The Face of the Waters

  "Gabe?" Lawler said quietly. He knelt and waggled his fingers back and forth in front of Kinverson's face. No response. "Gabe, what's going on? Are you hypnotized?"

  "He's resting," came the voice of Onyos Felk suddenly, from behind. "Don't bother him. It was a busy night. We were hauling sail for hours and hours. But look now: there's the land, dead ahead. We're moving very nicely toward it."

  Land? When did anyone ever speak of land, on Hydros?

  "What are you talking about?" Lawler asked.

  "There. Do you see it?"

  Felk gestured vaguely toward the bow. Lawler looked forward and saw nothing, just the vastness of the luminous sea, and a clear horizon marked only by a few low stars and a sprawling, heavy cloud at middle height. The dark backdrop of the sky seemed weirdly ablaze, a frightful aurora fiercely blazing. There was colour everywhere, bizarre colour, a fantastic show of strange light. But no land.

  "In the night," said Felk, "the wind shifted, and turned us toward it. What an incredible sight it is! Those mountains! Those tremendous valleys! Would you ever have believed it, doc? The Face of the Waters!" Felk seemed about to burst into tears. "All my life, staring at my sea-charts, seeing that dark mark on the far hemisphere, and now we're looking it right in the eye-the Face, doc, the Face itself!"

  Lawler pulled his arms close against his sides. In the tropic warmth of the night he felt a sudden chill.

  He still saw nothing at all, only the endless roll of the empty water.

  "Listen, Onyos, if Delagard comes on deck early and finds your whole watch sleeping, you know what's going to happen. For God's sake, if you won't wake them up, I will!"

  "Let them sleep. By morning we'll be at the Face."

  "What Face? Where?

  "There, man! There!"

  Lawler still didn't see. He strode forward. When he reached the bow he found Gharkid, the one missing member of the watch, sitting crosslegged, perched on top of the forecastle with his head thrown back and his eyes wide and staring like two orbs of glass. Like Kinverson he was in some other state of awareness entirely.

  Bewilderedly Lawler peered into the night. The dazzling maze of colours danced before him, but he still saw only clear water and empty sky ahead. Then something changed. It was as though his vision had been clouded, and now at last it had cleared. It seemed to him that a section of the sky had detached itself and come down to the water's surface and was moving about in an intricate way, folding and refolding upon itself until it looked like a sheaf of crumpled paper, and then like a bundle of sticks, and then like a mass of angry serpents, and then like pistons driven by some invisible engine. A writhing interwoven network of some incomprehensible substance had sprung up along the horizon. It made his eyes ache to watch it.

  Felk came up alongside him.

  "Now do you see? Now?"

  Lawler realized that he had been holding his breath a long while. He let it out slowly.

  Something that felt like a breeze, but was something else, was blowing toward his face. He knew it couldn't be a breeze, for he could feel the wind also, blowing from the stern, and when he glanced up at the sails he saw them bellying outward behind him. Not a breeze, no. An emanation. A force. A radiation. Aimed at him. He felt it crackling lightly through the air, felt it striking his cheeks like fine wind-blown hail in a winter storm. He stood without moving, assailed by awe and fear.

  "Do you see?" Felk said again.

  "Yes. Yes, now I do." He turned to face the mapkeeper. By the strange light that was bursting upon them from the west Felk's face seemed painted, goblinish. "You'd better wake up your watch, anyway. I'm going to go down below and get Delagard. For better or for worse, he's brought us this far. He doesn't deserve to miss the moment of our arrival."

  7

  In the waning darkness Lawler imagined that the sea that lay before them was retreating swiftly, pulling back as though it were being peeled away, leaving a bare, bewildering sandy waste between the ship and the Face. But when he looked again he saw the shining waters as they had always been.

