast. There was no point in going to see her. The Sisters, he knew, weren’t likely to let him examine her. He suggested pain-killers and asked them to call back after Sister Boda’s next menstrual period. That was the last he heard of Sister Boda’s sore breast.

Someone on the Black Sea Star fell from the rigging and dislocated her arm. Lawler led Poilin Stayvol step by step through the process of relocating it for her. Someone on the Golden Sun was vomiting black bile. It turned out that he had been experimenting with eating arrowfish caviar. Lawler advised a more cautious diet. Someone on the Sorve Goddess complained of recurring nightmares. Lawler suggested a nip of brandy before going to sleep. For Lawler it was business as usual.

Father Quillan, perhaps envious, observed that it must be wonderfully gratifying to him to be needed in this way, to be so essential to the life of an entire community, to be able to heal the suffering ones, more often than not, when they turned to him in pain.

“Gratifying? I suppose so. I’ve never actually bothered to think much about it. It’s simply my job.”

And so it was. But Lawler realized that there was something in what the priest had said. His power over Sorve Island had been almost godlike, or at least priestly. What did it mean, after all, to have been the doctor there for twenty-five years? Why, that he had had every man’s balls in his hand at one time or another, that he had had his arm up every woman’s cunt, that just about everyone on Sorve under the age of twenty-five was someone he had pulled out into the air, bloody and kicking, and given his first slap on the rump. All that tended to create a certain bond. It gave the doctor a certain claim on them, and they on him. No wonder people anywhere will worship their doctor, Lawler thought. To them he is the Healer. The Doctor. The Magician. The one who protects, the one who gives comfort and surcease from pain. It had been going on that way since the days of the cave dwellers, back there on poor damned doomed lost Earth. He was only the latest in a long long line. And, unlike the hapless Father Quillan and others of his profession, whose thankless task it was to proffer the blessings of an invisible god, he was actually in a position where he could sometimes deliver tangible benefits. So yes, yes, he was a powerful figure in the community by virtue of his vocation, the man with the power of life and death, respected and needed and probably feared, and he supposed that that was gratifying. Very well. He was gratified. He didn’t see how that made much of a difference.

They were in the Green Sea now, where dense colonies of a lovely aquatic plant made it almost impossible for the ships to move forward. The plant was succulent, with thick glossy spoon-shaped leaves sprouting from a brown central stem and a central sporing stalk topped by brilliant yellow-and-purple reproductive bodies. Air-filled bladders kept the plants afloat. Feathery grey roots twined like tentacles below the surface, tangled together in dark mats. The plants were so closely interwoven below the waterline that they formed what was virtually an unbroken carpet covering the sea. The ships butted bow-first into them and came to a standstill.

Kinverson and Neyana Golghoz went out in the water-strider with machetes to hack them apart.

“Useless,” Gharkid said, to no one in particular. “I know these plants. You cut them up, each one turns into five new ones.”

Gharkid was right. Kinverson chopped at the pretty weeds with might and main while Neyana pedalled the strider forward by sheer brute force; but no opening appeared. It wasn’t possible for one man, no matter how strong, to cut a big enough hole in the plant mass to create any real channel. The sundered pieces of each plant took up independent lives immediately: you could almost see them growing themselves back, sealing off the cut place, putting out new roots, sending up shiny new spoons and showy new sporing stalks.

“Let me check my medical supplies,” said Lawler. “I might have something we can sprinkle on them that they won’t enjoy.”

He went below, to the cargo hold. What he had in mind was a tall flask of a black viscous oil sent to him long ago by his colleague Dr Nikitin of Salamil Island in return for a favour. Supposedly Dr Nikitin’s oil was useful in killing fireflower, an unpleasant stinging plant that occasionally caused problems for human swimmers, though Gillies didn’t seem to mind its presence at all. Lawler had never needed to make use of the oil: the last fireflower infestation in Sorve Bay had occurred when he was still a young man. But it was the only thing in his collection of drugs, medicines, ointments and potions that was intended to do injury to some form of plant life. Maybe it would be effective against the one they were encountering here. He saw no harm in trying.

The instructions on the label, closely written out in Dr Nikitin’s meticulous hand, said that a concentration of one part to a thousand parts of water would be sufficient to clear a hectare of bay from fireflower. Lawler mixed it in a concentration of one part to a hundred and had himself swung out over the water in the davits to spray it on the weeds around the Queen of Hydros ” bow.

The weeds seemed unbothered by it. But as the diluted oil trickled down through the clotted plants and spread out through the water around them an undersea commotion began, and quickly became a turmoil. From the deep came fish, thousands of them, millions, little nightmare creatures with huge gaping jaws, slim serpentine bodies, broadly flaring tails. Vast numbers of them must have been nesting down there under the plants and now the whole colony was rising as though with one accord. They smashed their way upward through the matted clumps of roots and went into a wild mating frenzy at the surface. Dr Nikitin’s oil, harmless though it was to the weeds, appeared to have a potent aphrodisiac effect on the creatures that lived in the water below them. The wild writhing of vast numbers of the snaky little things set the sea into such turbulence that the tight clusters of interwoven weeds were ripped apart and the ships were able to make their way through the channels that appeared. In short order all six vessels were past the zone of congestion, moving freely in open water.

“What a clever bastard you are, doc,” Delagard said.

“Yes. Except I didn’t know that was going to happen.”

“You didn’t?”

“Not a clue. I was simply trying to poison those plants. I had no idea those fish were underneath them. Now you see how a lot of great scientific discoveries get made.”

Delagard frowned. “And how is that?”

“By sheer accident.”

“Ah, yes,” said Father Quillan. Lawler saw that the priest was in his cynic/unbeliever mode. With a mock-solemn intonation Quillan exclaimed, “God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.”

“Indeed,” Lawler said. “So he does.”

A couple of days beyond the water-plant zone the sea became shallow for a time, hardly any deeper than Sorve Bay, with utterly transparent water. Gigantic contorted heads of coral, some of it green, some of it ochre, much of it a brooding dark shade of blue that was practically black, could be seen rising from a sea floor of brilliant white sand that looked close enough to touch. The green coral sprouted in fantastic baroque spires, the blue-black was in the form of umbrellas and long thick arms, the ochre had the shape of great flaring flattened horns, branching and rebranching. There was also a huge scarlet coral that grew as single isolated globular masses, vivid against the white sand, which had the wrinkled, involuted shape of human brains.

In places the coral had expanded its reach so exuberantly that it breached the surface. Little whitecaps licked around it at the waterline. The clumps that had been exposed longest to the air were dead, bleaching to whiteness in the hard sunlight, and just below them was a layer of dying coral that was taking on a dull brown colour.

“The beginning of land on Hydros,” Father Quillan observed. “Let the sea level change a little and all this coral will be sticking out of the water. Then it’ll decompose into soil, seed-producing air-dwelling plants will evolve and start sprouting, and away we’ll go. Natural islands first, then the sea floor rises a little more, and we get continents.”

“And how long do you think it’ll be before that happens?” Delagard asked.

Quillan shrugged. “Thirty million years? Forty, maybe. Or maybe a lot more than that.”

“Thank God!” Delagard bellowed. “Then we don’t have to worry about it for a while!”

What they did have to worry about, though, was this coral sea. The ochre coral heads, the horn-shaped ones, looked sharp as razors, and in places their upper edges lay only a few metres deeper than keel depth. There might be other places where there was even less clearance. A ship that passed over one could find itself laid open from bow to stern.

So it was necessary to move warily, searching for safe channels within the reefs. For the first time since they had left Sorve there could be no night sailing at all. By day, when the sun was a beacon striking patterns of sparkling lines on the shimmering white sea-floor, the voyagers wove a cautious path between the coral outcroppings, staring down in wonder at the unthinkable swarms of gilded fish that clustered around the coral, swiftly and silently going about their business, great hordes of them threading down every passageway as they fed on the reef’s rich population of microlife. By night the six ships anchored close by one another in some safe open sector, waiting for the dawn. Everyone came up on deck and leaned out, calling to friends on the other ships, even conducting shouted conversations. It was the first real contact most of them had had since their departure.

The night spectacle was even more dazzling than the daytime one: under the cold light of the Cross and the three moons, with Sunrise adding its own measure of brilliance, the coral creatures themselves came to life, emerging from a billion billion tiny caverns in the reefs: long whips, scarlet here, subtle rose there, a sulphurous yellow on this kind of coral, a glaucous bright aquamarine on that one, everything uncoiling and reaching forth, all of them frantically flagellating the water to harvest the even tinier beings that hung suspended in it. Down the aisles of the reef came stunning serpentine things, all eyes and teeth and shining scales, that slithered diligently along the bottom, leaving elegant belly-tracks in the sand. A pulsing green luminescence flowed from them. And out of a myriad dark dens appeared the apparent kings of the reef, swollen red octopoid creatures with plump, baggy, prosperous-looking bodies held secure within long swirling coiling tentacles from which emanated a throbbing, terrifying bluish-white light. By night every coral head became the throne for one of these great octopoids: there it sat, glowing smugly, quietly surveying its kingdom with gleaming yellow-green eyes that were larger across than a man’s outstretched hand. There was no escaping the gaze of those eyes as you peered over the rail in the darkness to look down at the wonderworld beneath. They stared at you confidently, complacently, revealing neither curiosity nor fear. What those great eyes seemed to be saying was, We are masters here, and you are not at all important. Come, swim down to us, and let us put you to some good use. And sharp yellow beaks would open suggestively. Come down to us. Come down to us. It was a temptation.

The coral outcroppings began to thin out, grew more and more sparse, finally vanished altogether. The sea floor remained shallow and sandy a while longer; then, abruptly, the brilliant white sand could no longer be seen, and the turquoise water, which had been so clear and serene, turned once more into the opaque dark blue of deep waters with a choppy covering of light rippling swells.

Lawler began to feel as if the voyage would never end. The ship had become not just his island but his entire world. He would simply go on and on aboard it forever. The other ships travelled alongside it like neighbouring planets in the void.

The odd thing was that he saw nothing much wrong with that. He was fully caught up in the rhythm of the voyage now. He had learned to enjoy the constant rocking of the ship, accepting the little privations, even relishing the occasional visitations of monsters. He had settled down. He had adapted. Was he mellowing? Or was it, perhaps, that he had simply become an ascetic, not really needing anything, not caring much about temporal comforts? It could be. He made a note to ask Father Quillan about that when he had a chance.

Dann Henders had gashed his forearm on a gaff while helping Kinverson bring on board some enormous flopping man-sized fish, and Lawler, his supply of bandages depleted, went down to the cargo hold to get more from his reserve stores. He was always uneasy when he went down there, ever since his encounter with Kinverson and Sundira; he assumed they were still slipping off there together and the last thing he wanted was to stumble upon them again.

But Kinverson was on deck just then, busy gutting his fish. Lawler rummaged around amidships for a time in the dark musty depths of the hold. Then he turned to start making his way back up and practically collided with Sundira Thane, coming toward him down the same narrow, badly lit passageway that he had just entered.

She seemed as surprised to find Lawler there as he was to see her, and the surprise appeared genuine. “Val?” she said. Her eyes went wide and she took a hasty awkward step back from him just in time to avoid crashing into him.

Then the ship lurched sharply and flung her forward again, right into his arms.

