The Face of the Waters

1

The ship was on a greased track, sliding freely across the world. Beneath him Lawler could feel the long roll of the world-ocean, the great swinging planetary surge of it, as the colossal wall of water on which they rode swept them resistlessly along. They were mere flotsam. They were an isolated atom tossing in the void. They were nothing at all and the immensity of the maddened sea was everything.

He had found a place amidships where he could crouch and brace himself, jammed up against one of the bulkheads with a thick wad of blankets wedging him into place. But he had no real expectation of surviving. That wall of water had been too huge, the sea too stormy, the ship too flimsy.

From sound and motion alone Lawler tried to imagine what must be happening abovedecks now.

The Queen of Hydros was scudding over the surface of the sea, caught up in the forward motion of the Wave and carried helplessly along by it, riding on its lower curl. Even if Delagard had managed to switch on his magnetron device in time it must have had little or no effect in shielding the ship from the impact of the oncoming surge, or from being scooped up and swept forward by it. Whatever the velocity of the Wave was, that was how fast the ship must be travelling now as the great mass of water pushed it onward. Lawler had never seen a Wave so great. Probably no one had in the brief one hundred and fifty years of human settlement on Hydros. Some unique concatenation of the three moons and the sister world, most likely: some diabolical conflux of gravitational forces, it was, that had lifted this unthinkable bulge of water and sent it careening around the belly of the planet.

Somehow the ship was still afloat. Lawler had no idea why. But he was certain that it still hovered like a bobbing cork on the breast of the water, for he could feel the steady force of acceleration as the Wave drove onward. That unyielding force hammered him back against the bulkhead and pegged him to it so he was unable to move. If they had already capsized, he reasoned, the Wave would have passed on by this time, leaving them quietly sinking in its lee. But no: no. They were travelling. Within the Wave, they were, spinning over and over, keel upward, keel downward, keel upward, keel downward, everything within the ship that wasn’t pinned down breaking loose and rattling around. He could hear the sounds of that, things clattering as though the ship were being shaken in the grasp of a giant, which indeed it was. Over and over and over. He found himself struggling for breath, gasping as though it were he himself and not the topdeck that was constantly being submerged and allowed to rise again. Down, up, down, up. There was a pounding in his chest. Dizziness assailed him, and a kind of drunken lightheadness that stripped all possibility of panic from him. He was being whirled around too wildly to feel fear: there was no room in his mind for it.

When do we finally sink? Now? Now? Now?

Or would the Wave never release them, but carry them endlessly around the world, turning forever like a wheel under the force of its terrible power?

A time came when everything was steady again. We’re free of it, he thought, we’re drifting on our own. But no: no. Only an illusion. After a moment or two the whirling began again, more intense than before. Lawler felt his blood streaming from his head to his feet, his feet to his head, his head to his feet, his feet to his head. His lungs ached. His nostrils burned at every intake of breath.

There were thumps and bangs that seemed to come from within the ship, furniture flying about, and louder thumps and bangs that seemed to come from without. He heard distant voices shouting, sometimes shrieking. There was the sound of the roaring of the wind, or at least the illusion of the sound of the roaring of the wind. There was the deeper booming of the Wave itself. There was a high seething hiss, shading into a harsh snarling, that Lawler couldn’t identify at all: some angry confrontation of water and sky at their meeting-place, perhaps. Or perhaps the Wave was a thing of varying densities, and its own component waters, held together helter-skelter only by the overriding momentum of the larger force, were quarrelling among themselves.

Then finally came another spell of stillness, and this one seemed to last and last and last. We are sinking now, Lawler thought. We are fifty metres below the surface, and descending. We are about to drown. At any moment the pressure of the water outside will burst the little bubble that is the ship and the sea will come rushing in, and it will all be over.

He waited for that inward gush to come. A quick death, it would be. The water’s fist against his chest would choke the flow of blood to his brain: he’d be unconscious in an instant. He would never know the rest of the story, the slow drifting descent, the crushed timbers cracking open, the curious creatures of the deeps wandering in to stare and ponder and eventually to feed.

But nothing happened. All was peaceful. They were drifting in a time outside of time, silent, calm. It occurred to Lawler now that they must already be dead, that this was the next life in which he had never been able to believe, and he laughed and looked around, hoping to find Father Quillan near by so that he could ask the priest, “Is this what you thought it would be like? An endless suspended drifting? Lying here in the very place where you died, still conscious, with an enormous silence all around you?”

He smiled at his own foolishness. The next life wouldn’t merely be a continuation of this one. This was still the old one. There were his familiar feet; these were his hands, with fading scars on their palms; that was the sound of his own breathing. He was still alive. The ship must still be afloat. The Wave had passed on at last.

“Val?” a voice said. “Val, are you all right?”

“Sundira?”

She came crawling toward him down the narrow passageway, cluttered now by all manner of things that had shaken loose. Her face was very pale. She looked dazed. Her eyes had a frozen glint to them. Lawler stirred, freed himself from a plank that had fallen from somewhere and landed on his chest without his being aware of it, and began to scramble out of his snug hiding-place. They met midway.

“Jesus,” she said softly. “Oh, Jesus God!”

She began to cry. Lawler reached for her and realized he was crying too. They held each other and wept together in the weird dreamlike stillness.

One of the hatches was open and a shaft of light was coming through it. Hand in hand they emerged into the open air.

The ship was upright, seated normally in the water as though nothing at all had happened. The deck was wet and shining as Lawler had never seen it shine before. It looked as if an army of a million deckhands had been swabbing it down for a million years. The wheel-box was still there, the binnacle, the quarterdeck, the bridge. The masts, amazingly, were still in place, though the foremast had lost one of its yards.

Kinverson was already on deck down by the gantry area, and Lawler saw Delagard up by the bow, splayfooted and motionless, stupefied by shock. He seemed rooted to the deck: it was as if he had been standing in that one place all the time that the ship had been swept along in the grip of the Wave. Beyond him to starboard was Onyos Felk, standing in that same stunned immobile way.

One by one the others were leaving their hiding places:

Neyana Golghoz, Dann Henders, Leo Martello, Pilya Braun. Then Gharkid, limping a little from some misadventure belowdecks, and Lis Niklaus, and Father Quillan. They moved about cautiously, shuffling like sleepwalkers, assuring themselves in a tentative way that the ship was still intact, touching the rails, the seatings of the masts, the roof of the forecastle. The only one missing was Dag Tharp. Lawler assumed that he had stayed below to try to make radio contact with the other ships.

The other ships? They were nowhere in sight.

“Look how calm it is,” Sundira said softly.

“Calm, yes. And empty.”

It looked the way the world must have looked on the first day of creation. To all sides stretched a totally featureless sea, grey-blue and tranquil, not a swell in it, not a wave, not a whitecap, not the merest ripple: a placid horizontal nothingness. The passage of the Wave had purged it of all energy.

The sky too was smooth and grey and nearly empty. A single low cloud lay across it in the distant west, with the sun setting behind it. Pale light streamed up from beyond the horizon. Of the storm that had preceded the Wave there was no trace. It had vanished as completely as the Wave itself.

And the other ships? The other ships?

Lawler walked slowly from one side of the vessel to the other and back again. His eyes searched the water for signs and portents: floating timbers, drifting fragments of sail, scattered clothing, even struggling swimmers. He saw nothing. Once before in this voyage, after that other great storm, the three-day gale, he had looked out onto a sea in which no other ship could be seen. That time the fleet had merely been strewn around by the winds, and within hours it had reassembled. Lawler was afraid that it was going to be different this time.

There’s Dag,” Sundira murmured. “My God, look at his face!”

Tharp was coming up the rear hatch now, pale, blank-eyed, slack-jawed, his shoulders stooped and his arms dangling limply. Delagard, breaking from his stasis, whirled and snapped, “Well? What’s the news?”

“Nothing. No news.” Tharp’s voice was a hollow whisper. “Not a sound. I tried and tried. Come in. Goddess, come in. Star, come in, Moons, come in. Cross. This is Queen. Come in, come in, come in.” He sounded half out of his mind. “Not a sound. Nothing.”

Delagard’s jowly face went leaden. His flesh sagged.

“None of them?”

“Nothing, Nid. They won’t come in. They aren’t there.”

“Your radio’s broken.”

“I picked up islands. I got Kentrup. I got Kaggeram. It was a bad Wave, Nid. Really bad.”

“But my ships—!”

“Nothing.”

“My ships. Dag!”

Delagard’s eyes were wild. He charged forward as though he meant to seize Tharp by the shoulders and shake better news out of him. Kinverson stepped between them out of nowhere and held Delagard back, steadying him while he shivered and trembled.

“Go back down,” Delagard ordered the radioman. “Try again.”

“It’s no use,” Tharp said.

“My ships! My ships!” Delagard spun about and ran to the rail. For one startling moment Lawler thought he was going to hurl himself overboard. But he simply wanted to hit something. He made clubs out of his fists and battered them against the rail, again and again, striking with such astonishing force that half a metre of the rail dented, bent, collapsed under the impact. “My ships!” Delagard wailed.

Lawler felt himself beginning to tremble now. The ships, yes. And all those who had been aboard them. He turned to Sundira and saw sympathy in her eyes. She knew what sort of pain he was feeling. But how could she possibly understand, really? They had all been strangers to her. To him, though, they represented his whole past: the substance of his life, for better or for worse. Nicko Thalheim, Nicko’s old father Sandor, Bamber Cadrell, the Sweyners, the Tanaminds, Brondo, the poor crazy Sisters, Volkin, Yanez, Stayvol, everyone, everyone he had ever known, everything, his childhood, his boyhood, his manhood, the custodians of a lifetime’s shared memories, all swept away at once. How could she comprehend that? Had she ever been part of a long-established community? Ever? She had left the island of her birth without giving it a second thought and wandered from place to place, never looking back. You couldn’t know what it was like to lose what you had never had.

“Val—” she said softly.

“Let me be, all right?”

“If I could only help somehow—”

“But you can’t,” Lawler said.

Now darkness was coming on. The Cross was starting to enter the sky, hanging at a curious angle, strangely askew, slanting from southwest to northeast. There was no wind. The Queen of Hydros wallowed languidly in the calm sea. Everyone was still on deck. No one had bothered to rig the sails again, though it was hours since the Wave had passed by. But that scarcely mattered in this stillness, these doldrums.

Delagard turned to Onyos Felk. In a lifeless voice he asked, “Where do you think we are?”

“By dead reckoning, or you want me to get my instruments out?”

“Just take a fucking guess, Onyos.”

“The Empty Sea.”

“I can figure that out for myself. Give me a longitude.”

“You think I’m a magician, Nid?”

“I think you’re a dumb prick. But you can give me a longitude, at least. Look at the fucking Cross.”

“I see the fucking Cross,” Felk said acidly. “It tells me that we’re south of the equator and a lot farther west than we were when the Wave got us. You want better than that, let me go below and try to find my instruments.”

“A lot farther west?” Delagard asked.

“A lot. A whole lot. We really had ourselves a ride.”

“Go get your instruments, then.”

Lawler watched, comprehending very little, as Felk, after a lengthy rummage in the chaos belowdecks, emerged with the tools of his trade, the crude, awkwardly-fashioned navigational instruments that probably would have made a mariner of sixteenth-century Earth chuckle condescendingly. He worked quietly, muttering to himself now and then as he took a fix on the Cross, pondered, fixed again. After a time Felk glanced at Delagard and said, “We’re farther west than I want to believe.”

“What’s our position?”

Felk told him. Delagard looked surprised. He went below himself, was gone a long while, returned eventually with his seachart. Lawler moved closer as Delagard ran his finger down the lines of longitude. “Ah. Here. Here.”

Sundira said, “Can you see where he’s pointing?”

“We’re in the heart of the Empty Sea. We’re almost as close to the Face of the Waters as we are to any of the settled islands behind us. It’s the middle of nowhere, all right, and we’re all alone in it.”

2

Gone now was any hope of calling a convocation of the ships, of focusing the will of the entire Sorve community against Delagard. The entire Sorve community had been reduced to just thirteen people. By this time everyone aboard the one surviving ship knew what the real destination of the voyage was. Some, like Kinverson, like Gharkid, seemed not to care: one destination was as good as any other, for men like that. Some—Neyana, Pilya, Lis—were unlikely to oppose Delagard in anything he wanted to do, no matter how strange. And at least one. Father Quillan, was Delagard’s avowed ally in the quest for the Face.

That left Dag Tharp and Dann Henders, Leo Martello, Sundira, Onyos Felk. Felk loathed Delagard. Good. One for my side, Lawler told himself. As for Tharp and Henders, they had already had one brush with Delagard over the direction of the voyage; they wouldn’t shrink from another. Martello, though, was a Delagard man, and Lawler wasn’t sure where his sympathies would lie in a showdown with the ship-owner. Even Sundira was an unknown quantity. Lawler had no right to assume that she’d side with him, no matter what sort of closeness seemed to be developing between them. She might well be curious about the Face, eager to learn its true nature. By avocation she was a student of Gillie life, after all.

So it was four against all the rest, or at best six. Not even half the ship’s complement. Not good enough, Lawler thought.

He began to think that the idea of bringing Delagard under control was futile. Delagard was too powerful a force to bring under control. He was like the Wave: you might not like where it was taking you, but there wasn’t much you could do about it. Not really.

In the aftermath of the catastrophe Delagard bustled with inexhaustible energy about the deck getting the ship ready for the resumption of the voyage. The masts were repaired, the sails were raised. If Delagard had been a driven, determined man before, he seemed completely demoniacal now, a relentless force of nature. The analogy with the Wave seemed to be the right one, Lawler thought. The loss of his precious ships appeared to have thrust Delagard across some threshold of will into a new realm of purposefulness. Furious, volatile, supercharged with energy, Delagard functioned now at the centre of a vortex of kinetic power that made him all but impossible to approach. Do this! Do that! Fix this! Move that! He left no space about himself for someone like Lawler to come up to him and say, “We aren’t going to let you take this ship where you want to take it, Nid.”

There were fresh bruises and cuts on Lis Niklaus” face the morning after the Wave. “I didn’t say a thing to him,” she told Lawler, as he worked to repair the damage. “He just went wild and started hitting me as soon as we got inside the cabin.”

“Has that happened before?”

“Not like this, no. He’s a crazy man, now. Maybe he thought I was going to say something he wouldn’t like. The Face, the Face, the Face, that’s all he can think about. He talks about it in his sleep. Negotiates deals, threatens competitors, promises wonders—I don’t know.” Big, solid woman that she was, she looked suddenly shrunken and frail, as though Delagard were drawing life out of her and into himself. “The longer I live with him, the more he scares me. You think he’s just a rich shipyard owner, interested in nothing but drinking and eating and screwing and getting even richer. God knows what for. And then once in a while he lets you look a little way inside him and you see devils.”

“Devils?”

“Devils, visions, fantasies. I don’t know. He thinks this big island will make him like an emperor here, or maybe like a god, that everyone will obey him, not just people like us, but the other islanders, the Gillies too, even. And on other worlds. Do you know he wants to build a spaceport?”

“Yes,” Lawler said. “He told me that.”

“He’ll do it, too. He gets what he wants, that man. He never rests, he never lets up. He thinks in his sleep. I mean it.” Lis gingerly touched a purpling place between her cheekbone and her left eye. “Are you going to try to stop him, do you think?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Be careful. He’ll kill you if you try to get in his way. Even you, doc. He’ll kill you the way he’d kill a fish.”

The Empty Sea seemed well named, clear and featureless, no islands, no coral reefs, no storms, hardly even a cloud overhead. The hot sun cast long orange gleams on the listless, glassy blue-grey swells. The horizon seemed a billion kilometres away. The wind was slack and fitful. Tidal surges came rarely now, and they were minor ones when they came, hardly more than a ripple on the sea’s flat bosom. The ship coasted easily over them.

Nor was there much in the way of marine life either. Kinverson trawled his lines in vain; Gharkid’s nets brought up scarcely any seaweed that might be of use. Occasionally some glittering school of fish went by, or larger sea-creatures could be seen sporting at a distance, but it was rare that anything came close enough to be caught. The existing supplies on board, the stocks of dried fish and algae, were running very low. Delagard ordered that the daily rations be cut. It looked to be a hungry voyage from here on. And a thirsty one too. There had been no time to put out the usual catch-receptacles during the fantastic downpour that had struck just before the coming of the Wave. Now, under that serene cloudless sky, the level in the water-casks grew lower every day.

Lawler asked Onyos Felk to show him where they were on the chart. The mapkeeper was vague, as usual, about his geography; but he indicated a point on the chart far out into the Empty Sea, close to midway between the equator and the supposed location of the Face of the Waters.

“Can that be right?” Lawler asked. “Can we really have come so far?”

“The Wave was moving at an incredible speed. It carried us with it all day long. The miracle is that the ship didn’t simply break up.”

Lawler studied the chart. “We’ve gone too far to turn back, haven’t we?”

“Who’s talking about turning back? You? Me? Certainly Delagard isn’t.”

“If we wanted to,” Lawler said. “Just if.”

“We’d be better off just keeping on going,” said Felk gloomily. “We’ve got no choice, really. There’s all that emptiness behind us. If we turn back toward known waters, we’ll probably starve before we get anyplace useful. About the only chance we’ve got now is to try to find the Face. There might be food and fresh water available there.”

“You think so?”

“What do I know?” Felk said.

Leo Martello said, “Do you have a minute, doc? I want to show you something.”

Lawler was in his cabin, sorting through his papers. He had three boxes here of medical records for sixty-four former citizens of Sorve Island who presumably had been lost at sea. Lawler had fought bitterly with Delagard for the right to bring them along when the fleet left Sorve, and for once he had managed to win. What now? Keep them? For what? On the chance that the five vanished ships would reappear with all hands on board? Save them to be used by some future historian of the island?

Martello was as close to being the island’s historian as anyone was. Maybe he’d like these useless documents to work into the later cantos of his epic.

“What is it, Leo?”

“I’ve been writing about the Wave,” Martello said. “What happened to us, and where we are now, and where we may be going, and all of that. I thought you might want to read what I’ve done so far.”

He grinned eagerly. There was a bright glow of excitement in his glossy brown eyes. Lawler realized that Martello must be tremendously proud of himself, that he was looking for applause. He envied Martello his exuberance, his outgoing nature, his boundless enthusiasms. Here in the midst of this desperate doomed journey Martello was capable of finding poetry. Amazing.

“Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself?” Lawler asked. “The last I heard, you had just got up to the emigration from Earth to the first colonized worlds.”

“Right. But I figure I’ll eventually reach the part of the poem that tells of our life on Hydros, and this voyage will be a big part of it. So I thought, why not write it down now while it’s still fresh in my mind, instead of waiting until I’m an old man forty or fifty years from now to do it?”

Why not indeed, Lawler thought.

Martello had been letting his shaven scalp grow in, over the past few weeks: dense, rank brown hair now had sprouted. It made him look ten years younger. Martello would probably live fifty more years if anyone on this ship did. Seventy, even. Plenty of time to write poetry. But yes, it was better to get the poetic impressions down on the page right now.

Lawler extended a hand. “Okay, let’s have a look at it,” he said.

Lawler read a few lines of it and pretended to scan the rest. It was a long scrawled outpouring, the same awkward mawkish stuff as the other piece of the great epic that Martello had allowed him to see, though at least this segment had the vigour of personal recollection.

Lawler glanced up.

“It’s very powerful stuff, Leo.”

“I think it’s a whole new level for me. All the historical stuff, I’ve had to feel my way into it from the outside, but this—it was right here—” He held up his hands, fingers outstretched. “I simply had to write it down, as fast as I could get the words on paper.”

“You were inspired.”

“That’s the word, yes.” Shyly Martello reached for the sheaf of manuscript. “I could leave it with you, if you’d like to go over it more carefully, doc.”

“No, no, I’d just as soon wait until you’ve finished the whole canto. You haven’t done the part about our coming out on deck afterwards and finding ourselves far out in the Empty Sea.”

“I thought I’d wait,” Martello said. “Until we get to the Face of the Waters. This part of the voyage isn’t very interesting, is it? Nothing’s happening at all. But when we get to the Face—”

He paused meaningfully.

“Yes?” Lawler said. “What do you think’s going to happen there?”

“Miracles, doc. Wonders and marvels and fabulous things.” Martello’s eyes were shining. “I can’t wait. I’ll do a canto about it that Homer himself would have been glad to write. Homer himself!”

“I’m sure you will,” said Lawler.

Out of the emptiness came hagfish yet again, suddenly, rising by the hundreds without warning. There was no reason to expect them: if anything, the sea seemed emptier here than it had been since the voyagers had entered it.

But at torrid noon it opened and besieged the ship with hagfish. They launched themselves all at once from the water, leaping across the midsection of the vessel in thick clouds. Lawler was on deck. He heard the first whirring sounds and ducked automatically into the shadow of the foremast. The hagfish, half a metre long and thick as his arm, came through the air like swift deadly projectiles. Their angular leathery wings were outspread, the rows of needle-sharp bristles on their backs were erect.

Some cleared the deck in a single swooping arc and landed splashing in the sea beyond. Others cracked into the masts, or the forecastle roof, or piled up in the bellying sails, or simply exhausted their trajectories amidships and landed in angry lashing convulsions on the deck. Lawler saw two go right past him side by side, dull eyes sparkling malevolently. Then came three flying even closer together, as if yoked; then more than he could count. There was no way to reach the safety of the hatch. He could only hide and huddle and wait.

He heard a scream from farther down the deck, and from another direction came an irritated grunt. Looking up, he caught sight of Pilya Braun in the rigging, struggling to hold herself up while beating off a swarm of them. One of her cheeks was torn and bloody.

A plump hagfish grazed Lawler’s arm but did no damage: the bristly side was facing away from him. Another crossed the deck just as Delagard was emerging from the hatch. It struck him across the chest, ripping a jagged, rapidly reddening line through his shirt, and fell writhing at his feet. Savagely he brought his heel down on it.

For three or four minutes the onslaught was like a rain of javelins. Then they were gone. The air was quiet again; the sea was still and smooth, a sheet of ground glass stretching toward infinity.

“Bastards,” Delagard said thickly. “I’ll wipe them out! I’ll exterminate every fucking one!”

When? When the Face of the Waters had made him supreme ruler of the planet?

“Let me see that cut, Nid,” Lawler said to him.

Delagard shook him off. “It’s just a scratch. I don’t even feel it any more.”

“Whatever you like.”

Neyana Golghoz and Natim Gharkid appeared from belowdecks and began sweeping the dead and dying hagfish into a heap. Martello, who had taken a bad slice in the arm and had a row of hagfish bristles embedded in his back, came over to show the damage to Lawler. Lawler told him to go below and wait in the infirmary for him. Pilya descended from the rigging and showed Lawler her wounds also: a bloody slash across her cheek, another just beneath her breasts. “You’ll need a few stitches, I think,” he told her. “How badly are you hurting?”

“It stings a little. It burns. It burns a lot, in fact. But I’ll be all right.”

She smiled. Lawler could still see the affection for him, the desire, whatever it was, shimmering in her eyes. She knew he was sleeping with Sundira Thane, but that hadn’t seemed to change anything for her. Maybe she actually welcomed getting chopped up by these hagfish like that: it would get her his attention, his touch would be on her skin. Lawler felt sorry for her. Her patient devotion saddened him.

Delagard, still bleeding, came by again as Neyana and Gharkid made ready to dump their pile of hagfish overboard. “Hold on, here,” he said brusquely. “We haven’t had fresh fish for days.”

Gharkid gave him a look of sheer wonder. “You would eat hagfish, captain-sir?”

“We can try it, can’t we?” Delagard said.

Baked hagfish turned out to taste like rags that had been steeped in urine for a couple of weeks. Lawler managed three mouthfuls before he gave up, gagging. Kinverson and Gharkid refused to have any; Dag Tharp, Henders and Pilya did without their portions also. Leo Martello gamely ate half a fish. Father Quillan picked at his with obvious distaste but dogged determination, as though he had taken some vow to the Virgin to eat whatever was set before him, no matter how loathsome.

Delagard finished his entire serving, and called for another.

“You like it?” Lawler asked.

“Man’s got to eat, don’t he? Man’s got to keep his strength up, doc. Don’t you agree? Protein is protein. Eh, doc? What do you say, doc? Here, have some more yourself.”

“Thanks,” said Lawler. “I think I’ll try to get along without it.”

He noticed a change in Sundira. The shift in the direction and purpose of the voyage appeared to have released her from whatever self-imposed restraints on intimacy she had bound herself with, and no longer were their periods of lovemaking marked by long spells of brittle silence broken only by bursts of shallow chatter. Now, as they lay together in the dark and mildewed corner of the cargo hold that was their special place, she revealed herself to him in long unexpected bursts of autobiographical monologue.

