The Face of the Waters

  "This way," Delagard said.

  A strand of pearly dawnlight broke suddenly across the eastern sky. The stars dimmed and the little moon on the horizon began to fade from sight as the day started to come on. The bay was taking on its emerald morning colour. Lawler, following Delagard down the path into the shipyard, glanced out into it and had his first clear view of the giant phosphorescent creatures that had been cruising around out there all night. He saw now that they were mouths: immense flattened baglike creatures, close to a hundred metres in length, that travelled through the sea with their colossal jaws agape, swallowing everything that lay before them. Once a month or so, a pod of ten or twelve of them turned up in Sorve harbour and disgorged the contents of their stomachs, still alive, into huge wickerwork nets kept there for that purpose by the Gillies, who harvested them at leisure over the weeks that followed. It was a good deal for the Gillies, Lawler thought-tons and tons of free food. But it was hard to see what was in the deal for the mouths.

  Delagard said, chuckling, "There's my competition. If I could only kill off the fucking mouths, I could be hauling in all sorts of stuff myself to sell to the Gillies."

  "And what would they pay you for it with?"

  "The same things they use to pay me now for the things I sell them," said Delagard scornfully. "Useful elements. Cadmium, cobalt, copper, tin, arsenic, iodine, all the stuff this goddamn ocean is made of. But in very much bigger quantities than the dribs and drabs they dole out now, or that we're capable of extracting ourselves. We get the mouths out of the picture somehow, and then I supply the Gillies with their meat, and they load me up with all kinds of valuable commodities in return. A very nice deal, let me tell you. Within five years I'd make them dependent on me for their entire food supply. There'd be a fortune in it."

  "I thought you were worth a fortune already. How much more do you need?"

  "You just don't understand, do you?"

  "I guess not," Lawler said. "I'm only a doctor, not a businessman. Where's this patient of yours?"

  "Easy, easy. I'm taking you as fast as I can, doc." Delagard gestured seaward with a quick brushing movement of his hand. "You see down there, by Jolly's Pier? Where that little fishing boat is? That's where we're going."

  Jolly's Pier was a finger of rotting kelp-timber sticking out thirty metres or so beyond the sea-wall, at the far end of the shipyard. Though it was faded and warped, battered by tides and nibbled by drillworms and raspers, the pier was still more or less intact, a venerable artifact of a vanished era. A crazy old sailor had constructed it, long dead now, a grizzled weird relic of a man whose claim it had been to have journeyed solo completely around the world-even into the Empty Sea, where no one in his right mind would go, even to the borders of the Face of the Waters itself, that immense forbidden island far away, the great planetary mystery that apparently not even the Gillies dared to approach. Lawler could remember sitting out here at the end of Jolly's Pier when he was a boy, listening to the old man spinning his wild, flamboyant tales of implausible, miraculous adventure. That was before Delagard had built his shipyard here. But for some reason Delagard had preserved the bedraggled pier. He must have liked to listen to the old man's yarns too, once upon a time.

  One of Delagard's fishing coracles was tied up alongside it, bobbing on the bay swells. On the pier near the place where the coracle was moored was a shed that looked old enough to have been Jolly's house, though it wasn't. Delagard, pausing outside it, looked up fiercely into Lawler's eyes and said in a soft husky growl, "You understand, doc, whatever you see inside here is absolutely confidential."

  "Spare me the melodrama, Nid."

  "I mean it. You've got to promise you won't talk. It won't just be my ass if this gets out. It could screw us all."

  "If you don't trust me, get some other doctor. But you might have some trouble finding one around here."

  Delagard gave him a surly look. Then he produced a chilly smile. "All right. Whatever you say. Just come on in."

  He pushed open the door of the shed. It was utterly dark inside, and unusually humid. Lawler smelled the tart salty aroma of the sea, strong and concentrated as though Delagard had been bottling it in here, and something else, sour and pungent and disagreeable, that he didn't recognize at all. He heard faint grunting noises, slow and rasping, like the sighs of the damned. Delagard fumbled with something just within the door that made a rough, bristly sound. After a moment he struck a match, and Lawler saw that the other man was holding a bundle of dried seaweed that had been tied at one end to form a torch, which he had ignited. A dim, smoky light spread like an orange stain through the shed.

  "There they are," Delagard said.