It had to be an accident: she would never have done anything so blatant. Bracing himself against the stack of packing crates behind him, Lawler let his stack of folded bandages drop and caught her as she came whirling into him like a discarded doll that some petulant little girl had thrown. He held her, steadying her on her feet. The ship started to lurch back the other way and he tightened his grip to keep her from being hurled against the far wall. They stood nose to nose, eye to eye, laughing.

Then the ship righted itself and Lawler became aware that he was still holding her. And enjoying it.

So much for his alleged asceticism. What the hell. What the hell, indeed.

His lips went to hers, or perhaps hers went to his: he was never quite sure afterward which it had been. But the kiss was a long and active and interesting one. After that, though the ship’s motions had become much less extreme, there was nothing really to be gained by letting go of her. His hands moved, though, one roaming the small of her back, the other sliding downward to her taut muscular rump, and he pulled her even closer against him, or she pushed herself closer: that too was an uncertain thing.

Lawler was wearing only a twist of yellow cloth around his waist. Sundira had on a light hip-length grey wrap. It was easy enough to untwist and unwrap. The whole thing was happening in a simple, orderly, predictable way, though it was not at all dull for being so predictable: it had the clear, crisp, lucid inevitability of a dream, and a dream’s infinitely promising mysteriousness. Dreamily Lawler explored her skin. It was smooth and warm. Dreamily Sundira ran her fingers across the back of his neck. Dreamily he moved his right hand from her back to her front, down between their close-pressed bodies, past the valley between her small firm breasts where he had probed with his stethoscope what seemed several hundred years before, and on downward over her flat belly to the juncture of her thighs. He touched her. She was wet. She began to take the lead away from him now, pushing him backward, not in any unfriendly way but just trying, so it seemed, to guide him into a place between the packing crates where they would have room to lie down, or at least almost to lie down. After a moment he understood that.

It was close, cramped quarters. They both were long-legged people. But somehow they managed things, without even having rehearsed them. Neither of them said a word. Sundira was lively and active and quick. Lawler was vigorous and eager. It took just a moment for them to synchronize their rhythms and then it was smooth sailing all the way. Somewhere in the middle of things Lawler found himself trying to calculate how long it had actually been since he had last done this, and he dictated an angry memorandum to himself that got his attention back where it belonged.

Afterward they lay laughing and gasping in a sweaty heap, their legs still intertwined in a complicated fashion that might have been a challenge for the octopoids of the coral reef to bring off. Lawler sensed that this was not the time to be saying anything that might be considered as sentimental or romantic.

But he had to say something, eventually.

“You didn’t follow me down here, did you?” he asked, finally breaking the long silence.

She looked at him with surprise and amusement mingling in her look.

“Why would I have done that?”

“How would I know?”

“I came down here to get some rope-mending tools. I didn’t know you were here. The next thing was the ship jumping around and then I was in your arms.”

“Yes. You don’t regret that, do you?”

“No,” she said. “Why should I? Do you?”

“Not at all.”

“Good,” she said. “We could have done this a long time back, you know.”

“Could we?”

“Of course we could. Why did you wait so long?”

He studied her by the light of the dim, smoky taper. Her cool grey eyes held a glint of amusement, definite amusement, but he saw no mockery there. Even so, it seemed to him that she was taking this rather more lightly than he was.

“I could ask the same thing,” he said.

“Good point.” Then, after a moment: “I gave you some opportunities. You very carefully didn’t take them.”

“I know.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a long story,” he said. “Also very boring. Does it matter?”

“Not really.”

“Good.”

They fell into another spell of silence.

After a little while the thought came to him that it might be a good idea to make love again, and he began idly stroking her arm and her thigh as they lay entangled on the floor of the hold. He detected the first little tremors of response in her, but with a remarkable display of control and tact she contrived to abort the process before it had gone too far to halt and gently disengaged herself from his grasp.

“Later,” she said in a friendly way. “I really did have a reason for coming down here, you know.”

She rose and put her wrap back on and gave him a cool, cheerful grin and a wink, and disappeared into the storeroom in the stern.

Lawler was startled by her imperturbability. Certainly he had no right to expect that what had just happened would be as unsettling to her as it had been for him after his long period of self-imposed celibacy. She had seemed to welcome it, yes. She had definitely seemed to enjoy it. All the same, had it really been nothing more than a casual random event for her, a mere fortuitous consequence of the lurching of the ship? So it would seem.

Father Quillan, one torpid afternoon, decided to make a Catholic out of Natim Gharkid. At least that was what he appeared to be doing, with great intensity, as Lawler wandered past them and glanced down from the bridge. The priest, looking sweaty and inflamed, was offering the little brown-skinned man a voluble conceptual flow; and Gharkid was listening intently in his usual impassive way. “Father, Son and Holy Ghost,” Quillan said. “A single Godhead, but a triple entity.” Gharkid nodded solemnly. Lawler, an unseen listener, blinked at the strange term “Holy Ghost’. Whatever could that be? But Quillan had moved onward from there. Now he was explaining something called the Immaculate Conception. Lawler’s attention wandered and he strolled on, but when he came back that way fifteen minutes later Quillan was still at it, speaking now of redemption, renewal, essence and existence, the meaning of sin and how it can exist in a creature which is the image of God, and why it had become necessary to send to the world a Saviour who by His death would take upon Himself the evils of mankind. Some of it made sense to Lawler, some seemed the wildest gibberish; and after a time the proportion of gibberish to sense struck him as so high that he was offended by Quillan’s intense dedication to such an absurd creed. Quillan was too intelligent, Lawler thought, to give any veracity to these notions of a god who first must create a world populated by a flawed version of himself and then send an aspect of himself to that world to redeem it from its built-in flaws by letting himself be killed. And it angered him to think that Quillan, after keeping his religion to himself so long, was fastening now on the hapless Gharkid as his first convert.

He went up to Gharkid later and said, “You mustn’t pay attention to the things Father Quillan was saying. I’d hate to see you falling for that pile of nonsense.”

In Gharkid’s unreadable eyes appeared a momentary glint of surprise. “You think I am falling?”

“You seemed to be.”

Gharkid laughed softly. “Ah, that man understands nothing,” he said. And he walked away.

Later in the day Quillan sought Lawler out and said testily, “I’d be grateful if you’d avoid offering your opinions about things you hear in the conversations you eavesdrop on. All right, doctor?”

Lawler reddened. “What do you mean?”

“You know very well what I mean.”

“Ah. I suppose.”

“If you’ve got something to contribute to the dialogue, come and sit with Gharkid and me and let’s hear it. But don’t snipe at me from behind my back.”

Nodding, Lawler said, “Sorry.”

Quillan gave him a long frosty look.

“Are you?”

“Do you think it’s fair, trying to sell your beliefs to a simple soul like Gharkid?”

“We’ve been through this before. He’s less simple than you think.”

“Perhaps so,” Lawler said. “He told me he wasn’t very impressed with your dogmas.”

“He isn’t. But at least he’s approaching them with an open mind. Whereas you—”

“All right,” Lawler said. “So, I’m by nature not a religious man. I can’t help that. Go ahead and turn Gharkid into a Catholic. I don’t really care. Make him an even better Catholic than yourself. That wouldn’t be hard. Why should I care, after all? I’ve already said I was sorry for butting in. And I am. Will you accept my apology?”

“Of course,” Quillan answered, after a moment.

But things remained strained between them for some time. Lawler made a point of keeping away whenever he saw the priest and Gharkid together. It was evident, though, that Gharkid wasn’t making any more sense out of Quillan’s teachings than Lawler could, and his dialogues with the priest eventually came to an end. Which pleased Lawler more than he had anticipated.

An island came into view, the first they had seen on the entire voyage, unless you counted the one that the Gillies were constructing. Dag Tharp hailed it by radio, but no answer came back.

“Are they just unsociable,” Lawler said to Delagard, “or is it a Gillie island?”

“Gillies,” Delagard said. “Nobody but fucking Gillies over there. Trust me. That’s not one of ours.”

Three days later there was another, in the shape of a crescent moon, lying like a sleeping animal on the northern horizon. Lawler, borrowing the helmsman’s spy-glass, thought he could see signs of a human settlement at the island’s eastern end. Tharp started down to the radio room, but Delagard called him back, telling him not to bother.

“This one a Gillie island too?” Lawler asked.

“Not this time. But there’s no sense putting in a call. We aren’t going to pay them a visit.”

“Maybe they’d let us fill up on water. We’re running pretty damned low.”

“No,” Delagard said. “That’s Thetopal over there. My ships don’t have landing rights on Thetopal. I don’t get along well with the Thetopali at all. They wouldn’t let us have a bucket of stale piss.”

“Thetopal?” Onyos Felk said, looking puzzled. “You sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. What else can it be? That’s Thetopal.”

“Thetopal,” Felk said. “All right. Thetopal, then. If you say so, Nid.”

Once they had passed Thetopal, the sea was devoid of islands again. There was nothing but water to be seen in all directions. It was like travelling through an empty universe.

Lawler calculated that they were about halfway to Grayvard by now, though it was only a guess. Surely they had been at sea at least four weeks, but the ship’s isolation and the unvarying daily routines made it difficult for him to work out any very clear sense of how rapidly time was passing.

For three days running a cold, hard wind raked down on the fleet from the north and stirred the wrath and fury of the sea all about them. The first sign was an abrupt transformation of the atmosphere, which in the region of the coral reefs had been soft and almost tropically mild. Suddenly now the air turned clear and tight-strung, so that the sky arched high above the ship, vibrating and pale, like an immense metallic dome. Lawler, who was something of an amateur meteorologist, was troubled by that. He brought his fears to Delagard, who took them seriously and gave orders to batten down. A little while later came a distant drumroll that heralded the first strong winds, a prolonged deep booming; and then the winds themselves arrived, quick nervous short-lived bursts of chilly air that licked and jabbed at the sea, stirring it as though with a pestle. With them came sparse rattling scatterings of dry hail, but no rain.

“Worse to come,” Delagard muttered. He was on deck constantly as the weather worsened, scarcely taking the time to sleep. Father Quillan was often beside him, the two of them standing together like old cronies, peering into the wind. Lawler saw them talking, pointing, shaking their heads. What did these two have to say to each other, anyway, that coarse raucous man of blunt appetites and the austere, melancholic, God-haunted priest? There they were, anyway, together in the wheel-box, together by the binnacle, together on the quarterdeck. Was Quillan trying to convert Delagard now? Or were they trying to pray the storm away?

It came on anyway. The sea became an immense waste of broken water. Spray as fine as white smoke filled the air. The full wind struck with a hammering rush, burning past their ears and leaving a confused clamour echoing behind. They shortened the sails to it, but the ropes pulled free nevertheless and the heavy yards went whirling from side to side.

All hands were on deck. Martello, Kinverson and Henders moved about precariously in the rigging, lashing themselves in to keep from being whirled off into the water. The rest yanked on the ropes while Delagard furiously shouted orders. Lawler worked alongside the rest: no more doctor’s exemption for him, not in a gale like this.