“I was always a curious little girl. Too curious for my own good, I suppose. Wading in the bay, picking up things in the shallows, getting nipped and bitten. When I was about four I put a little crab in my vagina.” Lawler winced: she laughed. “I don’t know whether I was trying to find out what would happen to the crab or to my vagina. The crab apparently didn’t mind it much. But my parents did.”

Her father had been Mayor of Khamsilaine Island. Mayor, apparently, was a term that signified the head of a government among the islanders in the Azure Sea. The human settlement on Khamsilaine was a big one, close to five hundred people. To Lawler’s way of thinking that was an enormous multitude, an unimaginably complex aggregation. Sundira was vague about her mother: a scholar of some sort, perhaps a historian, a student of the human galactic migration, but she had died very young and Sundira barely remembered her. Evidently Sundira had inherited some of her mother’s searching intellect. The Gillies in particular fascinated her—the Dwellers ; she was forever careful to call them by the more formal term, which to Lawler was awkward and ponderous. When she was fourteen Sundira and an older boy had begun spying on the secret ceremonies of the Dwellers of Khamsilaine Island. She and the boy had engaged in some sexual experimentation, too, her first; she mentioned that in a matter-of-fact way to Lawler, who was surprised to find himself bitterly envying him. To have had a dazzling girl like Sundira for a lover, when you were so young? What a privilege that would have been! There had been a sufficiency of girls in Lawler’s own adolescence, and then some, whenever he had managed to escape from the endless hours of medical studies that kept him penned so much of the time in his father’s vaargh. But it hadn’t been their questing minds that had attracted him to those girls. He wondered for a moment what his life would have been like if there had been a Sundira on Sorve Island when he had been growing up. What if he had married her instead of Mireyl? It was an astounding supposition: decades of close partnership with this extraordinary woman instead of the solitary, marginal life that he had actually chosen to lead. A family. A deep continuity.

He pushed the distracting thoughts aside. Useless fantasies, these were: he and Sundira had grown up thousands of kilometres and many years apart. And even if things had been different in this way, whatever continuity they would have built on Sorve would have been shattered by the expulsion in any case. All paths led to this point of floating exile, bobbing in a tiny ship in the midst of the Empty Sea.

Sundira’s questing mind had eventually taken her into deep scandal. She was in her early twenties; her father was still Mayor; she lived by herself at the edge of the human community on Khamsilaine and spent as much of her time among the Dwellers as they would allow. “It was an intellectual challenge. I wanted to learn all I could about the world. Understanding the world meant understanding the Dwellers. There was something going on here, I was sure: something that none of us were seeing.”

She became fluent in the Dweller language—not a common skill, it appeared, on Khamsilaine. Her father appointed her the island’s ambassador to the Dwellers: all contact with them was carried on through her. She spent as much time in the Dweller village at the island’s south end as she did in her own community. Most of them merely tolerated her presence, as Dwellers customarily did; some were bluntly hostile, as Dwellers often were; but there were a few that seemed almost friendly. Sundira felt she was coming to know some of those as actual individuals, not merely as the hulking ominous undifferentiated alien creatures that Dwellers seemed to most human beings to be.

That was my mistake, and theirs: getting too close to them. I presumed on that closeness. I remembered certain things that I had seen when I was a girl, when Tomas and I were sneaking around where we shouldn’t have gone. I asked questions. I got evasive answers. Tantalizing answers. I decided I needed to go sneaking again.”

Whatever it was that Sundira had seen in the secret chambers of the Gillies, she didn’t seem able to communicate its nature to Lawler: perhaps she was being secretive with him, perhaps she simply hadn’t seen enough to comprehend anything. She hinted at ceremonies, communions, rituals, mysteries; but the vagueness in her descriptions seemed to be centred in her own perceptions, not in her willingness to share what she knew with him. “I went back to the same places I had crept into with Tomas years before. This time I was caught. I thought they were going to kill me. Instead they took me to my father and told him to kill me. He promised that he’d drown me, and they seemed to accept that. We went out in a fishing boat and I jumped over the side. But he had arranged for a boat from Simbalimak to pick me up, around at the back of the island. I had to swim for three hours to get to it. I never went back to Khamsilaine. And I never saw my father or spoke with him again.”

Lawler touched her cheek gently.

“So you know something about exile too.”

“Something, yes.”

“You never said a word to me.”

She shrugged. “What did it matter? You were hurting so much. Would it have made you feel any better if I told you that I had had to leave my native island too?”

“It might have.”

“I wonder,” she said.

A day or two later and they were in the hold again; and again afterward she spoke of the life she had left behind. A year on Simbalimak—a serious love affair there, which she had alluded to once before, and further attempts to probe the secrets of the Gillies that ended nearly as disastrously as her illicit prowlings on Khamsilaine—and then she had moved along, out of the Azure Sea entirely, off to Shaktan. Whether it was Gillie pressure or the collapse of the affair that caused her to leave was a point about which Lawler wasn’t quite certain, and he didn’t care to ask.

Shaktan to Velmise, Velmise to Kentrup, at last Kentrup to Sorve: a restless life and not a particularly happy one, so it would seem. There was always some new question beyond the last answer. More attempts to penetrate Gillie secrets; more trouble as a result. Other love affairs, coming to nothing. An isolated, fragmentary, roving existence. Why had she come to Sorve? “Why not? I wanted to leave Kentrup. Sorve was a place to go to. It was close, it had room for me. I would have stayed awhile and moved along.”

“Is that how you expected things to be for the rest of your life? Stay somewhere a little while, and then go somewhere else, and then leave that place too?”

“I suppose so,” she said.

“What were you looking for?”

“The truth.”

Lawler waited, offering no comment.

She said, “I still think something’s going on here that we only barely suspect. The Dwellers have a unitary society. It doesn’t vary from island to island. There’s a link: between one Dweller community and another, between the Dwellers and the divers, the Dwellers and the platforms, the Dwellers and the mouths. Between the Dwellers and the hagfish, for all I know. I want to know what the link is.”

“Why do you care so much?”

“Hydros is where I’m going to have to spend all the rest of my life. Doesn’t it make sense for me to learn as much about it as I can?”

“So you aren’t troubled, then, that Delagard has hijacked us and is dragging us off like this?”

“No. The more I see of this planet, the more I can understand of it.”

“You aren’t afraid to sail to the Face? To go into uncharted waters?”

“No,” she said. Then, after a moment: “Yes, maybe a little. Of course I’m afraid. But only a little.”

“If some of us tried to stop Delagard from carrying out his plan, would you be willing to join us?”

“No,” she said, without hesitation.

3

Some days there was no wind at all, and the ship lay like a dead thing in the water, altogether becalmed under a swollen sun that grew larger all the time. The air here in these deep tropics was dry and hot and often it was a struggle simply to breathe. Delagard performed wonders at the helm, ordering the sails to be swung around this way and that, that way and this, in order to catch the faintest puff of breeze, and somehow they moved along, most of the time, making their steady headway to the southwest, ever deeper into this barren wilderness of water. But there were the other days too, the terrible ones, when it seemed that there would be no gust of air again to fill the sails, not ever, and they would sit here forever until they turned to skeletons. “As idle as a painted ship,” Lawler said, “upon a painted sea.”

“What’s that?” Father Quillan asked.

“A poem. From Earth, an old one. One of my favourites.”

“You’ve quoted from it before, haven’t you? I remember the metre of it. Something about water, water everywhere.”

“Nor any drop to drink,” said Lawler.

The water was all but gone now. There was nothing but sticky shadows left at the bottom of most of the casks. Lis measured out the supply in dribbles.

Lawler was entitled to an extra ration, if he needed it for medicinal purposes. He wondered how to deal with the problem of administering his daily doses of the numbweed tincture. The stuff had to be taken in highly diluted form or it was dangerous; and he could hardly allow himself the luxury of that much water for a purely private indulgence. What then? Mix it with sea water? He could get away with that for a little while, at least; there’d be a cumulative effect on his kidneys if he kept it up very long, but he could always hope that some rain would come in a few days and he’d have a chance to flush himself clean.

There was always the possibility also of simply not taking the drug at all.

He tried that just as an experiment one morning. By midday his scalp felt strangely itchy. By late afternoon his skin was crawling as though infested with scale. He was trembling and sweaty with need by twilight.

Seven drops of numbweed and his agitation faded into the familiar welcome numbness.

But his supply of the drug was starting to run low. That seemed a worse problem to Lawler than the water shortage. There was always the hope that it would rain tomorrow, after all. But the numbweed plant didn’t seem to grow in these seas.

Lawler had counted on finding more when the ship reached Grayvard. The ship wasn’t ever going to get to Grayvard, though. He had just enough numbweed left to last him another few weeks, he estimated. Perhaps less. Before long it would all be gone.

What then? What then?

In the meantime, try mixing it with a little sea water.

Sundira told him more about her childhood on Khamsilaine, her turbulent adolescence, her later wanderings from island to island, her ambitions, her hopes, her strivings and failures. They sat together for hours in the musty darkness, stretching their long legs out before them amidst the crates, intertwining their hands like young lovers while the ship drifted placidly on the placid tropical sea. She asked Lawler about his life too, and he related the small tales of his simple boyhood and his quiet, steady, carefully self-circumscribed life as an adult on the one island he had ever known.

Then one afternoon he went belowdecks to rummage in his storage cases for fresh supplies and heard moans and gasps of passion coming from a dark corner of the hold. It was their special corner of the hold; it was a woman’s voice. Neyana was in the rigging, Lis was in the galley, Pilya was off duty and lounging on deck. The only other woman on board was Sundira. Where was Kinverson? He was first watch, like Pilya: he’d be off duty too. That must be Kinverson behind those crates, Lawler realized, urging those gasps and moans out of Sundira’s eager body.

So whatever it was that those two had between them—and Lawler knew what it was—hadn’t ended, not at all, not even in these new days of shared autobiographical confidences and sweetly intertwined hands.

Eight drops of numbweed helped him get through it, more or less.

He measured out what was left of his supply. Not much. Not very much at all.

Food was becoming a problem too. It was so long since they’d had any fresh catch that another attack by a hagfish swarm was almost beginning to seem like an appealing prospect. They lived on their dwindling supply of dried fish and powdered algae, as though they were in the depths of an arctic winter. Sometimes they were able to pull in a load of plankton by trawling a strip of fabric behind the ship, but eating plankton was like eating gritty sand, and the taste was bitter and difficult. Deficiency diseases began to make themselves felt. Wherever he looked Lawler saw cracked lips, dulled hair, blotchy skins, gaunt and haggard faces.

“This is crazy,” Dag Tharp muttered. “We’ve got to turn back before we all die.”

“How?” Onyos Felk asked. “Where’s the wind? When it blows at all here, it blows from the east.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Tharp said. “We’ll find a way. Throw that bastard Delagard overboard and swing the ship around. What do you say, doc?”

“I say we need some rain before long, and a good school of fish to come by.”

“You aren’t with us any more? I thought you were as hot to turn back as we are.”

“Onyos has a good point,” said Lawler cautiously. “The wind’s against us here. With or without Delagard, we may not be able to beat our way back east.”

“What are you saying, doc? That we just have to sail right on around the world until we come up on Home Sea again from the far side?”

“Don’t forget the Face,” Dann Henders put in. “We’ll get to the Face before we start up the other side of the world.”

“The Face,” said Tharp darkly. “The Face, the Face, the Face! Fuck the Face!”

“The Face will fuck us first,” Henders said.

The breeze freshened finally and chopped around from northeast to east-southeast, and blew with surprising chilly vigour, while the sea grew high and confused, breaking frequently across the stern. Suddenly there were fish again, a teeming silvery mass of them, and Kinverson netted a heave load.

“Easy there,” Delagard cautioned, when they sat down at table. “don’t stuff yourselves or you’ll burst.”

Lis outdid herself preparing the meals, conjuring up a dozen different sauces out of what seemed like nothing at all. But there was still no water, which made eating a taxing chore. Kinverson urged them to eat their fish raw once again, to get the benefit of the moisture it contained. Dipping the fresh bleeding chunks in sea water helped to make them more palatable, although it compounded the problem of thirst.

“What’ll happen to us if we drink salt water, doc?” Neyana Golghoz asked. “Will we die? Will we go crazy?”

“We already are crazy,” Dag Tharp said softly.

“We can tolerate a certain amount of salt water,” Lawler said, thinking of the amount he had consumed himself lately. But he wasn’t going to say anything about that. “If we had any fresh water, we could actually stretch the supply by diluting it ten or fifteen per cent with ocean water and it wouldn’t hurt us. In fact it would help us to replace the salt we’re sweating out of ourselves all the time in this hot weather. But we can’t live on straight sea water very long. Our bodies would manage to filter it and turn it into pure water, but our kidneys wouldn’t be able to get rid of the salt buildup without pulling water out of other body tissues to do it. We’d dry up pretty fast. Fever, vomiting, delirium, death.”

Dann Henders set up a row of little solar stills, stretching clear plastic over the mouths of pots partly filled with sea water. Each pot had a cup inside it, placed carefully to catch the drops of fresh water that condensed on the underside of the plastic. But that was a tortuous business. It seemed impossible to produce enough usable water this way to meet their needs.

“What if it doesn’t rain soon?” Pilya Braun asked. “What are we going to do?”

Lawler gestured toward Father Quillan. “We could try praying,” he said.

Late the following evening when the heat held them as tightly as a glove and the ship was standing almost perfectly still in the water, Lawler heard Henders and Tharp whispering in the radio room as he headed back to his cabin to go to sleep. There was something irritatingly abrasive about the scratchy sounds of their voices.

As Lawler halted in the passageway for a moment Onyos Felk came down the ladder and gave him a quick nod of greeting; then Felk went on to the radio room too. Lawler, pausing outside his cabin door, heard Felk say, “The doc’s out here. You want me to ask him in?”

Lawler couldn’t hear the reply. But it must have been affirmative, because Felk turned and beckoned to him and said, “Would you come over here for a minute, doc?”

“It’s late, Onyos. What is it?”

“Just for a minute.”

Tharp and Henders were sitting practically knee-to-knee in the tiny radio room with a guttering candle casting a sombre light between them. There was a flask of grapeweed brandy on the table, and two cups. Tharp ordinarily wasn’t a drinker, Lawler remembered.

Henders said, “Some brandy, doc?”

“I don’t think so, thanks.”

“Everything going all right?”

“I’m tired,” Lawler said, not very patiently. “What’s up, Dann?”

“We’ve been talking about Delagard, Dag and I. And Onyos. Discussing this idiotic fucked-up mess of a voyage that he’s dragged us off on. What do you think of him, doc?”

“Delagard?” Lawler shrugged. “You know what I think.”

“We all know what all of us think. We’ve all known each other too goddamned long. But tell us anyway.”

“A very determined man. Stubborn, strong, completely unscrupulous. Totally sure of himself.”

“Crazy?’

“That I can’t say.”

“I bet you could,” Dag Tharp put in. “You think he’s out of his fucking head.”

“That’s very possible. Or then again, not. Sometimes it’s not easy to tell the difference between singlemindedness and insanity. A lot of geniuses have seemed like madmen, in their times.”

“You think he’s a genius?” Henders asked.

“Not necessarily. But he’s unusual, at least. I’m not in a position to say what goes on in his mind. He may well be crazy. But he can give you perfectly rational-sounding reasons for what he’s doing, I’d be willing to bet. This Face of the Waters thing may make perfect sense to him.”

Felk said, “Don’t pretend to be so innocent, doc. Every lunatic thinks that his lunacy makes perfect sense. Isn’t a man in the world who ever believed he was crazy.”

“Do you admire Delagard?” Henders said to Lawler.

“Not particularly.” Lawler shrugged. “He’s got his strong points, you have to admit. He’s a man of vision. I don’t necessarily think his visions are very admirable ones.”

“Do you like him?”

“No. Not in the slightest.”

“You’re straightforward on that, anyway.”

“Look, is there a point to all this?” Lawler asked. “Because if you’re simply having a good time sitting here over a bottle of brandy telling each other what a miserable bastard Delagard is, I’d just as soon go to bed, okay?”

“We’re just trying to find out where you stand, doc,” Dann Henders said. “Tell us, do you want the voyage to continue the way it’s been going?”

“No.”

“Well, what are you prepared to do to change things?”

“Is there anything we can do?”

“I asked you a question. Asking me a question back doesn’t amount to an answer.”

“You planning on a mutiny, are you?”

“Did I say that? I don’t remember saying that, doc.”

“A deaf man could hear you saying it.”

“A mutiny,” Henders said. “Well, now, what if some of us did try to take some active role in deciding which way the ship ought to be travelling. What would you say if that were to happen? What would you do?”

“It’s a lousy idea, Dann.”

“You think so, doc?”

“There was a time when I was just as eager as you are to make Delagard turn the ship around. Dag knows that. I spoke to him about it. Delagard was to be stopped, I told him. You remember that. Dag? But that was before the Wave brought us way the hell out here. Since then I’ve had plenty of time to think about it, and I’ve changed my mind.”

“Why?”

“Three reasons. One is that this is Delagard’s ship, for better or for worse, and I don’t much like the notion of taking it away from him. A moral issue, you might say. You could justify doing it on the grounds that he’s risking our lives without our consent, I suppose. But even so I don’t think it’s a smart idea. Delagard’s too tricky. Too dangerous. Too strong. He’s on guard all the time. And a lot of the others on board are loyal to him, or afraid of him, which amounts to the same thing. They won’t help us. They’re likely to help him. You try any funny stuff with him and you very likely will find yourself regretting it.”

Henders” expression was a wintry one. “You said you had three reasons. That was two.”

Lawler said, “The third is the thing that Onyos was talking about the other day. Even if you grabbed the ship, how would you make it take us back to Home Sea? Be realistic about it. There’s no wind. We’re running out of food and water faster than I want to think about. Unless we can somehow pick up a westerly wind, the best we can hope for at this point is to keep on heading toward the Face on the chance that we’ll be able to reprovision ourselves when we get there.”

Henders gave the mapkeeper a quizzical look. “You still feel that way, Onyos?”

“We’re pretty far in, yes. And right now we do seem to be becalmed most of the time. So I suppose we really don’t have a lot of choice but to continue on our present course.”

“That’s your opinion?” Henders asked.

“I suppose it is,” said Felk.

“Continuing to follow a lunatic who’s leading us toward a place we know nothing about? One which very likely is full of all sorts of dangers that we can’t even begin to imagine?”

“I don’t like that any more than you do. But like the doctor says, we need to be realistic. Of course, if the wind should change—”

“Right, Onyos. Or if angels should come down from the skies and bring some nice cool fresh water with them.” There was a long prickly silence in the small cramped room. At length Henders looked up and said, “Okay, doc. This isn’t accomplishing anything. And I don’t want to take up any more of your time. We were just inviting you in for a friendly little drink, but I can see how tired you are. Good night, doc. Sleep well.”

“Are you going to try it, Dann?”

“I don’t see how that concerns you one way or another, doc.”

“All right,” Lawler said. “Good night.”

“Onyos, would you stick around for a little while?” Henders said.

“Whatever you want, Dann,” Felk said.

The mapkeeper sounded as though he was ready to be convinced.

A bunch of fools, Lawler thought, as he went to his bunk. Playing at being mutineers. But he doubted very much that anything would come of it. Felk and Tharp were weaklings, and Henders couldn’t deal with Delagard by himself. In the end nothing would be done, and the ship would stay on course for the Face. That seemed the likeliest outcome of all this planning and scheming.

Somewhere in the night Lawler heard noises from above, shouts, some heavy pounding, the sound of feet running across the deck. There was an angry yell, muffled by the deck planking above him but nevertheless clearly a cry of rage, and he knew that he had been wrong. They were doing it after all. He sat up, blinking. Without taking the time to dress, he rose and made his way into the passageway and up the ladder.

It was almost dawn. The sky was grey-black; the Cross was low in the sky, hanging in that weirdly askew fashion that was its way in these latitudes. A strange drama was being enacted on deck, near the fore hatch. Or was it a farce?

Two frantic figures were chasing each other around the open hatch, yelling and gesticulating as they ran. After a moment Lawler focused his sleep-blurred eyes and saw that they were Dann Henders and Nid Delagard. Henders was doing the chasing, Delagard the fleeing.

Henders had one of Kinverson’s gaffs clutched in his hand like a spear. As he followed Delagard around the perimeter of the hatch he stabbed the air with the weapon again and again, with the clear intent of putting it through the ship-owner’s back. There had already been at least one hit. Delagard’s shirt was torn; Lawler saw a thin jagged line of blood seeping through near his right shoulder, like a red thread sewn into the fabric, widening with every moment.

But Henders was going it alone. Dag Tharp stood near the rail, goggle-eyed, motionless as a statue. Onyos Felk was close by him. In the rigging were Leo Martello and Pilya Braun, frozen also, looks of astonishment and awe on their faces.

“Dag!” Henders yelled. “For Christ’s sake. Dag, where are you? Give me a hand with him, will you.”

“I’m here—over here—” the radioman whispered, in a hoarse husky tone that could barely be heard five metres away. He stayed where he was.

“For Christ’s sake,” Henders said again, disgustedly. He shook his fist at Tharp and leaped wildly toward Delagard in a frantic lunging attempt at reaching him. But Delagard managed—only barely—to elude the sharp tip of the gaff. He looked back over his shoulder, cursing. His face glistened with sweat; his eyes were inflamed and bright with fury.

As Delagard passed near the foremast in his frenzied circular flight he looked up and called out in a whipcrack voice to Pilya, suspended just above him on the yard, “Help me! Fast! Your knife!”

Swiftly Pilya unfastened the scabbard that held the blade of sharpened bone she always wore strapped around her waist and tossed it, scabbard and all, to Delagard as he went by beneath her. He snapped it out of the air with a quick fierce swipe of his hand, pulled the blade from its holder, gripped its haft tightly in his hand. Then he swung around, unexpectedly striding straight toward the astounded Henders, who was plunging along behind him at a pace too swift to check. Henders ran right into him. Delagard brushed the long gaff to one side with a stiff, brusque motion of his forearm and came in underneath it, bringing his arm upward and sinking the blade to its hilt in Henders” throat.

Henders grunted and flung up his arms. He looked amazed. The gaff went flying aside. Delagard, embracing Henders now as though they were lovers, clamped his other hand to the back of the engineer’s neck and with weird tenderness held him close up against him with the blade firmly rammed home.

Henders” eyes, wide and bulging, glistened like full moons in the grey of dawn. He made a thick sputtering sound and a spurt of dark blood shot from his mouth. His tongue came into view, swollen and lagging. Delagard held him upright, pressing hard.

Lawler found his voice, finally.

“Nid—my God, Nid, what have you done—”

“You want to be next, doc?” Delagard asked calmly. He pulled the blade out, giving it a savage twist as he withdrew it, and stepped back. A torrent of blood came springing forth once the knife was out. Henders” face had turned black. He took a shaky step, and another, like a sleepwalker. The look of astonishment still gleamed in his eyes.

Then he tottered and fell. Lawler knew he was dead before he reached the deck.

Pilya had come down from the rigging. Delagard tossed the blade across the planks to her. It landed at her feet. “Thanks,” he said offhandedly. “I owe you one for that.” Scooping Henders” body up as if it were weightless, one arm around the dead man’s shoulders and the other under his legs, Delagard strode quickly toward the rail, lifted the body high over his head, and flung it into the sea as though it was garbage.

Tharp hadn’t moved during the whole thing. Delagard went over to him and slapped him in the face, hard enough to send his head rocking back.

“You cowardly little fucker. Dag,” Delagard said. “You didn’t even have the guts to follow through on your own plot. I ought to throw you overboard too, but it isn’t worth the effort.”

“Nid—for God’s sake, Nid—’

“Shut your mouth. Get out of my sight.” Delagard wheeled around and glared at Felk. “What about you, Onyos? Were you part of this thing too?”

“Not me, Nid! I wouldn’t! You know that!”

“’Not me, Nid!’” Delagard mimicked savagely. “Cocksucker! You would have been if you’d had the guts. A coward from the start. And how about you, Lawler? Will you stitch me up, or are you part of this fucking conspiracy too? You weren’t even here. What did you do, sleep late for your own mutiny?”

“I wasn’t in it,” said Lawler quietly. “It was a dumb idea, and I told them so.”

“You knew, and you didn’t warn me?”

“That’s right, Nid.”

“If you’re not party to a mutiny, then it’s your obligation to notify the captain of what’s going on. Law of the sea. You didn’t do that.”

“That’s right,” Lawler said. “I didn’t.”

Delagard considered that for a moment. Then he shrugged and nodded. “All right, doc. I think I get your meaning.” He looked around. “Somebody clean up the deck,” he said. “I hate a messy ship.” He gestured to Felk, who looked dazed. “Onyos, take the wheel, as long as you seem to be awake. I’ve got to get this cut fixed. Come on, doc. I guess I can trust you to stitch me up.”