  Then a little while later dawn arrived, bringing with it strange new sounds and sights: breakers visible, the crisp slap of wavelets against the bow, a line of tossing luminous foam in the distance. By the first grey light Lawler found it impossible to make out more than that. There was land ahead, not very far, but he was unable to see it. All was uncertain here. The air seemed thick with mist that would not burn off even as the sun moved higher. Then abruptly he became aware of the great dark barrier that lay across the horizon, a low hump that might almost have been the coastline of a Gillie island, except that there weren't any Gillie islands the size of this one on Hydros. It stretched before them from one end of the world to the other, walling off the sea, which thundered and crashed against it in the distance but could not impose its strength on it in any way.

  Delagard appeared. He stood trembling on the bridge, face thrust forward, hands gripping the rail in eerie fervour.

  "There it is!" he cried. "Did you believe me or didn't you? There's the Face at last! Look at it! Look at it!"

  It was impossible not to feel awe. Even the dullest and simplest of the voyagers-Neyana, say, or Pilya, or Gharkid-seemed moved by its encroaching presence, by the strangeness of the landscape ahead, by the power of the inexplicable psychic emanations that came in pulsing waves from the Face. All eleven of the voyagers stood arrayed side by side on deck, nobody bothering to sail or to steer, staring in stunned silence as the ship drifted toward the island as if caught in some powerful magnetic grip.

  Only Kinverson appeared, if not untouched, then at least unshaken. He had awakened from his trance. Now he too was staring fixedly at the approaching shore. His craggy face seemed riven by strong emotion of some sort. But when Dag Tharp turned to him and asked him if he was afraid at all, Kinverson replied with a blank look, as if the question had no meaning for him, and a flat incurious glare, as though he felt no need to have it explained.

  "Afraid?" he said. "No. Should I be?"

  The constant motion of everything on the island struck Lawler as its most bewildering aspect. Nothing was at rest. Whatever vegetation lay along its shore, if vegetation was indeed what it was, appeared to be in a process of intense, dynamic, churning growth. There was no stillness anywhere. There were no recognizable patterns of topography. Everything was moving, everything was writhing, flailing, weaving itself into the tangled web of shimmering substance and unweaving itself again, whipping about in a ceaseless lunatic dance of exhausting energy that might well have been going on this way since the beginning of time.

  Sundira came up alongside Lawler and laid her hand gently on his bare shoulder. They stood facing outward, scarcely daring even to breath.

  "The colours," she said softly. "The electricity."

  It was a fantastic display. Light was constantly born from every millimetre of surface. Now it was a pure white, now a brilliant red, now the deepest of violets, verging on impenetrable black. And then came colours Lawler could barely name. They were gone before he could comprehend them, and others just as potent came in their place.

  It was light that had the quality of vast noise: it was an explosion, a terrible din, a flashing, pounding dazzle. The overwhelming energy of it had a perverse, demented vigour: such fury could hardly be sane. Phantasmal eruptions of cold flame danced and gleamed and vanished and were replaced. One could not dwell on the same part of it very long; the force of those violent bursts of colour forced the eye away. Even when you didn't look, Lawler thought, it pounded insistently at your brain all the same. The place was like an immense radio device that sent forth an inexorable broadcast on the biosensory wavelengths. He could feel its emanation probing him, touching his mind, slithering around inside his skull like invisible fingers caressing his soul.

  He stood motionless, shivering, his arm around Sundira's waist, all his muscles clenched from scalp to toes.

  Then, cutting through the crazed blazing brilliance, there came somethi
ng just as violent, just as demented, but much more familiar: the voice of Nid Delagard, transformed now into something raw and harsh and weirdly rigid, but recognizable even so. "All right, back to your posts, all of you! We've got work to do!"

  Delagard was panting in strange excitement. His face had a dark, stormy look, as though some private tempest was roiling his soul. In an odd frantic way he moved along the deck among them, roughly seizing them one by one, swinging them around bodily to get their eyes off the Face.

  "Turn away! Turn away! That cockeyed light'll hypnotize you if you give it the chance!"

  Lawler felt Delagard's fingers digging into the flesh of his upper arms. He yielded to the tugging and let Delagard pull him away from the astonishing sight across the water.

  "You've got to force yourself not to look," Delagard said. "Onyos, take the wheel! Neyana, Pilya, Lawler, let's get those sails to the wind! We need to find ourselves a harbour."