The sky was black. The sea was blacker, except where it was tipped with white foam, or when a mammoth wave rose beside them like a giant wall of green glass. The ship wallowed forward into it, boring down instead of rising as it should, pitching headlong into dark smooth hollows, rolling as some great wave backed off to leeward with a terrible sucking sound, then came crashing toward them again to send cataracts of water tumbling across the deck. The magnetron was useless for this: the winds were coming in from contrary directions, colliding, surrounding them with unruly water that slammed against them from all sides, so that there was no rising over it. They had battened down everything, they had brought whatever they could belowdecks, but the sluicing waves found anything left behind, a bucket, a stool, a gaff, a water cask, and sent it thumping and leaping across the deck until it vanished over the side. The ship’s nose dipped, rose, dipped again. Someone was vomiting; someone was screaming. Lawler caught a glimpse of one of the other ships—he had no idea which, it flew no flag—hard alongside them, caught in an oscillating wallow, now rising above them as though it planned to come crashing right down on their deck, now plummeting out of sight as if being dragged straight to the bottom.

“The masts!” someone yelled. “They’re going to go! Get down! Get down!”

But the masts held firm, certain though it seemed that they would be jumped from their sockets and thrown into the sea. Their desperate vibrations shook the entire ship. Lawler found himself clinging to someone—Pilya, it was—and when Lis Niklaus came scudding down the deck at the mercy of the wind they both caught hold of her and reeled her in like a hooked fish. At any moment Lawler expected a deluge of rain to begin, and it bothered him that in all this frenzy of wind they would have no chance to put out any containers to catch the good sweet fresh water in. But the winds remained dry, dry and crackling. Once he looked out over the rail and by the light of the sea-foam he saw the ocean full of little glinting staring eyes. Fantasy? Hallucination? He didn’t think so. Drakken-heads, they were: an army of the things, a legion of them, long evil-looking snouts sticking up everywhere. A myriad of sharp teeth waiting for the moment when the Queen of Hydros capsized and its thirteen occupants went pitching into the water.

The gale blew and blew and blew, but the ship held and held and held. They lost all track of time. There was no night; there was no day; there was only the wind. Onyos Felk calculated later that it had been a three-day blow: perhaps he was right. It all came to an end as swiftly as it started, the black winds transforming themselves into a clear bright force that gleamed and cut like a knife; and then, as though some cue had been given, the storm dropped away in a moment and calmness returned with an impact much like a crash.

Stunned, Lawler moved slowly across the soaking deck in the strange new quietness. The deck was littered with torn bits of algae, clumps of jellyfish, angry flopping things, all sorts of marine detritus that the surging waves had thrown up. His hands ached where new rope-burns had awakened the pain the net-thing had inflicted. Silently Lawler took inventory: there was Pilya, there was Gharkid, there was Father Quillan, there was Delagard. Tharp, Golghoz, Felk, Niklaus. Martello? Yes, up above. Dann Henders? Yes.

Sundira?

He didn’t see her. Then he did, and wished he hadn’t: she was up near the forecastle, wet through and through, her clothes clinging to her skin so that she might just as well not have been wearing any, and Kinverson was with her. They were examining some creature of the deeps that he had found and was holding up to her, a sea-serpent of sorts, a long drooping comical thing with a wide but somehow harmless-seeming mouth and rows of circular green spots running down its flabby yellow body to give it a clownish look. They were laughing; Kinverson shook the thing at her, practically thrusting it into her face, and she howled with laughter and waved it away. Kinverson dangled it from its tail and watched its pathetic wrigglings; Sundira ran her hand along its sleek length, as though petting it, consoling it for its indignities; and then he flipped it back into the sea. He slipped his arm across her shoulders and they moved on out of sight.

How easy they were with each other. How casual, how playful, how disturbingly intimate.

Lawler turned away. Delagard was coming down the deck toward him.

“You seen Dag?” he called out.

Lawler pointed. “Right over there.” The radioman sat crumpled like a pile of rags against the starboard rail, shaking his head as though unable to believe that he had survived.

Delagard wiped strands of sopping hair out of his eyes and looked around. “Dag! Dag! Get on that fucking horn of yours, fast! We’ve lost the whole goddamned fleet!”

Lawler, aghast, swung about to stare at the eerily calm water. Delagard was right. Not one of the other ships was in view. The Queen of Hydros was all alone in the water.

“You think they sank?” he asked the ship-owner.

“Let’s just pray,” Delagard said.

But the ships weren’t lost at all. They were simply out of view. One by one they made radio contact with the flagship as Tharp tuned them in. The storm had casually scattered them like flimsy straws, carrying them this way and that over a great stretch of the sea; but they were all there. The Queen of Hydros held its position and the others homed in on it. By nightfall the entire fleet was reunited. Delagard ordered brandy broken out to celebrate their survival, the last of Gospo Struvin’s Khuviar stock. Father Quillan, standing on the bridge, led them in a brief prayer of thanksgiving. Even Lawler found himself uttering a few quick, thankful words, a little to his own surprise.

6

Whatever existed between Kinverson and Sundira didn’t seem to preclude whatever was coming into existence between Sundira and Lawler. Lawler was unable to understand either relationship, Sundira’s and Kinverson’s or his own and Sundira’s; but he was wise enough in this sort of thing to know that the surest way to kill it was to try to understand it. He would simply have to take what came.

One thing quickly became clear. Kinverson didn’t care that Sundira had taken up with Lawler. He seemed indifferent to matters of sexual possessiveness. Sex was like breathing to him, so it appeared: he did it without thinking about it. With anyone handy, as often as his body called for it, purely a natural function, automatic, mechanical. And he expected other people to look upon it the same way.

When Kinverson cut his arm and came to Lawler to have it cleaned and bandaged, he said, while Lawler was working on him, “So you’re fucking Sundira now too, doc?”

Lawler pulled the bandage tight.

“I don’t see why I need to answer that. It’s none of your business.”

“Right. Well, of course you’re fucking her. She’s a fine woman. Too smart for me, but I don’t mind that. And I don’t mind what you do with her either.”

“Very kind of you,” Lawler said.

“Of course I hope it works the same the other way.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“It means there might be something left between Sundira and me,” said Kinverson. “I hope you realize that.”

Lawler gave him a long clear-eyed stare. “She’s a grown woman. She can do whatever she wants with whoever she wants, whenever.”

“Good. It’s a small place, a ship. We wouldn’t want any fuss here over a woman.”

In rising irritation Lawler said, “You do what you do, and I’ll do what I do, and let’s not talk about it any more. You make her sound like a piece of equipment we both want to use.”

“Yeah,” said Kinverson. “Damned fine equipment.”

One day not long afterward Lawler wandered into the galley and found Kinverson with Lis Niklaus, the two of them giggling and groping and grappling and growling like Gillies in rut. Lis gave him a quick wink and a raucous chuckle over Kinverson’s shoulder. “Hi, there, doc!” she called, sounding very drunk. Lawler looked back at her, startled, and went quickly out.

The galley was very far from being a private place: obviously Kinverson wasn’t much concerned about taking precautions against Sundira’s discovering—or Delagard, for that matter—that he had something running with Lis on the side. At least Kinverson was consistent, Lawler thought. He didn’t care. About anything. About anyone.

Several times in the week following the windstorm Lawler and Sundira found the opportunity for a rendezvous in the cargo hold. His body, its fires so long dormant, was quickly relearning the meaning of passion. But there was nothing like passion coming from her, so far as Lawler could see, unless swift, efficient, enthusiastic but almost impersonal physical pleasure qualified as passion. Lawler didn’t think so. He might have when he was younger, but not now.

They never said anything to each other while they were making love, and when they lay together afterward, returning from it, they seemed by common treaty to limit their conversation to the lightest of chatter. The new rules were established very quickly. Lawler took his cues from her, as he had from the start: she was obviously enjoying what was going on between them, and just as obviously she had no wish for any heavier transaction. Whenever Lawler encountered her on deck they spoke in the same inconsequential way, now. “Nice weather,” they would say. Or, “What a strange colour the sea is here.”

He might say, “I wonder how soon we’ll get to Grayvard.”

She might say, “I don’t cough at all any more, have you noticed that?”

He might say, “Wasn’t that red fish we had for dinner last night marvellous?”

She might say, “Look, isn’t that a diver swimming past us down there?”

Everything very bland, pleasant, controlled. He never said, “I haven’t felt like this about anyone in a million years, Sundira.” She never said, “I can’t wait until the next time we can slip away, Val.” He never said, “We’re two of a kind, really, people who don’t quite fit in.” She never said, “The reason I kept wandering from island to island is that I was always looking for something more, wherever I was.”

Instead of getting to know her better now that they were lovers he found that she was becoming more remote and indistinct to him. Lawler hadn’t expected that. He wished there was more. But he didn’t see how he could make there be more unless she wanted it.

She seemed to want to hold him at arm’s length and take from him nothing more than she was already getting from Kinverson. Unless he had misread her, she didn’t desire any other kind of intimacy. Lawler had never known a woman like that, so indifferent to permanence, to continuity, to the union of spirits, one who appeared to take each event as it came and never troubled to link it to what had gone before or what might come afterward. Then he realized that he did know someone like that.

Not a woman. Himself. The long-ago Lawler of Sorve Island, skipping from lover to lover with no thought except for the moment. But he was different now. Or so he hoped.

In the night Lawler heard muffled shouts and thumps coming from the cabin next to his. Delagard and Lis were having a quarrel. It wasn’t the first time, not by any means; but this one sounded louder and angrier than most.

In the morning, when Lawler went down to the galley early for breakfast, Lis was huddled over her stove with her face averted. From the side her face looked puffy; and when she turned he saw a yellow bruise along her cheekbone and another over her eye. Her lip was split and swollen.

“You want me to give you something for that?” Lawler asked.

“I’ll survive.”

“I heard the noise last night. What a lousy thing.”

“I fell out of my bunk, is what happened.”

“And went rattling around the cabin for five or ten minutes, shouting and cursing? And Nid, when he picked you up, felt like shouting and cursing too? Come off it, Lis.”

She gave him a cold, sullen look. She seemed close to tears. He had never seen tough, salty Lis so close to breaking before.

Quietly he said, “Let breakfast wait a few minutes. I can clean up that cut for you and give you something to take the sting out of those bruises.”

“I’m used to it, doc.”

“He hits you often?”

“Often enough.”

“Nobody hits anybody any more, Lis. That kind of stuff went out with the cave men.”

“Tell that to Nid.”

“You want me to? I will.”

Panic flared in her eyes. “No! For Christ’s sake, don’t say a word, doc! He’ll kill me.”

“You really are afraid of him, aren’t you?”

“Aren’t you?”

Lawler said, surprised, “No. Why should I be?”

“Well, maybe you aren’t. But that’s you. I figure I got off lucky. I was doing something he didn’t like, and he found out, and he took it a lot harder than I ever imagined he would. Taught me a thing or two, that did. Nid’s a wild man. I thought last night he was going to murder me.”

“Call me, next time. Or bang on the cabin wall.”

“There won’t be a next time. I’m going to be good from now on. I mean it.”

“You’re that much afraid of him?”

“I love him, doc. Can you believe that? I love the dirty bastard. If he doesn’t want me screwing around, I’m not going to screw around. He’s that important to me.”

“Even though he hits you.”

“That tells me how important I am to him.”

“You can’t seriously mean that, Lis.”

“I do. I do.”

He shook his head. “Jesus. He slams you black and blue, and you tell me it’s because he loves you so much.”

“You don’t understand these things, doc,” Lis said. “You never did. You never could.”

Lawler studied her in bewilderment, trying to comprehend. She was as alien to him as a Gillie right now.

