The Face of the Waters

  "Does it matter? We just have to put the Face behind us and keep on going. So long as we have enough of a crew working the sails-"

  Sundira circled the deck. "Pilya! Neyana! Grab those ropes! Val, do you know how to work the wheel? Oh, Jesus, the anchor's still down. Gabe! Gabe, for Christ's sake, heave the anchor up!"

  "Lis is coming back now," Lawler said.

  "Never mind that. Give Gabe a hand with the anchor."

  But it was too late. Already Lis was halfway back to the ship, swimming powerfully, easily. Gharkid was just behind her. She paused in the water and looked up, and her eyes were new, strange, alien.

  "God help us all," Father Quillan muttered. "They're both pulling on us now!" There was terror in his eyes. He was shaking convulsively. "I'm afraid, Lawler. This is what I've wanted all my life, and now that it's here, I'm afraid, I'm afraid!" The priest extended his hands toward Lawler in appeal. "Help me. Take me belowdecks. Or else I'll go over to it. I can't fight it any longer."

  Lawler started toward him.

  "Let him go!" Sundira cried. "We don't have time. He's no use to us anyway."

  "Help me!" Quillan wailed. He was moving toward the rail in the same dreamlike shuffle Lis had used. "God is calling me and I'm afraid to go to Him!"

  "That isn't God that's calling," Sundira snapped. She was running everywhere at once, trying to galvanize the others into motion, but nothing seemed to be happening. Pilya was looking up at the rigging as though she had never seen a sail before. Neyana was off by herself near the forecastle, chanting something in a low monotone. Kinverson had done nothing about the anchor: he stood stock-still amidships, vacant-eyed, lost in uncharacteristic contemplation.

  Come to us, Gharkid and Lis were saying. Come to us, come to us, come to us.

  Lawler trembled. The pull was far more powerful now than when it had been Gharkid alone who was summoning them. He heard a splash. Someone else had gone over the side. Felk? Tharp? No, Tharp was still there, a puking little heap. But Felk was gone. And then Lawler saw Neyana too, hoisting herself over the rail, plummeting like a meteor toward the water.

  One by one they all would go, he thought. One by one, they would be incorporated into the alien entity that was the Face.

  He struggled to resist. He summoned all the stubbornness in his soul, all the love of solitude, all the cantankerous insistence on following his own path, and used it as a weapon against the thing that was calling him. He wrapped his lifelong aloneness around him like a cloak of invisibility.

  And it seemed to work. Strong though the pull was-and getting stronger-it couldn't manage to draw him over the rail. An outsider to the last, he thought, the eternal loner, keeping himself apart even from union with that potent hungry thing that waited for them across the narrow strait.

  "Please," Father Quillan said, almost whimpering. "Where's the hatch? I can't find the hatch!"

  "Come with me," Lawler said. "I'll take you below."

  He saw Sundira heaving desperately at the windlass, trying to get the anchor up herself. But she didn't have the strength for it: only Kinverson, of them all, was strong enough to do it alone. Lawler hesitated, caught between Quillan's need and the greater urgency of getting the ship aweigh.

  Delagard, on his feet at last, came staggering toward him like a man who has had a stroke. Lawler shoved the priest into Delagard's arms.

  "Here. Hang onto him, or he'll go over."

  Lawler ran toward Sundira. But Kinverson suddenly stepped out into his path and pushed him back with one big hand against his chest.

  "The anchor-" Lawler began. "We've got to lift anchor-"

  "No. Let it be."

  Kinverson's eyes were very strange. They seemed to be rolling upward in his head.

  "You too?" Lawler asked.

  He heard a grunt from behind him, and then another splash. He looked back. Delagard was alone by the rail, studying his fingers as if wondering what they were. Quillan was gone. Lawler saw him in the water, swimming with sublime determination. He was on his way to God-or whatever was over there-at last.

  "Val!" Sundira called, still pulling at the windlass.

  "No use," Lawler replied. "They're all going overboard!"

