"They didn't like to talk about it. Except one, a female Dweller I used to know on Simbalimak. She was willing to answer a few of my questions."
"And?"
"She said it's the forbidden place, a place where no one may go."
"Is that all? Tell me more."
"It's pretty murky stuff."
"I imagine it is. Tell me, Sundira. Please."
"She was pretty cryptic. Deliberately so, it seemed to me. But I got the impression from her that the Face is not simply taboo, or sacred, and therefore to be avoided, but that it's literally uninhabitable-physically dangerous. 'It is the fountain of creation,' she said. A dead Dweller is thought of as returning to the source. When a Dweller dies, she said, the phrase that they use is that it 'has gone to the Face.' I got the impression of something boiling with energy-something hot and fierce and very, very powerful. As though a nuclear reaction is going on there all the time."
"Christ," Lawler said tonelessly. Warm as it was in the humid little cabin, he felt a chill starting to move up his legs. His fingers were cold too, and twitchy. Turning, he took down the flask of numbweed tincture and poured a little dose for himself. He looked inquiringly at Sundira, but she shook her head. "Hot and fierce and powerful," he said. "A nuclear reaction."
"You understand that that wasn't her concept. It's mine, based on the vague and no doubt metaphorical phrases she was using. You know how hard it is to understand what the Dwellers say to us."
"Yes."
"But I found myself wondering, while she was talking about these things with me, whether some Dweller experiment might have taken place there long ago, maybe some kind of atomic power project that went astray, something along that line. It's only a guess, you understand. But I could see from the way she was talking, how uneasy she was, how she kept putting up walls when I asked too many questions, that she believes that there's something very much to be avoided on the Face. Something she doesn't even want to think about, let alone talk about."
"Shit. Shit." Lawler drank the numbweed in a single gulp and felt its steadying effect almost at once. "A nuclear wasteland. A perpetual chain reaction. That doesn't fit very well with the things that Delagard was telling me. Or Father Quillan."
"You've been talking about the Face of the Waters with them? Why? What's so interesting about the Face, suddenly?"
"It's the big topic of the moment."
"Val, will you be kind enough to tell me what's going on?"
He hesitated a moment. Then he said quietly, "We haven't been travelling in the direction of Grayvard for days. We're south of the equator and moving steadily deeper into the Empty Sea." She gave him a startled look. He went right on. "What we're heading for," he told her, "is the Face of the Waters."
"You say that as though you're actually serious."
"I am."
She pulled back from him, the sort of little reflexive jerking gesture she might have made if he had raised his hand in a menacing way.
"Is this Delagard's doing?"
"Right. He told me so himself, half an hour ago, when I braced him with some questions about the route we seemed to be following." Quickly Lawler summed it up for her: Jolly's tale of his voyage to the Face; Delagard's dream of establishing a city there and using it to gain power over the whole planet. Dwellers and all; his plan to build a spaceport, eventually, and open Hydros to interstellar commerce.
"And Father Quillan? How does he fit into this?"
"He's cheering Delagard on. He's decided, don't ask me why, that the Face is some sort of Paradise, and that God-his God, the one he's been trying to find all his life-makes his headquarters there when he's in the neighbourhood. So he's eager to have Delagard take him there so he can finally say hello."
Sundira was staring at him with the disconcerted expression of a woman who has just discovered a small snake crawling upward along the inside of her thigh.
"Are they both crazy, do you think?"
"Anybody who talks about things like 'seizing control' and 'gaining power' seems crazy to me," Lawler said. "Likewise somebody who's concerned with a concept like 'finding God.' These are nonsensical ideas to me. Anyone who embraces nonsensical ideas is crazy, by my definition of the word. And one of them happens to be in command of this fleet."
* * *
The sky was darkening when Lawler returned to the main deck, and the midday watch was scampering around in the rigging, swiftly shortening sail under Onyos Felk's direction. A brisk wind was blowing toward the north; it was already hard and strong, with the clear potential of turning into a screaming gale at any minute. A heavy storm was coming down upon them, a ragged black mass of turbulence advancing out of the south. Lawler could see it on the march far in the distance, hurling down torrents of rain, churning the bosom of the sea into wild crests of white foam. Lightning flickered across the sky, a rare sight, a terrifying forked yellow flash. It was followed almost immediately by a heavy booming roll of thunder.
"Buckets! Casks! Here comes water!" Delagard was yelling.
"Yeah, enough water to swamp us but good," Dag Tharp said under his breath, as he trotted up the deck past Lawler.
"Dag! Wait!"
The radioman turned. "What is it, doc?"
"You and I have to do some calling around the fleet when this storm is over. I've been talking to Delagard. He's taking us to the Face of the Waters, Dag."
"You've got to be joking."
