The Face of the Waters

  "I imagine they will. Assuming they exist."

  "Then aren't they likely to call in an armada of rammerhorns and hatchet-jaws and sea-leopards and drakkens to teach us not to come around bothering them again?"

  "They won't get the chance," Delagard said serenely. "If they're there, what we'll do is go down there and conquer the shit out of them."

  "We'll do what?"

  "It'll be the easiest thing you can imagine. They're soft and decadent and old. If they're there, doc. If. They've had their own way on this world since the beginning of time and the concept of an enemy doesn't even exist in their minds. Everything on Hydros is here to serve them. And they've been down there in their hole for half a million years living in luxury we couldn't even begin to imagine. When we get down there we'll discover that they'll have no way of defending themselves at all. Why should they? Defend themselves against whom? We walk right in and tell them we're taking over, and they'll roll over and surrender."

  "Eleven half-naked men and women armed with gaffs and belaying pins are going to conquer the capital city of an immensely advanced alien civilization?"

  "You ever study any Earth history, Lawler? There was a place called Peru that ruled half a continent and had temples built of gold. A man named Pizarro came in with maybe two hundred men armed with medieval weapons that weren't any damned good at all, a cannon or two and some rifles you wouldn't believe, and he seized the emperor and conquered the place just like that. Around the same time a man named Cortes did the same thing in an empire called Mexico that was just as rich. You take them by surprise, you don't let yourself even allow for the possibility of defeat, you simply march in and get command of their central authority figure, and they fall down at your feet. And everything they have is yours."

  Lawler stared at Delagard, wonder-struck.

  "Without even lifting a finger in our own defence, Nid, we allowed ourselves to be thrown off the island where we had lived for a hundred and fifty years by the simple peasant cousins of these super-Gillies, because we knew we didn't stand a chance in a fight against them. But now you tell me with a straight face that you're going to overthrow an entire superior technological civilization with your bare hands, and you give me medieval folk tales about mythical kingdoms captured by ancient culture-heroes to prove to me that it can be done. Jesus, Nid! Jesus!"

  "You'll see, doc. I promise you."

  Lawler looked around, appealing to the others. But they sat mute, glazed, as though asleep.

  "Why are we even wasting our time on this?" he asked. "There's no such city. It's an impossible concept. You don't believe in it for a minute, Nid. Do you? Do you?"

  "I've already told you, maybe I do, maybe I don't. Jolly believed in it."

  "Jolly was crazy."

  "Not when he first came back to Sorve. It was only later, after he'd been laughed at for years-"

  But Lawler had had enough. Delagard went round and round and round and nothing he said made sense. The close, dank air in the cabin suddenly was as hard to breathe as water. Lawler felt as if he were choking. Spasms of claustrophobic nausea swept over him. He yearned powerfully for his numbweed.

  He understood now that Delagard wasn't simply dangerously obsessive: he was completely crazy.

  And we are all lost down here at the far end of the world, Lawler thought, with no way of escaping and no place to escape to even if we could.

  "I can't listen to this garbage any more," he said in a voice half strangled by rage and disgust, and got up and rushed from the room.

  "Doc!" Delagard called. "Come back here! Damn you, doc, come back!"

  Lawler slammed the door and kept on going.

  * * *

  As he stood alone on the deck Lawler knew even without turning around that Father Quillan had come up behind him. That was odd, knowing without looking. It must be some side effect of the furious emanations pouring over them out of the Face.

  "Delagard asked me to come up and talk with you," the priest said.

  "About what?"

  "Your outburst down below."

  "My outburst?" Lawler said, astonished. He turned and looked at the priest. By the strange many-coloured light that crackled all about them Quillan seemed more gaunt than ever, his long face a thing of a myriad planes, his skin tanned and glossy, his eyes bright as beacons. "What about Delagard's outburst? Lost cities under the sea! Cockeyed wars of conquest modelled on mythical fables out of antiquity!"

  "They weren't mythical. Cortes and Pizarro really lived, and really did conquer great empires with just a handful of troops, a thousand years ago. It's the truth. It's been documented in Earth history."