  He could see figures on shore, moving steadily deeper into the throbbing thickets of baroque vegetation: Neyana, Felk. And now Quillan, scrambling up onto the land and moving after them. Gharkid and Lis had already disappeared.

  Lawler counted up those who remained on board: Kinverson, Pilya, Tharp, Delagard, Sundira. And he made six. Tharp went over even as he was making the count. Five, then. Just five, out of all those who had set out from Sorve Island.

  Kinverson said, "This miserable life. How I hated every stinking day of it. How I wished I'd never been born. You didn't know that? What did you know? They figured I was too big and strong to hurt. Because I never said anything, nobody knew. But I did hurt, every goddamned minute of the day! And nobody knew. Nobody knew."

  "Gabe!" Sundira cried.

  "Get out of my fucking way or I'll fucking split you in half."

  Lawler lurched over, clutched at him. Kinverson swept him aside as if he were a straw and leaped to the top of the rail in one smooth bound, and vaulted over.

  Four.

  Where was Pilya, though? Lawler glanced around and saw her in the rigging, naked, glistening in the sunlight, climbing higher, higher-was she going to dive from there? Yes. Yes, she was.

  Splash.

  Three.

  "Just us," Sundira said. She looked at Lawler and then at Delagard, who sat dismally propped against the base of the mainmast with his hands over his face. "We're the ones it doesn't want, I guess."

  "No," said Lawler. "The only ones strong enough to fight it off."

  "Hurray for us," Delagard said gloomily, without looking up.

  "Are three of us enough to sail this ship?" she asked. "What do you think, Val?"

  "We can try, I suppose."

  "Don't talk garbage," Delagard said. "You can't possibly run this ship with a crew of three."

  "We could set the sails to the prevailing breezes and simply ride the current," Lawler said. "Maybe if we did that we'd get to some inhabited island sooner or later. It's better than staying here. What do you say, Nid?"

  Delagard shrugged.

  Sundira was looking towards the Face.

  "Can you see any of them?" Lawler asked.

  "Not a one. But I hear something. I feel something. Father Quillan, I think, coming back."

  Lawler peered toward shore. "Where?" The priest was nowhere in sight. But yet, but yet-no doubt of it, Lawler too felt a Quillan-like presence. It was as though the priest were right here beside them on the deck. Another trick of the Face, he decided.

  "No," Quillan said. "Not a trick. I am here."

  "It isn't so. You're still on the island," said Lawler tonelessly.

  "On the island, and here with you, at one and the same time."

  Delagard made a hollow sound of disgust. "Son of a bitch. Why won't the thing leave us alone?"

  "It loves you," Quillan said. "It wants you. We want you. Come and join us."

  Lawler saw that their victory was only a tentative one. The pull was still there-subtler now, as if holding itself in abeyance, but ready to seize them the moment they let down their guard. Quillan was intended as a distraction-a seductive distraction.

  He said, "Are you Father Quillan, or are you the Face speaking?"

  "Both. I am of the Face now."

  "But you still perceive yourself as the priest Father Quillan, dwelling within the entity that is the Face of the Waters?"

  "Yes. Yes, exactly."

  "How can that be?" Lawler asked.

  "Come and see," said Quillan. "You remain yourself. And yet you become something infinitely greater."

  "Infinitely?"

  "Infinitely, yes."

  "It's like a dream," Sundira said. "Talking to something that you can't see, and having it answer you in the voice of someone you know
." She sounded very calm. Like Delagard, she seemed past all fear now, past all tumult. Either the Face would have them or it wouldn't, but it was almost at the point of being beyond their control. "Father, can you hear me too?"

  "Of course, Sundira."

  "Do you know what the Face is? Is it God? Can you tell us?"

  "The Face is Hydros, and Hydros is the Face," said the priest's quiet voice. "Hydros is a great corporate mind, a collective organism, a single intelligent entity that spans the entire planet. This island which we have come to, this place that we call the Face of the Waters, is a living thing, the brain of the planet. And more than a brain: the central womb of everything is what the Face is. The universal mother from which all life on Hydros flows."

  "Is that why the Dwellers won't come here?" Sundira asked. "Because it's sacrilege to return to the place from which you've come?"