"I wish I was." Lawler glanced upward at the rapidly shifting sky. It had taken on a weird metallic tone, a sinister dull greyish glow, and little hissing tongues of lightning were flickering at the edges of the great black storm-cloud that now hung just to the south of the ships. The ocean was beginning to look as fierce as it had during the three-day windstorm. "Listen, we don't have time to discuss this now. But he's got a whole raft of berserk reasons for doing what he's doing. We have to stop him."
"And how are we going to do that?" Tharp asked. A wave rose against the starboard side with whipcrack ferocity.
"We'll speak with the captains. Call a convocation of all the ships. Tell everyone what's going on, put it to a vote if necessary, depose Delagard somehow." Lawler saw the scheme clearly in his mind: a meeting of all the Sorve people, a revelation of the bizarre truth of their journey, a passionate denunciation of the ship-owner's insane ambition, a straightforward appeal to the common sense of the community. His reputation for logic and sanity staked against Delagard's grandiose vision and tempestuous headstrong nature. "We can't just let him drag us off willy-nilly into whatever lunatic place he's heading for. He has to be prevented from doing it."
"The captains are loyal to him."
"Will they stay loyal when they find out what the actual situation is?"
Another wave struck the ship, a hard back-of-the-hand blow that sent it heeling toward portside. A sudden cascade came roiling over the rail. A moment later there was a terrible lightning flash and an almost simultaneous earsplitting crack of thunder, and then the rain descended in a single drenching sheet.
"We'll talk about it," Lawler called to Tharp. "Later. When the storm blows itself out!"
The radioman went off toward the bow. Lawler clung to the rail, engulfed in water, choking as it hit him from several sides at once, the wildly leaping foaming sea and the great downward weight of the almost solid mass of rain. His mouth and nostrils were full of water, fresh water and salt water mixed. He gasped and turned his head away, feeling half drowned, and choked and wheezed and coughed until he could breathe again. A midnight blackness had descended on the ship. The sea was invisible, except when a flash of lightning revealed vast yawning black caverns rising all around them, like secret chambers opening to swallow them up. Dark figures could still be seen moving about the deck, running frenziedly to and fro as Delagard and Felk screamed orders. The sails were down, now. The Queen of Hydros, rocking and heeling wildly under the full brunt of the storm, turned its bare spars to windward. Now it rose on a towering sea, now it plunged downward i
nto a gaping hollow, striking its foaming floor with a tremendous bang. Lawler heard distant shrieks. He had an overwhelming sense of great volumes of relentless water descending from every side.
Then in the midst of the immense uproar of the storm, the terrifying percussive fury that was hammering them, the shrill cry of the wind and the rumble of the thunder and the drumming of the rain, there came a sudden sound that was more frightening than anything that had preceded it: the sound of silence, the utter absence of noise, falling as though magically like a curtain over the tumult. Everyone on the ship perceived it at the same moment, and paused and looked up, startled, bewildered, scared.
It lasted for perhaps ten seconds, that strange silence: an eternity, just then.
And after it came a sound that was even stranger-incomprehensible, even-and so overwhelmingly awesome that Lawler had to fight against the urge to drop down to his knees. It was a low roaring sound that rose swiftly in intensity from second to second, so that in a few moments it filled the air like the outcry of a throat bigger than the galaxy. Lawler was deafened by it. Someone ran by him-it was Pilya Braun, he realized afterward-and tugged furiously on his arm. She pointed windward and shouted at him. Lawler stared at her, not understanding a word; and she said it again, and this time her voice, infinitesimal against the monstrous roar that filled the heavens, reached him clearly enough.
"What are you doing on deck?" she asked. "Go below! Go below! Don't you see, it's the Wave!"
Lawler peered into the blackness and saw something long and high and glowing with a golden inner fire lying on the breast of the ocean far away: a bright line that stretched along the horizon, something higher than any wall, streaming with its own radiance. He looked at it in wonder. Two figures rushed past him, crying out warnings to him, and Lawler nodded to them: Yes, yes, I see, I understand. He was still unable to draw his eyes away from that distant onrushing thing. Why was it glowing that way? How high was it? Where had it come from? There was a kind of beauty about it: the snowy white tongues of foam along its crest, the crystalline gleam of its heart, the purity of its unbroken advancing motion. It was devouring the storm as it came, imposing a titanic order of its own on the storm's chaos. Lawler watched until there was almost no time left. Then he rushed toward the forward hatch. He paused for an instant to look back and saw the Wave looming above the ship like a god astride the sea. He dived through the opening and shut it behind him. Kinverson rose up beside him to drive home the battens. Without a word Lawler sprawled down the ladder into the heart of the ship and huddled down with his shipmates to await the moment of impact.
THREE
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; t
hat 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.