At midday a wind came up between one moment and the next, as if Henders” death had been a sacrifice to whatever gods ruled the weather on Hydros. In the vast quiet of the long calm there abruptly appeared the deep roaring of gusts that had travelled a long way: all the way from the pole, in fact, a sharp southerly blow, cold and crisp.

The sea grew high. The ship, stilled for so long, tumbled into a trough, heeled back, dropped into another. Then the sky darkened with a suddenness that was almost startling. The wind was bringing rain with it.

“Buckets!” Delagard bellowed. “Casks!”

No one needed to be urged. The watch below came awake in an instant and the deck was alive with busy hands. Anything that could hold water was set forth to catch it, not simply the usual jars and casks and pots, but also clean rags, blankets, clothes, whatever was absorbent and could be wrung out after the storm. It had been weeks since the last rainfall; it might be weeks until the next.

The rain was a distraction, easing the shock of Henders” abortive mutiny and violent death. Lawler, naked in the cool rain, rushing back and forth like everyone else to empty the smaller vessels into the larger storage containers, was grateful for it. The nightmare scene on deck had affected him in a wholly unexpected way, stripping him of layers of hard-won defences. It had been a long time since he had felt so naive, so callow. Spouting gouts of blood, raw torn flesh, even sudden death, they were all everyday things to him, part of his professional routine. He was accustomed to them; he took them casually. But a killing? He had never seen a murder before. He had never really even imagined the possibility of one. For all of Dag Tharp’s brave talk of throwing Delagard overboard in the past couple of weeks, Lawler could hardly believe that one man might actually be capable of taking another’s life. There was no question, certainly, that Delagard had killed Henders in self defence. But he had done it coolly, matter-of-factly, remorselessly. Lawler felt humiliatingly ingenuous, confronting these ugly realities. Wise old Doc Lawler, the man who has seen everything, shivering in his boots over a bit of archaic violence? It was absurd. And yet it was real. The impact on him was intense. It had been a shattering sight.

Archaic was the right word for it. The efficiency and indifference with which Delagard had rid himself of his pursuer had been positively medieval, if not downright prehistoric: a hand had risen up out of the shadowy past, a dark act out of mankind’s primeval dawn had been reenacted on the deck of the Queen of Hydros this morning. Lawler would hardly have been more surprised if Earth itself had appeared suspended in the sky, hanging just above the masts with blood dripping from every teeming continent. So much for all those centuries of civilization. So much for the earnest common belief that all such ancient passions were extinct, that raw violence of that bloody kind had evolved out of the race.

The rainstorm was a welcome distraction, yes, as well as a much-needed source of water. It washed the deck clean of the stain of sin. What had happened here today was something Lawler would just as soon forget as quickly as he could.

4

In the night came troubling dreams, dreams filled not with murder but with powerful erotic passions.

The shadowy figures of women danced around Lawler as he slept, women without faces, mere cavorting bodies, generic receptacles for desire. They could have been anyone, anonymous, mysterious, pure female essence without specific identity, blank tablets and nothing more: a procession of swaying breasts, broad hips, full buttocks, dense thick pubic triangles. Sometimes it seemed to him that the dance was made up of disembodied breasts alone, or a succession of endlessly parting thighs, or moist shining lips. Or wriggling fingers, or flicking tongues.

He tossed restlessly, drifting toward wakefulness but always subsiding again into sleep, which brought new flurries of fevered sensuality. Clouds of women surrounded his bunk, their eyes slitted and wanton, their nostrils flaring, their bodies bare. Now there were faces to go with the bodies, the faces of the Sorve women he had known and loved and all but forgotten, a legion of them, all the escapades of his busy youth recalled to life and surrounding him now, the unformed faces of adolescent girls, the leering faces of older women who were dallying with a boy half their age, the tense, sharp-eyed faces of women stricken with a love that they knew was futile. One by one they passed within Lawler’s reach, let him touch them, allowed him to pull them close, and then faded into smoke, to be replaced almost at once by another. Sundira—Anya Braun—Boda Thalheim, not yet Sister Boda—Mariam Sawtelle—Mireyl—Sundira again—Meela—Moira—Sundira—Sundira—Anya—Mireyl—Sundira—

Lawler felt all the torment that desire can bring, and no hope of relief from it. His penis was huge, aching, a log. His testicles were iron weights. A hot musky woman-smell, maddening and irresistible, covered his nose and mouth like a smothering blanket, choking him, seeping down deep into his throat and filling his lungs until they were fiery with discomfort.

And beneath the images, beneath the fantasies, beneath the aching sense of distress and frustration, was something else: a strange vibration, perhaps a sound or perhaps not, in any event a steady widening beam of strong sensory input that came stabbing up through his body from his loins to his skull. He could feel it entering him like an icy spear just behind his testicles and rising through all the steaming intricacies of his guts, through his diaphragm, his heart, piercing his throat, stabbing upward into his brain. He was skewered on it and turning slowly like a fish grilling on a spit; and as he turned the intensity of the erotic sensations grew and grew and grew until there seemed to Lawler that nothing else existed in the universe but the need to find a partner and couple with her at once.

He rose from his narrow bed, not sure whether he was awake or still dreaming, and went out into the passageway. Up the ladder, through the hatch, out on deck.

The night was mild and moonless. The Cross trailed across the lower sky like a cluster of jewels that someone had carelessly tossed aside. The sea was calm, with little rounded rippling swells glittering by starlight. There was an easy breeze. The sails were set and full.

Figures were moving about: sleepwalkers, dreamers.

They were as vague and ghostly to Lawler as the figures of his dreams. He understood that he knew them, but that was all. They had no names just now. They had no selves. He saw a short thick-bodied man and another with a bony, angular body and a tiny, emaciated one with wattles at his throat. Men were not what he was looking for, though. Far down by the stern there was a tall, slender dark-haired woman. He headed for her. But before he could reach for her another man appeared, a tall strapping one with big glowing eyes, who came gliding out of the shadows and caught her by the wrist. They sank down together on the deck.

Lawler turned. There were other women on this ship. He would find one. He had to.

The throbbing ache between his legs was unendurable. That strange vibratory sensation still spitted him, rising the whole length of his torso, past his gullet and into his skull. It had the cold burning force of an icicle, and an icicle’s knife-like insistence.

He stepped over one couple grappling on the deck: a greying older man with a compact, solid-looking body and a big hefty woman with dark skin and golden hair. Lawler thought vaguely that he might have known them once; but, as before, no names came. Beyond them a small bright-eyed man flitted by alone, and then there was another couple locked in a close embrace, the man huge and muscular, the woman lithe, youthful, vigorous.

“You!” came a voice from the shadows. “Here!”

She was sprawled below the bridge, beckoning to him, a sturdy broad-bodied woman with a flat-featured face, orange hair, a sprinkling of reddish freckles on her face and breasts. She was shiny with sweat, breathing hard. Lawler knelt by her and she drew him down and gripped him between her thighs.

“Give it to me! Give it to me!”

He slipped easily inside her. She was warm and lathered and soft. Her arms enfolded him. She crushed him down against her heavy breasts. His hips moved in urgent thrusts. It was quick, wild, fierce, a hard grunting moment of rut. Almost as soon as he began to move, Lawler felt the walls of her hot moist passage quivering and tightening on him in deep, steady spasms. He could feel the impulses of pleasure running along her nerve-channels. That was confusing, that he should be feeling what she was feeling. An instant later came his spurting response, and he could feel that in a double way too, not only his sensations but hers as she received his fluid. That too was very strange. It was difficult to tell where his consciousness left off and hers began.

He rolled away from her. She reached for him, trying to pull him back, but no, no, he was on his way. He wanted another partner now. That single throbbing moment hadn’t been nearly enough to ease the need that drove him. It might be that nothing could. But perhaps he could find the tall slender one next, or else that robust young sleek-limbed one who seemed to be overflowing with vital energies. Or even the big dark-skinned one with the golden hair. It made no difference which one. He was insatiable, inexhaustible.

There was the slender one, by herself once more. Lawler started toward her. Too late! The hairy thick-bodied man with fleshy breasts like a woman’s seized her and claimed her. Off they went into the darkness.

Well, the big one, then—Or the young one—

“Lawler!” a man’s voice said.

“Who’s that?”

“Quillan! Here! Here!”

It was the angular man, the man who seemed to have no flesh. He came out from behind the place where the water-strider was stowed and took hold of Lawler’s arm. Lawler shook him off. “No, not you—it’s not a man that I’m after—”

“Neither am I. Nor a woman, either. Good lord, Lawler! Have you all gone crazy?”

“What?”

“Stand here with me and watch what’s going on. This lunatic orgy.”

Lawler shook his head muzzily. “What? What? Orgy?”

“You see Sundira Thane and Delagard going at it over there? Kinverson and Pilya? And look, look, there’s Neyana, moaning for it like a madwoman. You’ve just finished with her yourself, haven’t you? And already you want more. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Lawler clutched his loins. “I feel—pain—here—”

“It’s something out of the sea that’s doing it to us. Affecting our minds. I feel it too. But I’m able to control myself. Whereas you—the whole crazed lot of you—”

Lawler had great difficulty understanding what the bony man was telling him. He began to move away. Now he saw the big golden-haired woman wandering the deck, looking for her next partner.

“Lawler, come back!”

“Wait—later—we can talk later—”

As he shambled toward the woman a slender dark male figure moved past him, calling out, “Father-sir! Doctor-sir! I see it! Over here, over the side!”

“What do you see, Gharkid?” the angular one called Quillan asked.

“A big limpet, Father-sir. Attached to the hull. It must be sending out some chemical—some drug—”

“Lawler! Come look at what Gharkid’s found!”

“Later—later—”

But they were merciless. They went toward him and took him by the arms, one gripping him on each side, and marched him toward the rail. Lawler peered over. Here the sensations were far more intense than anywhere else on board: Lawler felt a deep rhythmic thrumming along his backbone, a stupefying pounding in his groin. His balls tolled like bells. His rigid penis trembled and jerked upright, pointing at the stars.

He fought to clear his brain. He could barely comprehend what was happening.

A thing invading the ship, driving everybody crazy with lust.

Names returned to his mind and he matched them with faces and forms. Quillan. Gharkid. Resisting the force. And those who hadn’t: he and Neyana, Sundira and Martello, Sundira and Delagard. Kinverson and Pilya. Felk and Lis. On and on in an unending change of partners, a feverish dance of pricks and cunts. Where was Lis? He wanted Lis. He had never wanted her before. He had never wanted Neyana either. But he did now. Now, Lis, yes. And then Pilya, finally. Give her what she’s been after this whole voyage. And Sundira after that. Get her away from loathsome Delagard. Sundira, yes, and then Neyana again, and Lis, and Pilya—Sundira, Neyana, Pilya, Lis—fuck till dawn—fuck till noon—fuck till the end of time—

“I’m going to kill it,” Quillan said. “Hand me that gaff, Natim.”

“You don’t feel its force?” Lawler asked. “You’re immune?”

“Of course I’m not immune,” the priest said.

“So your vows—”

“It isn’t the vows that are holding me back. It’s simple fear, Lawler.” To Gharkid Quillan said, “The gaff should just about reach. Hang on to my legs so I don’t go overboard.”

“Let me do it,” Lawler said. “My arms are longer than yours.”

“Stay where you are.”

The priest pulled himself up on the rail and wriggled down the outer side of the hull. Gharkid grabbed his legs. Lawler steadied Gharkid. Looking down, Lawler saw something that looked like a bright yellow plaque perhaps a metre across clinging to the ship just above the water-line. It was flat and circular with a little puckered dome in its centre. Quillan reached down as far as he could and stabbed at it. Again. Again. A tiny spurt of blue fluid rose like a feeble little fountain from the creature’s back. Another poke. The creature quivered convulsively.

Lawler felt the pain in his loins beginning to ease.

“Hold me tighter!” Quillan called. “I’m starting to slip!”

“No, Father-sir. No!”

Lawler clamped his hands around Quillan’s upturned ankles. He felt the priest’s body go taut as he bent away from the ship, reached downward, drove the gaff home with a short hard thrust. The thing clinging to the ship rippled wildly along its fleshy perimeter. Its colour darkened to a deep green, then to a morbid black; sudden writhing ridges arose in its soft flesh; it drew itself up and fell back into the sea and was swept off into the ship’s wake.

Almost at once Lawler felt his mind throw off the last of its fog.

“My God,” he said. “What was it?”

“A limpet is what Gharkid called it,” said Quillan. “Stuck to the ship, dousing us all with wild pheromones.” He was quivering as though released from some unbearable tension. “Some of us were able to fight it. Some weren’t.”

Lawler looked updeck. Everywhere naked people were wandering slowly about, looking dazed, like newly awakened sleepers. Leo Martello stood beside Neyana, staring at her as if he had never seen her before in his life. Kinverson was with Lis Niklaus. Lawler’s eyes met Sundira’s. She seemed stunned. Her hand brushed again and again across her flat bare belly in an anguished scrubbing motion, as if to rub away the impress of Delagard’s flesh against her own.

The limpet was a harbinger. In these low latitudes the Empty Sea appeared to be getting less empty.

A new kind of drakken appeared, a southern species. They were much like the ones of the north, but larger and more cunning-looking, with a cheerily calculating look about them. Instead of travelling in swarms of many hundreds these drakkens moved in a pack of only a few dozen, and when their long tubular heads came jutting up out of the water they were very widely spaced, as though each member of the pack demanded and received a generous territorial allotment from its companions. They accompanied the ship for hours, kicking along untiringly beside it with their noses up in the air. Their gleaming crimson eyes never closed. It was easy enough to believe that they were waiting for darkness and an opportunity to come scrambling up on board. Delagard ordered the watch below to go on duty early, patrolling the deck armed with gaffs.

At twilight the drakkens submerged, all of them vanishing in a single moment in that sudden simultaneous way of their kind, as if they had been sucked down in one gulp by some vastness below them. Delagard wasn’t convinced that they were gone and kept the patrols on deck all night. But there was no attack, and in the morning the drakkens were nowhere to be seen.

Then late that afternoon as darkness began to fall a great amorphous soft mass of some sallow viscous stuff came drifting by the ship on the windward side. It went on and on, stretching out over hundreds of metres, perhaps more. It might almost have been an island of some strange kind, it was so big: a colossal flabby island, an island made entirely of mucus, a gigantic agglomeration of snot. When they drew closer to it they realized that this huge puckered wrinkled thing was actually alive, or at least partly so. Its pale custardy surface was lightly quivering in fitful motion, pushing up little rounded projections which almost immediately sank back down into the central mass.

Dag Tharp struck a comic pose. “Here we are, ladies and gentlemen! The Face of the Waters at last!”

Kinverson laughed. “More like the other end, is the way it looks to me.”

“Look there,” Martello said. “Bits of light rising from it, fluttering around in the air. How beautiful they are!”

“Like fireflies,” said Quillan.

“Fireflies?” Lawler asked.

“They have them on Sunrise. Insects equipped with luminescent organs. You know what insects are? Land-dwelling six-legged arthropods, unbelievably common on most worlds. Fireflies are insects that come out at twilight and blink their little lights on and off. Very pretty, very romantic. The effect is much like this.”

Lawler watched. It was a beautiful sight, yes; tiny fragments of that enormous turgid drifting mass detaching themselves and rising, borne upward on the light breeze, glowing as they rose, quick flashes of yellow brilliance, little soaring sunlets. The air was full of them, dozens, hundreds. They coasted on the wind, rose, fell, climbed again. On, off, on, off: flashing, flashing, flashing.

On Hydros beauty was almost always cause for suspicion. Lawler felt a growing uneasiness as the fireflies danced.

Then Lis Niklaus yelled, “The sail’s on fire!”

Lawler glanced upward. Some of the fireflies had come drifting across the ship, and wherever they fetched up against one of the sails they clung and glowed steadily, igniting the close-woven sea-bamboo fabric. Little puffs of smoke were spiralling upward in a dozen places; little red gleams of burning threads could be seen. In fact the ship was under attack.

Delagard shouted orders for a change of course. The Queen pulled away as fast as it could from the bloated enemy on its flank. Anyone not needed to shift the sails was sent aloft to defend them. Lawler scrambled around in the rigging with the others, batting at the little sparklers as they came drifting into the sails, scraping away at the ones that were already affixed to them. The heat of them was insignificant but persistent: the constant warmth they emitted while stuck to the fabric was what achieved ignition. Lawler saw charred places where they had been pulled free in time, others where starlight glittered through small holes in the sails, and—high up on the foremast topsail—a scarlet tongue of flame, tipped with a black trail of smoke, where the material was ablaze.

Kinverson was climbing swiftly toward the burning place. He reached it and began to clamp his hands over the blaze to smother it. The bright flamelets disappeared one by one into his grasp as though by a conjuring trick. In moments nothing but glowing embers could be seen; and then those too were out. The firefly that had ignited the fire was already gone. It had fallen to the deck as the sail gave way around it, leaving behind a ragged, blackened hole the size of a man’s head.

The ship caught the wind and moved quickly off to the southwest. Their unlovely foe, unable to travel at the same pace, soon was out of sight behind them. But its pretty offshoots, its dainty fluttering fireflies, continued to ride the breeze for hours in lessening numbers, and it was dawn before Delagard felt it was safe for the defenders in the rigging to come down.

Sundira spent the next three days mending the sails, with help from Kinverson, Pilya and Neyana. The ship made no headway while the spars were bare. The air was still; the sun was disagreeably strong; the sea was quiet. Sometimes a fin flickered above the surface in the distance. Lawler had the feeling they were under constant surveillance now.

He calculated that he had a week’s supply of numbweed left, at best.

Another free-floating creature, neither as gigantic nor as repellent nor as hostile as the last, came by: a large featureless ovoidal thing, perfectly smooth, of a lovely emerald colour, aglow with radiant luminosity. It stood up out of the water to its midsection, but the sea was so clear here that its shining lower half was easily visible. The thing was perhaps twenty metres around at its waist, and ten or fifteen metres in length from its submerged bottom to its rounded summit.

Delagard, jumpy, ready for anything, lined everyone up along the side of the ship armed with gaffs. But the ovoid drifted on past, harmless as a piece of fruit. Perhaps that was all that it was. Two more wandered along later the same day. The third was more spherical than the first, the second more elongated, but they seemed otherwise to be of the same kind. They seemed to take no notice of the Queen. What these ovoids needed, Lawler decided, were huge glistening eyes, the better to stare at the ship as they floated past it. But their faces were blind, smooth, mysterious, maddeningly bland. There was a curious solemnity about them, a massive calm gravity. Father Quillan said they reminded him of a bishop he had once known; and then he had to explain to everyone what a bishop was.

After the ovoids came a species of flying fish, neither the elegant iridescent air-skimmers of Home Sea nor the hideous hagfish of the open ocean. These were delicate-looking glossy creatures about fifteen centimetres long with filmy graceful wings that lifted them to astonishing heights. They could be seen far off, bursting almost vertically from the water and travelling for extraordinary distances before swooping back down and re-entering the ocean virtually without a splash. Moments later they were aloft again, up and down, up and down, coming closer to the ship with each cycle of flight and descent, until finally they were just off the starboard bow.

These fliers didn’t seem any more dangerous than yesterday’s huge floating emerald ovoids. They flew so high that there was no risk of colliding with them on deck, and so there was no need to duck and hide as would have been necessary if an overflight of hagfish had come by. They were so beautiful, gleaming brilliantly against the bright hard dome of the sky, that nearly the entire ship’s complement turned out to watch their passage.

Their bodies were practically transparent. It was easy to make out their fine wiry bones, their round pulsing red-violet stomachs, their threadlike blue veins, as they went shooting by overhead. Their blood-red eyes were finely faceted, glinting as they caught the light.

Beautiful, yes. But as they coursed through the air above the ship a strange rain fell from them, a faint shimmering shower of dark glittering drops that bit deep and burned wherever they touched.

In the first few moments no one realized what was happening. The initial nipping bites of the fliers” secretions were barely perceptible annoyances. But the pain was cumulative: the acid worked its way in, and what had been an odd little mild itch turned quickly to agony.

Lawler, standing in the shadow of the foresails, was shielded against the worst of the bombardment. Some scattering outspray caught him along his forearm, not enough to provoke more than a frown. But then he saw dark mottled scars beginning to appear on the polished yellow wood of the deck just a short distance away, and he looked up to see his shipmates howling and prancing wildly around, slapping at their arms, rubbing at their cheeks.

“Get down!” he called. Take cover! It’s coming from those flying fish!”

The airborne attackers had passed over the ship now and gone on beyond. But already a second wave of the creatures was rising from the sea off to starboard.

The entire onslaught lasted close to an hour, half a dozen waves in all. Afterward, the victims lined up one by one in Lawler’s infirmary to have their burns treated.

Sundira, who had been in the rigging when the fliers came, was the last one to come. She had been wearing nothing but a twist of cloth about her waist, and blisters were rising all over her body now. In silence Lawler dabbed her with ointment. She stood naked before him and his hands moved over her skin, rubbing the ointment in around her nipples, along her thighs, up her crotch to a point a fingerbreadth’s length from her loins.

They hadn’t made love since before the night of the limpet. But Lawler found no desire stirring in him now as he touched her, even in the most intimate places.

Sundira noticed it too. Lawler could feel her muscles tensing beneath his probing fingers. She was drawing herself up tightly, angrily.

She said finally, “You’re handling me like so much meat, Val.”

“I’m a medical man trying to care for a patient who’s got a bunch of nasty blisters all over her skin.”

“That’s all I am to you now?”

“Right at this moment, yes. You think it’s a good idea for a doctor to start breathing hard every time he touches an attractive patient’s body?”

“I’m not just any patient, am I?”

“Of course you aren’t.”

“But you’ve been keeping away from me for days. And now you treat me like a stranger. What’s the problem?”

“Problem?” He gave her a troubled look. Tapping her lightly on the hip, he said, “Turn around. I missed the ones in the small of your back. Where’s there a problem, Sundira?”

“Am I right that you don’t want me any more?”

He dipped his fingers into the ointment flask and rubbed the stuff on her just above her bare buttocks.

“I didn’t know we had a specific schedule. Do we?”

“Of course not. But look how you’re touching me now.”

“I just got through telling you,” Lawler said. “Let me try again. I thought you were here for medical care, not for lovemaking. Doctors learn early that it’s never a good idea to mix the two. But also it might have occurred to me, not as a matter of ethics but just one of common sense, that you wouldn’t want me to come on to you at a time when you happen to have painful blisters all over your skin. Okay?” This was the closest thing to a quarrel they had ever had. “Does that sound reasonable, Sundira?”

She swung around to face him. “It’s because of what I did with Delagard, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“You hate the idea that he had his hands on me, and more than his hands, and now you don’t want anything to do with me again.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes. And I’m right, too. If you could see the expression on your face just now—”

Lawler said, “We were all out of our minds while that thing was stuck to the hull. Nobody’s responsible for anything that happened that night. You think I wanted to fuck Neyana? If you want the truth, Sundira, it was you I was looking for you when I first came up on deck. Not that I could even remember your name, or my own, in the condition I was in. But I saw you and I wanted you and I headed toward you, only Leo Martello got to you first. And then Neyana caught hold of me and so I went with her. I was under the influence, same as you, same as everybody. Everybody except Father Quillan and Gharkid, that is. Our two holy men.” Lawler’s cheeks were hot. He felt his heartbeat climbing. “Jesus, Sundira, I’ve known about you and Kinverson all along, and that hasn’t stopped me, has it? And on the limpet night there was you and Martello first, before Delagard. Why would what you did with Delagard matter to me any more than what you’ve done with all the others?”

“Delagard’s different. You hate him. He disgusts you.”

“Does he?”

“He’s a murderer and a bully. He got us all thrown off Sorve Island. Ever since then he’s been running this expedition like a tyrant. He beats Lis. He killed Henders. He lies, he cheats, he does whatever he feels like doing in order to get his way. Everything about him is loathsome to you, and you can’t stand the idea that he’s fucked me too, now, whether or not I was in my right mind when I let him do it. So you’re taking it out on me. You don’t want to put your mouth where Delagard’s mouth has been, let alone your cock. Isn’t that so, Val?”

“You’re doing an awful lot of mind-reading, suddenly. I never knew you were telepathic, Sundira.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass. Is it so or isn’t it?”

“Look, Sundira—”

“It is, isn’t it?” Her tone, which had been hard and cold, softened suddenly, and she looked at him with a tenderness and longing that surprised him. “Val, Val, don’t you think it disgusts me too, to know that I had that man inside me? Don’t you think I’ve been trying to wash myself clean of him ever since? But that shouldn’t be your problem. I don’t have spots on my skin where he touched me. You have no right to turn against me like this, simply because some alien thing clamped itself to the side of our ship one night and made us commit acts that we never would have dreamed of doing otherwise.” Then there was bright anger in her eyes again. “If it isn’t Delagard, what is it? Tell me.”

