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 s
kins, 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.