The Face of the Waters

  After the ovoids came a species of flying fish, neither the elegant iridescent air-skimmers of Home Sea nor the hideous hagfish of the open ocean. These were delicate-looking glossy creatures about fifteen centimetres long with filmy graceful wings that lifted them to astonishing heights. They could be seen far off, bursting almost vertically from the water and travelling for extraordinary distances before swooping back down and re-entering the ocean virtually without a splash. Moments later they were aloft again, up and down, up and down, coming closer to the ship with each cycle of flight and descent, until finally they were just off the starboard bow.

  These fliers didn't seem any more dangerous than yesterday's huge floating emerald ovoids. They flew so high that there was no risk of colliding with them on deck, and so there was no need to duck and hide as would have been necessary if an overflight of hagfish had come by. They were so beautiful, gleaming brilliantly against the bright hard dome of the sky, that nearly the entire ship's complement turned out to watch their passage.

  Their bodies were practically transparent. It was easy to make out their fine wiry bones, their round pulsing red-violet stomachs, their threadlike blue veins, as they went shooting by overhead. Their blood-red eyes were finely faceted, glinting as they caught the light.

  Beautiful, yes. But as they coursed through the air above the ship a strange rain fell from them, a faint shimmering shower of dark glittering drops that bit deep and burned wherever they touched.

  In the first few moments no one realized what was happening. The initial nipping bites of the fliers' secretions were barely perceptible annoyances. But the pain was cumulative: the acid worked its way in, and what had been an odd little mild itch turned quickly to agony.

  Lawler, standing in the shadow of the foresails, was shielded against the worst of the bombardment. Some scattering outspray caught him along his forearm, not enough to provoke more than a frown. But then he saw dark mottled scars beginning to appear on the polished yellow wood of the deck just a short distance away, and he looked up to see his shipmates howling and prancing wildly around, slapping at their arms, rubbing at their cheeks.

  "Get down!" he called. "Take cover! It's coming from those flying fish!"

  The airborne attackers had passed over the ship now and gone on beyond. But already a second wave of the creatures was rising from the sea off to starboard.

  The entire onslaught lasted close to an hour, half a dozen waves in all. Afterward, the victims lined up one by one in Lawler's infirmary to have their burns treated.

  * * *

  Sundira, who had been in the rigging when the fliers came, was the last one to come. She had been wearing nothing but a twist of cloth about her waist, and blisters were rising all over her body now. In silence Lawler dabbed her with ointment. She stood naked before him and his hands moved over her skin, rubbing the ointment in around her nipples, along her thighs, up her crotch to a point a finger-breadth's length from her loins.

  They hadn't made love since before the night of the limpet. But Lawler found no desire stirring in him now as he touched her, even in the most intimate places.

  Sundira noticed it too. Lawler could feel her muscles tensing beneath his probing fingers. She was drawing herself up tightly, angrily.

  She said finally, "You're handling me like so much meat, Val."

  "I'm a medical man trying to care for a patient who's got a bunch of nasty blisters all over her skin."

  "That's all I am to you now?"

  "Right at this moment, yes. You think it's a good idea for a doctor to start breathing hard every time he touches an attractive patient's body?"

  "I'm not just any patient, am I?"

  "Of course you aren't."

  "But you've been keeping away from me for days. And now you treat me like a stranger. What's the problem?"

  "Problem?" He gave her a troubled look. Tapping her lightly on the hip, he said, "Turn around. I missed the ones in the small of your back. Where's there a problem, Sundira?"

  "Am I right that you don't want me any more?"

  He dipped his fingers into the ointment flask and rubbed the stuff on her just above her bare buttocks.

  "I didn't know we had a specific schedule. Do we?"

  "Of course not. But look how you're touching me now."

  "I just got through telling you," Lawler said. "Let me try again. I thought you were here for medical care, not for lovemaking. Doctors learn early that it's never a good idea to mix the two. But also it might have occurred to me, not as a matter of ethics but just one of common sense, that you wouldn't want me to come on to you at a time when you happen to have painful blisters all over your skin. Okay?" This was the closest thing to a quarrel they had ever had. "Does that sound reasonable, Sundira?"

