The Face of the Waters

  The davits were out over the water now. Kinverson was dangling from them. Lower," he ordered. "A little more. That's it. Over to the left. Good. Good."

  He caught the struggling Martello under the arms and reeled him in as though he were a child.

  "Now you, doc," Kinverson said.

  "You can't lift us both!"

  "Come on. Here."

  Kinverson's other arm locked itself around Lawler's chest.

  The davits rose. Swung inward over the rail, onto the deck. Lawler staggered free of Kinverson's grip, stumbled and pitched forward, landed hard on both his knees. Sundira was at his side at once to help him up.

  Martello, dripping wet, lay face upward, limp and motionless.

  "Keep back," Lawler ordered. He waved Kinverson away. "You too, Gabe."

  "We got to turn him over and pump the water out of him, doc."

  "It's not the water I'm worried about. Get back, Gabe." Lawler turned to Sundira. "You know where my bag of instruments is? The scalpels, and all? Bring it up on deck, will you?"

  He knelt beside Martello and bared him to the waist. Martello was breathing, but he didn't seem to be conscious. His eyes were wide, expressionless, unseeing. Now and again his lips would draw back in a frightful writhing grimace of pain and his whole body would go rigid and jerk as though an electrical current had passed through him. Then he would go limp again.

  Lawler put his hand on Martello's belly and pressed. He felt movement within: a trembling, a strange quivering, beneath the hard, tight band of abdominal muscle.

  Something in there? Yes. This damnable ocean, invading wherever you gave it the slightest chance. But maybe it wasn't too late to save him, Lawler thought. Clean him out, seal the wound, keep the community from being diminished any further.

  Shadows moved about him. Everyone was crowding in, staring. They looked fascinated and repelled, both at once.

  Brusquely Lawler said, "Clear out, all of you. You won't want to see this. And I don't want you watching me."

  No one moved.

  "You heard the doctor," came Delagard's low growl. "Back off. Let him do his work."

  Sundira put his medical kit down on the deck beside him.

  Lawler touched Martello's abdomen again. Movement, yes. An unmistakable squirming. A quivering. Martello's face was flushed, his pupils were dilated, his eyes were staring into some other world entirely. Hot sweat ran from every pore.

  Lawler drew his best scalpel from the bag and set it down on the deck. He put both his hands on Martello's abdomen just below the diaphragm and squeezed upward. Martello made a dull sighing sound, and a trickle of sea water and some vomit dribbled from his lips, but nothing else. Lawler tried again. Nothing. He felt motion again under his fingers: more spasms, more squirmings.

  One more try. He turned Martello over and rammed his joined hands downwards against the middle of Martello's back with all the strength he could find. Martello grunted. He spewed up some more thin puke. But that was all.

  Lawler sat back for a moment, trying to think.

  He turned Martello over again and picked up his scalpel.

  "You won't want to see this," Lawler said to anyone who might be watching, without looking up, and drew a red line with the sharp iron point from left to right across Martello's abdomen. Martello barely seemed to notice. He made a soft blurry sound, the vaguest of comments. Other distractions were taking priority for him.

  Skin. Muscle. The knife seemed to know where it had to go. Deftly Lawler stripped back the layers of tissue. He was cutting now through the peritoneum. He had trained himself to enter an altered state of consciousness whenever he performed surgery, in which he thought of himself as a sculptor, not as a surgeon, and of the patient as something inanimate, a wooden log, not a suffering human being. That was the only way he could bear the process at all.

  Deeper. He had breached the restraining abdominal wall, now. Blood mingled with the puddle of seawater around Martello on the deck.

  The intestinal coils should come spilling out into view-

  Yes. Yes. There they were.

  Someone screamed. Someone uttered a grunt of disgust.

  But not at the sight of the intestines. Something else was rising from Martello's belly, something slender and bright, slowly unreeling itself and standing up on end. Perhaps six centimetres of it was visible: eyeless, seemingly even headless, just a smooth, slippery pink strip of undifferentiated living matter. There was an opening at its top end, a mouth of sorts, through which a sharp little rasping red tongue could be seen. The supple shining creature moved with supernal grace, gliding from side to side in a hypnotic way. Behind Lawler the screaming went on and on.