  "Something like that, yes."

  "And the multitude of intelligent life-forms of Hydros," Lawler said, seeing the connection suddenly. "That came about because everything is linked to the Face, isn't that so? The Gillies and the divers and the rammerhorns and everything else? One giant conglomerate world-mind?"

  "Yes. Yes. One universal intelligence."

  Lawler nodded. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine what it was like to be part of such an entity. The world as a single huge clockwork mechanism, ticking, ticking, ticking, and every living thing on it dancing to the rhythm of the ticks.

  Quillan was part of it now. Gharkid. Lis, Pilya, Neyana, Tharp, Felk, even poor tortured Kinverson. Swallowed up in the godhead. Lost in the immensity of the divine.

  Delagard said suddenly, still not lifting his head from the posture of darkest depression in which he sat slumped, "Quillan? Tell me this, Quillan: what about the undersea city? Is there one or isn't there?"

  "A myth," the voice of the unseen Quillan replied. "A fable."

  "Ah," said Delagard bitterly. "Ah."

  "Or a metaphor, more truthfully. Your wandering seaman had something of the fundamental idea, but he garbled it. The great city is everywhere on Hydros, under the sea and in it and at its surface. The planet is a single city; every living creature on it is a citizen of it."

  Delagard looked up. His eyes were dull with exhaustion.

  Quillan went on, "The beings who live here have always dwelled in the water. Guided by the Face, united with the Face. At first they were completely aquatic, and then the Face showed them how to build the floating islands, to prepare them for the time in the distant future when land would begin to rise from the depths. But there was never any secret undersea city. This is a water-world and nothing else. And everything in it is bound harmoniously within the power of the Face."

  "Everything except us," said Sundira.

  "Everything except the few wandering humans who have found their way to this world, yes," Quillan said. "The exiles. Who out of ignorance have continued to be exiles here. Insisting on it, even. Aliens choosing to live apart from the harmony that is Hydros."

  "Because they have no business being part of that harmony," Lawler said.

  "Not true. Not true. Hydros welcomes everyone."

  "But only on its own terms."

  "Not true," said Quillan.

  "But once you cease to be yourself-" Lawler said. "Once you become part of some larger entity-"

  He frowned. Something had changed just then. He felt silence all around him. The aura, the enveloping blanket of thought, that had surrounded them during their colloquy with Quillan had vanished.

  "I don't think he's here any more," Sundira said.

  "No, he isn't," said Lawler. "He's pulled back from us. It has." The Face itself, the sense of a vast nearby presence, seemed to be gone. For the moment, at least.

  "How strange it feels to be alone again."

  "It feels good, I'd say. Just the three of us, each in our own head, and nobody talking to us out of the sky. For however long it is until it starts up again."

  "It will start up again, won't it?" said Sundira.

  "I suppose," Lawler said. "And we'll have to fight it all over again. We can't allow ourselves to be swallowed up. Human beings have no business becoming part of an alien world. We weren't meant for that."

  Delagard said in an odd tone, soft and wistful, "He sounded happy, didn't he?"

  "You think so?" Lawler asked.

  "Yes, I do. He was always so strange, so sad, so distant. Wondering where God was. Well, now he knows. He's with God at last."

  Lawler gave him a curious look. "I didn't know that you believed in God, Nid. Now you think that the Face is God?"

  "Quillan does. And Quillan's happy. For the first time in his life."

  "Quillan's dead, Nid. Whatever was talking to us just now wasn't Quillan."

  "It sounded like Quillan. Quillan and something else, but Quillan even so."

  "If you like to think so."

  "I do," said Delagard. Abruptly he stood up, swaying a little as though the effort made him dizzy. "I'm going to go over there and join up."

  Lawler stared at him.

  "You too?" he said in wonder.

  "Me, yes. Don't try to stop me. I'll kill you if you try. Remember what Lis did to me when I tried to stop her. We can't be stopped, doc."

  Lawler was still staring. He means it, he thought. He actually means it. He's really going to go. Could this really be Delagard? Yes. Yes. Delagard had always been one for doing what seemed best for Delagard, no matter what effect it might have on those around him.