In a voice thickened by shame Lawler said, “All right. I admit it. It is Delagard.”

“Oh, shit, Val.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you?”

“I don’t think I even realized what was bothering me myself, not until you flung it in my face like this. But yes, yes, I suppose that on some level it’s been eating away at me since that night. Delagard’s hand crawling around between your legs. Delagard’s blubbery mouth on your breasts.” Lawler closed his eyes a moment. “It wasn’t your fault. I’m acting like a stupid adolescent kid.”

“You’re right on all counts. You’re being very silly. And I want to remind you that under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have let Delagard screw me in a million years. Not if he was the last man in the galaxy.”

Lawler smiled. “The devil made you do it.”

“The limpet.”

“Same thing.”

“If you say so. But it never happened, not really. Not by any conscious act of mine. And I’m trying as hard as I know how to unhappen it. You try too. I love you, Val.”

He looked at her in astonishment. That was a phrase that had never arisen between them. He had never imagined that it would. It was so long since he had last heard it that he couldn’t remember who it was who had said it to him.

What now? Was he expected to say it too?

She was grinning. She wasn’t expecting him to say anything. She knew him too well for that.

“Come here, doctor,” she said. “I need some more intense examination.”

Lawler glanced around to see if the infirmary door was locked. Then he went to her.

“Watch out for my blisters,” she said.

5

Things like giant periscopes rose from the sea, glistening stalks twenty metres high topped with five-sided blue polygons. From distances of half a kilometre or so they regarded the ship with a cool, unwavering gaze for hours. They were eye-stalks, obviously. But the eyes of what?

The periscopes slipped down into the water and didn’t reappear. Next came great yawning mouths, vast creatures similar to those of Home Sea, but even larger: large enough, it would seem, for them to swallow the Queen of Hydros at a single gulp. They too stayed at a distance, lighting up the sea day and night with their greenish phosphorescence. Mouths had never been known to create difficulties for ships on Hydros, but these were the mouths of the Empty Sea, capable of anything. The dark chasms of their open gullets were a threatening, troublesome sight.

The water itself grew phosphorescent. The effect was mild at first, just a little tingle of colour, a faint charming glow. But then it intensified. At night the ship’s wake was a line of fire across the sea. Even by day the waves looked fiery. The spray that occasionally broke across the rail had a bright sparkle.

There was a rain of stinging jellyfish. There was a display of madly frolicking divers, breaking the surface and leaping so high they seemed to be trying to take wing and fly. In one place something that looked like a collection of wooden poles tied together by a bundle of shabby cords came walking across the surface of the sea, with a tiny many-eyed globular creature in an open capsule at the centre of it, as though travelling on stilts.

Then one morning Delagard, peering over the edge of the rail—he was constantly on patrol now, wary of attack from any quarter—reared back abruptly and cried out, “What the fuck? Kinverson, Gharkid, will you come here and look at this?”

Lawler joined the group. Delagard was pointing straight down. At first Lawler saw nothing unusual; but then he noticed that the ship had sprouted a skirt of some sort about twenty centimetres below the surface, an outgrowth of yellowish fibrous stuff that extended outward all along the hull for a distance of a metre or so. No, not a skirt, Lawler decided: more like a ledge, a woody shelf.

Delagard turned to Kinverson. “You ever see anything like that before?”

“Not me.”

“You, Gharkid?”

“No, captain-sir, never.”

“Some sort of seaweed growing on us? A cross between a seaweed and a barnacle? What do you think, Gharkid?”

Gharkid shrugged. “It is a mystery to me, captain-sir.”

Delagard had a rope-ladder flung over the rail and went over the side to inspect. Hanging from the ladder by one arm, dangling just above the surface of the water and leaning far out and down, he used a long-handled barnacle-scraper to prod at the strange excresence. He came back up red-faced and cursing.

The problem, he said, was with the network of sea-finger weed that grew on the hull as a constantly self-repairing coating, protecting and reinforcing the ship’s outer timbers. “Some local plant has hooked up with it. A related species, maybe. Or a symbiote. Whatever it is, it’s clustering around the sea-finger, attaching itself as fast as it can, and it’s growing like crazy. The shelf that’s jutting out of us now is big enough already to be causing a perceptible drag. But if it keeps going at the rate it’s expanding, in a couple of days we’re going to find ourselves sealed in for good.”

“What are we going to do about it?” Kinverson asked.

“You have any suggestions?”

“That somebody go out there in the water-strider and cut the damned stuff off while it can still be done.”

Delagard nodded. “Good idea. I’ll volunteer to take the first shift. Will you go with me?”

“Sure.” Kinverson said. “Why not?”

Delagard and Kinverson climbed into the water-strider. Martello, operating the davits, lifted it and swung it far out past the rail, well beyond the new ledge, before lowering it to the surface of the water.

The trick was to pedal fast enough to keep the strider afloat, but not so fast that the man operating the barnacle-scraper would be unable to cut away the intrusive growths. That was hard to manage at first. Kinverson, holding the scraper, made the most of his long reach to lean over and chop at the ledge; but he took only a couple of strokes and then the strider went shooting past the place where he was working, and when they backed up and tried to hold it in one position for a longer time it began to lose lift and slip down into the water.

After a time they got the hang of it. Delagard pedalled, Kinverson chopped. When Kinverson became visibly weary they changed places, precariously creeping around the rocking vehicle until Delagard was in front and Kinverson was at the pedals.

“All right, next shift,” Delagard called finally. He had been working with his usual manic zeal and he looked worn out. “Two more volunteers! Leo, did I hear you say you’d take the next turn? And was that you, Lawler?”

Pilya Braun worked the davits to lower Martello and Lawler over the side. The sea was fairly calm, but even so the flimsy strider bobbed and rocked constantly. Lawler imagined himself being flung out into the water by some unusually strong swell. When he looked down he could see individual fibres of the invading seaplant tossing on the swells just beyond the border of the shelf that had already formed. As the movements of the sea brought them against the side of the ship he was sure that he saw some of them affixing themselves to it.

He also could see small shining ribbony shapes coiling and writhing in the water. Worms, serpents, maybe eels. They looked quick and agile. Hoping for a snack, were they?

The ledge resisted chopping. Lawler had to grip the barnacle-scraper with both hands and ram it downward with all his strength. Often it slipped harmlessly aside, deflected by the toughness of the strange new growth. He nearly lost it altogether a couple of times.

“Hey!” Delagard yelled from above. “We don’t have any of those things to spare!”

Lawler found a way of striking edge-on at a slight angle that allowed the scraper to get between individual strands of the fibrous mass. Chunk after huge chunk of the stuff now came loose and went drifting away. He fell into the rhythm of it, slicing and slicing. Sweat rolled down his skin. His arms and wrists began to protest. Pain spread upward toward his armpits, his chest, his shoulders. His heart pounded.

“Enough,” he said to Martello. “Your turn, Leo.”

Martello seemed tireless. He hacked away with a joyous vigour that Lawler found humiliating. He had thought he had done pretty well during his stint; but in Martello’s first five minutes with the scraper he chopped away as much as Lawler had managed in his whole time. Lawler supposed that Martello even now was composing the Chopping Canto of his great epic in his head while he worked:

Onyos Felk and Lis Niklaus went down next. After them it was the turn of Neyana and Sundira, and after them, Pilya and Gharkid.

“Fucking stuff grows as fast as we can cut,” said Delagard sourly.

But they were making progress. Great chunks of the outgrowth were gone. In some places it had been cut back right to the original line of sea-finger weed.

The turn of Delagard and Kinverson came around once more. They chopped and slashed with diabolical fury. When they returned to the ship both men looked incandescent with exhaustion; they had passed beyond mere weariness into some transcendental state that left them glowing and exalted.

“Let’s go, doc,” Martello said. “It’s us again.”

Martello seemed determined to outdo even Kinverson. While Lawler kept the water-strider stabilized with a steady, numbing effort, Martello went after the vegetable enemy like some avenging god. Whack! Whack! Whack! He lifted the scraper high over his head, rammed it downward with a two-handed thrust, drove it deep. Whack! Whack! Huge sections of weed broke loose and floated away. Whack! Each stroke was mightier than the last. The water-strider tipped wildly from side to side. Lawler struggled to keep it upright. Whack! Whack!

Then Martello rose higher than ever before and brought the barnacle-scraper downward in a stroke of terrible force. It carved away an immense slab, clear back to the hull of the Queen. It must have come away more easily than Martello was expecting: Martello lost first his balance and then his grip on the scraper’s handle. He clawed at it, missed, and toppled forward, plunging with a heavy splash into the sea.

Lawler, still pedalling, leaned over and stretched out his hand. Martello was a couple of metres from the strider by now and flailing around desperately. But either he didn’t see the reaching hand or he was too far gone in panic to understand what to do.

“Swim toward me!” Lawler called. “Over here, Leo! Here!”

Martello continued to thrash and flounder. His eyes were glazed with shock. Then he stiffened suddenly as if wounded by a dagger from below. He began to jerk convulsively.

The davits were out over the water now. Kinverson was dangling from them. Lower,” he ordered. “A little more. That’s it. Over to the left. Good. Good.”

He caught the struggling Martello under the arms and reeled him in as though he were a child.

“Now you, doc,” Kinverson said.

“You can’t lift us both!”

“Come on. Here.”

Kinverson’s other arm locked itself around Lawler’s chest.

The davits rose. Swung inward over the rail, onto the deck. Lawler staggered free of Kinverson’s grip, stumbled and pitched forward, landed hard on both his knees. Sundira was at his side at once to help him up.

Martello, dripping wet, lay face upward, limp and motionless.

“Keep back,” Lawler ordered. He waved Kinverson away. “You too, Gabe.”

“We got to turn him over and pump the water out of him, doc.”

“It’s not the water I’m worried about. Get back, Gabe.” Lawler turned to Sundira. “You know where my bag of instruments is? The scalpels, and all? Bring it up on deck, will you?”

He knelt beside Martello and bared him to the waist. Martello was breathing, but he didn’t seem to be conscious. His eyes were wide, expressionless, unseeing. Now and again his lips would draw back in a frightful writhing grimace of pain and his whole body would go rigid and jerk as though an electrical current had passed through him. Then he would go limp again.

Lawler put his hand on Martello’s belly and pressed. He felt movement within: a trembling, a strange quivering, beneath the hard, tight band of abdominal muscle.

Something in there? Yes. This damnable ocean, invading wherever you gave it the slightest chance. But maybe it wasn’t too late to save him, Lawler thought. Clean him out, seal the wound, keep the community from being diminished any further.

Shadows moved about him. Everyone was crowding in, staring. They looked fascinated and repelled, both at once.

Brusquely Lawler said, “Clear out, all of you. You won’t want to see this. And I don’t want you watching me.”

No one moved.

“You heard the doctor,” came Delagard’s low growl. “Back off. Let him do his work.”

Sundira put his medical kit down on the deck beside him.

Lawler touched Martello’s abdomen again. Movement, yes. An unmistakable squirming. A quivering. Martello’s face was flushed, his pupils were dilated, his eyes were staring into some other world entirely. Hot sweat ran from every pore.

Lawler drew his best scalpel from the bag and set it down on the deck. He put both his hands on Martello’s abdomen just below the diaphragm and squeezed upward. Martello made a dull sighing sound, and a trickle of sea water and some vomit dribbled from his lips, but nothing else. Lawler tried again. Nothing. He felt motion again under his fingers: more spasms, more squirmings.

One more try. He turned Martello over and rammed his joined hands downwards against the middle of Martello’s back with all the strength he could find. Martello grunted. He spewed up some more thin puke. But that was all.

Lawler sat back for a moment, trying to think.

He turned Martello over again and picked up his scalpel.

“You won’t want to see this,” Lawler said to anyone who might be watching, without looking up, and drew a red line with the sharp iron point from left to right across Martello’s abdomen. Martello barely seemed to notice. He made a soft blurry sound, the vaguest of comments. Other distractions were taking priority for him.

Skin. Muscle. The knife seemed to know where it had to go. Deftly Lawler stripped back the layers of tissue. He was cutting now through the peritoneum. He had trained himself to enter an altered state of consciousness whenever he performed surgery, in which he thought of himself as a sculptor, not as a surgeon, and of the patient as something inanimate, a wooden log, not a suffering human being. That was the only way he could bear the process at all.

Deeper. He had breached the restraining abdominal wall, now. Blood mingled with the puddle of seawater around Martello on the deck.

The intestinal coils should come spilling out into view—

Yes. Yes. There they were.

Someone screamed. Someone uttered a grunt of disgust.

But not at the sight of the intestines. Something else was rising from Martello’s belly, something slender and bright, slowly unreeling itself and standing up on end. Perhaps six centimetres of it was visible: eyeless, seemingly even headless, just a smooth, slippery pink strip of undifferentiated living matter. There was an opening at its top end, a mouth of sorts, through which a sharp little rasping red tongue could be seen. The supple shining creature moved with supernal grace, gliding from side to side in a hypnotic way. Behind Lawler the screaming went on and on.

He struck the thing with a quick, steady backhand flick of his scalpel that cut it neatly in half. The upper end landed on the deck next to Martello, writhing. It began heading toward Lawler. Kinverson’s great boot descended at once and crushed it to slime.

“Thanks,” Lawler said quietly.

But the other half was still inside. Lawler tried to coax it out with the scalpel’s tip. It seemed untroubled by its bisecting; its dance continued, as graceful as before. Probing behind the heavy mound of intestines, Lawler struggled to dislodge it. He poked here, tugged there. He thought he saw the inner end of it and sliced at it, but there was more: another few centimetres still mocked him. He cut again. This time he had it all. He flipped it aside. Kinverson crushed it.

Everyone was silent now behind him.

He started to close the incision. But a new squirming motion made him stop.

Another one? Yes. Yes, one more, at least. Probably others. Martello groaned. He stirred slightly. Then he jerked with sudden force, rising a little way from the deck: Lawler got the scalpel out of the way just in time to keep from wounding him. A second eel rose into view and a third, weaving in that same eerie dance; then one of them pulled itself back in and disappeared once again into Martello’s abdominal cavity, burrowing upward in the general direction of his lungs.

Lawler teased the other one out, cut it in half and in halves again, yanked the last bit of it free. He waited for the one that had gone back in to make itself visible again. After a moment he caught a glimpse of it, bright and gleaming within Martello’s bloody midsection. But it wasn’t the only one. He could see the slender coils of others, now, busily wriggling about, having themselves a feast. How many more were in there? Two? Three? Thirty?

He looked up, grim-faced. Delagard stared back at him. There was a look of shock and dismay and sheer revulsion in Delagard’s eyes.

“Can you get them all out?”

“Not a chance. He’s full of them. They’re eating their way through him. I can cut and cut, and by the time I’ve found them all I’ll have cut him to pieces, and I still won’t have found them all, anyway.”

“Jesus,” Delagard murmured. “How long can he live this way?”

“Until one of them reaches his heart, I suppose. That won’t be long.”

“Can he feel anything, do you think?”

“I hope not,” Lawler said.

The agony went on another five minutes. Lawler had never realized that five minutes could last so long. From time to time Martello would jump and twitch as some major nerve was struck; once he seemed to be trying to rise from the deck. Then he uttered a little sighing sound and fell back, and the light went out of his eyes.

“All over,” Lawler announced. He felt numb, hollow, weary, beyond all grief, beyond all shock.

Probably, he thought, there had never been any chance to save Martello. At least a dozen of the eels must have entered him, very likely more, a horde of them gliding swiftly in through mouth or anus and burrowing diligently through flesh and muscle toward the centre of his abdomen. Lawler had extracted nine of the things; but others were still lurking in there, at work on Martello’s pancreas, his spleen, his liver, his kidneys. And when they were done with those, the delicacies, there was all the rest of him awaiting their little rasping red tongues. No surgery, no matter how speedily done or unerring, could have cleaned all of them out of him in time.

Neyana brought a blanket and they wrapped it about him. Kinverson gathered the body in his arms and moved toward the side with it.

“Wait,” Pilya said. “Put this with him.”

She held a sheaf of papers that she must have brought up from Martello’s cabin. The famous poem. She tucked the worn and folded pages of the manuscript into the blanket and pulled its ends tight around the body. Lawler thought for a moment of objecting, but he checked himself. Let it go. It belonged with him.

Quillan said, “Now we commend our dearly beloved Leo to the sea, in the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost—”

The Holy Ghost again? Every time Lawler heard that odd phrase of Quillan’s he was startled by it. It was such a strange concept: try as he might, he couldn’t imagine what a holy ghost might be. He shook the thought away. He was too tired for such speculations now.

Kinverson carried the body to the rail and held it aloft. Then he gave it a little push and it went outward, downward, into the water.

Instantly creatures of some strange kind appeared as if by a conjuring spell from the depths, long slim finny swimmers covered in thick black silken fur. There were five of them, sinuous, gentle-eyed, with dark tapering snouts covered with twitching black bristles. Gently, tenderly, they surrounded Martello’s drifting body and buoyed it up and began to unwrap the blanket that covered it. Tenderly, gently, they pulled it free. And then—gently, tenderly—they clustered around his stiffening form and set about the task of consuming him.

It was quietly done, no slovenly gluttonous frenzy. It was horrifying and yet eerily beautiful. Their motions stirred the sea to extraordinary phosphorescence. Martello seemed to be absorbed by a shower of cool crimson flame. Slowly he exploded in light. They made an anatomy lesson of him, peeling back the skin with utmost fastidiousness to reveal tendons, ligaments, muscles, nerves. Then they went deeper. It was a profoundly disturbing thing to watch, even for Lawler, to whom the inner secrets of the human body were no secret at all; but nevertheless the work was carried out so cleanly, so unhurriedly, so reverently, that it was impossible not to watch, or to fail to see the beauty in what they were doing. Layer by layer they put Martello’s core on display, until at last only the white cage of bone remained. Then they looked up at the watchers at the rail as though for approval. There was the unmistakable glint of intelligence in their eyes. Lawler saw them nod in what could only have been a salute; and then they slipped out of sight as silently as they had come. Martello’s clean skeleton had already disappeared, on its way to some unknown depth where, no doubt, other organisms were waiting to put its calcium to good use. Of the vital young man who had been Leo Martello nothing was left now except some pages of manuscript drifting on the surface of the water. And after a little while not even those could be seen.

Later, alone in his cabin, Lawler studied what was left of his numbweed supply. About two days” worth, he figured. He poured half of it into a flask and drank it down.

What the hell, he thought.

He drank the other half too. What the hell.

6

The withdrawal symptoms began the morning after next, just before noon: the sweats, the shakes, the nausea. Lawler was ready for them, or thought he was. But they quickly grew more severe, far worse than he had expected, a test so tough he was unsure that he would pass it. The intensity of the pain, sweeping in on him in great billowing waves, frightened him. He imagined that he could feel his brain expanding, pressing against the walls of his skull.

Automatically he looked for his flask, but of course the flask was empty. He crouched on his bunk, shivering, feverish, miserable.

Sundira came to him in mid-afternoon.

“Is it what happened the other day?” she asked.

“Martello? No, that isn’t it.”

“Are you sick, then?”

He indicated the empty flask.

After a moment she understood. “Is there anything I can do, Val?”

“Hold me, that’s all.”

She cradled his head in her arms, against her breast. Lawler shook violently for a while. Then he grew calmer, though he still felt terrible.

“You seem better,” she said.

“A little. Don’t go away.”

“I’m still here. Do you want some water?”

“Yes. No. No, just stay where you are.” He nestled against her. He could feel the fever rising, falling, rising again, with sudden devastating velocity. The drug was more powerful than even he had suspected and his dependency evidently had been a very strong one. And yet—yet—the pain fluctuated; as the hours passed there were moments when he felt almost normal. That was odd. But it gave him hope. He didn’t mind fighting if he had to, but he wanted to win in the end.

Sundira stayed with him all through the afternoon. He slept, and when he woke she was still there. His tongue felt swollen. He was too weak to stand.

“Did you know it would be like this?” she asked.

“Yes. I suppose I did. Maybe not quite this bad.”

“How do you feel now?”

“It varies,” Lawler said.

He heard a voice outside the door. “How is he?” Delagard.

“He’s worried about you,” Sundira said to Lawler.

“Very thoughtful of him.”

“I told him you were sick.”

“Not going into details?”

“No details, no.”

The night was a terrifying one. Lawler thought for a time that he would go out of his mind. But then in the small hours came another of those unexpected, inexplicable periods of recovery, as though something were reaching into his brain from afar and turning down the craving for the drug. By dawn he felt his appetite return; and when he stood up—it was the first time he had risen from his bunk since the fever had started—he was able to keep his balance. “You look okay,” Sundira told him. “Are you?” “More or less. The bad stuff will come back. This is going to be a long struggle.”

But when it did come back it was less severe than it had been. Lawler was at a loss to explain the change. He had expected three, four, even five days of utter horror and then perhaps a gradual sloping off of the torment as his system gradually purged itself of the need. This was only the second day, though.

Again that sense of intervention from without, something guiding him, lifting him, pulling him free of the morass.

Then the tremors and sweats again. And then another spell of recovery, lasting nearly half a day. He went up on deck, enjoyed the fresh air, walked slowly around. Lawler told Sundira that he felt he was getting off too easy.

“Count your blessings,” she said.

By nightfall he was sick again. On, off: up, down. But the basic trend was favourable. He seemed to be recovering. By the end of the week there were only occasional moments of discomfort. He looked at the empty flask and grinned.

The air was clear, the wind was strong. The Queen of Hydros sped onward at a steady swift rate, following its southwesterly track around the watery globe.

The sea’s phosphorescence increased in intensity day by day, even hour by hour. The whole world began to look luminous. Water and sky glowed day and night. Nightmarish creatures of half a dozen unfamiliar kinds burst from the water to soar briefly overhead and disappear with great splashes in the distance. Huge mouths yawned in the depths.

Silence reigned much of the time aboard the Queen. Everyone moved quietly and efficiently through his chores. There was much to do, for now only eleven remained to do the work that fourteen had performed at the beginning of the voyage. Martello, lighthearted, cheery, optimistic, had done much to set the tone for the rest: his death inevitably altered things.

But also the Face was growing nearer. That must have something to do with the newly sombre mood, Lawler thought. It was impossible yet to see it on the horizon, but everyone knew it was there, not far away. Everyone felt it. It was a real presence on board. Its effects were indefinable but unmistakable. Something was there, Lawler found himself thinking, something more than a mere island. Something alert and aware. Waiting for them.

He shook his head, trying to clear it. These were nonsensical fantasies, feverish nightmare horrors, insubstantial, foolish. The drug withdrawal must still be operating on him, he told himself. He was wobbly, weary, vulnerable.

The Face continued to occupy his mind. He struggled to remember the things Jolly had told him about it long ago, but everything was vague and muddled under thirty years” layers of memories. A wild and fantastic place, Jolly had said. Full of plants unlike the ones that grew in the sea. Plants, yes. Strange colours, bright lights shining day and night, a weird realm at the far edge of the world, beautiful and eerie. Had Jolly said anything about animals, land-dwelling creatures of any sort? No, nothing that Lawler could recall. No animal life, just thick jungles.

But there was something about a city, too—

Not on the Face. Near it.

Where? In the ocean? The image eluded him. He struggled to recapture the times he had spent with Jolly, down by the water, the leathery-faced sun-darkened old man rocking back and forth, casting his fishing lines, talking, talking—

A city. A city in the sea. Under the sea.

Lawler caught the tip of the recollection, felt it slip away, lunged for it, could not get it, lunged again—

A city under the sea. Yes. A doorway in the ocean opening into a passageway, a gravity funnel of some sort, leading downward to a tremendous underwater city where the Gillies lived, a hidden city of Gillies as superior to the island-dwelling ones as kings are to peasants—Gillies living like gods, never coming up to the surface, sealed away under the sea in pressurized vaults, living in solemn majesty and absolute luxury—

Lawler smiled. That was it, yes. A grand fable, a glorious fantasy. The finest, most flamboyant of all Jolly’s tales. He could remember trying to imagine what that city had been like, envisioning tall, stately, infinitely majestic Gillies moving through lofty archways into shining palatial halls. Thinking about it now, he felt like a boy again, crouching in wonder at the old seaman’s feet, straining to hear the hoarse, rasping voice.

Father Quillan had been thinking about the Face too.

“I have a new theory about it,” he announced.

The priest had spent an entire morning meditating, sitting beside Gharkid in the gantry area. Lawler, going past them, had stared in wonder. The two of them had seemed lost in trances. Their souls might have been on some other plane of existence entirely.