  Lawler shrugged. "What happened long ago on another planet doesn't matter here."

  "You say that? You, the man who visits Earth in his dreams?"

  "Cortes and Pizarro weren't dealing with Gillies. Delagard's a lunatic and everything he's been saying to us today is absolute madness." Then, suddenly cautious, he said, "Or don't you agree?"

  "He's a volatile, melodramatic man, full of frenzy and fire. But I don't think he's crazy."

  "An undersea city at the deep end of a gravity funnel? You actually think such a thing can exist? You'll believe anything, won't you? Yes, you will. You can believe Father, Son and Holy Ghost, so why not an undersea city?"

  "Why not?" the priest said. "Stranger things than that have been found on other worlds."

  "I wouldn't know," Lawler said sullenly.

  "And it's a plausible explanation for why Hydros is the way it is. I've been giving this place some thought, Lawler. There are no real water worlds in the galaxy, you know. The others that are like Hydros all have chains of natural islands, at least, archipelagoes, the tops of sunken mountains showing above the sea. Hydros is just a big ball of water, though. But if you postulate that there once was a certain amount of land, and it was cut away to build one or more enormous undersea cities, until at last all of Hydros' surface territory had disappeared into the sea and there was nothing but water left on top-"

  "Maybe so. Or maybe not."

  "It stands to reason. Why are the Gillies an island-building race? Because they're evolving from an aquatic form and need land to live on? That's a reasonable theory. But what if it's the other way around entirely, that they were land-dwellers to begin with, and the ones who were left behind at the surface at the time of the migration underground evolved into a semi-aquatic form when the land was taken away? That would account for-"

  Wearily Lawler said, "You argue science the way you argue theology: start with an illogical notion, then pile all kinds of hypotheses and speculations on top of it in the hope of making it make sense. If you want to believe that the Gillies suddenly got bored with living outdoors, so they built themselves a hideaway in the ocean, stripped away all the land surface of the planet in the process, and left a mutated amphibious form of themselves up above just for the hell of it, go ahead and believe it. I don't care. But do you also believe that Delagard can march in and conquer them the way he says he's planning to do?"

  "Well-"

  "Look," Lawler said, "I don't for a moment think that this magical city exists. I used to talk to this Jolly too, and he always seemed like a crackpot to me. But even if the place is right around the next bend in the coast, we can't possibly invade it. The Gillies would wipe us out in five minutes." He leaned close to the other man. "Listen to me, Father. What we really need to do is put Delagard under restraint and get ourselves out of here. I felt that way weeks ago, and then I changed my mind, and now I see I was right the first time. The man's deranged and we have no business being in this place."

  "No," said Quillan.

  "No?"

  "Delagard may be as disturbed as you say he is, and his schemes pure lunacy. But I won't support you in any attempt to interfere with him. Quite the contrary."

  "You want to continue sniffing around the Face, regardless of the risks?"

  "Yes."

  "Why?"

  "You know why."


  For a beat or two Lawler was silent. "Right," he said finally. "It slipped my mind for the moment. Angels. Paradise. How could I have let myself forget that you were the one who encouraged Delagard to come here in the first place, for your own private reasons, which have nothing to do with his?" Lawler waved a hand contemptuously at the wild circus of gyrating vegetation across the strait on the shore of the Face. "You still think that that's the land of the angels over there? Of the gods?"

  "In a way, yes."

  "And you still think you can wangle some kind of redemption for yourself over there?

  "Yes."

  "Redeemed by that? Lights and noise?"

  "Yes."

  "You're crazier than Delagard."

  "I can understand why you'd think so," the priest said.

  Lawler laughed harshly. "I can just see you marching beside him into the undersea city of the super-Gillies. He's carrying a gaff and you're carrying a cross, and the two of you are singing hymns, you in one key and him in another. The Gillies come forward and kneel, and you baptize them one by one, and then you explain to them that Delagard is now their king."

  "Please, Lawler."

  "Please what? You want me to pat you on the head and tell you how impressed I am with your profound ideas? And then go below and tell Delagard how grateful I am for his inspired leadership? No, Father, I'm sailing aboard a ship commanded by a madman, who with your connivance has brought us to the weirdest and most dangerous place on this planet, and I don't like it, and I want to get out of here."

