The Face of the Waters

  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 demoniaca
l 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.

  Down from the sky came a deluge of darkness

  Drenching us deep, soaking our bones.

  Then as we struggled and fought to keep upright

  Came a new enemy greater than the last.

  The Wave it was! Striking deep fear in us.

  Choking our throats and chilling our hearts.

  The Wave! Dread foe, mightiest of adversaries

  Rising like a death-wall on the breast of the sea.

  Then did we tremble, then did we falter,

  Then did we sink to our knees in despair-

  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.