“I’ve changed my mind,” said Quillan. “You remember I told you before that I thought the Face had to be Paradise and God Himself walked there, the First Cause, the actual Creator, He to whom we address all our prayers. Well, I don’t feel that way any more.”

“All right,” Lawler said, indifferently. The Face isn’t God’s vaargh, then. If you say so. You know more about these things than I do.”

“Not God’s vaargh, no. But definitely some god’s vaargh. This is the exact reverse of my original notion about the island, you see. And of everything I have ever believed about the nature of the Divine. I begin to drop into the greatest heresy. I become a polytheist at this late stage in my life. A pagan! It seems absurd even to me. And yet I embrace it with all my heart.”

“I don’t understand. A god, the god—what’s the difference? If you can believe in one god, you can believe in any number of them, as far as I can see. The trick is to believe in as many as one, and I can’t even get that far.”

Quillan gave him a loving smile. “You really don’t understand, do you? The classical Christian tradition, which derives from Judaism and for all we know from something out of ancient Egypt, holds that God is a single indivisible entity. I’ve never questioned that. I’ve never even thought of questioning that. We Christians speak of Him as a Trinity, but we are aware that the Trinity is One. That may seem confusing to an unbeliever, but we know what it means. No dispute about it: one God, only one. Just in the past few days, though—the last few hours, even—” The priest paused. “Let me make use of a mathematical analogy. Do you know what Godel’s Theorem is?”

“No.”

“Well, neither do I, not exactly. But I can give you an approximation of it. It’s a twentieth-century idea, I think. What Godel’s Theorem asserts, and nobody has ever been able to disprove it, is that there’s a fundamental limit to the rational reach of mathematics. We can prove all the assumptions of mathematical reasoning down to a certain bed-rock point, and then we hit a level where we simply can’t go any farther. Ultimately we find that we’ve descended beyond the process of mathematical proof to a realm of unprovable axioms, things that simply have to be taken on faith if we’re to make any sense out of the universe. What we reach is the boundary of reason. In order to go beyond it—in order to go on thinking at all, really—we are compelled to accept our defining axioms as true, even though we can’t prove them. Are you following me?”

“I think so.”

“All right. What I propose is that Godel’s Theorem marks the dividing line between gods and mortals.”

“Really,” Lawler said.

“This is what I mean,” said Quillan. “It sets a boundary for human reasoning. The gods occupy the far side of that boundary. Gods, by definition, are creatures who aren’t bound by the Godel limits. We humans live in a world where reality ultimately breaks down into irrational assumptions, or at least assumptions that are non-rational because they’re unprovable. Gods live in a realm of absolutes where realities are not only fixed and knowable down beyond the level of our axiomatic floor, but can be redefined and reshaped by divine control.”

For the first time in this discussion Lawler felt a flicker of interest. “The galaxy is full of beings which aren’t human, but their maths isn’t any better than ours, is it? Where do they fit your scheme?”

“Let’s define all intelligent beings who are subject to the Godel limitations as human, regardless of their actual species. And any beings that are capable of functioning in an ultra-Godelian realm of logic are gods.”

Lawler nodded. “Go on.”

“Now let me introduce the concept that came to me this morning when I was sitting up there thinking about the Face of the Waters. This actually is the blackest heresy, I admit. But I’ve been heretical before, and survived it. Though not this heretical.” Again Quillan smiled beatifically. “Let us suppose that the gods themselves at some point must reach a Godel limit, a place where their own reasoning powers—that is, their powers of creation and recreation—run up against some kind of barrier. Like us, but on a qualitatively different plane, they eventually come to a point at which they can go thus far, and no farther.”

“The ultimate limit of the universe,” Lawler said.

“No. Just their ultimate limit. It may well be that there are greater gods beyond them. The gods we’re talking about are encapsulated just as we mortals are within a larger reality defined by a different mathematics to which they have no access. They look upward to the next reality and the next level of gods. And those gods—that is, the inhabitants of that larger reality—also have a Godel wall around them, with even greater gods outside it. And so on and so on and so on.”

Lawler felt dizzy. “To infinity?”

“Yes.”

“But don’t you define a god as something that’s infinite? How can an infinite thing be smaller than infinity?”

“An infinite set may be contained within an infinite set. An infinite set may contain an infinity of infinite subsets.”

“If you say so,” replied Lawler, a little restless now. “But what does this have to do with the Face?”

“If the Face is a true Paradise, unspoiled and virgin—a domain of the holy spirit—then it may very well be occupied by superior entities, beings of great purity and power. What we of the Church once called angels. Or gods, as those of older faiths might have said.”

Be patient, Lawler thought. The man takes these things seriously.

He said, “And these superior beings, angels, gods, whatever term we choose to use—these are the local post-Godelian geniuses, do I have it right? Gods, to us. Gods to the Gillies, too, since the Face seems to be a holy place for them. But not God Himself, God Almighty, your god, the one that your church worships, the prime creator of the Gillies and us and everything else in the universe. You won’t find Him around here, at least not very often. That god is higher up along the scale of things. He doesn’t live on any one particular planet. He’s up above somewhere in a higher realm, a larger universe, looking down, checking up occasionally on how things are going here.”

“Exactly.”

“But even He isn’t all the way at the top?”

“There is no top,” Quillan said. “There’s only an ever-retreating ladder of Godhood, ranging from the hardly-more-than-mortal to the utterly unfathomable. I don’t know where the inhabitants of the Face are located on the ladder, but very likely it’s somewhere at a point higher than the one we occupy. It’s the whole ladder that is God Almighty. Because God is infinite, there can be no one level of godhood, but only an eternally ascending chain; there is no Highest, merely Higher and Higher and Even Higher, ad infinitum. The Face is some intermediate level on that chain.”

“I see,” said Lawler uncertainly.

“And by meditating on these things, one can begin to perceive the higher infinities, even though by definition we can never perceive the Highest of all, since to do that we’d have to be greater than the greatest of infinities.” Quillan looked toward the heavens and spread his arms wide in a gesture that was almost self-mocking. But then he turned to Lawler and said in an entirely different tone of voice from the one he had used a moment before, “At last, doc, I’ve come to an understanding of why I failed in the priesthood. I must have been aware all along that the God I was looking for, the One Supreme Entity who watches over us, is utterly unattainable. So far as we’re concerned He doesn’t in fact exist. Or if He does. He exists in a region so far removed from our existence that He might just as well not exist at all. Now finally I understand that I need to go looking for a lesser god, one who’s closer to our own level of awareness. For the first time, Lawler, I see the possibility that I can find some comfort in this life.”

“What kind of bullshit are you two discussing?” said Delagard, who had come up behind them.

“Theological bullshit,” Quillan said.

“Ah. Ah. A new revelation?”

“Sit down,” said the priest. “I’ll tell you all about it.”

Inflamed by the logic of his new revelation, Quillan went about the ship offering to share it with anyone who would listen. But he found few takers.

Gharkid seemed the most interested. Lawler had always suspected that the strange little man had a deep streak of mysticism in him; and now, enigmatic as always, Gharkid could be seen sitting with shining eyes in a pose of the deepest attention, drinking in everything that the priest had to say. But as ever Gharkid had no comments of his own to offer, only the occasional soft query.

Sundira spent an hour with Quillan and came to Lawler afterward looking puzzled and thoughtful. “The poor man,” she said. “A paradise. Holy spirits walking around in the underbrush, offering benedictions to pilgrims. All these weeks at sea must have driven him out of his mind.”

“If he was ever in it in the first place.”

“He wants so badly to give himself over to something bigger and wiser than he is. He’s been chasing God all his life. But I think he’s really just trying to find his way back to the womb.”

“What a terribly cynical thing to say.”

“Isn’t it, though?” Sundira laid her head on Lawler’s lap. “What do you think? Did any of that mathematical mumbo-jumbo make any sense to you? Or the theology? Paradise? An island of holy spirits?”

He stroked her thick, dark hair. The weeks and months of the voyage had coarsened its texture, giving it a crisped, frizzled look. But it was still beautiful.

He said, “A certain amount. At least I can understand the metaphor he’s using. But it doesn’t matter, do you know? Not to me. There could be an infinity of distinct layers of gods in the universe, each one with exactly sixteen times as many eyes as the ones in the layer below it, and Quillan could have absolute irrefutable proof of the existence of the whole elaborate rigmarole, and it wouldn’t mean a thing to me. I live in this world, and only in this world, and there aren’t any gods here. What might be happening in the higher levels, if there are any, doesn’t concern me.”

“That doesn’t mean the higher levels don’t exist.”

“No. I suppose you’re right. Who knows? The old sailor who told us all about the Face in the first place also had some wild story about an underwater city of super-Dwellers just off shore. I can believe that just as easily as I can all of Quillan’s theological hodge-podge, I guess. But in fact I can’t believe any of it. One notion’s just as crazy as the other to me.”

She craned her head around to look at him. “But let’s say for argument’s sake that there really is a city under the sea not far from the Face, and some special kind of Dwellers live there. If that’s so, it would explain why the Dwellers we know regard the Face as a holy island, and are afraid or at least unwilling to go near it. What if there are god-like beings living there?”

“Let’s wait and see what’s there when we get there, and then I’ll give you an answer to that, okay?”

“Okay,” Sundira said.

Halfway through the night Lawler found himself suddenly awake, in that kind of hyper-wakefulness that is certain to last until dawn. He sat up, rubbing his aching forehead. He felt as though someone had opened his skull while he slept and filled it with a million bright strands of fine shimmering wire, which now were rubbing back and forth against each other with every breath he took.

Someone was in his cabin. By the faint gleam of starlight that came through his single porthole he saw a tall square-shouldered figure against the bulkhead, quietly watching him. Kinverson? No, not quite big enough for Kinverson, and why would Kinverson invade his cabin in the dead of night anyway? But none of the other men on board were nearly this tall.

“Who’s there?” Lawler said.

“Don’t you know me, Valben?” A deep voice, resonant, wonderfully calm and self-assured.

“Who are you?”

“Take a good look, boy.” The intruder turned so that the side of his face was in the light. Lawler saw a strong jaw, a thick, curling black beard, a straight, commanding nose. Except for the beard the face could have been his own. No, the eyes were different. They had a powerful gleam; their gaze was at once more stern and more compassionate than Lawler’s. He knew that look. A shiver went down his back.

“I thought I was awake,” he said calmly. “But now I see that I’m still dreaming. Hello, father. It’s good to see you again. It’s been a long time.”

“Has it? Not for me.” The tall man took a couple of steps toward him. In the tiny cabin, that brought him practically to the edge of the bunk. He was wearing a dark ruffled robe of an old-fashioned kind, a robe that Lawler remembered well. “It must have been a while, though. You’re all grown up, boy. You’re older than I am, aren’t you?”

“About the same, now.”

“And a doctor. A good doctor, I hear.”

“Not really. I do my best. It isn’t good enough.”

“Your best is always good enough, Valben, if it’s truly your best. I used to tell you that, but I suppose you didn’t believe me. So long as you don’t shirk, so long as you honestly care. A doctor can be an absolute bastard off duty, but so long as he cares he’s all right. So long as he understands that he’s put here to protect, to heal, to love. And I think you understood that.” He sat down on the corner of the bunk. He seemed very much at home. “You didn’t have a family, did you?”

“No, sir.”

“Too bad. You’d have been a good father.”

“Would I?”

“It would have changed you, of course. But for the better, I think. Do you regret it?”

“I don’t know. Probably. I regret a lot of things. I regret that my marriage went bad. I regret that I never married again. I regret that you died too soon, father.”

“Was it too soon?”

“For me it was.”

“Yes. Yes, I suppose it was.”

“I loved you.”

“And I loved you too, boy. I still do. I love you very much. I’m very proud of you.”

“You talk as though you’re still alive. But this is all only a dream: you can say anything you like, can’t you?”

The figure rose and stepped back into the darkness. It seemed to cloak itself in shadows.

“It isn’t a dream, Valben.”

“No? Well, then. You’re dead, even so, father. You’ve been dead twenty-five years. If this isn’t a dream, why are you here? If you’re a ghost, why did you wait until now to start haunting me?”

“Because you’ve never been this close to the Face before.”

“What does the Face have to do with you or me?”

“I dwell in the Face, Valben.”

Despite himself, Lawler laughed. “That’s a thing that a Gillie would say. Not you.”

“It isn’t only Gillies that are taken to dwell in the Face, boy.”

The flat, quiet, appalling statement hung in the air like a miasmic cloud. Lawler recoiled from it. He was starting to understand, now. Anger began to rise in him.

He gestured irritably at the phantom.

“Get out of here. Let me have some sleep.”

“What way is that to talk to your father?”

“You aren’t my father. You’re either a very bad dream or a lying illusion coming from some telepathic sea urchin or dragonfish out there in the ocean. My father would never have said a thing like that. Not even if he came back as a ghost, which is also something he wouldn’t have done. Haunting wasn’t his style. Go away and leave me alone!”

“Valben, Valben, Valben!”

“What do you want with me? Why won’t you leave me alone?”

“Valben, boy—”

Lawler realized suddenly that he could no longer see the tall shadowy figure.

“Where are you?”

“Everywhere around you, and nowhere.”

Lawler’s head was throbbing. Something was churning in his stomach. He groped in the dark for his numbweed flask. After a moment he remembered that it was empty.

“Whatare you?”

“I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.”

“No!”

“God save thee, ancient Mariner! From the fiends, that plague thee thus!—”

“This is lunacy! Stop it! Get out of here! Out!” Trembling now, Lawler searched for his lamp. Light would drive this thing away. But before he could locate it he felt a sudden sharp sense of new solitude and realized that the vision, or whatever it had been, had left him of its own accord.

Its departure left an unexpected ringing emptiness behind.

Lawler felt its absence as a shock, like that of an amputation. He sat for a time at the edge of his bunk, shivering, sweat-soaked, shaking as he had shaken during the worst of his period of withdrawal of the drug.

Then he rose. Sleep wasn’t likely now. He went up on deck. A couple of moons were overhead, stained strange purples and greens by the luminescence that rose out of the western horizon and now seemed to fill the air all the time. The Hydros Cross itself, hanging off in the corner of the sky like a bit of discarded finery, was pulsing in colour too, something Lawler had never seen before: from its two great arms came booming, dizzying swirls of turquoise, amber, scarlet, ultramarine.

Nobody seemed to be on duty. The sails were set, the ship was responding to a light steady breeze, but the deck looked empty. Lawler felt a quick stab of terror at that. The first watch should be on duty: Pilya, Kinverson, Gharkid, Felk, Tharp. Where were they? Even the wheel-box was untended. Was the ship steering itself?

Apparently so. And steering off course, too. Last night, he remembered now, the Cross had been off the port bow. Now it was lined up with the beam. They were no longer going west-southwest, but had swung around at a sharp angle to their former path.

He tiptoed around the deck, mystified. When he came by the rear mast he saw Pilya asleep on a pile of ropes, and Tharp nearby, snoring. Delagard would flay them if he knew. A little farther on was Kinverson, sitting against the side with his back to the rail. His eyes were open, but he didn’t seem awake either.

“Gabe?” Lawler said quietly. He knelt and waggled his fingers back and forth in front of Kinverson’s face. No response. “Gabe, what’s going on? Are you hypnotized?”

“He’s resting,” came the voice of Onyos Felk suddenly, from behind. “Don’t bother him. It was a busy night. We were hauling sail for hours and hours. But look now: there’s the land, dead ahead. We’re moving very nicely toward it.”

Land? When did anyone ever speak of land, on Hydros?

“What are you talking about?” Lawler asked.

“There. Do you see it?”

Felk gestured vaguely toward the bow. Lawler looked forward and saw nothing, just the vastness of the luminous sea, and a clear horizon marked only by a few low stars and a sprawling, heavy cloud at middle height. The dark backdrop of the sky seemed weirdly ablaze, a frightful aurora fiercely blazing. There was colour everywhere, bizarre colour, a fantastic show of strange light. But no land.

“In the night,” said Felk, “the wind shifted, and turned us toward it. What an incredible sight it is! Those mountains! Those tremendous valleys! Would you ever have believed it, doc? The Face of the Waters!” Felk seemed about to burst into tears. “All my life, staring at my sea-charts, seeing that dark mark on the far hemisphere, and now we’re looking it right in the eye—the Face, doc, the Face itself!”

Lawler pulled his arms close against his sides. In the tropic warmth of the night he felt a sudden chill.

He still saw nothing at all, only the endless roll of the empty water.

“Listen, Onyos, if Delagard comes on deck early and finds your whole watch sleeping, you know what’s going to happen. For God’s sake, if you won’t wake them up, I will!”

“Let them sleep. By morning we’ll be at the Face.”

“What Face? Where?

“There, man! There!”

Lawler still didn’t see. He strode forward. When he reached the bow he found Gharkid, the one missing member of the watch, sitting crosslegged, perched on top of the forecastle with his head thrown back and his eyes wide and staring like two orbs of glass. Like Kinverson he was in some other state of awareness entirely.

Bewilderedly Lawler peered into the night. The dazzling maze of colours danced before him, but he still saw only clear water and empty sky ahead. Then something changed. It was as though his vision had been clouded, and now at last it had cleared. It seemed to him that a section of the sky had detached itself and come down to the water’s surface and was moving about in an intricate way, folding and refolding upon itself until it looked like a sheaf of crumpled paper, and then like a bundle of sticks, and then like a mass of angry serpents, and then like pistons driven by some invisible engine. A writhing interwoven network of some incomprehensible substance had sprung up along the horizon. It made his eyes ache to watch it.

Felk came up alongside him.

“Now do you see? Now?”

Lawler realized that he had been holding his breath a long while. He let it out slowly.

Something that felt like a breeze, but was something else, was blowing toward his face. He knew it couldn’t be a breeze, for he could feel the wind also, blowing from the stern, and when he glanced up at the sails he saw them bellying outward behind him. Not a breeze, no. An emanation. A force. A radiation. Aimed at him. He felt it crackling lightly through the air, felt it striking his cheeks like fine wind-blown hail in a winter storm. He stood without moving, assailed by awe and fear.

“Do you see?” Felk said again.

“Yes. Yes, now I do.” He turned to face the mapkeeper. By the strange light that was bursting upon them from the west Felk’s face seemed painted, goblinish. “You’d better wake up your watch, anyway. I’m going to go down below and get Delagard. For better or for worse, he’s brought us this far. He doesn’t deserve to miss the moment of our arrival.”

7

In the waning darkness Lawler imagined that the sea that lay before them was retreating swiftly, pulling back as though it were being peeled away, leaving a bare, bewildering sandy waste between the ship and the Face. But when he looked again he saw the shining waters as they had always been.

Then a little while later dawn arrived, bringing with it strange new sounds and sights: breakers visible, the crisp slap of wavelets against the bow, a line of tossing luminous foam in the distance. By the first grey light Lawler found it impossible to make out more than that. There was land ahead, not very far, but he was unable to see it. All was uncertain here. The air seemed thick with mist that would not burn off even as the sun moved higher. Then abruptly he became aware of the great dark barrier that lay across the horizon, a low hump that might almost have been the coastline of a Gillie island, except that there weren’t any Gillie islands the size of this one on Hydros. It stretched before them from one end of the world to the other, walling off the sea, which thundered and crashed against it in the distance but could not impose its strength on it in any way.

Delagard appeared. He stood trembling on the bridge, face thrust forward, hands gripping the rail in eerie fervour.

“There it is!” he cried. “Did you believe me or didn’t you? There’s the Face at last! Look at it! Look at it!”

It was impossible not to feel awe. Even the dullest and simplest of the voyagers—Neyana, say, or Pilya, or Gharkid—seemed moved by its encroaching presence, by the strangeness of the landscape ahead, by the power of the inexplicable psychic emanations that came in pulsing waves from the Face. All eleven of the voyagers stood arrayed side by side on deck, nobody bothering to sail or to steer, staring in stunned silence as the ship drifted toward the island as if caught in some powerful magnetic grip.

Only Kinverson appeared, if not untouched, then at least unshaken. He had awakened from his trance. Now he too was staring fixedly at the approaching shore. His craggy face seemed riven by strong emotion of some sort. But when Dag Tharp turned to him and asked him if he was afraid at all, Kinverson replied with a blank look, as if the question had no meaning for him, and a flat incurious glare, as though he felt no need to have it explained.

“Afraid?” he said. “No. Should I be?”

The constant motion of everything on the island struck Lawler as its most bewildering aspect. Nothing was at rest. Whatever vegetation lay along its shore, if vegetation was indeed what it was, appeared to be in a process of intense, dynamic, churning growth. There was no stillness anywhere. There were no recognizable patterns of topography. Everything was moving, everything was writhing, flailing, weaving itself into the tangled web of shimmering substance and unweaving itself again, whipping about in a ceaseless lunatic dance of exhausting energy that might well have been going on this way since the beginning of time.

Sundira came up alongside Lawler and laid her hand gently on his bare shoulder. They stood facing outward, scarcely daring even to breath.

“The colours,” she said softly. “The electricity.”

It was a fantastic display. Light was constantly born from every millimetre of surface. Now it was a pure white, now a brilliant red, now the deepest of violets, verging on impenetrable black. And then came colours Lawler could barely name. They were gone before he could comprehend them, and others just as potent came in their place.

It was light that had the quality of vast noise: it was an explosion, a terrible din, a flashing, pounding dazzle. The overwhelming energy of it had a perverse, demented vigour: such fury could hardly be sane. Phantasmal eruptions of cold flame danced and gleamed and vanished and were replaced. One could not dwell on the same part of it very long; the force of those violent bursts of colour forced the eye away. Even when you didn’t look, Lawler thought, it pounded insistently at your brain all the same. The place was like an immense radio device that sent forth an inexorable broadcast on the biosensory wavelengths. He could feel its emanation probing him, touching his mind, slithering around inside his skull like invisible fingers caressing his soul.

He stood motionless, shivering, his arm around Sundira’s waist, all his muscles clenched from scalp to toes.

Then, cutting through the crazed blazing brilliance, there came something just as violent, just as demented, but much more familiar: the voice of Nid Delagard, transformed now into something raw and harsh and weirdly rigid, but recognizable even so. “All right, back to your posts, all of you! We’ve got work to do!”

Delagard was panting in strange excitement. His face had a dark, stormy look, as though some private tempest was roiling his soul. In an odd frantic way he moved along the deck among them, roughly seizing them one by one, swinging them around bodily to get their eyes off the Face.

“Turn away! Turn away! That cockeyed light’ll hypnotize you if you give it the chance!”

Lawler felt Delagard’s fingers digging into the flesh of his upper arms. He yielded to the tugging and let Delagard pull him away from the astonishing sight across the water.

“You’ve got to force yourself not to look,” Delagard said. “Onyos, take the wheel! Neyana, Pilya, Lawler, let’s get those sails to the wind! We need to find ourselves a harbour.”

Sailing with slitted eyes, working hard to avert their gaze from the incomprehensible display that was erupting before them, they cruised along its turbulent shore seeking some cove or bay where they might find shelter. At first it seemed that there was none. The Face was one long headland, impenetrable, unwelcoming.

Then the ship swept unexpectedly through the line of breakers and found itself in calm waters, a placid bay encircled by two jutting limbs of the island rimmed by steep hills. But the placidity was deceptive and short-lived. Within moments of their arrival the bay began to heave and swell. In the churning water thick black strands of what might have been kelp rose into view, flailing the surface like the dark limbs of monsters, and spiky spear-like protrusions appeared menacingly between them, emitting clouds of sinister radiant yellow smoke. Convulsions of the land seemed to be taking place along the shore.

Lawler, exhausted, began to imagine images, mysterious, abstract, tantalizing. Unfamiliar shapes danced in his mind. He felt a maddening unreachable itch behind his forehead and pressed his hands to his temples, but it did no good.

Delagard paced the deck, brooding, muttering. After a time he gave orders to swing the ship around and took it out beyond the breakers again. As soon as they had left the bay it grew calm. It looked as tempting as it had before.

“Do we try again?” Felk asked.

“Not now,” said Delagard dourly. His eyes flashed with cold anger. “Maybe this isn’t a good place. We’ll move along westward.”

The coast to the west was unpromising: rough and wild and steep. A crisp acrid odour of combustion drifted on the wind. Flaming sparks floated upward from the land. The air itself seemed to be burning. Occasional waves of overpowering telepathic force came drifting toward them from the island, short sudden jolts that caused mental confusion and disarray. The midday sun was bloated and discoloured. There appeared to be no inlets anywhere. After a time Delagard, who had gone below, reappeared and announced in a tight, bitter voice that he was abandoning, for the moment, his attempts to make a closer approach.

They retreated to a point well beyond the churning surf, where the sea was flat and shallow, streaming with colours that rose from a bed of glistening sand. There they cast anchor for the first time since the beginning of the voyage.

Lawler found Delagard at the rail, staring into the distance.

