The Face of the Waters

  "And he'll get us out of it. The Gillies are angry just now, but they won't-"

  "What do you think, doc?" someone called out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "We should get married," he said.

  "Should we?"

  "We should, yes."

  "The doctor's wife. I never thought I'd be the doctor's wife." She laughed. "But somebody has to be."

  "No, nobody has to be. But I want you to be."

  She wriggled away from him and started swimming. "Catch me and I'll marry you!"

  "No fair. You had a head start."

  "Nothing's ever fair," she called to him.

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

  The doctor had a wife, then.

  "Are you happy?" he would ask.

  "Oh, yes, yes."

  "So am I."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Mind if I join you?" she asked.

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

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

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

  "Did I?"

  "Were you?"

  "I suppose."

  "Thinking the big thoughts, doctor?"

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

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

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

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

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

  "I don't ever think about Earth at all," Sundira said.

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

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

  "Well, they are from Sorve. At least you can't argue that away."

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

  Lawler found himself desperately wanting to change the subject.

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

  He said, after a while, "How's the cough?"

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

  "Come up to the vaargh when it's all gone and I'll give you some more."

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

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

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

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

  "Trees, you mean?"

  "Trees, yes."

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

  "You talk as if you've seen some," Lawler said.

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

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

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

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

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

  "Never. I don't understand how to do it, I guess. Tying yourself down to one person forever-it seems so strange to me."

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

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

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

  He wanted her, no doubt of that.

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

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

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

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

  "Right," he said.

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