  He struck the thing with a quick, steady backhand flick of his scalpel that cut it neatly in half. The upper end landed on the deck next to Martello, writhing. It began heading toward Lawler. Kinverson's great boot descended at once and crushed it to slime.

  "Thanks," Lawler said quietly.

  But the other half was still inside. Lawler tried to coax it out with the scalpel's tip. It seemed untroubled by its bisecting; its dance continued, as graceful as before. Probing behind the heavy mound of intestines, Lawler struggled to dislodge it. He poked here, tugged there. He thought he saw the inner end of it and sliced at it, but there was more: another few centimetres still mocked him. He cut again. This time he had it all. He flipped it aside. Kinverson crushed it.

  Everyone was silent now behind him.

  He started to close the incision. But a new squirming motion made him stop.

  Another one? Yes. Yes, one more, at least. Probably others. Martello groaned. He stirred slightly. Then he jerked with sudden force, rising a little way from the deck: Lawler got the scalpel out of the way just in time to keep from wounding him. A second eel rose into view and a third, weaving in that same eerie dance; then one of them pulled itself back in and disappeared once again into Martello's abdominal cavity, burrowing upward in the general direction of his lungs.

  Lawler teased the other one out, cut it in half and in halves again, yanked the last bit of it free. He waited for the one that had gone back in to make itself visible again. After a moment he caught a glimpse of it, bright and gleaming within Martello's bloody midsection. But it wasn't the only one. He could see the slender coils of others, now, busily wriggling about, having themselves a feast. How many more were in there? Two? Three? Thirty?

  He looked up, grim-faced. Delagard stared back at him. There was a look of shock and dismay and sheer revulsion in Delagard's eyes.

  "Can you get them all out?"

  "Not a chance. He's full of them. They're eating their way through him. I can cut and cut, and by the time I've found them all I'll have cut him to pieces, and I still won't have found them all, anyway."

  "Jesus," Delagard murmured. "How long can he live this way?"

  "Until one of them reaches his heart, I suppose. That won't be long."

  "Can he feel anything, do you think?"

  "I hope not," Lawler said.

  The agony went on another five minutes. Lawler had never realized that five minutes could last so long. From time to time Martello would jump and twitch as some major nerve was struck; once he seemed to be trying to rise from the deck. Then he uttered a little sighing sound and fell back, and the light went out of his eyes.

  "All over," Lawler announced. He felt numb, hollow, weary, beyond all grief, beyond all shock.

  Probably, he thought, there had never been any chance to save Martello. At least a dozen of the eels must have entered him, very likely more, a horde of them gliding swiftly in through mouth or anus and burrowing diligently through flesh and muscle toward the centre of his abdomen. Lawler had extracted nine of the things; but others were still lurking in there, at work on Martello's pancreas, his spleen, his liver, his kidneys. And when they were done with those, the delicacies, there was all the rest of him awaiting their little rasping red tongues. No surgery, no matter how speedily done or unerring, could have cl
eaned all of them out of him in time.

  Neyana brought a blanket and they wrapped it about him. Kinverson gathered the body in his arms and moved toward the side with it.

  "Wait," Pilya said. "Put this with him."

  She held a sheaf of papers that she must have brought up from Martello's cabin. The famous poem. She tucked the worn and folded pages of the manuscript into the blanket and pulled its ends tight around the body. Lawler thought for a moment of objecting, but he checked himself. Let it go. It belonged with him.

  Quillan said, "Now we commend our dearly beloved Leo to the sea, in the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost-"

  The Holy Ghost again? Every time Lawler heard that odd phrase of Quillan's he was startled by it. It was such a strange concept: try as he might, he couldn't imagine what a holy ghost might be. He shook the thought away. He was too tired for such speculations now.

  Kinverson carried the body to the rail and held it aloft. Then he gave it a little push and it went outward, downward, into the water.