“Well? What do you think of your paradise now, Nid? Your land of milk and honey?”

“We’ll find a way in. We just came on it from the wrong side, that’s all.”

“You want to land there?”

Delagard turned to face him. His bloodshot eyes, strangely transformed by the clashing light all around them, seemed to be dead, utterly without life. But when he spoke his voice was as strong as ever. “Nothing that I’ve seen so far has changed my mind about anything, doc. This is the place I want to be. Jolly was able to make a landfall here, and so will we.”

Lawler made no reply. There wasn’t anything he could think of to say that wasn’t likely to trigger an explosion of insane wrath in Delagard.

But then he grinned and leaned forward and clapped his hand to Lawler’s shoulder amiably. “Doc, doc, doc, don’t look so solemn! Of course this is a weird-looking place. Of course. Why else would the Gillies have kept away from it all this time? And of course the stuff that comes wafting out of there feels strange to us. We simply aren’t used to it. But that doesn’t mean we need to be afraid of it. This is just a fancy bunch of visual effects. Just decorations, just trimming on the package. They don’t mean a thing. Not a fucking thing.”

“I’m glad you’re so sure of yourself.”

“Yes. So am I. Listen, doc, have faith. We’re almost there. We’ve made it this far, and we’re going to go the rest of the way. There’s nothing to worry about.” He grinned again. “Look, doc, relax, will you? I found a little of Gospo’s brandy hidden away last night. Come on down to my cabin in an hour or so. Everyone will be there. We’ll have a party. We’re going to celebrate our arrival.”

Lawler was the last to arrive. By candlelight in the dark cramped musky-smelling room they were all grouped in a rough semicircle around Delagard, Sundira to his left, Kinverson just on the other side of her, Neyana and Pilya beyond, then Gharkid, Quillan, Tharp, Felk, Lis. Everyone had a cup of brandy. An empty flask and two full ones were on the table. Delagard stood facing them with his back pressed up against the bulwark and his head drawn down into his shoulders in a peculiar way that seemed both defensive and aggressive at the same time. He looked possessed. His eyes were bright, almost feverish. His face, stubbly and peeked with some irritation of the skin, was flushed and sweaty. It struck Lawler suddenly that the man was on the verge of some kind of crisis: an inner eruption, a violent explosion, the release of pent-up emotion that had been too long in storage.

“Have a drink, doc,” Delagard called.

“Thanks. I will. I thought we were out of this stuff.”

“I thought so too,” said Delagard. “I was wrong.” He poured until the cup overflowed, and shoved it along the table toward Lawler. “So you remembered Jolly’s story about the undersea city, eh?”

Lawler took a deep gulp of the brandy, and waited until it had hit bottom.

“How did you know that?”

“Sundira told me. She said you talked to her about it.”

With a shrug Lawler said, “It came floating back into my mind out of nowhere yesterday. I hadn’t thought about it in years. The best part of Jolly’s story, and I’d forgotten it.”

“But I hadn’t,” Delagard said. “I was just telling the others, while we were waiting for you to come down. What do you think, doc? Was Jolly full of shit or wasn’t he?”

“An underwater city? How would that be possible?”

“Gravity funnel, that’s what I remember Jolly saying. Super-technology. Achieved by super-Gillies.” Delagard rotated his cup, rolling the brandy around in it. He was well on his way toward being drunk, Lawler realized. “I always liked that story of his best of all, just like you,” Delagard said. “How the Gillies, half a million years ago, decided to go live under the ocean. There was some land mass on this planet, that’s what they told Jolly, remember? Fair-sized islands, small continents, even, and they dismantled most of that and used the material to build sealed chambers at the deep end of their gravity tunnel. And when they had everything ready they moved down below and shut the door behind them.”

“And you believe this?” Lawler asked.

“Probably not. It’s pretty wild stuff. But it’s a nice story, isn’t it, doc? An advanced race of Gillies down there, the bosses of the planet. Leaving their country cousins behind on the floating islands, serfs and peasants who run the upper world for them as a farm to provide them with food. And all the life-forms on Hydros, the island Gillies and mouths and platforms and divers and hagfish and everything else, right down to the crawlie-oysters and the raspers, are tied together in one big ecological web whose sole purpose is to serve the needs of the ones who live in the undersea city. The island Gillies believe that when they die they come here to live on the Face. Ask Sundira if you don’t believe me. That must mean that they hope to go down below and live a soft life in the hidden city. Maybe the divers believe that too. And the crawlie-oysters.”

“An old man’s crazy fable, this city,” Lawler said. “A myth.”

“Maybe so. Or maybe not.” Delagard offered him a cool, taut smile. His self-control was frightening in its intensity, unreal, ominous. “But let’s say it isn’t. What we saw this morning—this whole incredible jimbo-jambo of whirling, dancing God-knows-what—might in fact be a huge biological machine that provides the energy for the secret Gillie city. The plants that grow over there are metal. I’ll bet that they are. They’re parts of the machine. They’ve got their roots in the sea and they extract minerals and create new tissues out of them. And perform all sorts of mechanical functions. And what’s on that island somewhere, maybe, is a gigantic electrical grid. In the middle of it, I’ll bet, there’s a solar collector, an accumulator disc that pulls in energy that all that semi-living wiring over there is pumping down to the submerged city. What we’ve been feeling is the surplus force of it all. It comes crackling through the air and fucks up our minds. Or would, if we let it. But we aren’t going to let it. We’re smart enough to stay out of its grip. What we’re going to do is sail right along the coast at a safe distance until we come to the entrance to the hidden city, and then—”

Lawler said, “You’re moving too fast, Nid. You say that you don’t think the undersea city is anything more than an old man’s fantasy, and all of a sudden you’re at its entrance.”

Delagard looked unfazed. “I’m just assuming it’s real. For the sake of the conversation. Have some more brandy, doc. This is the last of it for sure. We might as well enjoy it all at once.”

“Assuming it’s real,” said Lawler, “how are you going to build the great city you were talking about here, when the place is already in possession of a bunch of super-Gillies? Aren’t they going to get a little annoyed? Assuming they exist.”

“I imagine they will. Assuming they exist.”

“Then aren’t they likely to call in an armada of rammerhorns and hatchet-jaws and sea-leopards and drakkens to teach us not to come around bothering them again?”

“They won’t get the chance,” Delagard said serenely. “If they’re there, what we’ll do is go down there and conquer the shit out of them.”

“We’ll do what ?”

“It’ll be the easiest thing you can imagine. They’re soft and decadent and old. If they’re there, doc. If. They’ve had their own way on this world since the beginning of time and the concept of an enemy doesn’t even exist in their minds. Everything on Hydros is here to serve them. And they’ve been down there in their hole for half a million years living in luxury we couldn’t even begin to imagine. When we get down there we’ll discover that they’ll have no way of defending themselves at all. Why should they? Defend themselves against whom? We walk right in and tell them we’re taking over, and they’ll roll over and surrender.”

“Eleven half-naked men and women armed with gaffs and belaying pins are going to conquer the capital city of an immensely advanced alien civilization?”

“You ever study any Earth history, Lawler? There was a place called Peru that ruled half a continent and had temples built of gold. A man named Pizarro came in with maybe two hundred men armed with medieval weapons that weren’t any damned good at all, a cannon or two and some rifles you wouldn’t believe, and he seized the emperor and conquered the place just like that. Around the same time a man named Cortes did the same thing in an empire called Mexico that was just as rich. You take them by surprise, you don’t let yourself even allow for the possibility of defeat, you simply march in and get command of their central authority figure, and they fall down at your feet. And everything they have is yours.”

Lawler stared at Delagard, wonder-struck.

“Without even lifting a finger in our own defence, Nid, we allowed ourselves to be thrown off the island where we had lived for a hundred and fifty years by the simple peasant cousins of these super-Gillies, because we knew we didn’t stand a chance in a fight against them. But now you tell me with a straight face that you’re going to overthrow an entire superior technological civilization with your bare hands, and you give me medieval folk tales about mythical kingdoms captured by ancient culture-heroes to prove to me that it can be done. Jesus, Nid! Jesus!”

“You’ll see, doc. I promise you.”

Lawler looked around, appealing to the others. But they sat mute, glazed, as though asleep.

“Why are we even wasting our time on this?” he asked. “There’s no such city. It’s an impossible concept. You don’t believe in it for a minute, Nid. Do you? Do you?”

“I’ve already told you, maybe I do, maybe I don’t. Jolly believed in it.”

“Jolly was crazy.”

“Not when he first came back to Sorve. It was only later, after he’d been laughed at for years—”

But Lawler had had enough. Delagard went round and round and round and nothing he said made sense. The close, dank air in the cabin suddenly was as hard to breathe as water. Lawler felt as if he were choking. Spasms of claustrophobic nausea swept over him. He yearned powerfully for his numbweed.

He understood now that Delagard wasn’t simply dangerously obsessive: he was completely crazy.

And we are all lost down here at the far end of the world, Lawler thought, with no way of escaping and no place to escape to even if we could.

“I can’t listen to this garbage any more,” he said in a voice half strangled by rage and disgust, and got up and rushed from the room.

“Doc!” Delagard called. “Come back here! Damn you, doc, come back!”

Lawler slammed the door and kept on going.

As he stood alone on the deck Lawler knew even without turning around that Father Quillan had come up behind him. That was odd, knowing without looking. It must be some side effect of the furious emanations pouring over them out of the Face.

“Delagard asked me to come up and talk with you,” the priest said.

“About what?”

“Your outburst down below.”

“Myoutburst?” Lawler said, astonished. He turned and looked at the priest. By the strange many-coloured light that crackled all about them Quillan seemed more gaunt than ever, his long face a thing of a myriad planes, his skin tanned and glossy, his eyes bright as beacons. “What about Delagard’s outburst? Lost cities under the sea! Cockeyed wars of conquest modelled on mythical fables out of antiquity!”

“They weren’t mythical. Cortes and Pizarro really lived, and really did conquer great empires with just a handful of troops, a thousand years ago. It’s the truth. It’s been documented in Earth history.”

Lawler shrugged. “What happened long ago on another planet doesn’t matter here.”

“You say that? You, the man who visits Earth in his dreams?”

“Cortes and Pizarro weren’t dealing with Gillies. Delagard’s a lunatic and everything he’s been saying to us today is absolute madness.” Then, suddenly cautious, he said, “Or don’t you agree?”

“He’s a volatile, melodramatic man, full of frenzy and fire. But I don’t think he’s crazy.”

“An undersea city at the deep end of a gravity funnel? You actually think such a thing can exist? You’ll believe anything, won’t you? Yes, you will. You can believe Father, Son and Holy Ghost, so why not an undersea city?”

“Why not?” the priest said. “Stranger things than that have been found on other worlds.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Lawler said sullenly.

“And it’s a plausible explanation for why Hydros is the way it is. I’ve been giving this place some thought, Lawler. There are no real water worlds in the galaxy, you know. The others that are like Hydros all have chains of natural islands, at least, archipelagoes, the tops of sunken mountains showing above the sea. Hydros is just a big ball of water, though. But if you postulate that there once was a certain amount of land, and it was cut away to build one or more enormous undersea cities, until at last all of Hydros” surface territory had disappeared into the sea and there was nothing but water left on top—”

“Maybe so. Or maybe not.”

“It stands to reason. Why are the Gillies an island-building race? Because they’re evolving from an aquatic form and need land to live on? That’s a reasonable theory. But what if it’s the other way around entirely, that they were land-dwellers to begin with, and the ones who were left behind at the surface at the time of the migration underground evolved into a semi-aquatic form when the land was taken away? That would account for—”

Wearily Lawler said, “You argue science the way you argue theology: start with an illogical notion, then pile all kinds of hypotheses and speculations on top of it in the hope of making it make sense. If you want to believe that the Gillies suddenly got bored with living outdoors, so they built themselves a hideaway in the ocean, stripped away all the land surface of the planet in the process, and left a mutated amphibious form of themselves up above just for the hell of it, go ahead and believe it. I don’t care. But do you also believe that Delagard can march in and conquer them the way he says he’s planning to do?”

“Well—”

“Look,” Lawler said, “I don’t for a moment think that this magical city exists. I used to talk to this Jolly too, and he always seemed like a crackpot to me. But even if the place is right around the next bend in the coast, we can’t possibly invade it. The Gillies would wipe us out in five minutes.” He leaned close to the other man. “Listen to me. Father. What we really need to do is put Delagard under restraint and get ourselves out of here. I felt that way weeks ago, and then I changed my mind, and now I see I was right the first time. The man’s deranged and we have no business being in this place.”

“No,” said Quillan.

“No?”

“Delagard may be as disturbed as you say he is, and his schemes pure lunacy. But I won’t support you in any attempt to interfere with him. Quite the contrary.”

“You want to continue sniffing around the Face, regardless of the risks?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

For a beat or two Lawler was silent. “Right,” he said finally. “It slipped my mind for the moment. Angels. Paradise. How could I have let myself forget that you were the one who encouraged Delagard to come here in the first place, for your own private reasons, which have nothing to do with his?” Lawler waved a hand contemptuously at the wild circus of gyrating vegetation across the strait on the shore of the Face. “You still think that that’s the land of the angels over there? Of the gods?”

“In a way, yes.”

“And you still think you can wangle some kind of redemption for yourself over there?

“Yes.”

“Redeemed by that? Lights and noise?”

“Yes.”

“You’re crazier than Delagard.”

“I can understand why you’d think so,” the priest said.

Lawler laughed harshly. “I can just see you marching beside him into the undersea city of the super-Gillies. He’s carrying a gaff and you’re carrying a cross, and the two of you are singing hymns, you in one key and him in another. The Gillies come forward and kneel, and you baptize them one by one, and then you explain to them that Delagard is now their king.”

“Please, Lawler.”

“Please what? You want me to pat you on the head and tell you how impressed I am with your profound ideas? And then go below and tell Delagard how grateful I am for his inspired leadership? No, Father, I’m sailing aboard a ship commanded by a madman, who with your connivance has brought us to the weirdest and most dangerous place on this planet, and I don’t like it, and I want to get out of here.”

“If only you’d be willing to see that what the Face has to offer us—”

“I know what the Face has to offer. Death is what it has to offer. Father. Starvation. Dehydration. Or worse. You see those lights flashing over there? You feel that strange electrical crackling? It doesn’t feel friendly to me. It feels lethal, in fact. Is that your idea of redemption? Dying?”

Quillan shot him a sudden startled, wild-eyed glance.

“Isn’t it true,” Lawler said, “that your church believes that suicide is one of the gravest of all sins?”

“You’re the one who’s talking about suicide, not me.”

“You’re the one who’s planning to commit it.”

“You don’t understand what you’re saying, Lawler. And in your ignorance you’re distorting everything.”

“Am I?” Lawler asked. “Am I, really?”

8

Late that afternoon Delagard ordered the anchor pulled up, and once more they moved westward along the coast of the Face. A hot, steady on-shore breeze was blowing, as though the huge island were trying to gather them in.

“Val?” Sundira called. She was just above him in the rigging, fixing the stays on the fore yard.

He looked up toward her.

“Where are we, Val? What’s going to happen to us?” She was shivering in the tropic warmth. Uneasily she glanced toward the island. “Looks like my idea of this place as the scene of some sort of nuclear devastation was wrong. But it’s scary all the same, over there.”

“Yes.”

“And yet I still feel drawn to it. I still want to know what it really is.”

“Something bad is what it is,” Lawler said. “You can see that from here.”

“It would be so easy to turn the ship toward shore—you and me, Val, we could do it right now, just the two of us—”

“No.”

“Why not?” There wasn’t much conviction in her question. She looked as uncertain about the island as he was. Her hands were shaking so badly that she dropped her mallet. Lawler caught it as it fell and tossed it back up to her. “What would happen to us, do you think, if we went closer to the shore?” she asked. “If we went up onto the Face itself?”

“Let somebody else find that out for us,” Lawler told her. “Let Gabe Kinverson go over there, if he’s so brave. Or Father Quillan. Or Delagard. This is Delagard’s picnic: let him be the first to go ashore. I’ll stay here and watch what happens.”

“That makes sense, I suppose. And yet—yet—”

“You’re tempted.”

“Yes.”

“There’s a pull, isn’t there? I feel it too. I hear something inside me saying, Go on across, have a look, see what’s there. There’s nothing else like it in the world. You have to see it. But it’s a crazy idea.”

“Yes,” Sundira said quietly. “You’re right. It is.”

She was silent for a time, concentrating on the repairs. Then she climbed down to his level in the rigging. Lawler touched his fingertips lightly, almost experimentally, to her bare shoulder. She made a soft sound and pressed herself up against him, and together they stared out at the colour-stained sea, the swollen setting sun, the haze of bewildering light rising from the island across the way.

“Val, can I stay with you in your cabin tonight?” she asked.

She hadn’t done that often, and not for a long time. The two of them together were too big for the tiny cabin, for his narrow bunk.

“Of course.”

“I love you, Val.”

Lawler ran his hands across the strong ridges of her shoulders and up to the nape of her neck. He felt more strongly drawn to her than ever before: almost as though they were two halves of some severed organism, and not just two semi-strangers who had happened to find themselves thrown together on a bizarre voyage to a perilous place. Was it the peril, he wondered, that had brought them together? Was it—God forbid!—the enforced togetherness in the middle of the ocean that made him so open to her now, so eager to be near her?

“I love you,” he whispered.

They ran for his cabin. He had never felt this close to her … to anyone. They were allies, just the two of them against a turbulent, mystifying universe. With only each other to clutch as the mystery of the Face enveloped them.

The short night was a tangle of interwoven arms and legs, sweaty bodies slipping and sliding against one another, eyes meeting eyes, smiles meeting smiles, breath mingling with breath, soft words spoken, her name on his lips, his on hers, reminiscences exchanged, new memories forged, no sleep at all. Just as well, Lawler thought. Sleep might bring new phantoms. Better to pass the night in wakefulness. And in passion. The new day could well be their last.

He went on deck at dawn. These days he was working first watch. During the night, Lawler saw, the ship had passed within the line of breakers again. Now it was anchored in a bay very much like the first one, though there were no hills along the shore, only low meadows densely packed with dark vegetation.

This time the bay seemed to be accepting their presence, even welcoming it. Its surface was calm, not so much as a ripple; there was no hint of the flailing kelp that had driven them almost at once from the last one.

Here, as everywhere else, the water was luminescent, sending up cascades of pink and gold and scarlet and sapphire radiance; and on shore the wild looping dance of never-resting life was going on with the usual frenzy. Purple sparks rose from the land. The air seemed to be aflame again. There were bright colours everywhere. The insane indefatigable magnificence of the place was a hard thing to face first thing in the morning after a sleepless night.

Delagard was alone on the bridge, huddling into himself in an odd way, arms locked across his cheek.

“Come talk to me, doc,” he said.

Delagard’s eyes were bleary and reddened. He looked as if he had had no sleep, not just this night past, but for days. His jowls were greyish and sagging, his head seemed to have folded downward into his thick neck. Lawler saw a tic at work in Delagard’s cheek. Whatever demon had been riding him yesterday on their first approach to the shore of the Face had returned in the night.

Hoarsely Delagard said, “I hear that you think I’m crazy.”

“Does it matter a damn to you if I do?”

“Will it make you any happier if I tell you that I’m starting to come around almost to agree with you? Almost. Almost.”

Lawler searched for a trace of irony in Delagard’s words, of humour, of mockery. But there was none. Delagard’s voice was thick and husky, with a cracked edge to it.

“Look at that fucking place,” Delagard muttered. He waved his arms in loose looping circles. “Look at it, doc! It’s a wasteland. It’s a nightmare. Why did I ever come here?” He was shaking, and his skin was pale beneath the beard. He looked terrifyingly haggard. In a low husky voice he said, “Only a crazy man would have come this far. I see that clear as anything, now. I saw it yesterday when we pulled into that bay, but I tried to pretend it wasn’t so. I was wrong. At least I’m big enough to admit that. Christ, doc, what was I thinking of when I brought us to this place? It isn’t meant for us.” He shook his head. When he spoke again his voice was no more than an anguished croak. “Doc, we’ve got to get out of here right away.”

Was he serious? Or was this all some grotesque test of loyalty?

“Do you mean it?” Lawler asked him.

“Damned right I do.”

Yes. He really did. He was terrified, quaking. The man seemed to be disintegrating before Lawler’s eyes. It was a stupefying reversal, the last thing Lawler would have expected. He struggled to come to terms with it.

After a while he said, “What about the sunken city?”

“You think that there is one?” Delagard asked.

“Not for a second. But you do.”

“Like shit I do. I had too much brandy, that’s all. We’ve travelled a third of the way around the Face, I figure, and there hasn’t been any sign of it. You’d suppose there’d be a strong coastal current if there’s a gravity funnel holding the sea open up ahead. A vortex flow. But where the fuck is it?”

“You tell me, Nid. You seemed to think it was here.”

“That was Jolly who thought so.”

“Jolly was crazy. Jolly’s brains got cooked when he took his trip around the Face.”

Delagard nodded sombrely. His eyelids rolled slowly down over his bloodshot eyes. Lawler thought for a moment that he had fallen asleep standing up. Then he said, still keeping his eyes closed, “I’ve been out here by myself all night, doc. Working things out in my mind. Trying to take a practical view of the situation. It sounds funny to you, because you think I’m crazy. But I’m not crazy, doc. Not really. I may do things that look crazy to other people, but I’m not crazy myself. I’m just different from you. You’re sober, you’re cautious, you hate taking chances, you just want to go along and go along and go along. That’s all right. There are people like you in the universe and there are people like me, and we never really understand each other, but sometimes it happens that we get thrown together in a situation and we have to work together anyway. Doc, I wanted to come here more than anything I’ve ever wanted in my life. For me it was the key to everything. Don’t ask me to explain. You’d never get it, anyway. But now I’m here and I see made a mistake. There’s nothing here for us. Nothing.”

“Pizarro,” Lawler said. “Cortes. They would at least have gone ashore before turning tail and running.”

“Don’t fuck around with me now,” said Delagard. “I’m trying to level with you.”

“You gave me Pizarro and Cortes when I tried to level with you, Nid.”

Delagard opened his eyes. They were frightful: bright as coals, fiery with pain. He drew back the corner of his mouth in what might have been an attempt at a smile. “Go easy, doc. I was drunk.”

“I know.”

“You know what my mistake was, doc? I believed my own bullshit. And Jolly’s bullshit. And Father Quillan’s. Quillan fed me a lot of stuff about the Face of the Waters as a place where godly powers would be mine for the taking, or so I interpreted what he was saying. And here we are. Here we lie. Rest in peace. I stood here all night and I thought. How would I build a spaceport? With what? How could anyone live in all that chaos over there without going out of his mind in half a day? What would we eat? Could we even breathe the air? No wonder the Gillies won’t come here. The miserable place is uninhabitable. And suddenly everything came clear to me, and I was standing here all by myself, face to face with myself, laughing at myself. Laughing, doc. But the joke was on me, and it wasn’t very funny. This whole voyage has been sheer lunacy, hasn’t it, doc?”

Delagard was swaying back and forth, now. Lawler saw abruptly that he must still be drunk. There had to be one more hidden cache of brandy on board and probably he’d been drinking all night. For days, maybe. He was so drunk that he thought he was sober.

“You ought to lie down. I can give you a sedative.”

“Fuck your sedative. What I want is for you to agree with me! It’s been a crazy voyage. Hasn’t it, doc?”

“You know that’s what I think, Nid.”

“And you think I’m crazy too.”

“I don’t know if you are or you aren’t. What I do know is that you’re right on the verge of collapse.”

“Well, what if I am?” Delagard asked. “I’m still the captain of this ship. I got us into this. All those people who died, they died because of me. I can’t let anybody else die. I’ve got the responsibility for getting us out.”

“What’s your plan, then?”

“What we need to do now,” Delagard said, speaking slowly and carefully out of some almost unfathomable depth of fatigue, “is work out a course that’ll take us up into inhabited waters, and go to the first island we can reach and fucking beg them to take us in. Eleven people: they can always find room for eleven people, no matter how crowded they try to tell us they are.”

“That sounds fine with me.”

“I figured it would.”

“Okay, then. You go get yourself some rest, Nid. The rest of us will get us out of here right now. Felk can navigate, and we’ll pull the sails around, and by mid-afternoon we’ll be a hundred kilometres from here and making for someplace like Grayvard as fast as we know how.” Lawler nudged Delagard toward the steps leading down from the bridge. “Go on. Before you drop.”

“No,” Delagard said. “I told you, I’m still the captain. If we have to leave here, it’ll be with me at the wheel.”

“All right. Whatever you like.”

“It isn’t what I like. It’s what I have to do. What I need to do. And there’s something I need from you, doc, before we go.”

“What’s that?”