“I guess I don’t,” he said.

After the windstorm the sea was quiet for a while, never exactly tranquil but not especially challenging, either. There came another zone thick with the clustering sea-plants, though these were less dense than the first one and they got through without needing Dr Nitikin’s lethal aphrodisiac oil. A little farther on was a place where close-packed clumps of mysterious lanky yellow-green algae drifted. They humped themselves up above the surface of the sea as the ship went by and emitted sad whooshing exhalations from dark waggling bladders dangling on short prickly stems: “Go back,” they seemed to be saying. “Go back, go back, go back.” It was a disturbing and troublesome sound. This was plainly an unlucky place to be. But before long the strange algae were no longer to be seen, though it was still possible, for another half a day or so, to hear their distant melancholy murmur occasionally riding on the gusts of a following wind.

The next day another unfamiliar life-form appeared: a gigantic floating colonial creature, a whole population in itself, hundreds or perhaps thousands of different kinds of specialized organisms suspended from one huge float nearly the size of a platform or a mouth. Its fleshy transparent central body glistened up out of the water at them like a barely submerged island; and as they drew closer they could see the innumerable components of the thing quivering and whirring and churning about in their individual duties, this group of organisms paddling, this set trawling for fish, these little fluttering organs around the edges serving as stabilizers for the whole vast organism as it moved in its stately way through the sea.

When the ship came near it the creature extruded several dozen clear pipe-like structures, a couple of metres in height, that rose like thick glossy chimneys above the surface of the water.

“What are those things, do you think?” Father Quillan asked.

“Visual apparatus?” Lawler suggested. “Periscopes of some sort?”

“No, look, now there’s something coming out of them—”

“Watch out!” Kinverson yelled from overhead. “It’s shooting at us!”

Lawler pulled the priest down with him to the deck just as a blob of some gooey reddish substance went whistling past. The blob fell in mid-deck, two or three metres behind them. It looked like a large orange turd, shapeless and quivering. Steam began to rise from it. Half a dozen similar projectiles landed at other points along the deck, and more were arriving every moment.

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Delagard roared, stomping around wildly. “The stuff is burning the deck. Buckets and shovels! Buckets and shovels! Tack! Tack, Felk! Get us the hell out of here, damn you!”

The deck was sizzling and steaming where the blobs were eating into it. Felk, at the wheel, struggled to pull away from the bombardment, shoving and dodging and manoeuvring the ship with frantic zeal. Under his hoarse commands the duty watch pulled the ropes about, swung the yards, reset the sails. Lawler, Quillan and Lis Niklaus rushed about the deck, shovelling up the soft corrosive projectiles and tossing them overboard. Dark charred scars remained wherever one of the acid lumps had touched the pale yellow wood of the planks. The colonial creature, distant now, continued to hurl its missiles at the ship with methodical unthinking hostility, though now they dropped harmlessly into the water, stirring up puffs of vapour as they boiled downwards and disappeared.

The charred marks in the deck were too deep to remove. Lawler suspected that the sticky projectiles, if they hadn’t been swept up immediately, would have burned right down from deck to deck until they emerged through the hull.

The following morning Gharkid saw a grey cloud of whizzing airborne forms far off to starboard.

“Hagfish in mating frenzy.”

Delagard swore and gave the order for a change of course.

“No,” Kinverson said. “That won’t work. There’s no time to manoeuvre. Lower the sails.”

“What?”

“Take them down or they’ll act as hagfish nets when the swarm hits us. We’ll be up to our asses in hagfish on deck.”

Cursing mightily, Delagard ordered the sails to be struck. Soon the Queen of Hydros was drifting with bare poles rising into a hard white sky. And then the hagfish came.

The ugly bristle-backed winged worms, berserk with lust, were spread out by the millions, just windward of the fleet. It was a sea of hagfish: you could hardly see the water for the thrashing bodies. In surging waves they took to the air—the females in the lead, uncountable numbers of them, blotting out the sunlight. Furiously they beat their shiny sharp-angled little wings; desperately they held their snub-nosed heads aloft; onward they came, maddened platoons of them. And the males were right behind them.

It didn’t matter to them that there were ships in their way. Ships were mere incidental distractions to hagfish in heat. Mountains would have been. They had their genetically programmed course to follow, and they followed it blindly, unresistingly. If it meant that they would smash head on into the side of the Queen of Hydros, so be it. If it meant that they would clear the deck of the ship by a few metres and go cracking into the base of a mast or the door of the forecastle, so be it. So be it. So be it. There was no one on the ship’s deck when the hagfish armada reached it. Lawler already knew what it was like to be struck by an immature one. A full-grown one in the high frenzy of its mating urge would probably be travelling with ten times the force of the one that had hit him: a collision would be fatal, most likely. A glancing blow of a wing-tip would cut through skin to the bone. The touch of those fierce bristles would leave a bloody track.

The only thing to do was hide and wait. And wait, and wait. All hands took refuge below. For hours the buzzing whoosh of their passage filled the air, punctuated by strange whining cries and the sound of brutal, abrupt impacts.

At last there was silence. Cautiously, Lawler and a couple of the others went up on deck.

The air was clear. The swarm had moved on. But dead and dying hagfish were everywhere, piled like vermin wherever some structure of the deck had created an obstacle to their flight. Broken as they were, some still had enough life left in them to hiss and nip and try to rise and fly into the faces of the cleanup crew. It took all day to get rid of them.

After the hagfish came a dark cloud that promised welcome rain, but dropped instead a coating of slime: a migrating mass of some foul-smelling little airborne microorganism that enveloped the ship in its nearly infinite multitudes and left a slick gluey brown pall on sails and rigging and masts and every square millimetre of the deck. Cleaning that off took three days more.

And after that came more rammerhorns, and Kinverson bestrode the deck once more, pounding on his drum to drive them into confusion.

And after the rammerhorns—

Lawler began to think of the great planetary sea as a stubborn, implacably hostile force that was tirelessly throwing one thing after another at them in an irritable response to their presence on its broad bosom. Somehow the voyagers were making the ocean itch, and it was scratching at them. Some of the scratching was pretty intense. Lawler wondered if they would manage to survive long enough to reach Grayvard.

There was a blessed day of heavy rain, at last. It cleaned away the slime of the microorganisms and the reek that the dead hagfish had left on deck, and allowed them to refill their storage casks just when the water situation had been starting to seem critical again. In the wake of the rain a school of divers appeared and frolicked in a genial playful way alongside the ship, leaping in the foam like elegant dancers welcoming tourists to their native land. But no sooner had the divers moved on out of sight than another of the turd-throwing colonial things drifted near, or perhaps it was the same one as before, and bombarded the ship with moist incendiary missiles all over again. It was as though the ocean had belatedly become aware that by sending the rain and then the divers it was showing the voyagers too amiable a face, and wanted to remind them of its true nature.

Then for a time all was quiet again. The winds were fair, the creatures of the ocean relented from the pattern of constant assault. The six ships moved onward serenely toward their goal. Their wakes, long and straight, stretched out behind them like retreating highways through the immense solitude that they had already crossed.

In the calm of a perfect dawn—the sea almost without waves, the breeze steady, the sky shimmering, the lovely blue-green globe of Sunrise visible just above the horizon and one moon still in view also—Lawler came up on deck to find a conference taking place on the bridge. Delagard was there, and Kinverson, and Onyos Felk, and Leo Martello. After a moment Lawler saw Father Quillan too, half hidden behind Kinverson’s bulk.

Delagard had his spy-glass with him. He was scanning the distance with it and reporting on something to the others, who were pointing, staring, commenting.

Lawler clambered up the ladder.

“Something going on?”

“Something sure is, yes,” Delagard said. “One of our ships is missing.”

“Are you serious?”

“Take a look.” Delagard handed Lawler the spy-glass. “An easy night. Nothing unusual between midnight and dawn, the lookouts tell me. Count the ships you can see. One, two, three, four.”

Lawler put the glass to his eye.

One. Two. Three. Four.

“Which one isn’t there?”

Delagard tugged at his thick, greasy coils of hair. “Not sure yet. They don’t have their flags up. Gabe thinks it’s the Sisters who are gone. Splitting off during the night, taking some independent course of their own.”

“That would be crazy,” Lawler said. “They’ve got no real idea how to navigate a ship.”

“They’ve been doing all right so far,” Leo Martello said.

“That’s by simply following along in the convoy. But if they tried to go off on their own—”

“Well, yes,” Delagard said. “It would be crazy. But they are crazy. Those fucking dyke bitches, I wouldn’t for a moment put it past them to do something like—”

He broke off. There was the sound of footsteps on the ladder below them.

“Dag, that you?” Delagard called. To Lawler he explained, “I sent him down to the radio room to do some calling around.”

Tharp’s shrivelled little head appeared, and then the rest of him.

“The Golden Sun’s the one that’s missing,” Tharp announced.

“Sisters are on the Hydros Cross,” Kinverson said.

“Right,” said Tharp sourly. “But Hydros Cross answered when I called them just now. So did the Star, the Three Moons and the Goddess. All silent out of the Golden Sun.”

“You absolutely certain? Couldn’t raise them at all?” Delagard asked. “Wasn’t any way at all you could bring them in?”

“You want to try, you go and try. I called around the fleet. Four ships answered.”

“Including the Sisters?” Kinverson persisted.

“I talked to Sister Halla herself, okay?”

Lawler said, “Whose ship is the Golden Sun? I forget.”

“Damis Sawtelle’s,” Leo Martello replied.

“Damis would never go off on his own. He isn’t like that.”

“No,” Delagard said, with a look of suspicion and distrust. “He isn’t, is he, doc?”

Tharp kept on trying to pick up the Golden Sun’s frequency all day long. The radio operators of the other four ships tried also.

Silence on the Golden Sun channel. Silence. Silence. Silence.

“A ship just doesn’t vanish in the night,” Delagard said, pacing ferociously.

“Well, this one seems to have,” said Lis Niklaus.

“Shut your fucking mouth!”

“Oh, nice, Nid, very nice.”

“Shut it or I’ll shut it for you!”

“This isn’t helping,” Lawler said. He turned toward Delagard. “You ever lose one of your ships like this before? Just quietly disappearing, no SOS, nothing?”

“I never lost a ship. Period.”

“They would have radioed, if there was trouble, right?”

“If they could have,” Kinverson said.

“What does that mean?” Delagard asked.

“Suppose a whole bunch of those net-things came crawling up on board during the night. The watch changes at three in the morning, the people in the rigging come down, the watch below goes up on deck, they all step on nets and get pulled over the side. And you’ve got half the ship’s complement gone just like that. Damis or whoever comes down out of the wheel-box while the massacre is going on to see what’s what and a net gets him too. And then the rest, one by one—”

“Gospo yelled like crazy when the net got him,” Pilya Braun pointed out. “You think a whole shipload of people is going to get tangled up in those things and dragged overboard and not one person will make enough noise to warn the others of what’s going on?”

“So it wasn’t nets,” said Kinverson. “It was something else that came on board. Or it was nets plus something else. And they all died.”

“And then a mouth came along and swallowed the ship too?” Delagard asked. “Where the fuck is the ship? Everybody on it may be gone, but what happened to the ship?”

“A ship under sail can drift a long way in a few hours, even in a quiet sea,” Onyos Felk observed. “Ten, fifteen, twenty kilometres—who knows? And still moving. We’d never find it if we looked for a million years.”