  Sailing with slitted eyes, working hard to avert their gaze from the incomprehensible display that was erupting before them, they cruised along its turbulent shore seeking some cove or bay where they might find shelter. At first it seemed that there was none. The Face was one long headland, impenetrable, unwelcoming.

  Then the ship swept unexpectedly through the line of breakers and found itself in calm waters, a placid bay encircled by two jutting limbs of the island rimmed by steep hills. But the placidity was deceptive and short-lived. Within moments of their arrival the bay began to heave and swell. In the churning water thick black strands of what might have been kelp rose into view, flailing the surface like the dark limbs of monsters, and spiky spear-like protrusions appeared menacingly between them, emitting clouds of sinister radiant yellow smoke. Convulsions of the land seemed to be taking place along the shore.

  Lawler, exhausted, began to imagine images, mysterious, abstract, tantalizing. Unfamiliar shapes danced in his mind. He felt a maddening unreachable itch behind his forehead and pressed his hands to his temples, but it did no good.

  Delagard paced the deck, brooding, muttering. After a time he gave orders to swing the ship around and took it out beyond the breakers again. As soon as they had left the bay it grew calm. It looked as tempting as it had before.

  "Do we try again?" Felk asked.

  "Not now," said Delagard dourly. His eyes flashed with cold anger. "Maybe this isn't a good place. We'll move along westward."

  * * *

  The coast to the west was unpromising: rough and wild and steep. A crisp acrid odour of combustion drifted on the wind. Flaming sparks floated upward from the land. The air itself seemed to be burning. Occasional waves of overpowering telepathic force came drifting toward them from the island, short sudden jolts that caused mental confusion and disarray. The midday sun was bloated and discoloured. There appeared to be no inlets anywhere. After a time Delagard, who had gone below, reappeared and announced in a tight, bitter voice that he was abandoning, for the moment, his attempts to make a closer approach.

  They retreated to a point well beyond the churning surf, where the sea was flat and shallow, streaming with colours that rose from a bed of glistening sand. There they cast anchor for the first time since the beginning of the voyage.

  Lawler found Delagard at the rail, staring into the distance.

  "Well? What do you think of your paradise now, Nid? Your land of milk and honey?"

  "We'll find a way in. We just came on it from the wrong side, that's all."

  "You want to land there?"

  Delagard turned to face him. His bloodshot eyes, strangely transformed by the clashing light all around them, seemed to be dead, utterly without life. But when he spoke his voice was as strong as ever. "Nothing that I've seen so far has changed my mind about anything, doc. This is the place I want to be. Jolly was able to make a landfall here, and so will we."

  Lawler made no reply. There wasn't anything he could think of to say that wasn't likely to trigger an explosion of insane wrath in Delagard.

  But then he grinned and leaned forward and clapped his hand to Lawler's shoulder amiably. "Doc, doc, doc, don't look so solemn! Of course this is a weird-looking place. Of course. Why else would the Gillies have kept away from it all this time? And of course the stuff that comes wafting out of there feels strange to us. We simply aren't used to it. But that doesn't mean we need to be afraid of it. This is just a fancy bunch of visual effects. Just decorations, just trimming on the package. They don't mean a thing. Not a fucking thing."

  "I'm glad you're so sure of yourself."

  "Yes. So am I. Listen, doc, have faith. We're almost there. We've made it this far, and we're going to go the rest of the way. There's nothing to worry about." He grinned again. "Look, doc, relax, will you? I found a little of Gospo's brandy hidden away last night. Come on down to my cabin in an hour or so. Everyone will be there. We'll have a party. We're going to celebrate our arrival."

  * * *

  Lawler was the last to arrive. By candlelight in the dark cramped musky-smelling room they were all grouped in a rough semicircle around Delagard, Sundira to his left, Kinverson just on the other side of her, Neyana and Pilya beyond, then Gharkid, Quillan, Tharp, Felk, Lis. Everyone had a cup of brandy. An empty flask and two full ones were on the table. Delagard stood facing them with his back pressed up against the bulwark and his head drawn down into his shoulders in a peculiar way that seemed both defensive and aggressive at the same time. He looked possessed. His eyes were bright, almost feverish. His face, stubbly and peeked with some irritation of the skin, was flushed and sweaty. It struck Lawler suddenly that the man was on the verge of some kind of crisis: an inner eruption, a violent explosion, the release of pent-up emotion that had been too long in storage.