“Something that’ll let me deal with the way things have turned out. It’s been a total defeat, hasn’t it? A complete fuck-up. I’ve never failed at anything in my life until now. But this catastrophe—this disaster—” Delagard’s hand suddenly jabbed out and clutched at Lawler’s arm. “I need a way of making myself able to live with it, doc. The shame. The guilt. You don’t think I’m capable of feeling guilt, but what the fuck did you ever know about me, anyway? If we survive this trip everyone on Hydros is going to look at me wherever I go and say, There’s the man who headed the voyage, who led six ships full of people right down the toilet. And there’ll be reminders for me all the time. From now on every time I see you, or Dag, or Felk, or Kinverson—” Delagard’s eyes were fixed and fiery now. “You’ve got some drug, don’t you, that numbs out your feelings, right? I want you to give me some. I want to dose myself up on it but good, and stay dosed from here on in. Because the only other thing for me to do now is kill myself, and that’s something I can’t even imagine doing.”

“Drugs are a form of killing yourself, Nid.”

“Spare me the pious bullshit, will you, doc?”

“I mean it. Take it from somebody who spent years dosing himself with the stuff. It’s a living death.”

“That’s still better than a dead death.”

“Maybe so. But in any case I can’t give you any. I used up the last of my supply before we got here.”

Delagard’s grasp on Lawler’s arm tightened fiercely. “You’re lying to me!”

“Am I?”

“I know you are. You can’t live without the drug. You take it every day. Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think everybody does?”

“It’s all gone, Nid. Do you remember last week, when I was so sick? What I was doing was going through withdrawal. There isn’t a drop left. You can search my stores if you like. But you won’t find any.”

“You’re lying to me!”

“Go and look. You can have all you can find. That’s a promise.” Carefully Lawler lifted Delagard’s hand from his arm. “Listen, Nid, just lie down and get yourself some rest. By the time you wake up we’ll be far from here and you’ll feel better, believe me, and you’ll be able to start the whole process of forgiving yourself. You’re a resilient man. You know how to deal with things like guilt—believe me, you do. Right now you’re so damned tired and depressed that you can’t see beyond the next five minutes, but once we’re out in the open sea again—”

“Hold on a minute,” Delagard said, looking over Lawler’s shoulder. He pointed toward the gantry area in the stern. “What the fuck’s happening down there?”

Lawler turned to see. Two figures were struggling, a big man and a much slighter one: Kinverson and Quillan, an unlikely pair of antagonists. Kinverson had his hands clamped on the priest’s thin shoulders and was holding him at arm’s length, immobilized, while Quillan fought to break free.

Lawler scrambled down the steps and hurried aft, with Delagard stumbling along behind him.

“What are you doing?” Lawler asked. “Let go of him.”

“I let go, he goes across to the Face. That’s what he says. You want him to do that, doc?”

Quillan looked weirdly ecstatic. He wore a sleepwalker’s glazed stare. His pupils were dilated, his skin was as pale as though he had been drained of blood. His lips were drawn back in a frozen grin.

Kinverson said, “He was wandering around here like somebody who’s out of his head. Going to the Face, he kept saying. Going to the Face. Started to climb over the side, and I grabbed him, and he hit me. Jesus, I never knew he was such a fighter! But I think he’s quieting down a little now.”

“Try letting go,” Lawler said. “See what he does.”

Shrugging, Kinverson released him. Quillan began at once to press onward toward the rail. The priest’s eyes were shining as if with an inner light.

“You see?” the fisherman asked.

Delagard came shouldering forward. He looked groggy but determined. Order had to be maintained aboard ship. He caught the priest by his wrist. “What are you up to? What do you think you’re trying to do?”

“Going ashore—the Face—to the Face—” Quillan’s dreamy grin broadened until it seemed that his cheeks must split. “The god wants me—the god in the Face—”

“Jesus,” Delagard said, his face mottling in exasperation. “What are you saying? You’ll die if you go over there. Don’t you understand that? There’s no way to live over there. Look at the light coming from everything. The place is poison. Snap out of it, will you! Snap out of it!”

“The god in the Face—”

Quillan struggled to break free of Delagard’s grasp, and for a moment succeeded. He took two sliding steps toward the rail. Then Delagard caught him again, yanking Quillan toward him and slapping him so hard that the priest’s lip began to bleed. Quillan stared at him, stunned. Delagard raised his hand again.

“Don’t,” Lawler said. “He’s coming out of it.”

Indeed something was changing in Quillan’s eyes. The glow was leaving them, and the rigid look of trance. He seemed dazed now but fully conscious, trying to blink away his confusion. Slowly he rubbed his face where Delagard had struck him. He shook his head. The motion widened into a convulsive body-long shudder, and he began to tremble. Tears glistened in his eyes.

“My God. I actually was going over there. That was what I was doing, wasn’t I? It was pulling me. I felt it pulling.”

Lawler nodded. It seemed to him that he felt it too, suddenly. A pulsation, a throbbing in his mind. Something stronger than the tempting urge, the mild tug of curiosity, that he and Sundira had felt the night before. It was a powerful mental pressure, drawing him inward, calling him toward the wild shore behind the surf-line.

Angrily he brushed the idea aside. He was getting as crazy as Quillan.

The priest was still talking about the pull he had felt. “There was no way I could resist it. It was offering me the thing I’d been searching for all my life. Thank God Kinverson grabbed me in time.” Quillan gave Lawler a dishevelled look, terror mixed with bewilderment. “You were right, doc, what you said yesterday. It would have been suicide. I thought just then that I’d be going to God, to a god of some sort. But it was the devil, for all I know. That’s Hell over there. I thought it was Paradise, but it’s Hell.” The priest’s voice trailed off. Then, more distinctly, he said to Delagard, “I ask you to take us away from this place. Our souls are in danger here, and if you don’t believe that there is such a thing as the soul, then at least consider that it’s our lives that are in peril. If we stay here any longer—”

“Don’t worry,” Delagard said. “We aren’t going to stay. We’re leaving here as fast as we can.”

Quillan made an O of surprise with his lips.

Wearily Delagard said, “I’ve had a little revelation of my own, Father, and it agrees with yours. This voyage was a gigantic fucking miscalculation, if you’ll excuse the vernacular. We don’t belong here. I want to get out of here as much as you do.”

“I don’t understand. I thought—that you—”

“Don’t think so much,” said Delagard. “Thinking too much can be very bad for you.”

“Did you say we’re leaving?” Kinverson asked.

“That’s right.” Delagard looked up defiantly at the big man. His face was red with chagrin. But he seemed almost amused now by the extent of the calamity that was tumbling down upon him. He was beginning to seem himself again. Something not far from a smile played across his features. “We’re clearing out.”

“Fine with me,” said Kinverson. “Any time you say.”

Lawler glanced away, his attention caught suddenly by something very strange.

He said abruptly, “Did you hear that sound, just now? Somebody speaking to us out of the Face?”

“What? Where?”

“Stand very still and listen. It’s coming from the Face. “Doctor-sir. Captain-sir. Father-sir."” Lawler mimicked the high, thin, soft voice with keen accuracy. “You hear that? “I am with the Face now, captain-sir. Doctor-sir. Father-sir.” It’s as if he’s standing right here next to us.”

“Gharkid!” Quillan exclaimed. “But how—where—”

Others were coming on deck, now: Sundira, Neyana, Pilya Braun. Dag Tharp and Onyos Felk were a few paces behind them. All of them seemed astounded by what they had heard. The last to appear was Lis Niklaus, moving in a peculiar shambling, stumbling way. She jabbed her forefinger at the sky again and again, as though trying to stab it.

Lawler turned and looked up. And saw what Lis was pointing to. The swirling colours in the sky were congealing, taking shape—the shape of the dark, enigmatic face of Natim Gharkid. A gigantic image of the mysterious little man hovered above them, inescapable, inexplicable.

“Where is he?” Delagard cried, in a thick, clotted voice. “How’s he doing that? Bring him here! Gharkid! Gharkid!” He waved his arms frantically. “Go find him. All of you! Search the ship! Gharkid!”

“He’s in the sky,” Neyana Golghoz said blandly, as if that explained everything.

“No,” Kinverson said. “He’s on the Face. Look there—the water-strider’s gone. He must have gone across while we were busy with the Father.”

Indeed, the strider’s housing was empty. Gharkid had taken it out by himself and crossed the little bay to the shore beyond. And had entered the Face; and had been absorbed; and had been transformed. Lawler stared in wonder and terror at the huge image in the sky. Gharkid’s face, no question of that. But how? How?

Sundira came up beside him. Her arm slipped through his. She was shivering with fear. Lawler wanted to comfort her, but no words would come.

Delagard was the first to find his voice.

“Work stations, everyone! Pull that anchor up! I want to see sails! We’re getting the hell out of here right now!”

“Wait a second,” Quillan said quietly. He nodded toward the shore. “Gharkid’s coming back.”

The little man’s journey toward the ship seemed to take a thousand years. No one dared move. They all stood in a row watching by the rail, frozen, appalled.

The image of Gharkid had vanished from the sky the moment the real Gharkid had come into view. But the unmistakable tone of Gharkid’s voice, somehow, was still a part of the strange mental emanation that had begun to radiate steadily from the Face. The physical incarnation of the man might be returning, but something else had remained behind.

He had abandoned the water-strider—Lawler saw it now, beached in the vegetation at the edge of the shore; tendrils of new growth were already beginning to wrap themselves around it—and was swimming across the narrow bay: wading, really. He moved at an unhurried pace, obviously not regarding himself in any danger from whatever creatures might inhabit these strange waters. Of course not, Lawler thought. He was one of them now.

When he reached the deeper waters close to the ship Gharkid put his head down and began to swim. His strokes were slow and serene, and he moved with ease and agility.

Kinverson went to the gantry and returned with one of his gaffs. His cheek was jerking with barely controlled tension. He held the sharp tool aloft like a spear.

“If that thing tries to climb up on board—”

“No,” Father Quillan said. “You mustn’t. This is his ship as much as yours.”

“Who says? What is he? Who says he’s Gharkid? I’ll kill him if he comes near us.”

But Gharkid had no intention, it seemed, of coming up on board. He was just off the side, now, floating placidly, holding himself in one place with little motions of his hands.

He was looking up at them.

Smiling his sweet, inscrutable Gharkid-smile.

Beckoning to them.

“I’ll kill him!” Kinverson roared. “The bastard! The dirty little bastard!”

“No,” said Quillan again quietly, as the big man drew back the hand that held the gaff. “Don’t be afraid. He won’t hurt us.” The priest reached up and touched Kinverson lightly on the chest; and Kinverson seemed to dissolve at the touch. Looking stunned, he let his arm sag to his side. Sundira came up alongside him and took the gaff from him. Kinverson hardly seemed to notice.

Lawler looked toward the man in the water. Gharkid—or was it the Face, speaking through what had been Gharkid?—was calling to them, summoning them to the island. Now Lawler felt the pull in earnest, no doubt of that, no illusion either but a firm unmistakable imperative coming in heavy throbbing waves; it reminded him of the strong undertows that sometimes came eddying up while he was swimming in the bay of Sorve Island. He had been able easily enough to withstand those undertows. He wondered whether he’d be able to withstand this one. It was tugging at the roots of his soul.

He became aware of Sundira’s ragged breathing close beside him. Her face was pale, her eyes were bright with fear. But her jaw was set. She was determined to hold her own against that eerie summons.

Come to me, Gharkid was saying. Come to me, come to me.

Gharkid’s soft voice. But it was the Face that spoke. Lawler was certain of it: an island that spoke, seductively promising everything, anything, in a word. Only come. Only come.

“I’m coming!” Lis Niklaus cried suddenly. “Wait for me! Wait! I’m coming!”

She was midway down the deck, near the mast, blank-eyed, trance-faced, moving uncertainly toward the rail with flatfooted shuffling steps. Delagard, whirling about, called out to her to stop. Lis kept on going. He cursed and began to run toward her. He caught up with her just as she reached the rail and made a grab for her arm.

In a cold, fierce voice that Lawler could barely recognize as hers Lis said, “No, you bastard. No. Keep away from me!” She shoved at Delagard ferociously and sent him tumbling to the deck. Delagard struck the planks hard and lay there on his back, looking at her incredulously. He seemed unable to rise. A moment later Lis was on the rail, and then over it, plunging in free fall toward the water, landing with a tremendous luminous splash.

Side by side, she and Gharkid swam off toward the Face.

Clouds of a new colour hung low in the hot, churning air above the Face of the Waters. They were tawny above, darker below: Lis Niklaus” colouration. She had reached her destination.

“It’s going to take us all,” Sundira said, gasping. “We have to get away from here!”

“Yes,” Lawler said. “Fast.” He glanced quickly around. Delagard still lay sprawled on the deck, more stunned than hurt, perhaps, but not getting up. Onyos Felk was crouching by the foremast, talking to himself in muzzy whispers. Father Quillan was on his knees, making the sign of the Cross over and over again, muttering prayers. Dag Tharp, yellow-eyed with fear, was clutching at his belly and rocking with dry heaves. Lawler shook his head. “Who’s going to navigate?”

“Does it matter? We just have to put the Face behind us and keep on going. So long as we have enough of a crew working the sails—”

Sundira circled the deck. “Pilya! Neyana! Grab those ropes! Val, do you know how to work the wheel? Oh, Jesus, the anchor’s still down. Gabe! Gabe, for Christ’s sake, heave the anchor up!”

“Lis is coming back now,” Lawler said.

“Never mind that. Give Gabe a hand with the anchor.”

But it was too late. Already Lis was halfway back to the ship, swimming powerfully, easily. Gharkid was just behind her. She paused in the water and looked up, and her eyes were new, strange, alien.

“God help us all,” Father Quillan muttered. “They’re both pulling on us now!” There was terror in his eyes. He was shaking convulsively. “I’m afraid, Lawler. This is what I’ve wanted all my life, and now that it’s here, I’m afraid, I’m afraid!” The priest extended his hands toward Lawler in appeal. “Help me. Take me belowdecks. Or else I’ll go over to it. I can’t fight it any longer.”

Lawler started toward him.

“Let him go!” Sundira cried. “We don’t have time. He’s no use to us anyway.”

“Help me!” Quillan wailed. He was moving toward the rail in the same dreamlike shuffle Lis had used. “God is calling me and I’m afraid to go to Him!”

“That isn’t God that’s calling,” Sundira snapped. She was running everywhere at once, trying to galvanize the others into motion, but nothing seemed to be happening. Pilya was looking up at the rigging as though she had never seen a sail before. Neyana was off by herself near the forecastle, chanting something in a low monotone. Kinverson had done nothing about the anchor: he stood stock-still amidships, vacant-eyed, lost in uncharacteristic contemplation.

Come to us, Gharkid and Lis were saying. Come to us, come to us, come to us.

Lawler trembled. The pull was far more powerful now than when it had been Gharkid alone who was summoning them. He heard a splash. Someone else had gone over the side. Felk? Tharp? No, Tharp was still there, a puking little heap. But Felk was gone. And then Lawler saw Neyana too, hoisting herself over the rail, plummeting like a meteor toward the water.

One by one they all would go, he thought. One by one, they would be incorporated into the alien entity that was the Face.

He struggled to resist. He summoned all the stubbornness in his soul, all the love of solitude, all the cantankerous insistence on following his own path, and used it as a weapon against the thing that was calling him. He wrapped his lifelong aloneness around him like a cloak of invisibility.

And it seemed to work. Strong though the pull was—and getting stronger—it couldn’t manage to draw him over the rail. An outsider to the last, he thought, the eternal loner, keeping himself apart even from union with that potent hungry thing that waited for them across the narrow strait.

“Please,” Father Quillan said, almost whimpering. “Where’s the hatch? I can’t find the hatch!”

“Come with me,” Lawler said. “I’ll take you below.”

He saw Sundira heaving desperately at the windlass, trying to get the anchor up herself. But she didn’t have the strength for it: only Kinverson, of them all, was strong enough to do it alone. Lawler hesitated, caught between Quillan’s need and the greater urgency of getting the ship aweigh.

Delagard, on his feet at last, came staggering toward him like a man who has had a stroke. Lawler shoved the priest into Delagard’s arms.

“Here. Hang onto him, or he’ll go over.”

Lawler ran toward Sundira. But Kinverson suddenly stepped out into his path and pushed him back with one big hand against his chest.

“The anchor—” Lawler began. “We’ve got to lift anchor—”

“No. Let it be.”

Kinverson’s eyes were very strange. They seemed to be rolling upward in his head.

“You too?” Lawler asked.

He heard a grunt from behind him, and then another splash. He looked back. Delagard was alone by the rail, studying his fingers as if wondering what they were. Quillan was gone. Lawler saw him in the water, swimming with sublime determination. He was on his way to God—or whatever was over there—at last.

“Val!” Sundira called, still pulling at the windlass.

“No use,” Lawler replied. “They’re all going overboard!”

He could see figures on shore, moving steadily deeper into the throbbing thickets of baroque vegetation: Neyana, Felk. And now Quillan, scrambling up onto the land and moving after them. Gharkid and Lis had already disappeared.

Lawler counted up those who remained on board: Kinverson, Pilya, Tharp, Delagard, Sundira. And he made six. Tharp went over even as he was making the count. Five, then. Just five, out of all those who had set out from Sorve Island.

Kinverson said, “This miserable life. How I hated every stinking day of it. How I wished I’d never been born. You didn’t know that? What did you know? They figured I was too big and strong to hurt. Because I never said anything, nobody knew. But I did hurt, every goddamned minute of the day! And nobody knew. Nobody knew.

“Gabe!” Sundira cried.

“Get out of my fucking way or I’ll fucking split you in half.”

Lawler lurched over, clutched at him. Kinverson swept him aside as if he were a straw and leaped to the top of the rail in one smooth bound, and vaulted over.

Four.

Where was Pilya, though? Lawler glanced around and saw her in the rigging, naked, glistening in the sunlight, climbing higher, higher—was she going to dive from there? Yes. Yes, she was.

Splash.

Three.

“Just us,” Sundira said. She looked at Lawler and then at Delagard, who sat dismally propped against the base of the mainmast with his hands over his face. “We’re the ones it doesn’t want, I guess.”

“No,” said Lawler. “The only ones strong enough to fight it off.”

“Hurray for us,” Delagard said gloomily, without looking up.

“Are three of us enough to sail this ship?” she asked. “What do you think, Val?”

“We can try, I suppose.”

“Don’t talk garbage,” Delagard said. “You can’t possibly run this ship with a crew of three.”

“We could set the sails to the prevailing breezes and simply ride the current,” Lawler said. “Maybe if we did that we’d get to some inhabited island sooner or later. It’s better than staying here. What do you say, Nid?”

Delagard shrugged.

Sundira was looking towards the Face.

“Can you see any of them?” Lawler asked.

“Not a one. But I hear something. I feel something. Father Quillan, I think, coming back.”

Lawler peered toward shore. “Where?” The priest was nowhere in sight. But yet, but yet—no doubt of it, Lawler too felt a Quillan-like presence. It was as though the priest were right here beside them on the deck. Another trick of the Face, he decided.

“No,” Quillan said. “Not a trick. I am here.”

“It isn’t so. You’re still on the island,” said Lawler tonelessly.

“On the island, and here with you, at one and the same time.”

Delagard made a hollow sound of disgust. “Son of a bitch. Why won’t the thing leave us alone?”

“It loves you,” Quillan said. “It wants you. We want you. Come and join us.”

Lawler saw that their victory was only a tentative one. The pull was still there—subtler now, as if holding itself in abeyance, but ready to seize them the moment they let down their guard. Quillan was intended as a distraction—a seductive distraction.

He said, “Are you Father Quillan, or are you the Face speaking?”

“Both. I am of the Face now.”

“But you still perceive yourself as the priest Father Quillan, dwelling within the entity that is the Face of the Waters?”

“Yes. Yes, exactly.”

“How can that be?” Lawler asked.

“Come and see,” said Quillan. “You remain yourself. And yet you become something infinitely greater.”

“Infinitely?”

“Infinitely, yes.”

“It’s like a dream,” Sundira said. “Talking to something that you can’t see, and having it answer you in the voice of someone you know.” She sounded very calm. Like Delagard, she seemed past all fear now, past all tumult. Either the Face would have them or it wouldn’t, but it was almost at the point of being beyond their control. “Father, can you hear me too?”

“Of course, Sundira.”

“Do you know what the Face is? Is it God? Can you tell us?”

“The Face is Hydros, and Hydros is the Face,” said the priest’s quiet voice. “Hydros is a great corporate mind, a collective organism, a single intelligent entity that spans the entire planet. This island which we have come to, this place that we call the Face of the Waters, is a living thing, the brain of the planet. And more than a brain: the central womb of everything is what the Face is. The universal mother from which all life on Hydros flows.”

“Is that why the Dwellers won’t come here?” Sundira asked. “Because it’s sacrilege to return to the place from which you’ve come?”

“Something like that, yes.”

“And the multitude of intelligent life-forms of Hydros,” Lawler said, seeing the connection suddenly. “That came about because everything is linked to the Face, isn’t that so? The Gillies and the divers and the rammerhorns and everything else? One giant conglomerate world-mind?”

“Yes. Yes. One universal intelligence.”

Lawler nodded. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine what it was like to be part of such an entity. The world as a single huge clockwork mechanism, ticking, ticking, ticking, and every living thing on it dancing to the ryhthm of the ticks.

Quillan was part of it now. Gharkid. Lis, Pilya, Neyana, Tharp, Felk, even poor tortured Kinverson. Swallowed up in the godhead. Lost in the immensity of the divine.

Delagard said suddenly, still not lifting his head from the posture of darkest depression in which he sat slumped, “Quillan? Tell me this, Quillan: what about the undersea city? Is there one or isn’t there?”

“A myth,” the voice of the unseen Quillan replied. “A fable.”

“Ah,” said Delagard bitterly. “Ah.”

“Or a metaphor, more truthfully. Your wandering seaman had something of the fundamental idea, but he garbled it. The great city is everywhere on Hydros, under the sea and in it and at its surface. The planet is a single city; every living creature on it is a citizen of it.”

Delagard looked up. His eyes were dull with exhaustion.

Quillan went on, “The beings who live here have always dwelled in the water. Guided by the Face, united with the Face. At first they were completely aquatic, and then the Face showed them how to build the floating islands, to prepare them for the time in the distant future when land would begin to rise from the depths. But there was never any secret undersea city. This is a water-world and nothing else. And everything in it is bound harmoniously within the power of the Face.”

“Everything except us,” said Sundira.

“Everything except the few wandering humans who have found their way to this world, yes,” Quillan said. “The exiles. Who out of ignorance have continued to be exiles here. Insisting on it, even. Aliens choosing to live apart from the harmony that is Hydros.”

“Because they have no business being part of that harmony,” Lawler said.

“Not true. Not true. Hydros welcomes everyone.”

“But only on its own terms.”

“Not true,” said Quillan.

“But once you cease to be yourself—” Lawler said. “Once you become part of some larger entity—”

He frowned. Something had changed just then. He felt silence all around him. The aura, the enveloping blanket of thought, that had surrounded them during their colloquy with Quillan had vanished.

“I don’t think he’s here any more,” Sundira said.

“No, he isn’t,” said Lawler. “He’s pulled back from us. It has.” The Face itself, the sense of a vast nearby presence, seemed to be gone. For the moment, at least.

“How strange it feels to be alone again.”

“It feels good, I’d say. Just the three of us, each in our own head, and nobody talking to us out of the sky. For however long it is until it starts up again.”

“It will start up again, won’t it?” said Sundira.

“I suppose,” Lawler said. “And we’ll have to fight it all over again. We can’t allow ourselves to be swallowed up. Human beings have no business becoming part of an alien world. We weren’t meant for that.”

Delagard said in an odd tone, soft and wistful, “He sounded happy, didn’t he?”

“You think so?” Lawler asked.

“Yes, I do. He was always so strange, so sad, so distant. Wondering where God was. Well, now he knows. He’s with God at last.”

Lawler gave him a curious look. “I didn’t know that you believed in God, Nid. Now you think that the Face is God?”

“Quillan does. And Quillan’s happy. For the first time in his life.”

“Quillan’s dead, Nid. Whatever was talking to us just now wasn’t Quillan.”

“It sounded like Quillan. Quillan and something else, but Quillan even so.”

“If you like to think so.”

“I do,” said Delagard. Abruptly he stood up, swaying a little as though the effort made him dizzy. “I’m going to go over there and join up.”

Lawler stared at him.

“You too?” he said in wonder.

“Me, yes. Don’t try to stop me. I’ll kill you if you try. Remember what Lis did to me when I tried to stop her. We can’t be stopped, doc.”

Lawler was still staring. He means it, he thought. He actually means it. He’s really going to go. Could this really be Delagard? Yes. Yes. Delagard had always been one for doing what seemed best for Delagard, no matter what effect it might have on those around him.