“Or maybe it sank,” Neyana Golghoz said. “Something came up beneath it and drilled a hole in its bottom and it went right down just like that.”

“Without even sending a signal?” Delagard asked. “Ships don’t sink in two minutes. Somebody would have had time to radio to us.”

“Do I know?” said Neyana. “Let’s say fifty things came up beneath it and drilled holes. It was full of holes all at once. And it went down faster than you can fart. It just sank, bam, no time to do anything. I don’t know. I’m just suggesting.”

“Who was on board the Golden Sun? ” Lawler asked.

Delagard counted up on his fingers, “Damis and Dana and their little boy. Sidero Volkin. The Sweyners. That’s six.”

Each name fell like an axe. Lawler thought of the gnarled old toolmaker and his gnarled old wife. How clever Sweyner had been with his hands, how adept at employing the limited materials that Hydros made available to them. Volkin, the shipwright, tough and hard working. Damis. Dana.

“Who else?”

“Let me think. I’ve got the list somewhere, but let me think. The Hains? No, they’re with Yanez on the Three Moons.

But Freddo Wong was on board, and his wife—what the hell was her name-”

“Lucia,” Lis said.

“Lucia, right. Freddo and Lucia Wong, and that girl Berylda, the one with the tits. And Martin Yanez” kid brother, I think. Yes. Yes.”

“Josc,” someone said.

Josc, yes.

Lawler felt a savage pain. That eager bright-eyed boy. The future doctor, the one who was going to take the burden of being the healer from him some day.

He heard a voice saying, “All right, that’s ten. What were there, fourteen on board? So we have to account for four more.”

People began to suggest names. It was hard to remember who had been on which ship, so many weeks after the departure from Sorve. But there had been fourteen on board the Golden Sun, everyone agreed on that.

Fourteen deaths, Lawler thought, dazed by the enormity of the loss. He felt it in his bones. Felt personally diminished. These people had shared his life, his past. Gone. Gone without warning, forever. Nearly a fifth of the community gone in a single stroke. On Sorve Island, in a bad year, they might have had two or three deaths. In most years, none. And now fourteen all at once. The disappearance of the Golden Sun had ripped a ragged hole in the fabric of the community. But wasn’t the community shattered already? Would they ever be able to restore on Grayvard anything resembling what they had been forced to abandon on Sorve?

Josc. The Sawtelles. The Sweyners. The Wongs. Volkin. Berylda Cray. And four others.

Lawler left them still discussing it on the bridge and went below. The numbweed flask was in his hand a moment after he entered his cabin. Eight drops, nine, ten, eleven. Let’s say a dozen for this, shall we? Yes. Yes. A dozen. What the hell. A double dose: that should take the sting out of anything.

“Val?” Sundira’s voice, outside the cabin door. “Are you all right?”

He let her in. Her eyes went to the glass in his hand, then back to his face.

“God, it really hurts you, doesn’t it?”

“Like losing some of my fingers.”

“Did they mean a lot to you?”

“Some of them did.” The numbweed was hitting, now. He felt the sharp edge of the pain blurring. His voice sounded furry in his ears. “Others were just people I knew, part of the island scene, old familiar faces. One was my apprentice.”

“Josc Yanez.”

“You knew him?”

She smiled sadly. “A sweet boy. I was swimming, once, and he came along, and we talked for a while. Mostly about you. He worshipped you, Val. Even more than he did his brother, the sea-captain.” A frown crossed her face. “I’m making it worse, not better.”

“Not?—really-”

His tongue was thick. He knew he had had too much numbweed.

She took the glass from his hand and put it down.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wish I could help.”

Come closer, Lawler wanted to say, but somehow he couldn’t, and didn’t.

She seemed to understand anyway.

For two days the fleet lay at anchor in the middle of nowhere while Delagard had Dag Tharp run through the whole spectrum of radio frequencies, trying to bring in the Golden Sun. He picked up radio operators on half a dozen islands, he picked up a ship called Empress of Sunrise that was running ferry service in the Azure Sea, he picked up a floating mining station working somewhere in the far northeast, the existence of which came as a complete surprise, and not a welcome one, to Delagard. But from the Golden Sun Tharp heard not a whisper.

“All right,” Delagard said finally. “If they’re still afloat, maybe they’ll find a way to get in touch with us. If they aren’t, they won’t. But we can’t sit here forever.”

“Will we ever find out what happened to them?” Pilya Braun asked.

“Probably not,” Lawler said. “It’s a big ocean full of dangerous things that we don’t know a goddamned thing about.”

“If we knew what it was that got them,” said Dann Henders, “we’d have a better chance of guarding against it ourselves if it showed up again to try to get us.”

“When whatever it was that got them shows up to get us,” Lawler said, “that’s when we’ll find out what it was. Not before.”

“Let’s hope we don’t find out, then,” said Pilya.

7

On a day of heavy fog and rolling seas big unfamiliar diamond-shaped creatures with thick, heavily ridged green shells covering their back came up alongside the ship and accompanied it for a time. They looked like floating storage tanks that had equipped themselves with swimming flippers. Their armoured heads were flat and squat with pointed snouts, their eyes were bleak little white slits, their underslung jaws seemed extremely unforgiving. Lawler was at the rail watching them when Onyos Felk appeared at his side and said, “Can I talk to you for a minute, doc?”

Felk was First Family, like Lawler, a distinction that meant nothing at all now that the Sorve Island community had taken to the sea. The mapkeeper was something like fifty-five years old, a dour little short-legged heavy-boned man who had never married. Supposedly he knew a great deal about the geography of Hydros and the way of the sea, and if things had gone differently over the years it could easily have been Felk and not Nid Delagard who controlled the Sorve shipyard; but the Felks had a reputation for bad luck and, sometimes, poor judgement.

“You not feeling well, Onyos?” Lawler asked.

“You won’t be either, when you hear what I’ve got to say. Let’s go down below.”

From his compartment in the forecastle Felk produced a small greenish globe, a sea-chart, though nothing much like the elaborate clockwork one that belonged to Delagard. This one had to be wound up with a little wooden key and the position of its islands had to be reset by hand every time it started up: a joke, compared with Delagard’s spectacular device. After a few moments spent adjusting it Felk held it out toward Lawler and said, “All right. Look closely, here. This is Sorve, over here. This is Grayvard, all the way around here to the northwest. This is the route we’ve been travelling.”

The lettering on the chart was cramped and faded and very hard to read. The islands were so close to one another that it wasn’t easy for Lawler to make clear sense of what he was seeing even where he could make out the labels. But he followed the line of Felk’s pointing finger westward around the globe, and as the mapkeeper retraced the journey Lawler began to translate the symbols on the chart into an understanding of the shape of their journey.

“This is where we were when the net grabbed Struvin. Here’s where we saw the Gillies building that new island. Now, this here is where we entered the Yellow Sea, and this is where we were when the rammerhorns attacked us the first time. We ran into that big tidal surge over here, and it knocked us a little way off course, like this. You following me, doc?”

“Keep going.”

“This is the Green Sea here. Just beyond it is that place where the coral was growing. Here’s where we passed those two islands, the Gillie one and then the one that Delagard said was Thetopal. This is where we hit the three-day windstorm that scattered the fleet. The hagfish were swarming over here. This is where we lost the Golden Sun.” Felk’s stubby finger was far around the curve of the little globe by now. “Are you beginning to notice anything a little strange?”

“Show me where Grayvard is, again?”

“Up here. Northwest of Sorve.”

“Am I reading things wrong, or is there some reason having to do with the currents why we’re sailing due west along the equator instead of on a northerly diagonal toward Grayvard?”

“We aren’t sailing due west,” Felk said.

Lawler frowned. “No?”

“The chart’s very small, and it’s hard to see the latitude lines unless you’re used to them. But in fact we’re not just going due west, we’re actually veering south west.”

“Awayfrom Grayvard?”

“Away from Grayvard, yes.”

“You’re absolutely sure of this?”

An expression of barely suppressed fury appeared for a moment, but only for a moment, in Felk’s small dark eyes. In a tightly controlled voice he said, “Let’s assume for the sake of the discussion that I understand how to read a chart, all right, doc? And that when I get up in the morning and look at where the sun’s coming up, I can remember where it came up the day before and the day before that and where it rose a week ago, and from that I can form at least an approximate idea of whether we’re sailing northwest or southwest, okay?”

“And we’ve been sailing southwest all this time?”

“No. We started out on a proper northwest course. Someplace around the coral sea we levelled off back into tropical waters and began heading due west, right along the equator, getting farther and farther off course every day. I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t realize how wrong it was until we went by those islands. Because that wasn’t Thetopal at all. Not only does the real Thetopal happen to be in high temperate waters right now, up toward Grayvard way, but it’s a round island. This one was curved, remember? In fact the island we passed was really Hygala. Here it is down here.”

“Practically on the equator.”

“Right. We should have been a long way north of Hygala if we were on a Grayvard course. But it was north of us, actually. And when Delagard recalculated our positions after the windstorm broke up the fleet, he got us going again in a sharp southerly veer. We’re down below the Equator now a little way. You can tell that from the position of the Cross, if you know anything about the night sky. Maybe you haven’t been looking, I guess. But for at least the last week we’ve been travelling precisely ninety degrees off our proper course. Would you like to see where we’re heading now? Or have you already figured that out for yourself?”

“Tell me.”

Felk turned the chart. “This is what we’re currently sailing toward. You don’t notice any islands shown here, do you?”

“We’re going into the Empty Sea?”

“We’re already in it. Islands have been sparse ever since we set out. We’ve only passed two, two and a half, on the whole trip, and since Hygala there haven’t been any. There won’t be any, now. The Empty Sea is empty because the currents don’t bring any islands that way. If we were on course for Grayvard, we’d be all the way up here north of the equator, and we’d have passed four different islands by this time. Barinan, Sivalak, Muril, Thetopal. One, two, three, four. Whereas way down over here there’s nothing at all once we’re beyond Hygala.”

Lawler contemplated the quadrant of the chart that Felk had turned toward him. He saw the little crescent shape that was Hygala; to the west and south of it he saw only nothingness and nothingness and more nothingness, and then, far away around the bend of the little globe, the dark splotch that was the Face of the Waters.

“You think Delagard’s made a mistake in figuring our course?”

“That’s the last thing I think. Delagards have been running ships around this planet since the days this was a penal colony. You know that. He isn’t any more likely to set us on a southwesterly course when he wants to go northwesterly than you are to start spelling “Lawler” wrong when you sign your name.”

Lawler put his thumbs to his temples and held them there, and pressed hard.

“Whywould Nid want to sail us into the Empty Sea, for Christ’s sake?”

“I thought you might want to ask him just that very thing.”

“Me?”

“Sometimes he seems almost to have a little respect for you,” Felk said. “He might actually give you an honest answer. Then again he might not. But he sure as hell isn’t going to tell me anything, is he? Is he now, doc?”

Kinverson was busy arranging his hooks and tackle, getting ready for the day’s fishing, when Lawler found him, a little while later that morning. He looked up grudgingly, regarding Lawler with the sort of absolute indifference that Lawler might have expected from an island, a hatchet, a Gillie. Then he went back to doing what he had been doing.

“So we’re off course. I knew that. What’s it to me, doc?”