  Instantly creatures of some strange kind appeared as if by a conjuring spell from the depths, long slim finny swimmers covered in thick black silken fur. There were five of them, sinuous, gentle-eyed, with dark tapering snouts covered with twitching black bristles. Gently, tenderly, they surrounded Martello's drifting body and buoyed it up and began to unwrap the blanket that covered it. Tenderly, gently, they pulled it free. And then-gently, tenderly-they clustered around his stiffening form and set about the task of consuming him.

  It was quietly done, no slovenly gluttonous frenzy. It was horrifying and yet eerily beautiful. Their motions stirred the sea to extraordinary phosphorescence. Martello seemed to be absorbed by a shower of cool crimson flame. Slowly he exploded in light. They made an anatomy lesson of him, peeling back the skin with utmost fastidiousness to reveal tendons, ligaments, muscles, nerves. Then they went deeper. It was a profoundly disturbing thing to watch, even for Lawler, to whom the inner secrets of the human body were no secret at all; but nevertheless the work was carried out so cleanly, so unhurriedly, so reverently, that it was impossible not to watch, or to fail to see the beauty in what they were doing. Layer by layer they put Martello's core on display, until at last only the white cage of bone remained. Then they looked up at the watchers at the rail as though for approval. There was the unmistakable glint of intelligence in their eyes. Lawler saw them nod in what could only have been a salute; and then they slipped out of sight as silently as they had come. Martello's clean skeleton had already disappeared, on its way to some unknown depth where, no doubt, other organisms were waiting to put its calcium to good use. Of the vital young man who had been Leo Martello nothing was left now except some pages of manuscript drifting on the surface of the water. And after a little while not even those could be seen.

  * * *

  Later, alone in his cabin, Lawler studied what was left of his numbweed supply. About two days' worth, he figured. He poured half of it into a flask and drank it down.

  What the hell, he thought.

  He drank the other half too. What the hell.

  6

  The withdrawal symptoms began the morning after next, just before noon: the sweats, the shakes, the nausea. Lawler was ready for them, or thought he was. But they quickly grew more severe, far worse than he had expected, a test so tough he was unsure that he would pass it. The intensity of the pain, sweeping in on him in great billowing waves, frightened him. He imagined that he could feel his brain expanding, pressing against the walls of his skull.

  Automatically he looked for his flask, but of course the flask was empty. He crouched on his bunk, shivering, feverish, miserable.

  Sundira came to him in mid-afternoon.

  "Is it what happened the other day?" she asked.

  "Martello? No, that isn't it."

  "Are you sick, then?"

  He indicated the empty flask.

  After a moment she understood. "Is there anything I can do, Val?"

  "Hold me, that's all."

  She cradled his head in her arms, against her breast. Lawler shook violently for a while. Then he grew calmer, though he still felt terrible.

  "You seem better," she said.

  "A little. Don't go away."

  "I'm still here. Do you want some water?"

  "Yes. No. No, just stay where you are." He nestled against her. He could feel the fever rising, falling, rising again, with sudden devastating velocity. The drug was more powerful than even he had suspected and his dependency evidently had been a very strong one. And yet-yet-the pain fluctuated; as the hours passed there were moments when he felt almost normal. That was odd. But it gave him hope. He didn't mind fighting if he had to, but he wanted to win in the end.

  * * *

  Sundira stayed with him all through the afternoon. He slept, and when he woke she was still there. His tongue felt swollen. He was too weak to stand.

  "Did you know it would be like this?" she asked.

  "Yes. I suppose I did. Maybe not quite this bad."

  "How do you feel now?"

  "It varies," Lawler said.

  He heard a voice outside the door. "How is he?" Delagard.

  "He's worried about you," Sundira said to Lawler.

  "Very thoughtful of him."

  "I told him you were sick."

  "Not going into details?"

  "No details, no."

