The Face of the Waters

  "That's a nice theory. But does Delagard understand how to operate this radio equipment?"

  "No," Tharp said. "Not that I know of."

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

  "You've got a point there."

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

  "You going to talk to Delagard, doc?"

  "I think I ought to," Lawler said.

  8

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

  "What is it, doc?"

  "Can we talk?"

  Delagard's eyelids slid downward for a moment. "Right this minute?"

  "I think so, yes."

  "All right. Come on. Come on down with me."

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

  "You want a drink?" Delagard asked.

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

  "Have we?" Delagard didn't sound surprised.

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

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

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

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

  "I consulted some experts."

  "Onyos Felk? That foolish old fart?"

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

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

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

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

  "Jesus Christ, Nid. Why not?"

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

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

  "I didn't lie to everybody. I told Gospo Struvin the truth. And Father Quillan."

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

  "I tell him a lot of things."

  "You a Catholic now? He's your confessor?"

  "He's my friend. He's full of interesting ideas."

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

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

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

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

  "Right, doc."

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

  "Because he knew I had always wanted to go there."

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

  "That's right." Delagard shook off the sarcasm, smiling quietly.

  "Father Quillan gives wonderful advice. That's why he's been such a success in the priesthood."

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

  "A bunch of fairy tales, yes."

  "That's more or less what you said the other time. But do you remember them?"

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

  "Yes," Delagard said. "That's the essential story."

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

  "You ought to be, doc. It's going to be the great adventure of our lives."

  "Is it, now?"

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

  Lawler stared.

  "You're out of your fucking mind, Nid."

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

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

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

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

  "You think I'm crazy?"

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

  "You yourself said that you didn't want that. Remember?"

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

  "Yes. It is."

  "You bastard. You absolute and utter bastard. You are crazy, then!"

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

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

  "Yes."

  "But didn't tell your captains, even."

  "Only Gospo."

  "Who thought it was a perfectly swell idea."

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

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

  "Yes. You've got it exactly."

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

  "You don't like it, doc? You want to get off the ship? Go right ahead. We're going forward whether you like it or not."

  "And your captains? You think they're going to go with you once they know what the real destination is?"

  "You bet they will. They go where I say. Always have, always will. The Sisters may not follow, if they pick up any idea of what's really going on, but that's okay. What good are they anyway, those crazy bitches? They'll just make trouble for us when we get to the Face. But Stayvol will sail anywhere I want him to. And Bamber, and Martin. And poor fucking Damis would have, too. Right straight on to the Face. No question of it. We'll get there, and we'll build the biggest, richest goddamned place Hydros has ever seen, and we'll all live happily ever after. Trust me, we will. You want some more brandy, doc? Yes. Yes, I think you do. Here. Have a good stiff one. You look like you need it."

  * * *

  Father Quillan, standing at the rail staring out ecstatically at an emptiness that seemed even emptier than the endless skein of sea they had already crossed, seemed to be in his high spiritual mode at the moment. His face was ruddy, his eyes were glowing.

  "Yes," he said. "I told Delagard that he should make the journey to the Face."

  "When was this? While we were still on Sorve?"

  "Oh, no. When we were at sea. It was a little while after Gospo Struvin was killed. Delagard took Gospo's death very hard, you know. He came to me and said, Father, I'm not a religious man, but I need to talk to somebody and you're the only one available that I trust. Maybe you can help me, he said. And he told me about the Face. What it was like, why he wanted to there. And about the plan that he and Gospo had worked out. He didn't know what to do now that Gospo was gone. He still wanted to go to the Face but he wasn't sure he could bring the voyage off. We discussed the Face of the Waters at great length. He explained its nature to me very fully, as he had heard it from that old sailor long ago. And when he had told me the story I urged him to carry through with his scheme, even without Gospo. I saw the importance of it and told him that he was the only man on this planet who could possibly achieve it. Nothing must be allowed to stand in your way, I told him. Go on: bring us to this paradise, this unspoiled island where we'll have a fresh start. And he turned the ship and started heading south."