  To hell with him, then. Good riddance.

  "Stop you?" Lawler said. "I wouldn't dream of it. Go ahead, Nid. If you think you'll be happy there, go. Go. Why should I stop you? What difference does anything make now?"

  Delagard smiled. "No difference to you, maybe. But to me, plenty. I'm so fucking tired, doc. I was full of big dreams. I tried this scheme, I tried that one, and for a long time everything worked out, and then I came here and it all fell apart. I fell apart. Well, fuck it. I just want to rest now."

  "To kill yourself, you mean?"

  "You think that's what it means. But I'd never do that. I'm tired of being the captain of the ship. I'm tired of telling people what to do, especially when I see now that I don't really know what the fuck I'm doing myself. I've had it, doc. I'm going to go over." Delagard's eyes brightened with newfound energy. "Maybe this is what I came here to do all along, only I never realized it until this minute. Maybe the Face sent Jolly home to bring the rest of us to it-only it took forty years, and then only a few of us came." He looked almost jaunty now. "So long, doc. Sundira. It was nice knowing you. Come visit me some time."

  They watched him go.

  "It's just you and me, kid," Lawler said to her. And they laughed. What else was there to do, but laugh?

  * * *

  Night came: a blazing night of comets and wonders, of flaring lights of a hundred different coruscating colours. Lawler and Sundira remained on deck as darkness came, sitting quietly near the mainmast, saying little to each other. He felt numb, burned out by the things that had happened this day. She was silent, exhausted.

  Great explosions of colour burst overhead. A celebration of the newly conquered, Lawler thought. The auras of his former shipmates seemed to sparkle in the sky. That great slash of stormy blue: was that Delagard? And that warm amber glow: Quillan? Could that scarlet pillar be Kinverson, and the splash of molten gold near the horizon, Pilya Braun? And Felk-Tharp-Neyana-Lis-Gharkid-

  It felt as though they were close at hand, every one of them. The sky boiled with radiant colour. But when Lawler listened for their voices, he was unable to hear them. All he could make out was a warm harmony of undifferentiated sounds.

  On the darkening horizon the frenzied fertility of the island across the strait went on unabated: things sprouted, writhed, quivered against the deep hue of the sky, sending up showers of luminous energy. Waves of streaming light rose toward the heavens. There was never any rest over there. Lawler and Sundira sat watch
ing the show far into the night, until at last he rose and said, "Are you hungry at all?"

  "Not a bit."

  "Neither am I. Let's get some sleep, then."

  "Yes. All right."

  She stretched her hand toward him and he pulled her to her feet. For a moment they stood close together by the rail, staring at the island across the strait.

  "Do you feel any sort of pull?" she asked.

  "Yes. It's always there-biding its time, I think. Waiting for the moment when it catches us off guard."

  "I feel it too. It isn't as strong as it was, but I know that that's only a trick. I have to hold my mind clenched against it all the time."

  "I wonder why we were the only ones who were able to hold fast against the urge to go," Lawler said. "Are we stronger and saner than the others, better able to live within our own identities? Or just so accustomed to feeling alienated from the society around us that we can't possibly let ourselves go and plunge into a group mind."

  "Did you really feel so alienated when you lived on Sorve, Val?"

  He considered that. "Maybe 'alienated' is too strong a word. I was part of the Sorve community, and it was part of me. But I wasn't part of it the way most of the others were. I was always a little to one side."

  "The same with me on Khamsilaine. I was never much of a belonger, I suppose."

  "Nor I."

  "Or even wanted to be. Some do, and can't manage it. Gabe Kinverson was just as much a loner as we are. More, even. But suddenly a time came when he didn't want to be, any more. And there he is, dwelling in the Face. But it gives me the shivers to think of yielding myself up and going over there to join some alien mind."

  "I never understood that man," Lawler said.

  "Neither did I. I tried to. But he was locked up in himself all the time. Even in bed."

  "I don't need to know about that."

  "Sorry."

  "That's okay."

  She pressed close against him.