  She swung around to face him. "It's because of what I did with Delagard, isn't it?"

  "What?"

  "You hate the idea that he had his hands on me, and more than his hands, and now you don't want anything to do with me again."

  "Are you serious?"

  "Yes. And I'm right, too. If you could see the expression on your face just now-"

  Lawler said, "We were all out of our minds while that thing was stuck to the hull. Nobody's responsible for anything that happened that night. You think I wanted to fuck Neyana? If you want the truth, Sundira, it was you I was looking for you when I first came up on deck. Not that I could even remember your name, or my own, in the condition I was in. But I saw you and I wanted you and I headed toward you, only Leo Martello got to you first. And then Neyana caught hold of me and so I went with her. I was under the influence, same as you, same as everybody. Everybody except Father Quillan and Gharkid, that is. Our two holy men." Lawler's cheeks were hot. He felt his heartbeat climbing. "Jesus, Sundira, I've known about you and Kinverson all along, and that hasn't stopped me, has it? And on the limpet night there was you and Martello first, before Delagard. Why would what you did with Delagard matter to me any more than what you've done with all the others?"

  "Delagard's different. You hate him. He disgusts you."

  "Does he?"

  "He's a murderer and a bully. He got us all thrown off Sorve Island. Ever since then he's been running this expedition like a tyrant. He beats Lis. He killed Henders. He lies, he cheats, he does whatever he feels like doing in order to get his way. Everything about him is loathsome to you, and you can't stand the idea that he's fucked me too, now, whether or not I was in my right mind when I let him do it. So you're taking it out on me. You don't want to put your mouth where Delagard's mouth has been, let alone your cock. Isn't that so, Val?"

  "You're doing an awful lot of mind-reading, suddenly. I never knew you were telepathic, Sundira."

  "Don't be a smart-ass. Is it so or isn't it?"

  "Look, Sundira-"

  "It is, isn't it?" Her tone, which had been hard and cold, softened suddenly, and she looked at him with a tenderness and longing that surprised him. "Val, Val, don't you think it disgusts me too, to know that I had that man inside me? Don't you think I've been trying to wash myself clean of him ever since? But that shouldn't be your problem. I don't have spots on my skin where he touched me. You have no right to turn against me like this, simply because some alien thing clamped itself to the side of our ship one night and made us commit acts that we never would have dreamed of doing otherwise." Then there was bright anger in her eyes again. "If it isn't Delagard, what is it? Tell me."

  In a voice thickened by shame Lawler said, "All right. I admit it. It is Delagard."

  "Oh, shit, Val."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Are you?"

  "I don't think I even realized what was bothering me myself, not until you flung it in my face like this. But yes, yes, I suppose that on some level it's been eating away at me since that night. Delagard's hand crawling around between your legs. Delagard's blubbery mouth on your breasts." Lawler closed his eyes a moment. "It wasn't your fault. I'm acting like a stupid adolescent kid."

  "You're
right on all counts. You're being very silly. And I want to remind you that under normal circumstances I wouldn't have let Delagard screw me in a million years. Not if he was the last man in the galaxy."

  Lawler smiled. "The devil made you do it."

  "The limpet."

  "Same thing."

  "If you say so. But it never happened, not really. Not by any conscious act of mine. And I'm trying as hard as I know how to unhappen it. You try too. I love you, Val."

  He looked at her in astonishment. That was a phrase that had never arisen between them. He had never imagined that it would. It was so long since he had last heard it that he couldn't remember who it was who had said it to him.

  What now? Was he expected to say it too?

  She was grinning. She wasn't expecting him to say anything. She knew him too well for that.

  "Come here, doctor," she said. "I need some more intense examination."

  Lawler glanced around to see if the infirmary door was locked. Then he went to her.

  "Watch out for my blisters," she said.