  * * *

  The night was a terrifying one. Lawler thought for a time that he would go out of his mind. But then in the small hours came another of those unexpected, inexplicable periods of recovery, as though something were reaching into his brain from afar and turning down the craving for the drug. By dawn he felt his appetite return; and when he stood up-it was the first time he had risen from his bunk since the fever had started-he was able to keep his balance. "You look okay," Sundira told him. "Are you?"

  "More or less. The bad stuff will come back. This is going to be a long struggle."

  But when it did come back it was less severe than it had been. Lawler was at a loss to explain the change. He had expected three, four, even five days of utter horror and then perhaps a gradual sloping off of the torment as his system gradually purged itself of the need. This was only the second day, though.

  Again that sense of intervention from without, something guiding him, lifting him, pulling him free of the morass.

  Then the tremors and sweats again. And then another spell of recovery, lasting nearly half a day. He went up on deck, enjoyed the fresh air, walked slowly around. Lawler told Sundira that he felt he was getting off too easy.

  "Count your blessings," she said.

  * * *

  By nightfall he was sick again. On, off: up, down. But the basic trend was favourable. He seemed to be recovering. By the end of the week there were only occasional moments of discomfort. He looked at the empty flask and grinned.

  The air was clear, the wind was strong. The Queen of Hydros sped onward at a steady swift rate, following its southwesterly track around the watery globe.

  The sea's phosphorescence increased in intensity day by day, even hour by hour. The whole world began to look luminous. Water and sky glowed day and night. Nightmarish creatures of half a dozen unfamiliar kinds burst from the water to soar briefly overhead and disappear with great splashes in the distance. Huge mouths yawned in the depths.

  Silence reigned much of the time aboard the Queen. Everyone moved quietly and efficiently through his chores. There was much to do, for now only eleven remained to do the work that fourteen had performed at the beginning of the voyage. Martello, lighthearted, cheery, optimistic, had done much to set the tone for the rest: his death inevitably altered things.

  But also the Face was growing nearer. That must have something to do with the newly sombre mood, Lawler thought. It was impossible yet to see it on the horizon, but everyone knew it was there, not far away. Everyone felt it. It was a real presence on board. Its effects were indefinable but unmistakable. Somethin
g was there, Lawler found himself thinking, something more than a mere island. Something alert and aware. Waiting for them.

  He shook his head, trying to clear it. These were nonsensical fantasies, feverish nightmare horrors, insubstantial, foolish. The drug withdrawal must still be operating on him, he told himself. He was wobbly, weary, vulnerable.

  The Face continued to occupy his mind. He struggled to remember the things Jolly had told him about it long ago, but everything was vague and muddled under thirty years' layers of memories. A wild and fantastic place, Jolly had said. Full of plants unlike the ones that grew in the sea. Plants, yes. Strange colours, bright lights shining day and night, a weird realm at the far edge of the world, beautiful and eerie. Had Jolly said anything about animals, land-dwelling creatures of any sort? No, nothing that Lawler could recall. No animal life, just thick jungles.

  But there was something about a city, too…

  Not on the Face. Near it.

  Where? In the ocean? The image eluded him. He struggled to recapture the times he had spent with Jolly, down by the water, the leathery-faced sun-darkened old man rocking back and forth, casting his fishing lines, talking, talking…

  A city. A city in the sea. Under the sea.

  Lawler caught the tip of the recollection, felt it slip away, lunged for it, could not get it, lunged again…

  A city under the sea. Yes. A doorway in the ocean opening into a passageway, a gravity funnel of some sort, leading downward to a tremendous underwater city where the Gillies lived, a hidden city of Gillies as superior to the island-dwelling ones as kings are to peasants-Gillies living like gods, never coming up to the surface, sealed away under the sea in pressurized vaults, living in solemn majesty and absolute luxury…

  Lawler smiled. That was it, yes. A grand fable, a glorious fantasy. The finest, most flamboyant of all Jolly's tales. He could remember trying to imagine what that city had been like, envisioning tall, stately, infinitely majestic Gillies moving through lofty archways into shining palatial halls. Thinking about it now, he felt like a boy again, crouching in wonder at the old seaman's feet, straining to hear the hoarse, rasping voice.