“You knew?”

“These don’t look like northern waters to me.”

“You knew all along that we were heading into the Empty Sea? And you didn’t say anything about it to anybody?”

“I know we’re off course, but I don’t necessarily know we’re heading into the Empty.”

“Felk says we are. He showed it to me on his chart.”

“Felk isn’t always right, doc.”

“Let’s say that this time he is.”

“Well, then we’re heading into the Empty,” said Kinverson calmly. “So?”

“Instead of heading toward Grayvard.”

“So?” Kinverson said again. He picked up a hook, pondered it, clamped it between his teeth and twisted it into a different shape.

This was getting nowhere. “Don’t you give the slightest damn that we’re going the wrong way?”

“No. Why the hell should I? One stinking island’s just like the next one. I don’t care where we wind up living.”

“There aren’t any islands in the Empty Sea, Gabe.”

“Then we’ll live on the ship. What of it? I can live okay in the Empty Sea. It isn’t empty of fishes, doc, is it? It’s not supposed to have much, but it’s got to have some, if there’s water in it. If a place has fishes, I can live there. I could have lived in my old little boat, if I had to.”

“Why weren’t you living in it all along, then?” Lawler asked, starting to get annoyed.

“Because I happened to be living on Sorve. But I could live in my boat just as easily. You think those islands are so fucking wonderful, doc? You walk around on hard wooden boards all the time and you live on seaweed and fish and it’s too hot when the sun shines and too cold when it’s raining, and that’s life. At least that’s our kind of life. It isn’t much. So it’s all the same to me, whether it’s Sorve or Salimil or a cabin on the Queen of Hydros or a fucking rowboat. I just want to be able to eat when I’m hungry and get laid when I’m horny and stay alive till I die, okay?”

It was probably the longest speech Kinverson had ever made in his life. He seemed surprised himself that he had said so much. When he was done with it he stared at Lawler coldly for a moment in evident anger and irritation. Then once again he went back to his hooks and tackle.

Lawler said, “You don’t mind that our great leader is leading us right into completely unknown territory and that he can’t take the trouble to let us in on whatever it is he’s up to?”

“No. I don’t mind. I don’t mind anything, except people who bother me too much. I take one day at a time. Let me alone, doc. I’ve got work to do, okay?”

Dag Tharp said, “You want to make your calls now, doc? You’re an hour early, aren’t you?”

“I could be. Does it matter?”

“Whatever you like.” Tharp’s hands moved over his dials and knobs. “You want to call early, we’ll call early. Don’t blame me if nobody’s ready for you out there.”

“Get me Bamber Cadrell first.”

“You usually call the Star first.”

“I know that. Call Cadrell first today.”

Tharp looked up, perplexed. “You got an eel up your ass this morning, doc?”

“When you hear what I have to say to Cadrell, you’ll find out what I’ve got up my ass. Call him, will you?”

“Okay. Okay.” From the bank of radio equipment came sputters and clicks. “This fucking fog,” Tharp muttered. “A wonder the equipment doesn’t rot. Come in, Goddess. Come in, Goddess. Queen calling. Goddess? Goddess, come in.”

“Queen, this is Goddess.” A boy’s voice, high-pitched, squeaky. Nicko Thalheim’s boy Bard was the radio operator aboard the Sorve Goddess.

“Tell him I want to talk to Cadrell,” Lawler said.

Tharp spoke into the microphone. Lawler wasn’t able to hear the tinny response clearly.

“What was that?”

“He says Bamber’s at the helm. His watch has another two hours to run.”

“Tell him to get Bamber down from the wheel and on the horn right away. This needs to be dealt with.”

More sputters, more clicks. The boy seemed to be objecting. Tharp repeated Lawler’s request, and there was a minute or so of silence at the other end.

Then came the voice of Bamber Cadrell: “What is it that’s so goddamned urgent, doc?”

“Send the boy away and I’ll tell you.”

“He’s my radio operator.”

“Fine. But I don’t want him to hear what I’m about to say.

“There’s a problem, huh?”

“Is he still there?”

“I sent him outside. What’s going on, doc?”

“We’re ninety degrees off course, in equatorial waters, heading south-southwest. Delagard is steering us into the Empty Sea.” Dag Tharp, listening at Lawler’s side, caught his breath sharply in amazement. “Are you aware of that, Bamber?”

There was another long silence from the Sorve Goddess.

“Of course I am, doc. What the hell kind of seaman do think I am?”

“The Empty Sea, Bamber.”

“Right. I heard you.”

“We’re supposed to be going to Grayvard.”

“I know that, doc.”

“It’s perfectly okay with you that we’re sailing the wrong way?”

“I assume Delagard knows what he’s doing.”

“You assume? ”

“These are his ships. I just work for him. When we started to veer south I figured there must be some trouble up north, a storm, maybe, something bad that he wants to get around. He’s got all the good charts, doc. We’re simply following the lead he sets.”

“Straight into the Empty Sea?”

“Delagard isn’t crazy,” Cadrell said. “We’ll turn north again before long. I don’t have any doubt of that.”

“You haven’t wanted to ask him why the change of course?”

“I told you. I assume it’s for a good reason. I assume he knows what he’s doing.”

“You assume a fucking lot,” Lawler said.

Tharp looked up from the radio desk. His eyes, usually hooded in wrinkled folds of flesh, were bright and big with astonishment.

“The Empty Sea?”

“Looks that way.”

“But that’s insane!”

“Isn’t it, though. Just pretend you haven’t heard a thing, for a little while, all right, Dag? Get me Martin Yanez, now.”

“Not Stayvol? You always make Stayvol your first call.”

“Yanez,” Lawler said, and fought back the memory of Josc smiling eagerly up at him.

Some fiddling with the dials, and the Three Moons ” radio operator’s voice came squeaking through the static—she was one of the Hain girls, Lawler wasn’t sure which one—and then a moment later the deep, steady voice of Martin Yanez, saying, “There’s nothing to report, doc, we’ve got a clean bill of health over here today.”

“This isn’t the regular medical call,” Lawler said.

“What then? You didn’t hear something from the Golden Sun, did you?” There was sudden excitement in Yanez” voice, eagerness, hope.

“Nothing like that, no,” Lawler said quietly.

“Ah.”

“I wanted to find out what you think about our change in course.”

“What change in course do you mean?”

“Don’t give me that shit, Martin. Please.”

“Since when do navigational matters concern the doctor?”

“I said don’t give me that shit.”

“Are you the navigator now, doc?”

“I’m an interested party. We all are. It’s my life too. What’s going on, Martin? Or are you so deep in Delagard’s pocket that you won’t tell me?”

“You sound awfully worked up,” Yanez said. “We’ve made a detour to the south. What of it?”

“Why have we done it?”

“You ought to ask Delagard that.”

“Have you?”

“I don’t need to. I’m simply following his lead. He turns south, I turn south too.”

“Bamber said more or less the same thing. Are you guys all such puppets that you let him jerk your strings any way he likes? Jesus, Martin, why aren’t we heading for Grayvard any longer?”

“I told you. Ask Delagard.”

“I mean to. First I wanted to find out how the other captains feel about sailing into the Empty Sea.”

“Is that what we’re doing?” Yanez asked, his voice as calm as ever. “I thought we were simply making a short-term detour to the south, for some reason that Delagard isn’t talking about. So far as I know Grayvard’s still our ultimate destination.”

“Do you really mean that?”

“If I said I did, would you believe me?”

“I’d like to.”

“It’s the truth, doc. As I loved my brother, it’s God’s own truth. Delagard hasn’t said a word about the change, and I haven’t asked, and neither have Bamber or Poilin. I assume the Sisters aren’t even aware that we’re off course.”

“You’ve talked about it with Cadrell and Stayvol, though?”

“Sure.”

“Stayvol’s very thick with Delagard. I don’t trust him much. What has he said?”

“He’s as puzzled as the rest of us.”

“You think he really is?”

“Yes. But what difference does it make? We’re all following Delagard. You want to know what’s going on, you ask him. And if he tells you, you tell me, doc.”

“That’s a promise.”

“You want me to call Stayvol next?” Dag Tharp asked.

“No. I think I’ll skip him just now.”

Tharp tugged at the wattles of his throat. “Holy shit,” he said. “Holy, holy, holy shit. You think it’s a conspiracy? All the captains up to something weird and not telling?”

“I believe Martin Yanez. Whatever’s happening, Delagard may have let Stayvol in on it, but most likely not the other two.”

“And Damis Sawtelle?”

“What about him?”

“Suppose that when he noticed this change of course he radioed Delagard and asked him what was what, and Delagard said it was none of his fucking business, and Damis got so annoyed that he just turned his ship around in the middle of the night and went shooting off toward Grayvard by himself. Damis has a pretty hot temper, you know. So there he is, a thousand kilometres north of us by now, and when we send out scanning calls trying to find him he simply ignores us, because he’s seceded from the fleet.”

“That’s a nice theory. But does Delagard understand how to operate this radio equipment?”

“No,” Tharp said. “Not that I know of.”

“Then how would Damis have talked with him unless you had taken the call?”

“You’ve got a point there.”

“Sawtelle didn’t just take off and sail away by himself. I’d bet on it, Dag. The Golden Sun’s at the bottom of the sea, with Damis Sawtelle and everybody else that was on board it. Something that lives in this ocean came along in the night and quickly and quietly sank it, something very cute and full of tricks, and if we’re lucky we’ve never going to find out what it was. There’s no sense thinking about the Golden Sun right now. What we need to know is why we’re heading south instead of north.”

“You going to talk to Delagard, doc?”

“I think I ought to,” Lawler said.

8

Delagard had just come off watch. He looked tired. His burly shoulders were slumped forward, his head was thrust forward wearily on his thick neck. As he started to descend the hatch that led to his quarters Lawler called to him to wait.

“What is it, doc?”

“Can we talk?”

Delagard’s eyelids slid downward for a moment. “Right this minute?”

“I think so, yes.”

“All right. Come on. Come on down with me.”

Delagard’s cabin, more than twice as spacious as Lawler’s was littered with discarded clothes, empty brandy bottles, odds and ends of ship’s equipment, even a few books. Books were such rarities on Hydros that it amazed Lawler to see them scattered so casually about.

“You want a drink?” Delagard asked.

“Not just yet. Go on, help yourself.” Lawler hesitated a moment. “A little problem has turned up, Nid. We seem to have accidentally gone off course.”

“Have we?” Delagard didn’t sound surprised.

“It appears that we’re on the wrong side of the equator. We’re heading south-southwest instead of north-northwest. It’s a pretty considerable variation from the plan.”

“That far off course?” Delagard said. It was mock wonder, very heavy-handed. “Going in the wrong direction entirely?” He toyed with his brandy cup, rubbed his right collarbone as though it ached, rearranged some of the intricate clutter on the table in front of him. “That’s one hell of a navigational error, if it’s true. Somebody must have sneaked up to the binnacle and turned the compass clean upside down with intent to deceive. But are you sure about all this, doc?”

“Don’t fuck around with me. It’s too late for that. What are you up to, Nid?”

“You don’t know shit about open-sea navigation. How can you tell which direction we’re going in?”

“I consulted some experts.”

“Onyos Felk? That foolish old fart?”

“Yes, I talked to him. Among others. Onyos isn’t always all that reliable, I agree, but the others are. Believe me.”