  "And why," Lawler said carefully, "do you think we're going to be able to make any sort of workable fresh start on this unspoiled island you and Delagard are taking us to? Just a handful of people settling in an unknown wilderness, where we don't know anything about anything?"

  "Because," said Quillan, in a calm, flat voice hard enough to have inscribed his words on metal plates, "I believe that the Face is literally a paradise. I think it's Eden. Literally."

  Lawler blinked. "You're serious? The actual Eden where Adam and Eve lived?"

  "The actual Eden, yes. Eden is anywhere that has not been touched by original sin."

  "So Delagard got that idea from you, about the Face being a paradise? I should have guessed. And I suppose you think God lives there too. Or is it just his vacation home?"

  "I don't know. But I would like to think that He is there. He always is wherever Paradise is."

  "Sure," Lawler said. "The Creator of the Universe is living right here on Hydros on a gigantic marshy island covered with a tangle of seaweed. Don't make me laugh, Father. I'm not even sure you believe in God. Half the time I don't think you're sure either."

  "Half the time I'm not sure," the priest said.

  "When you have your "dead" times."

  "Yes. The times when I find myself absolutely convinced that we evolved out of the lower animals for no purpose at all. When I think that the whole long process of rising from amoeba to man on Earth, from microorganism of any kind to sentient being of whatever sort on whichever planet, is as automatic as the movements of a planet about its sun, and just as meaningless. When I think that nothing set it in motion. That nothing keeps it going but its own innate nature."

  "This is what you believe half the time."

  "Not half. But sometimes. Most of the time not."

  "And when it's not what you believe? What then?"

  "Then I believe that there was a First Cause which set it all in motion for reasons that we may never know. And who keeps it all going, out of His great love for His creatures. For God is love, just as Jesus said, in the part of the Bible you didn't get around to reading: He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. God is connection, God is the end of aloneness, the ultimate communion. Who will one day gather all of us, however unworthy, to His bosom, where we will live everlastingly in glory, free from pain of every sort."

  "You believe this most of the time."

  "Yes. Do you think you can?"

  "No," Lawler said. "I wish I could. But I can't."

  "So you feel that everything is without purpose?"

  "Not exactly. But we'll never know w
hat that purpose is. Or whose it is. Things happen, the way the Golden Sun happened to disappear in the night, and we don't necessarily find out why. And when we die, there'll be no bosom to welcome us, no further life in glory. There won't be anything."

  "Ah," Quillan said, nodding. "My poor friend. You spend every day in the condition I reach at my moments of bleakest despair."

  "Maybe so. Somehow I endure it." Lawler narrowed his eyes and looked off toward the southwest across the glaring surface of the sea, as though he expected a dark vast island to be coming into view out there at any moment. His head was throbbing. He wanted to drown the ache in numbweed tincture.

  "What I pray for you is that you'll be able one day soon to yield up your pain at last," Quillan said.

  "I see," Lawler said darkly.

  "Do you see? Do you really?"

  "What I see is that in your hunger for paradise you didn't think twice about selling us all out to Delagard."

  "You put it very harshly," Quillan said.

  "Yes. I suppose I do. I'm sorry about that. You don't think I have any reason to be annoyed, do you?"

  "My child-"

  "I'm not your child!"

  "You are His child, at least."

  Lawler sighed. Two lunatics, he thought: Delagard, Quillan. One willing to do anything for redemption's sake, the other out to conquer the world.

  Quillan put his hand lightly on Lawler's hand and smiled.

  "God loves you," he said gently. "God will bring you His grace, never fear."

  * * *

  "Tell me what you know about the Face of the Waters," Lawler said to Sundira. "Everything."

  They were in his cabin. She said, "It isn't a lot. I know that it's some kind of gigantic island or island-like object, immensely bigger than any of the known and inhabited islands. It covers thousands of hectares, an enormous permanently anchored land mass."

  "That much I know already. But did you learn anything about it in all those conversations you used to have with the Gillies? Pardon me: the Dwellers."