To hell with him, then. Good riddance.

“Stop you?” Lawler said. “I wouldn’t dream of it. Go ahead, Nid. If you think you’ll be happy there, go. Go. Why should I stop you? What difference does anything make now?”

Delagard smiled. “No difference to you, maybe. But to me, plenty. I’m so fucking tired, doc. I was full of big dreams. I tried this scheme, I tried that one, and for a long time everything worked out, and then I came here and it all fell apart. I fell apart. Well, fuck it. I just want to rest now.”

“To kill yourself, you mean?”

“You think that’s what it means. But I’d never do that. I’m tired of being the captain of the ship. I’m tired of telling people what to do, especially when I see now that I don’t really know what the fuck I’m doing myself. I’ve had it, doc. I’m going to go over.” Delagard’s eyes brightened with newfound energy. “Maybe this is what I came here to do all along, only I never realized it until this minute. Maybe the Face sent Jolly home to bring the rest of us to it—only it took forty years, and then only a few of us came.” He looked almost jaunty now. “So long, doc. Sundira. It was nice knowing you. Come visit me some time.”

They watched him go.

“It’s just you and me, kid,” Lawler said to her. And they laughed. What else was there to do, but laugh?

Night came: a blazing night of comets and wonders, of flaring lights of a hundred different coruscating colours. Lawler and Sundira remained on deck as darkness came, sitting quietly near the mainmast, saying little to each other. He felt numb, burned out by the things that had happened this day. She was silent, exhausted.

Great explosions of colour burst overhead. A celebration of the newly conquered, Lawler thought. The auras of his former shipmates seemed to sparkle in the sky. That great slash of stormy blue: was that Delagard? And that warm amber glow: Quillan? Could that scarlet pillar be Kinverson, and the splash of molten gold near the horizon, Pilya Braun? And Felk—Tharp—Neyana—Lis—Gharkid—

It felt as though they were close at hand, every one of them. The sky boiled with radiant colour. But when Lawler listened for their voices, he was unable to hear them. All he could make out was a warm harmony of undifferentiated sounds.

On the darkening horizon the frenzied fertility of the island across the strait went on unabated: things sprouted, writhed, quivered against the deep hue of the sky, sending up showers of luminous energy. Waves of streaming light rose toward the heavens. There was never any rest over there. Lawler and Sundira sat watching the show far into the night, until at last he rose and said, “Are you hungry at all?”

“Not a bit.”

“Neither am I. Let’s get some sleep, then.”

“Yes. All right.”

She stretched her hand toward him and he pulled her to her feet. For a moment they stood close together by the rail, staring at the island across the strait.

“Do you feel any sort of pull?” she asked.

“Yes. It’s always there—biding its time, I think. Waiting for the moment when it catches us off guard.”

“I feel it too. It isn’t as strong as it was, but I know that that’s only a trick. I have to hold my mind clenched against it all the time.”

“I wonder why we were the only ones who were able to hold fast against the urge to go,” Lawler said. “Are we stronger and saner than the others, better able to live within our own identities? Or just so accustomed to feeling alienated from the society around us that we can’t possibly let ourselves go and plunge into a group mind.”

“Did you really feel so alienated when you lived on Sorve, Val?”

He considered that. “Maybe “alienated” is too strong a word. I was part of the Sorve community, and it was part of me. But I wasn’t part of it the way most of the others were. I was always a little to one side.”

“The same with me on Khamsilaine. I was never much of a belonger, I suppose.”

“Nor I.”

“Or even wanted to be. Some do, and can’t manage it. Gabe Kinverson was just as much a loner as we are. More, even. But suddenly a time came when he didn’t want to be, any more. And there he is, dwelling in the Face. But it gives me the shivers to think of yielding myself up and going over there to join some alien mind.”

“I never understood that man,” Lawler said.

“Neither did I. I tried to. But he was locked up in himself all the time. Even in bed.”

“I don’t need to know about that.”

“Sorry.”

“That’s okay.”

She pressed close against him.

“Just the two of us,” she said. “Stranded at the ass end of nowhere, all alone on a castaway ship. Very romantic, for however long we last. What are we going to do, Val?”

“We’ll go down below and make wild love. We can have the big bunk tonight in Delagard’s cabin.”

“And after that?”

“We’ll worry about after that after that,” said Lawler.

9

He awoke just before dawn. Sundira was sleeping peacefully, her face as smooth and unworried as a child’s. He slipped from the cabin and went up on deck. The sun was rising; the dazzling show of colours that the Face constantly emitted seemed more subdued this morning than it had been yesterday, far less flamboyant. He could still feel the pull of the Face tickling at the corners of his mind, but that was all it was just now, a tickle.

The figures of Lawler’s former companions were moving about on shore.

He watched them. Even at this distance he was able easily to identify them: towering Kinverson and little Tharp, stocky Delagard, bandy-legged Felk. Father Quillan, nothing but bones and sinew. Gharkid, darker-skinned than the others and light as a wraith. And the three women, heavy-breasted Lis and sturdy square-shouldered Neyana and lithe handsome Pilya. What were they doing? Wading along the edge of the water? No, no, they were walking out into the bay, they were coming this way, they were returning to the ship. All of them. Easily, calmly, they were paddling through the shallow water toward the Queen of Hydros.

Lawler felt a tremor of fear. It was like a procession of the dead coming through the water toward him.

He went below and woke Sundira.

“They’re coming back,” he told her.

“What? Who are? Oh. Oh.”

“The whole bunch of them. Swimming out to the ship.”

She nodded, as though it were no great chore for her to take in the concept that the physical shells of their former shipmates were returning from the inconceivable entity that had devoured their souls. Perhaps she wasn’t quite awake yet, Lawler thought. But she rose from the bunk and went up on deck with him. There were figures bobbing all around the ship now, just below the rail. Lawler peered down at them.

“What do you want?” he called.

“Throw down the rope ladder,” the Kinverson-figure replied, in what was recognizably Kinverson’s voice. “We’re coming on board.”

“My God,” Lawler said, under his breath. He shot a horrified look at Sundira.

“Do it,” she told him.

“But once they’re up here—”

“What does it matter? If the Face wanted to turn its full voltage on us we’d probably be helpless before it anyway. If they want to come aboard, let them come. We don’t have very much left to lose, do we?”

Shrugging, Lawler tossed down the ropes. Kinverson was the first to scramble aboard, then Delagard, Pilya, Tharp. The others followed. They were all naked. They stood in a quiet little group. There was no vitality to them; they seemed like sleepwalkers, like ghosts. They are ghosts, Lawler told himself.

“Well?” he said, finally.

“We’re here to help you sail the ship,” said Delagard.

Lawler was baffled by that. “Sail it? Where?”

“Back where you came from. You can’t stay here, you realize. We’ll take you to Grayvard so that you can ask for refuge.”

Delagard’s voice was flat and calm and his eyes were steady and clear, with none of their old manic gleam. Whoever or whatever this creature was, it was something other than the Nid Delagard Lawler had known for so many years. His inner demons were at rest. He had undergone a deep change—a kind of redemption, even. All his scheming was at an end, his soul seemed tranquil. So too with the others. They were at peace. They had surrendered to the Face, they had yielded up their individual selves, a thing which Lawler found incomprehensible; but he could not deny to himself that the returnees appeared to have found a happiness of some sort.

In a voice light as air Quillan said, “Before we leave, one last chance. Would you like to go to the island, doc? Sundira?”

“You know that we don’t,” Lawler said.

“It’s up to you. But once you’re back in Home Sea it won’t be a simple thing to return here if you change your mind.”

“I can live with that.”

“Sundira?” Quillan said.

“Me too.”

The priest smiled sadly. “It’s your choice. But I wish I could make you see what a mistake it is. Do you understand why we were attacked so constantly all the time that we were at sea? Why the rammerhorns came, and the limpet, and the hagfish, and all the rest? Not because they’re malevolent creatures. There aren’t any malevolent creatures on Hydros. What they were trying to do was heal the world, that’s all.”

“Heal the world?” Lawler said.

“Cleanse it. Rid it of an impurity. To them—to every life-form of Hydros—the Earthmen who live here are invasive, extraneous beings, because they live outside the harmony that is the Face. They see us as viruses or bacteria that have invaded the body of a healthy organism. Attacking us was the equivalent of ridding the body of disease.”

“Or cleaning grit out of a machine,” Delagard said.

Lawler turned away, feeling anger and disgust rising in him.

Sundira said to him in a quiet voice, “How frightening they are. A bunch of ghosts. No, worse: zombies. We’re lucky to have been strong enough to resist.”

“Are we really?” Lawler asked.

Her eyes widened. “What do you mean by that?”

“I’m not sure. But they look so peaceful, Sundira. They may have changed into something alien, but at least they’re at peace.”

Her nostrils flared in contempt. “You want peace? Go on, then. It’s only a short swim.”

“No. No.”

“Are you sure, Val?”

“Come here. Hold me.”

“Val—Val—”

“I love you.”

“I love you, Val.” They embraced unselfconsciously, ignoring the returnees around them. She said, close to his ear, “I won’t go across if you don’t.”

“I’m not going, don’t worry.”

“But if you do, we’ll go together.”

“What?”

“You think I want to be the only one on this ship who’s still real, sailing with ten zombies? It’s a deal, Val. Either we don’t go at all or we go together.”

“We don’t go.”

“But if we do—”

“Then it’ll be together,” Lawler said. “But we don’t go.”

As though nothing whatever out of the ordinary had happened at the Face of the Waters, the crew of the Queen of Hydros set about making preparations for the voyage back. Kinverson cast nets, and fish swam obligingly into them. Gharkid moved placidly through hip-deep water, gathering useful algae. Neyana, Pilya and Lis trekked back and forth between the island and the ship, carrying casks of fresh water that they filled from some spring on shore. Onyos Felk pondered his sea-charts. Dag Tharp tuned and tested his radio equipment. Delagard surveyed the rigging and sails, the rudder and the hull, and noted where repairs were needed, and he and Sundira and Lawler and even Father Quillan took care of what had to be done.

Very little was said. Everybody moved about their tasks as though part of some well-ordered machine. The returnees were gentle with the two who had not gone to the islands, treating them almost like troubled children who needed great tenderness; but Lawler felt no real contact with them.

Often Lawler stared in wonder and perplexity at the Face. The display of lights and colour coming from it was unending. Its constant berserk vigour fascinated him as much as it repelled him. He tried to imagine what it had been like for the others to be ashore, to move among those groves of live, sizzling strangenesses. But he knew that such speculations were dangerous. Now and again he felt a renewed pull, sometimes unexpectedly strong, from the island. In those moments the temptation was powerful. It would be so easy to slip over the side like the rest, swim quickly through the warm, welcoming waters of the bay, scramble up onto that alien shore—

But he was still able to resist. He had held the island off this long; he wasn’t about to surrender to it now. The work of preparation went on, and he stayed on board, as did Sundira, while the others freely came and went. It was a weird time, though not an unpleasant one. Life seemed suspended. In an odd way Lawler felt almost happy: he had survived, he had withstood every sort of adversity, he had been tempered in the forge of Hydros and was emerging all the stronger for it. He had come to love Sundira; he felt her love for him. These were new experiences for him. In whatever new life awaited him when the voyage was ended, he would be better able to cope with the uncertainties of his soul than before.

It was almost time to leave now.

It was late afternoon. Delagard had announced that departure would be at sunset. That they would be leaving the vicinity of the Face in the dark didn’t seem to trouble him. The light of the Face itself would guide the ship for a time; and after that they could sail by the stars. There was nothing to fear from the sea, not any longer. The sea would be friendly now. Everything on Hydros would be friendly.

Lawler realized that he was alone on deck. Most or perhaps all of the others had gone to the island: to make a farewell visit, he supposed. But where was Sundira?

He called her name.

No answer. For one wild moment he wondered if she had gone with them. Then he caught sight of her at the stern, up on the gantry bridge. Kinverson was with her. They seemed deep in conversation.

Quietly Lawler moved down the deck toward them.

He heard Kinverson telling her, “You can’t possibly understand what it’s like until you’ve gone over yourself. It’s as different from being an ordinary human as being alive is from being dead.”

“I feel alive enough now.”

“You don’t know. You can’t imagine it. Come with me now, Sundira. It takes only a moment. And then everything opens up for you. I’m not the same man I was, am I?”

“Not remotely.”

“But I am. Only I’m so much more, besides. Come with me.”

“Please, Gabe.”

“You want to go. I know you do. You’re staying only because of Lawler.”

“I’m staying because of me,” Sundira said.

“It isn’t so. I know. You feel sorry for the pitiful bastard. You don’t want to leave him behind.”

“No, Gabe.”

“You’ll thank me afterward.”

“No.”

“Come with me.”

“Gabe—please—”

There was a sudden doubtful note in her voice, a tone of weakening resolve, that struck Lawler with sledgehammer force. He jumped up on the gantry bridge next to them. Sundira gasped in surprise and backed away. Kinverson stood where he was, regarding Lawler calmly.

The gaffs were in their rack. Lawler grabbed one and held it out, practically in Kinverson’s face.

“Leave her alone.”

The big man eyed the sharp tool with amusement, or perhaps disdain. “I’m not doing anything to her, doc.”

“You’re trying to seduce her.”

Kinverson laughed. “She don’t need much seducing, do she, now?”

There was a roaring sound of fury in Lawler’s ears. It was all he could do to hold back from thrusting the gaff into Kinverson’s throat.

Sundira said, “Val, please, we were only talking.”

“I heard what you were talking about. He’s trying to get you to go to the Face. Isn’t that so?”

“I don’t deny that,” Kinverson said easily.

Lawler brandished the gaff, conscious of how comic his anger must seem to Kinverson, how petulant, how foolish. Kinverson hulked above him, still menacing for all his newfound gentleness, invulnerable, invincible.

But Lawler had to see this through. In a tight voice he said, “I don’t want you talking to her again before we sail.”

Kinverson smiled amiably. “I wasn’t trying to hurt her any.”

“I know what you were trying to do. I won’t let you.”

“Shouldn’t that be up to her, doc?”

Lawler glanced at Sundira. She said softly, “It’s all right, Val. I can look after myself.”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

“Give me that gaff, doc,” Kinverson said. “You might hurt yourself with it.”

“Keep back!”

“It’s my gaff, you know. You got no business waving it around.”

“Watch it,” Lawler said. “Get away. Get off the ship! Go on: back to the Face. Go on, Gabe. You don’t belong here. None of you do. This ship is for humans.”

“Val,” Sundira said.

Lawler gripped the gaff tightly, holding it as he would a scalpel, and took a step or two toward Kinverson. The fisherman’s lumbering form rose high. Lawler drew a deep breath. “Go on,” he said again. “Back to the Face. Jump, Gabe. Right here, right over the side.”

“Doc, doc, doc—”

Lawler brought the gaff upward and forward in a short, hard thrust at Kinverson’s diaphragm. It should have speared right into the big man’s heart; but Kinverson’s arm moved with unbelievable swiftness. His hand caught the shaft of the gaff and twisted, and pain shot the length of Lawler’s arm. A moment later the gaff was in Kinverson’s hand.

Automatically Lawler crossed his arms over his middle to protect himself against the thrust that he knew must be coming.

Kinverson studied him as if measuring him for it. Get it over with, damn you, Lawler thought. Now. Quickly. He could almost feel it already, the fiery intrusion, the tissues parting, the sharp point going for the heart within the cage of ribs.

But there was no thrust. Calmly Kinverson leaned forward and dropped the gaff back in the rack.

“You shouldn’t mess with the equipment, doc,” he said gently. “Excuse me, now. I’ll leave you and the lady alone.”

He turned and went past Lawler, down the gantry ladder, to the main deck.

“Did I look very stupid just then?” Lawler asked Sundira.

She smiled, very faintly. “He’s always seemed a threat to you, hasn’t he?”

“He was trying to talk you into going over. Is that a threat or isn’t it?”

“If he had picked me up bodily and carried me over the side, that would have been a threat, Val.”

“All right. All right.”

“But I understand why you were upset. Even to the point of going after him with that gaff like that.”

“It was dumb. It was an adolescent thing to do.”

“Yes,” she said. “It was.”

Lawler hadn’t expected her to agree so readily. He looked at her, startled, and saw something in her eyes that surprised and dismayed him even more.

There had been a change. There was a distance now between the two of them that hadn’t been there for a long while.

“What is it, Sundira? What’s happening?”

“Oh, Val—Val—”

“Tell me.”

“It wasn’t anything Kinverson said. I can’t be talked into something as easily as that. It’s entirely my own decision.”

“Whatis? For Christ’s sake, what are you talking about?”

“The Face.”

“What?”

“Come over with me, Val.”

It was like being pierced with Kinverson’s gaff.

“Jesus.” He took a step or two back from her. “Jesus, Sundira. What are you saying?”

“That we should go.”

He watched her, feeling as though he would turn to stone.

“This is wrong, trying to resist it,” she said. “We should have let ourselves yield to it, the way others did. They understood. We were blind.”

“Sundira?”

“I saw it, everything in one flash, Val, while you were trying to protect me from Gabe. How foolish it is to try to maintain our individual selves, all our little fears and jealousies and petty games. How much better it would be to drop all that, and join ourselves into the one great harmony that exists here. With the others. With Hydros.”

“No. No.”

“This is our one chance to let all the shit that oppresses us fall away from us.”

“I don’t believe you’re saying this, Sundira.”

“But I am. I am.”

“He hypnotized you, didn’t he? He put a spell on you. It did.”

“No,” she said, smiling. She held out her hands to him. “You told me once that you had never felt at home on Hydros, even though you were born here. Do you remember that, Val?”

“Well—”

“Do you? You said divers and meatfish feel at home here, but you don’t and never have. You do remember: I see that you do. All right. Here’s your chance to make yourself at home here, finally. To become a part of Hydros. Earth is gone. What we are is Hydrans, and Hydrans belong to the Face. You’ve held back long enough. So have I; but I’m giving in, now. Suddenly it all looks different to me, now. Will you come with me?”

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

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

“All right. I hear you.”

“I’m going to go. What about you?”

“You know the answer to that.”

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

“Not at all, then, that’s the deal.”

“But I want to go, Val. I do.”

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

“Come with me?”

“No. No. No. No.”

“You promised—”

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

“I’m sorry, Val.”

“So am I.”

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

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

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

“Never.”

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

“How could I?”

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

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

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

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

He had never felt so alone in his life.

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t understand.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only he. Only he.

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

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

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

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

He lay back, staring at the stars, letting the fierce brightness of the Cross fill his mind. How peaceful it is here now, he thought. How quiet.

“Val? It’s me.”

He looked up. A starlight-shadow crossed his face. He saw Sundira close by him.

“Can I sit with you?” she asked.

“If you want.”

She dropped down beside him. “I looked for you at mess. You weren’t there. You should have eaten.”

“I wasn’t hungry. You still eat, do you, now that you’ve been changed?”

“Of course we do. It’s not that kind of change.”

“I suppose. How would I know?”

“How would you, yes.” She ran her hand lightly across his arm. This time he didn’t flinch. “Not as much has changed as you’d think. I still love you, Val. I said I would, and it’s true.”

He nodded. There was nothing he could say.

Did he still love her, he wondered? Was it possible even to imagine that he did?

He slipped his arm around her shoulders. Her skin was smooth, cool, familiar. Pleasing. She nestled against him. They might have been the only two people in the world. She still seemed human to him. He bent forward and kissed her softly in the hollow between her chin and her shoulder, and she laughed.

“Val,” she said. “Oh, Val.”

That was all, just his name. What was she thinking, what had she left unsaid? That she wished he had gone to the Face with her? That she still hoped that he would? That she prayed that he would go to Delagard, and beg to have the ship turned around, and taken back to the island so that he too could undergo the transformation?

Should I have gone with her?

Was it a mistake to have refused?

For a moment he saw himself inside the machine, part of it, part of the All—surrendering at last, dancing with all the rest.

No. No. No. No.

I am who I am. I have done what I have done because I am who I am.

He lay back, with Sundira curled against him, and looked upward at the stars again. And one more vision came to him: the Earth that once had been, the Earth that had been lost.

His great romantic fantasy of old vanished Earth, that blue and shining planet, the shattered mother world of humanity, filled him once again: he saw it as he wanted it to have been, a peaceful and harmonious world teeming with loving human beings, a haven, a perfect entity. Had it ever really been like that? Probably not, he thought. Almost certainly not. It had been a place like any other, evil mixed with the good, flaws, failings. And in any case that world was gone from the universe, swept away by malign fate.

And here we are. Here lie we. Rest in peace.

Lawler peered into the night, imagining that he was looking toward the place in the heavens where that world had been. But he knew that for Earth’s surviving people scattered through the universe there was no hope of regaining the lost ancestral home. They must move on, they must discover some new place for themselves in this vast universe into which they had been flung as exiles. They must transform themselves.

They must transform themselves.

They must transform themselves.

He sat up as if jolted by a blast of burning light. It was all so wondrously clear to him, suddenly. The people he had known who lived their lives from day to day as though Earth had never existed had been right, and he, hopelessly dreaming of what once had been, long ago and far away, had been wrong. Earth would never return. For the Earthmen on Hydros there was only Hydros, now and forever more. To hold yourself apart, clinging desperately to your ancestral Earth identity amidst the native life-forms of your adopted world, was folly. On whatever world you might find yourself living, it is your task to make yourself fully a part of that world. Otherwise you will always be an outsider, alien and alienated.

And so it was. Here I am. More alone than I have ever been before.

And Hydros had offered to take him in, but he had said no and made the refusal stick, and now it was too late.

He closed his eyes and saw Earth bright and beautiful in the heavens once again. That vision of lost Earth that he had carried in his mind for so long was gleaming more vividly than he had ever seen it before. The blue Earth, lovely and strange, with its great golden-green land-masses shining by the light of a sun he had never seen. As he watched, the broad blue seas began to boil. Steam rose from them. The land was swept by flame. The golden-green immensities parched and blackened. Deep jagged fissures darker than night sprang up across their broad surfaces.

And after the flames: ice, death. Darkness.

A shower of small dead things, falling through space. A coin, a bit of statuary, a potsherd, a map, a rusted weapon, a chunk of stone. Tumbling helter-skelter, plummeting through the windless wastes of the galaxy. He followed them with his gaze, tracking them as they fell.

All gone, he thought. Let it all go. Forget it. Begin a new life.

The sudden thought astounded him.

What was that?he asked himself. What are you saying?

Surrender? Join? Was that what he had meant? Lawler began to tremble. Sweat broke out all over him. He sat up and looked out to sea, back in the direction of the Face.

It seemed to him that he could feel its force after all, reaching him even over this much distance, infiltrating his mind, wrapping its tentacles around his soul, pulling at him, drawing him in.

He fought it. Frantically, furiously, he struggled with it, hacking with desperate urgency at the strands of alien power that seemed to be invading him. For a long silent moment he worked at it, fiercely trying to cleanse himself of its intruding energies. The image came to him of Gospo Struvin, all the way back at the outset of the voyage, battling with that tangle of moist yellow fibres that had come up out of the sea to ensnare him. Struvin kicking in the air, shaking his foot, attempting vainly to extricate himself from that sticky, persistent thing that enfolded him. It was like that now. Lawler knew he was fighting for his life, as Gospo had done; and Gospo had lost.

Get—away—from—me—

He summoned all his energies for one great cleansing thrust. And launched it.

Against nothing. There was nothing there. No nets held him. No mysterious force entwined him in its snare. Lawler understood that and had no doubt of it: he was struggling against shadows, he was fighting with himself, really, only with himself, no one but himself.

So you want to go to it?he asked himself numbly. Despite everything, you actually do want to go? Even you? Is that what you want? What is it that you want, anyway?

Once again he saw the blue Earth gleaming in his mind as it had been before, and then once again it began to boil and blacken, and he beheld once again the ice, the death, the darkness, and the tiny objects falling.

And the answer came: I don’t want to be alone any more. God help me, I don’t want to be the last Earthman when there’s no more Earth.

Sundira stirred, warm against him. “What are you thinking, Val?”

“That I love you,” he said.

“Do you? You love what I am now?”

He drew a deep breath, the deepest he had ever drawn, pulling the air of Hydros far down into his lungs.

“Yes,” Lawler said.

Where Earth had been in his mind, there was only a flawless sphere of shimmering water. The scattering of tiny objects that had fallen from the dying world hovered for a moment above the surface of that great sea, dropped into it, vanished without a trace.

He felt a great easing, a sudden thawing. Something breaking within him like an ice-floe at the end of winter. Breaking up, streaming away, flowing. Flowing.

He sat up and turned toward her to tell her what had happened. But there was no need. She was smiling. She knew. And he could feel the ship moving in a big arc beneath him, already swinging about, heading back through the luminous sea toward the Face of the Waters.