Delagard gave Lawler a deadly look, slitted eyes, clamped jaws. Then he calmed; he drank again, and topped up his brandy cup; he disappeared into a contemplative silence.

“All right,” Delagard said finally. “Here’s where I let you in on it. Felk happens to be right for once. We aren’t going to Grayvard.”

Delagard’s casual self-assurance hit Lawler hard, a sharp jolt.

“Jesus Christ, Nid. Why not?”

“Grayvard doesn’t want us. It never did. They gave me the same bullshit story the other islands did, that they had room for maybe a dozen refugees tops, certainly not the whole bunch of us. I pulled all the strings I could. They stuck to their position. We were out in the cold, flat on our asses, nowhere to go.”

“So you were lying right from the start of the voyage? You were planning to take us to the Empty Sea all along? What the hell were you up to? Why did you bring us here, of all places?” Lawler shook his head wonderingly. “You’ve really got balls, Nid.”

“I didn’t lie to everybody. I told Gospo Struvin the truth. And Father Quillan.”

“Gospo I can understand, I guess. He was your top-of-the-line captain. But how come Quillan?”

“I tell him a lot of things.”

“You a Catholic now? He’s your confessor?”

“He’s my friend. He’s full of interesting ideas.”

“I’m sure. And what interesting idea did Father Quillan have about the course we should take?” Lawler asked. He felt as if he were dreaming this. “Did he tell you that through the wonders of prayer and spiritual fortitude he could work a miracle for us? Did he offer to conjure up some nice unoccupied island in the Empty Sea where we could set up housekeeping, maybe?”

“He told me that we ought to head for the Face of the Waters,” Delagard said coolly.

Another jolt, stronger than the last. Lawler’s eyes widened. He helped himself to a deep gulp of some of Delagard’s brandy, and waited a moment for it to achieve an effect. Delagard, facing him across the table, sat patiently watching, looking alert, calm, perhaps even amused.

“The Face of the Waters,” Lawler said, when he felt steady enough to speak again. “That’s what you said. The Face of the Waters.”

“Right, doc.”

“And why, can you tell me, did Father Quillan think it was such a great idea to head toward the Face?”

“Because he knew I had always wanted to go there.”

Lawler nodded. He felt the serenity of complete despair coming over him. Another drink seemed like a good idea. “Sure. Father Quillan believes in the gratification of irrational impulses. And since he had no place else to go anyway, you might just as well haul the entire fucking lot of us off halfway around the world to the strangest, most remote place on Hydros, about which we know absolutely nothing at all except that even the Gillies don’t have the guts to go anywhere near it?”

“That’s right.” Delagard shook off the sarcasm, smiling quietly.

“Father Quillan gives wonderful advice. That’s why he’s been such a success in the priesthood.”

Eerily calm, Delagard continued, “I asked you once if you remembered the stories Jolly used to tell about the Face.”

“A bunch of fairy tales, yes.”

“That’s more or less what you said the other time. But do you remember them?”

“Let’s see. Jolly claimed that he made it all the way across the Empty Sea by himself and found the Face, which he said was a huge island, a lot bigger than any of the Gillie islands, a warm, lush place with strange, tall plants bearing fruit, fresh water ponds, rich waters ripe for harvesting.” Lawler thought a moment, dredging into his memories. “He would have stayed there forever, it was such a sweet place to live. But one day when he was out fishing a storm blew him out to sea, and he lost his compass, and I think got caught in the Wave on top of everything else, and when he had control of his boat again he was halfway home with no way of getting back to the Face. So he kept going, on to Sorve, and tried to get people to go back there with him, but no one would. Everyone laughed at him. No one believed a thing he said. And eventually he went out of his mind. Right?”

“Yes,” Delagard said. “That’s the essential story.”

“It’s terrific. If I were still ten years old I’d be just thrilled out of my skull that we’re going to pay a visit to the Face of the Waters.”

“You ought to be, doc. It’s going to be the great adventure of our lives.”

“Is it, now?”

“I was fourteen years old when Jolly came back,” Delagard said. “And I listened to what he had to say. I listened very carefully. Maybe he was crazy, but he didn’t seem that way to me, at least not at first, and I believed him. A big, rich, fertile uninhabited island just waiting for us—and no stinking Gillies to get in our way! It sounds like paradise to me. A land of milk and honey. A place of miracles. You want to keep the community together, don’t you? Then why the hell should be crowd ourselves into some unwanted little corner of somebody else’s island and live like beggars on their charity? What better way can I make it up to everybody for what I did to them than by taking them around the world to live in paradise?”

Lawler stared.

“You’re out of your fucking mind, Nid.”

“I don’t think so. The Face is up for grabs, and we can grab it. The Gillies are so superstitious about it that they won’t go near it. Well, we can. And we can settle on it, we can build on it, we can farm it. We can make it give us the thing that we most want.”

“And what is it, the thing that we most want?” Lawler prompted, feeling as if he had begun to drift free of the planet and was floating off into the blackness of space.

“Power,” Delagard said. “Control. We want to run this place. We’ve lived on Hydros like pitiful pathetic refugees long enough. It’s time we made the Gillies kiss our asses. I’d like to build a settlement on the Face twenty times as big as any existing Gillie island—fifty times as big—and get a real community going there, five thousand people, ten thousand, and put a spaceport on it and open up commerce with the other human-inhabited planets of this fucking galaxy, and start to live like real human beings instead of having to scrape out a miserable soggy seaweed-eating life for ourselves drifting around randomly in the ocean the way we’ve been doing here for a hundred and fifty years.”

“You say all this so calmly, too. Such a rational tone of voice.”

“You think I’m crazy?”

“Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. What I do think is that you’re a monstrous selfish son of a bitch. Making us all hostages to this weird fantasy of yours this way. You could have dropped a few of us off at each of five or six different islands if Grayvard wouldn’t take us all.”

“You yourself said that you didn’t want that. Remember?”

“And this is better? Dragging us with you out here? Putting all our lives at risk while you go chasing after fairy tales?”

“Yes. It is.”

“You bastard. You absolute and utter bastard. You are crazy, then!”

“No, I’m not,” Delagard said. “I’ve been working this out for years, now. I’ve spent half my life thinking about it. I quizzed Jolly up and down, and I’m completely sure that he took the voyage he claimed to take and that the Face is what he says it is. I was planning for years to launch an expedition there. Gospo knew about it. He and I were going to go there together, maybe in another five years or so. Well, the Gillies gave me a good excuse, tossing us off Sorve the way they did, and then the other islands wouldn’t take us in, and I figured, here’s the moment, here’s the chance. Grab it, Nid. And I did.”

“So you had it in mind right from the time we left Sorve.”

“Yes.’

“But didn’t tell your captains, even.”

“Only Gospo.”

“Who thought it was a perfectly swell idea.”

“Correct,” Delagard said. “He was with me all the way. So was Father Quillan when I told him. The Father agrees with me completely.”

“Of course he does. The stranger the better, for him. The farther away from civilization he can hide himself, the more he likes it. The Face is the Promised Land to him. When we get there he can set up the Church in this land of milk and honey of yours with himself as high priest, cardinal, pope, whatever he wants to call himself—while you build an empire, eh, Nid. And everybody’s happy.”

“Yes. You’ve got it exactly.”

“And so it’s all set up. Here we are at the edge of the Empty Sea, getting deeper in every minute.”

“You don’t like it, doc? You want to get off the ship? Go right ahead. We’re going forward whether you like it or not.”

“And your captains? You think they’re going to go with you once they know what the real destination is?”

“You bet they will. They go where I say. Always have, always will. The Sisters may not follow, if they pick up any idea of what’s really going on, but that’s okay. What good are they anyway, those crazy bitches? They’ll just make trouble for us when we get to the Face. But Stayvol will sail anywhere I want him to. And Bamber, and Martin. And poor fucking Damis would have, too. Right straight on to the Face. No question of it. We’ll get there, and we’ll build the biggest, richest goddamned place Hydros has ever seen, and we’ll all live happily ever after. Trust me, we will. You want some more brandy, doc? Yes. Yes, I think you do. Here. Have a good stiff one. You look like you need it.”

Father Quillan, standing at the rail staring out ecstatically at an emptiness that seemed even emptier than the endless skein of sea they had already crossed, seemed to be in his high spiritual mode at the moment. His face was ruddy, his eyes were glowing.

“Yes,” he said. “I told Delagard that he should make the journey to the Face.”

“When was this? While we were still on Sorve?”

“Oh, no. When we were at sea. It was a little while after Gospo Struvin was killed. Delagard took Gospo’s death very hard, you know. He came to me and said, Father, I’m not a religious man, but I need to talk to somebody and you’re the only one available that I trust. Maybe you can help me, he said. And he told me about the Face. What it was like, why he wanted to there. And about the plan that he and Gospo had worked out. He didn’t know what to do now that Gospo was gone. He still wanted to go to the Face but he wasn’t sure he could bring the voyage off. We discussed the Face of the Waters at great length. He explained its nature to me very fully, as he had heard it from that old sailor long ago. And when he had told me the story I urged him to carry through with his scheme, even without Gospo. I saw the importance of it and told him that he was the only man on this planet who could possibly achieve it. Nothing must be allowed to stand in your way, I told him. Go on: bring us to this paradise, this unspoiled island where we’ll have a fresh start. And he turned the ship and started heading south.”

“And why,” Lawler said carefully, “do you think we’re going to be able to make any sort of workable fresh start on this unspoiled island you and Delagard are taking us to? Just a handful of people settling in an unknown wilderness, where we don’t know anything about anything?”

“Because,” said Quillan, in a calm, flat voice hard enough to have inscribed his words on metal plates, “I believe that the Face is literally a paradise. I think it’s Eden. Literally.”

Lawler blinked. “You’re serious? The actual Eden where Adam and Eve lived?”

“The actual Eden, yes. Eden is anywhere that has not been touched by original sin.”

“So Delagard got that idea from you, about the Face being a paradise? I should have guessed. And I suppose you think God lives there too. Or is it just his vacation home?”

“I don’t know. But I would like to think that He is there. He always is wherever Paradise is.”

“Sure,” Lawler said. “The Creator of the Universe is living right here on Hydros on a gigantic marshy island covered with a tangle of seaweed. Don’t make me laugh, Father. I’m not even sure you believe in God. Half the time I don’t think you’re sure either.”

“Half the time I’m not sure,” the priest said.

“When you have your “dead” times.”

“Yes. The times when I find myself absolutely convinced that we evolved out of the lower animals for no purpose at all. When I think that the whole long process of rising from amoeba to man on Earth, from microorganism of any kind to sentient being of whatever sort on whichever planet, is as automatic as the movements of a planet about its sun, and just as meaningless. When I think that nothing set it in motion. That nothing keeps it going but its own innate nature.”

“This is what you believe half the time.”

“Not half. But sometimes. Most of the time not.”

“And when it’s not what you believe? What then?”

“Then I believe that there was a First Cause which set it all in motion for reasons that we may never know. And who keeps it all going, out of His great love for His creatures. For God is love, just as Jesus said, in the part of the Bible you didn’t get around to reading: He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. God is connection, God is the end of aloneness, the ultimate communion. Who will one day gather all of us, however unworthy, to His bosom, where we will live everlastingly in glory, free from pain of every sort.”

“You believe this most of the time.”