  5

  Things like giant periscopes rose from the sea, glistening stalks twenty metres high topped with five-sided blue polygons. From distances of half a kilometre or so they regarded the ship with a cool, unwavering gaze for hours. They were eye-stalks, obviously. But the eyes of what?

  The periscopes slipped down into the water and didn't reappear. Next came great yawning mouths, vast creatures similar to those of Home Sea, but even larger: large enough, it would seem, for them to swallow the Queen of Hydros at a single gulp. They too stayed at a distance, lighting up the sea day and night with their greenish phosphorescence. Mouths had never been known to create difficulties for ships on Hydros, but these were the mouths of the Empty Sea, capable of anything. The dark chasms of their open gullets were a threatening, troublesome sight.

  The water itself grew phosphorescent. The effect was mild at first, just a little tingle of colour, a faint charming glow. But then it intensified. At night the ship's wake was a line of fire across the sea. Even by day the waves looked fiery. The spray that occasionally broke across the rail had a bright sparkle.

  There was a rain of stinging jellyfish. There was a display of madly frolicking divers, breaking the surface and leaping so high they seemed to be trying to take wing and fly. In one place something that looked like a collection of wooden poles tied together by a bundle of shabby cords came walking across the surface of the sea, with a tiny many-eyed globular creature in an open capsule at the centre of it, as though travelling on stilts.

  * * *

  Then one morning Delagard, peering over the edge of the rail-he was constantly on patrol now, wary of attack from any quarter-reared back abruptly and cried out, "What the fuck? Kinverson, Gharkid, will you come here and look at this?"

  Lawler joined the group. Delagard was pointing straight down. At first Lawler saw nothing unusual; but then he noticed that the ship had sprouted a skirt of some sort about twenty centimetres below the surface, an outgrowth of yellowish fibrous stuff that extended outward all along the hull for a distance of a metre or so. No, not a skirt, Lawler decided: more like a ledge, a woody shelf.

  Delagard turned to Kinverson. "You ever see anything like that before?"

  "Not me."

  "You, Gharkid?"

  "No, captain-sir, never."

  "Some sort of seaweed growing on us? A cross between a seaweed and a barnacle? What do you think, Gharkid?"

  Gharkid shrugged. "It is a mystery to me, captain-sir."

  Delagard had a rope-ladder flung over the rail and went over the side to inspect. Hanging from the ladder by one arm, dangling just above the surface of the water and leaning far out and down, he used a long-handled barnacle-scraper to prod at the strange excrescence. He came back up red-faced and cursing.

  The problem, he said, was with the network of sea-finger weed that grew on the hull as a constantly self-repairing coating, protecting and reinforcing the ship's outer timbers. "Some local plant has hooked up with it. A related species, maybe. Or a symbiote. Whatever it is, it's clustering around the sea-finger, attaching itself as fast as it can, and it's growing like crazy. The shelf that's jutting out of us now is big enough already to be causing a perceptible drag. But if it keeps going at the rate it's expanding, in a couple of days we're going to find ourselves sealed in for good."

  "What are we going to do about it?" Kinverson asked.

  "You have any suggestions?"

  "That somebody go out there in the water-strider and cut the damned stuff off while it can still be done."

  Delagard nodded. "Good idea. I'll volunteer to take the first shift. Will you go with me?"

  "Sure." Kinverson said. "Why not?"

  Delagard and Kinverson climbed into the water-strider. Martello, operating the davits, lifted it and swung it far out past the rail, well beyond the new ledge, before lowering it to the surface of the water.

  The trick was to pedal fast enough to keep the strider afloat, but not so fast that the man operating the barnacle-scraper would be unable to cut away the intrusive growths. That was hard to manage at first. Kinverson, holding the scraper, made the most of his long reach to lean over and chop at the ledge; but he took only a couple of strokes and then the strider went shooting past the place where he was working, and when they backed up and tried to hold it in one position for a longer time it began to lose lift and slip down into the water.