  "If only you'd be willing to see that what the Face has to offer us-"

  "I know what the Face has to offer. Death is what it has to offer, Father. Starvation. Dehydration. Or worse. You see those lights flashing over there? You feel that strange electrical crackling? It doesn't feel friendly to me. It feels lethal, in fact. Is that your idea of redemption? Dying?"

  Quillan shot him a sudden startled, wild-eyed glance.

  "Isn't it true," Lawler said, "that your church believes that suicide is one of the gravest of all sins?"

  "You're the one who's talking about suicide, not me."

  "You're the one who's planning to commit it."

  "You don't understand what you're saying, Lawler. And in your ignorance you're distorting everything."

  "Am I?" Lawler asked. "Am I, really?"

  8

  Late that afternoon Delagard ordered the anchor pulled up, and once more they moved westward along the coast of the Face. A hot, steady on-shore breeze was blowing, as though the huge island were trying to gather them in.

  "Val?" Sundira called. She was just above him in the rigging, fixing the stays on the fore yard.

  He looked up toward her.

  "Where are we, Val? What's going to happen to us?" She was shivering in the tropic warmth. Uneasily she glanced toward the island. "Looks like my idea of this place as the scene of some sort of nuclear devastation was wrong. But it's scary all the same, over there."

  "Yes."

  "And yet I still feel drawn to it. I still want to know what it really is."

  "Something bad is what it is," Lawler said. "You can see that from here."

  "It would be so easy to turn the ship toward shore-you and me, Val, we could do it right now, just the two of us-"

  "No."

  "Why not?" There wasn't much conviction in her question. She looked as uncertain about the island as he was. Her hands were shaking so badly that she dropped her mallet. Lawler caught it as it fell and tossed it back up to her. "What would happen to us, do you think, if we went closer to the shore?" she asked. "If we went up onto the Face itself?"

  "Let somebody else find that out for us," Lawler told her. "Let Gabe Kinverson go over there, if he's so brave. Or Father Quillan. Or Delagard. This is Delagard's picnic: let him be the first to go ashore. I'll stay here and watch what happens."

  "That makes sense, I suppose. And yet… yet…"

  "You're tempted."

  "Yes."

  "There's a pull, isn't there? I feel it too. I hear something inside me saying, Go on across, have a look, see what's there. There's nothing else like it in the world. You have to see it. But it's a crazy idea."

  "Yes," Sundira said quietly. "You're right. It is."

  She was silent for a time, concentrating on the repairs. Then she climbed down to his level in the rigging. Lawler touched his fingertips lightly, almost experimentally, to her bare shoulder. She made a soft sound and pressed herself up against him, and together they stared out at the colour-stained sea, the swollen setting sun, the haze of bewildering light rising from the island across the way.

  "Val, can I stay with you in your cabin tonight?" she asked.

  She hadn't done that often, and not for a long time. The two of them together were too big for the tiny cabin, for his narrow bunk.

  "Of course."

  "I love you, Val."

  Lawler ran his hands across the strong ridges of her shoulders and up to the nape of her neck. He felt more strongly drawn to her than ever before: almost as though they were two halves of some severed organism, and not just two semi-strangers who had happened to find themselves thrown together on a bizarre voyage to a perilous place. Was it the peril, he wondered, that had brought them together? Was it-God forbid!-the enforced togetherness in the middle of the ocean that made him so open to her now, so eager to be near her?

  "I love you," he whispered.

  They ran for his cabin. He had never felt this close to her… to anyone. They were allies, just the two of them against a turbulent, mystifying universe. With only each other to clutch as the mystery of the Face enveloped them.

  The short night was a tangle of interwoven arms and legs, sweaty bodies slipping and sliding against one another, eyes meeting eyes, smiles meeting smiles, breath mingling with breath, soft words spoken, her name on his lips, his on hers, reminiscences exchanged, new memories forged, no sleep at all. Just as well, Lawler thought. Sleep might bring new phantoms. Better to pass the night in wakefulness. And in passion. The new day could well be their last.