“Yes. Do you think you can?”

“No,” Lawler said. “I wish I could. But I can’t.”

“So you feel that everything is without purpose?”

“Not exactly. But we’ll never know what that purpose is. Or whose it is. Things happen, the way the Golden Sun happened to disappear in the night, and we don’t necessarily find out why. And when we die, there’ll be no bosom to welcome us, no further life in glory. There won’t be anything.”

“Ah,” Quillan said, nodding. “My poor friend. You spend every day in the condition I reach at my moments of bleakest despair.”

“Maybe so. Somehow I endure it.” Lawler narrowed his eyes and looked off toward the southwest across the glaring surface of the sea, as though he expected a dark vast island to be coming into view out there at any moment. His head was throbbing. He wanted to drown the ache in numbweed tincture.

“What I pray for you is that you’ll be able one day soon to yield up your pain at last,” Quillan said.

“I see,” Lawler said darkly.

“Doyou see? Do you really?”

“What I see is that in your hunger for paradise you didn’t think twice about selling us all out to Delagard.”

“You put it very harshly,” Quillan said.

“Yes. I suppose I do. I’m sorry about that. You don’t think I have any reason to be annoyed, do you?”

“My child—”

“I’m not your child!”

“You are His child, at least.”

Lawler sighed. Two lunatics, he thought: Delagard, Quillan. One willing to do anything for redemption’s sake, the other out to conquer the world.

Quillan put his hand lightly on Lawler’s hand and smiled.

“God loves you,” he said gently. “God will bring you His grace, never fear.”

“Tell me what you know about the Face of the Waters,” Lawler said to Sundira. “Everything.”

They were in his cabin. She said, “It isn’t a lot. I know that it’s some kind of gigantic island or island-like object, immensely bigger than any of the known and inhabited islands. It covers thousands of hectares, an enormous permanently anchored land mass.”

“That much I know already. But did you learn anything about it in all those conversations you used to have with the Gillies? Pardon me: the Dwellers.”

“They didn’t like to talk about it. Except one, a female Dweller I used to know on Simbalimak. She was willing to answer a few of my questions.”

“And?”

“She said it’s the forbidden place, a place where no one may go.”

“Is that all? Tell me more.”

“It’s pretty murky stuff.”

“I imagine it is. Tell me, Sundira. Please.”

“She was pretty cryptic. Deliberately so, it seemed to me. But I got the impression from her that the Face is not simply taboo, or sacred, and therefore to be avoided, but that it’s literally uninhabitable—physically dangerous. “It is the fountain of creation,” she said. A dead Dweller is thought of as returning to the source. When a Dweller dies, she said, the phrase that they use is that it “has gone to the Face". I got the impression of something boiling with energy—something hot and fierce and very, very powerful. As though a nuclear reaction is going on there all the time.”

“Christ,” Lawler said tonelessly. Warm as it was in the humid little cabin, he felt a chill starting to move up his legs. His fingers were cold too, and twitchy. Turning, he took down the flask of numbweed tincture and poured a little dose for himself. He looked inquiringly at Sundira, but she shook her head. “Hot and fierce and powerful,” he said. “A nuclear reaction.”

“You understand that that wasn’t her concept. It’s mine, based on the vague and no doubt metaphorical phrases she was using. You know how hard it is to understand what the Dwellers say to us.”

“Yes.”

“But I found myself wondering, while she was talking about these things with me, whether some Dweller experiment might have taken place there long ago, maybe some kind of atomic power project that went astray, something along that line. It’s only a guess, you understand. But I could see from the way she was talking, how uneasy she was, how she kept putting up walls when I asked too many questions, that she believes that there’s something very much to be avoided on the Face. Something she doesn’t even want to think about, let alone talk about.”

“Shit. Shit.” Lawler drank the numbweed in a single gulp and felt its steadying effect almost at once. “A nuclear wasteland. A perpetual chain reaction. That doesn’t fit very well with the things that Delagard was telling me. Or Father Quillan.”

“You’ve been talking about the Face of the Waters with them? Why? What’s so interesting about the Face, suddenly?”

“It’s the big topic of the moment.”

“Val, will you be kind enough to tell me what’s going on?”

He hesitated a moment. Then he said quietly, “We haven’t been travelling in the direction of Grayvard for days. We’re south of the equator and moving steadily deeper into the Empty Sea.” She gave him a startled look. He went right on. “What we’re heading for,” he told her, “is the Face of the Waters.”

“You say that as though you’re actually serious.”

“I am.”

She pulled back from him, the sort of little reflexive jerking gesture she might have made if he had raised his hand in a menacing way.

“Is this Delagard’s doing?”

“Right. He told me so himself, half an hour ago, when I braced him with some questions about the route we seemed to be following.” Quickly Lawler summed it up for her: Jolly’s tale of his voyage to the Face; Delagard’s dream of establishing a city there and using it to gain power over the whole planet. Dwellers and all; his plan to build a spaceport, eventually, and open Hydros to interstellar commerce.

“And Father Quillan? How does he fit into this?”

“He’s cheering Delagard on. He’s decided, don’t ask me why, that the Face is some sort of Paradise, and that God—his God, the one he’s been trying to find all his life—makes his headquarters there when he’s in the neighbourhood. So he’s eager to have Delagard take him there so he can finally say hello.”

Sundira was staring at him with the disconcerted expression of a woman who has just discovered a small snake crawling upward along the inside of her thigh.

“Are they both crazy, do you think?”

“Anybody who talks about things like “seizing control” and “gaining power” seems crazy to me,” Lawler said. “Likewise somebody who’s concerned with a concept like “finding God". These are nonsensical ideas to me. Anyone who embraces nonsensical ideas is crazy, by my definition of the word. And one of them happens to be in command of this fleet.”

The sky was darkening when Lawler returned to the main deck, and the midday watch was scampering around in the rigging, swiftly shortening sail under Onyos Felk’s direction. A brisk wind was blowing toward the north; it was already hard and strong, with the clear potential of turning into a screaming gale at any minute. A heavy storm was coming down upon them, a ragged black mass of turbulence advancing out of the south. Lawler could see it on the march far in the distance, hurling down torrents of rain, churning the bosom of the sea into wild crests of white foam. Lightning flickered across the sky, a rare sight, a terrifying forked yellow flash. It was followed almost immediately by a heavy booming roll of thunder.

“Buckets! Casks! Here comes water!” Delagard was yelling.

“Yeah, enough water to swamp us but good,” Dag Tharp said under his breath, as he trotted up the deck past Lawler.

“Dag! Wait!”

The radioman turned. “What is it, doc?”

“You and I have to do some calling around the fleet when this storm is over. I’ve been talking to Delagard. He’s taking us to the Face of the Waters, Dag.”

“You’ve got to be joking.”

“I wish I was.” Lawler glanced upward at the rapidly shifting sky. It had taken on a weird metallic tone, a sinister dull greyish glow, and little hissing tongues of lightning were flickering at the edges of the great black storm-cloud that now hung just to the south of the ships. The ocean was beginning to look as fierce as it had during the three-day windstorm. “Listen, we don’t have time to discuss this now. But he’s got a whole raft of berserk reasons for doing what he’s doing. We have to stop him.”

“And how are we going to do that?” Tharp asked. A wave rose against the starboard side with whipcrack ferocity.

“We’ll speak with the captains. Call a convocation of all the ships. Tell everyone what’s going on, put it to a vote if necessary, depose Delagard somehow.” Lawler saw the scheme clearly in his mind: a meeting of all the Sorve people, a revelation of the bizarre truth of their journey, a passionate denunciation of the ship-owner’s insane ambition, a straightforward appeal to the common sense of the community. His reputation for logic and sanity staked against Delagard’s grandiose vision and tempestuous headstrong nature. “We can’t just let him drag us off willy-nilly into whatever lunatic place he’s heading for. He has to be prevented from doing it.”

“The captains are loyal to him.”

“Will they stay loyal when they find out what the actual situation is?”

Another wave struck the ship, a hard back-of-the-hand blow that sent it heeling toward portside. A sudden cascade came roiling over the rail. A moment later there was a terrible lightning flash and an almost simultaneous earsplitting crack of thunder, and then the rain descended in a single drenching sheet.

“We’ll talk about it,” Lawler called to Tharp. “Later. When the storm blows itself out!”

The radioman went off toward the bow. Lawler clung to the rail, engulfed in water, choking as it hit him from several sides at once, the wildly leaping foaming sea and the great downward weight of the almost solid mass of rain. His mouth and nostrils were full of water, fresh water and salt water mixed. He gasped and turned his head away, feeling half drowned, and choked and wheezed and coughed until he could breathe again. A midnight blackness had descended on the ship. The sea was invisible, except when a flash of lightning revealed vast yawning black caverns rising all around them, like secret chambers opening to swallow them up. Dark figures could still be seen moving about the deck, running frenziedly to and fro as Delagard and Felk screamed orders. The sails were down, now. The Queen of Hydros, rocking and heeling wildly under the full brunt of the storm, turned its bare spars to windward. Now it rose on a towering sea, now it plunged downward into a gaping hollow, striking its foaming floor with a tremendous bang. Lawler heard distant shrieks. He had an overwhelming sense of great volumes of relentless water descending from every side.

Then in the midst of the immense uproar of the storm, the terrifying percussive fury that was hammering them, the shrill cry of the wind and the rumble of the thunder and the drumming of the rain, there came a sudden sound that was more frightening than anything that had preceded it: the sound of silence, the utter absence of noise, falling as though magically like a curtain over the tumult. Everyone on the ship perceived it at the same moment, and paused and looked up, startled, bewildered, scared.

It lasted for perhaps ten seconds, that strange silence: an eternity, just then.

And after it came a sound that was even stranger—incomprehensible, even—and so overwhelmingly awesome that Lawler had to fight against the urge to drop down to his knees. It was a low roaring sound that rose swiftly in intensity from second to second, so that in a few moments it filled the air like the outcry of a throat bigger than the galaxy. Lawler was deafened by it. Someone ran by him—it was Pilya Braun, he realized afterward—and tugged furiously on his arm. She pointed windward and shouted at him. Lawler stared at her, not understanding a word; and she said it again, and this time her voice, infinitesimal against the monstrous roar that filled the heavens, reached him clearly enough.

“What are you doing on deck?” she asked. “Go below! Go below! Don’t you see, it’s the Wave!”

Lawler peered into the blackness and saw something long and high and glowing with a golden inner fire lying on the breast of the ocean far away: a bright line that stretched along the horizon, something higher than any wall, streaming with its own radiance. He looked at it in wonder. Two figures rushed past him, crying out warnings to him, and Lawler nodded to them: Yes, yes, I see, I understand. He was still unable to draw his eyes away from that distant onrushing thing. Why was it glowing that way? How high was it? Where had it come from? There was a kind of beauty about it: the snowy white tongues of foam along its crest, the crystalline gleam of its heart, the purity of its unbroken advancing motion. It was devouring the storm as it came, imposing a titanic order of its own on the storm’s chaos. Lawler watched until there was almost no time left. Then he rushed toward the forward hatch. He paused for an instant to look back and saw the Wave looming above the ship like a god astride the sea. He dived through the opening and shut it behind him. Kinverson rose up beside him to drive home the battens. Without a word Lawler sprawled down the ladder into the heart of the ship and huddled down with his shipmates to await the moment of impact.