  After a time they got the hang of it. Delagard pedalled, Kinverson chopped. When Kinverson became visibly weary they changed places, precariously creeping around the rocking vehicle until Delagard was in front and Kinverson was at the pedals.

  "All right, next shift," Delagard called finally. He had been working with his usual manic zeal and he looked worn out. "Two more volunteers! Leo, did I hear you say you'd take the next turn? And was that you, Lawler?"

  Pilya Braun worked the davits to lower Martello and Lawler over the side. The sea was fairly calm, but even so the flimsy strider bobbed and rocked constantly. Lawler imagined himself being flung out into the water by some unusually strong swell. When he looked down he could see individual fibres of the invading seaplant tossing on the swells just beyond the border of the shelf that had already formed. As the movements of the sea brought them against the side of the ship he was sure that he saw some of them affixing themselves to it.

  He also could see small shining ribbony shapes coiling and writhing in the water. Worms, serpents, maybe eels. They looked quick and agile. Hoping for a snack, were they?

  The ledge resisted chopping. Lawler had to grip the barnacle-scraper with both hands and ram it downward with all his strength. Often it slipped harmlessly aside, deflected by the toughness of the strange new growth. He nearly lost it altogether a couple of times.

  "Hey!" Delagard yelled from above. "We don't have any of those things to spare!"

  Lawler found a way of striking edge-on at a slight angle that allowed the scraper to get between individual strands of the fibrous mass. Chunk after huge chunk of the stuff now came loose and went drifting away. He fell into the rhythm of it, slicing and slicing. Sweat rolled down his skin. His arms and wrists began to protest. Pain spread upward toward his armpits, his chest, his shoulders. His heart pounded.

  "Enough," he said to Martello. "Your turn, Leo."

  Martello seemed tireless. He hacked away with a joyous vigour that Lawler found humiliating. He had thought he had done pretty well during his stint; but in Martello's first five minutes with the scraper he chopped away as much as Lawler had managed in his whole time. Lawler supposed that Martello even now was composing the Chopping Canto of his great epic in his head while he worked:

  Fiercely then we strained and strived

  Against the ever-growing foe.

  Valiantly did we smite its evil spread,

  Grimly did we strike and hack and cut-

  Onyos Felk and Lis Niklaus went down next. After them it was the turn of Neyana and Sundira
, and after them, Pilya and Gharkid.

  "Fucking stuff grows as fast as we can cut," said Delagard sourly.

  But they were making progress. Great chunks of the outgrowth were gone. In some places it had been cut back right to the original line of sea-finger weed.

  The turn of Delagard and Kinverson came around once more. They chopped and slashed with diabolical fury. When they returned to the ship both men looked incandescent with exhaustion; they had passed beyond mere weariness into some transcendental state that left them glowing and exalted.

  "Let's go, doc," Martello said. "It's us again."

  Martello seemed determined to outdo even Kinverson. While Lawler kept the water-strider stabilized with a steady, numbing effort, Martello went after the vegetable enemy like some avenging god. Whack! Whack! Whack! He lifted the scraper high over his head, rammed it downward with a two-handed thrust, drove it deep. Whack! Whack! Huge sections of weed broke loose and floated away. Whack! Each stroke was mightier than the last. The water-strider tipped wildly from side to side. Lawler struggled to keep it upright. Whack! Whack!

  Then Martello rose higher than ever before and brought the barnacle-scraper downward in a stroke of terrible force. It carved away an immense slab, clear back to the hull of the Queen. It must have come away more easily than Martello was expecting: Martello lost first his balance and then his grip on the scraper's handle. He clawed at it, missed, and toppled forward, plunging with a heavy splash into the sea.

  Lawler, still pedalling, leaned over and stretched out his hand. Martello was a couple of metres from the strider by now and flailing around desperately. But either he didn't see the reaching hand or he was too far gone in panic to understand what to do.

  "Swim toward me!" Lawler called. "Over here, Leo! Here!"

  Martello continued to thrash and flounder. His eyes were glazed with shock. Then he stiffened suddenly as if wounded by a dagger from below. He began to jerk convulsively.