  "Have a drink, doc," Delagard called.

  "Thanks. I will. I thought we were out of this stuff."

  "I thought so too," said Delagard. "I was wrong." He poured until the cup overflowed, and shoved it along the table toward Lawler. "So you remembered Jolly's story about the undersea city, eh?"

  Lawler took a deep gulp of the brandy, and waited until it had hit bottom.

  "How did you know that?"

  "Sundira told me. She said you talked to her about it."

  With a shrug Lawler said, "It came floating back into my mind out of nowhere yesterday. I hadn't thought about it in years. The best part of Jolly's story, and I'd forgotten it."

  "But I hadn't," Delagard said. "I was just telling the others, while we were waiting for you to come down. What do you think, doc? Was Jolly full of shit or wasn't he?"

  "An underwater city? How would that be possible?"

  "Gravity funnel, that's what I remember Jolly saying. Super-technology. Achieved by super-Gillies." Delagard rotated his cup, rolling the brandy around in it. He was well on his way toward being drunk, Lawler realized. "I always liked that story of his best of all, just like you," Delagard said. "How the Gillies, half a million years ago, decided to go live under the ocean. There was some land mass on this planet, that's what they told Jolly, remember? Fair-sized islands, small continents, even, and they dismantled most of that and used the material to build sealed chambers at the deep end of their gravity tunnel. And when they had everything ready they moved down below and shut the door behind them."

  "And you believe this?" Lawler asked.

  "Probably not. It's pretty wild stuff. But it's a nice story, isn't it, doc? An advanced race of Gillies down there, the bosses of the planet. Leaving their country cousins behind on the floating islands, serfs and peasants who run the upper world for them as a farm to provide them with food. And all the life-forms on Hydros, the island Gillies and mouths and platforms and divers and hagfish and everything else, right down to the crawlie-oysters and the raspers, are tied together in one big ecological web whose sole purpose is to serve the needs of the ones who live in the undersea city. The island Gillies believe that when they die they come here to live on the Face. Ask Sundira if you don't believe me. That must mean that th
ey hope to go down below and live a soft life in the hidden city. Maybe the divers believe that too. And the crawlie-oysters."

  "An old man's crazy fable, this city," Lawler said. "A myth."

  "Maybe so. Or maybe not." Delagard offered him a cool, taut smile. His self-control was frightening in its intensity, unreal, ominous. "But let's say it isn't. What we saw this morning-this whole incredible jimbo-jambo of whirling, dancing God-knows-what-might in fact be a huge biological machine that provides the energy for the secret Gillie city. The plants that grow over there are metal. I'll bet that they are. They're parts of the machine. They've got their roots in the sea and they extract minerals and create new tissues out of them. And perform all sorts of mechanical functions. And what's on that island somewhere, maybe, is a gigantic electrical grid. In the middle of it, I'll bet, there's a solar collector, an accumulator disc that pulls in energy that all that semi-living wiring over there is pumping down to the submerged city. What we've been feeling is the surplus force of it all. It comes crackling through the air and fucks up our minds. Or would, if we let it. But we aren't going to let it. We're smart enough to stay out of its grip. What we're going to do is sail right along the coast at a safe distance until we come to the entrance to the hidden city, and then-"

  Lawler said, "You're moving too fast, Nid. You say that you don't think the undersea city is anything more than an old man's fantasy, and all of a sudden you're at its entrance."

  Delagard looked unfazed. "I'm just assuming it's real. For the sake of the conversation. Have some more brandy, doc. This is the last of it for sure. We might as well enjoy it all at once."

  "Assuming it's real," said Lawler, "how are you going to build the great city you were talking about here, when the place is already in possession of a bunch of super-Gillies? Aren't they going to get a little annoyed? Assuming they exist."