  * * *

  He went on deck at dawn. These days he was working first watch. During the night, Lawler saw, the ship had passed within the line of breakers again. Now it was anchored in a bay very much like the first one, though there were no hills along the shore, only low meadows densely packed with dark vegetation.

  This time the bay seemed to be accepting their presence, even welcoming it. Its surface was calm, not so much as a ripple; there was no hint of the flailing kelp that had driven them almost at once from the last one.

  Here, as everywhere else, the water was luminescent, sending up cascades of pink and gold and scarlet and sapphire radiance; and on shore the wild looping dance of never-resting life was going on with the usual frenzy. Purple sparks rose from the land. The air seemed to be aflame again. There were bright colours everywhere. The insane indefatigable magnificence of the place was a hard thing to face first thing in the morning after a sleepless night.

  Delagard was alone on the bridge, huddling into himself in an odd way, arms locked across his cheek.

  "Come talk to me, doc," he said.

  Delagard's eyes were bleary and reddened. He looked as if he had had no sleep, not just this night past, but for days. His jowls were greyish and sagging, his head seemed to have folded downward into his thick neck. Lawler saw a tic at work in Delagard's cheek. Whatever demon had been riding him yesterday on their first approach to the shore of the Face had returned in the night.

  Hoarsely Delagard said, "I hear that you think I'm crazy."

  "Does it matter a damn to you if I do?"

  "Will it make you any happier if I tell you that I'm starting to come around almost to agree with you? Almost. Almost."

  Lawler searched for a trace of irony in Delagard's words, of humour, of mockery. But there was none. Delagard's voice was thick and husky, with a cracked edge to it.

  "Look at that fucking place," Delagard muttered
. He waved his arms in loose looping circles. "Look at it, doc! It's a wasteland. It's a nightmare. Why did I ever come here?" He was shaking, and his skin was pale beneath the beard. He looked terrifyingly haggard. In a low husky voice he said, "Only a crazy man would have come this far. I see that clear as anything, now. I saw it yesterday when we pulled into that bay, but I tried to pretend it wasn't so. I was wrong. At least I'm big enough to admit that. Christ, doc, what was I thinking of when I brought us to this place? It isn't meant for us." He shook his head. When he spoke again his voice was no more than an anguished croak. "Doc, we've got to get out of here right away."

  Was he serious? Or was this all some grotesque test of loyalty?

  "Do you mean it?" Lawler asked him.

  "Damned right I do."

  Yes. He really did. He was terrified, quaking. The man seemed to be disintegrating before Lawler's eyes. It was a stupefying reversal, the last thing Lawler would have expected. He struggled to come to terms with it.

  After a while he said, "What about the sunken city?"

  "You think that there is one?" Delagard asked.

  "Not for a second. But you do."

  "Like shit I do. I had too much brandy, that's all. We've travelled a third of the way around the Face, I figure, and there hasn't been any sign of it. You'd suppose there'd be a strong coastal current if there's a gravity funnel holding the sea open up ahead. A vortex flow. But where the fuck is it?"

  "You tell me, Nid. You seemed to think it was here."

  "That was Jolly who thought so."

  "Jolly was crazy. Jolly's brains got cooked when he took his trip around the Face."

  Delagard nodded sombrely. His eyelids rolled slowly down over his bloodshot eyes. Lawler thought for a moment that he had fallen asleep standing up. Then he said, still keeping his eyes closed, "I've been out here by myself all night, doc. Working things out in my mind. Trying to take a practical view of the situation. It sounds funny to you, because you think I'm crazy. But I'm not crazy, doc. Not really. I may do things that look crazy to other people, but I'm not crazy myself. I'm just different from you. You're sober, you're cautious, you hate taking chances, you just want to go along and go along and go along. That's all right. There are people like you in the universe and there are people like me, and we never really understand each other, but sometimes it happens that we get thrown together in a situation and we have to work together anyway. Doc, I wanted to come here more than anything I've ever wanted in my life. For me it was the key to everything. Don't ask me to explain. You'd never get it, anyway. But now I'm here and I see made a mistake. There's nothing here for us. Nothing."