  The middle of the shed was taken up by a crude rectangular storage tank of pitch-caulked wickerwork, perhaps three metres long and two wide, filled almost to the brim with sea-water. Lawler went over to it and looked in. Three of the sleek aquatic mammals known as divers were lying in it, side by side, jammed close together like fish in a tin. Their powerful fins were contorted at impossible angles and their heads, rising stiffly above the surface of the water, were thrown back in an awkward, agonized way. The strange acrid smell Lawler had picked up at the doorway was theirs. It no longer seemed so unpleasant now. The terrible grunting noises were coming from the diver on the left. They were grunts of purest pain.

  "Oh, shit," Lawler said quietly. He thought he understood the Gillies' rage now. Their blazing eyes, that menacing snort. A quick hot burst of anger went rippling through him, setting up a brief twitching in his cheek. "Shit!" He looked back toward the other man in disgust, revulsion, and something close to hatred. "Delagard, what have you done now?"

  "Listen, if you think I brought you here just so you could chew me out-"

  Lawler shook his head slowly. "What have you done, man?" he said again, staring straight into Delagard's suddenly flickering eyes. "What the fuck have you done?"

  2

  It was nitrogen absorption: Lawler didn't have much doubt of that. The frightful way in which the three divers were twisted up was a clear signal. Delagard must have had them working at some job deep down in the open sea, keeping them there long enough for their joints, muscles and fatty tissues to absorb immense quantities of nitrogen; and then, unlikely as that seemed, they evidently had come to the surface without taking the proper time to decompress. The nitrogen, expanding as the pressure dropped, had escaped into their bloodstream and joints in the form of deadly bubbles.

  "We brought them here as soon as we realized there was trouble," Delagard said. "Figuring maybe you could do something for them. And I thought, keep them in water, they need to stay under water, so we filled this tank and-"

  "Shut up," Lawler said.

  "I want you to know, we made every effort-"

  "Shut up. Please. Just shut up."

  Lawler stripped off the water-lettuce wrap he was wearing and clambered into the tank. Water went splashing over the side as he crowded himself in next to the divers. But there wasn't much that he could do for them. The one in the middle was dead already: Lawler put his hands to the creature's muscular shoulders and felt the rigor starting to take hold. The other two were more or less alive-so much the worse for them; they must be in hideous pain, if they were conscious at all. The divers' usually smooth torpedo-shaped bodies, longer than a man's, were bizarrely knotted, each muscle straining against its neighbour, and their glistening golden skins, normally slick and satiny, felt rough, full of little lumps. Their amber eyes were dull. Their jutting underslung jaws hung slack. A grey spittle covered their snouts. The one on the left was still groaning steadily, every thirty seconds or so, wrenching the sound up from the depths of its guts in a horrifying way.

  "Can you fix them somehow?" Delagard asked. "Is there anything you can do at all? I know you can do it, doc. I know you can." There was an urgent wheedling tone in Delagard's voice now that Lawler couldn't remember ever hearing in it before. Lawler was accustomed to the way sick people would cede godlike p
ower to a doctor and beg for miracles. But why did Delagard care so much about these divers? What was going on here, really? Surely Delagard didn't feel guilty. Not Delagard.

  Coldly Lawler said, "I'm no diver doctor. Doctoring humans is all I know how to do. And I could stand to be a whole lot better even at that than I am."

  "Try. Do something. Please."

  "One of them's dead already, Delagard. I was never trained to raise the dead. You want a miracle, go get your friend Quillan the priest in here."

  "Christ," Delagard muttered.

  "Exactly. Miracles are his specialty, not mine."

  "Christ. Christ."

  Lawler felt carefully for pulses along the divers' throats. Yes, still beating after a fashion, slow, uneven. Did that mean they were moribund? He couldn't say. What the hell was a normal pulse, for a diver? How was he supposed to know stuff like that? The only thing to do, he thought, was to put the two that were still alive back in the sea, get them down to the depths where they had been, and bring them up again, slowly enough this time so they could rid themselves of the excess nitrogen. But there was no way to manage that. And it was probably too late anyway.

  In anguish he made futile, almost mystical passes over the twisted bodies with his hands, as though he could drive the nitrogen bubbles out by gesture alone. "How deep were they?" Lawler asked, without looking up.

  "We aren't sure. Four hundred metres, maybe. Maybe four fifty. The bottom was irregular there and the sea was moving around so we couldn't keep close track of how much line we'd paid out."

  Clear to the bottom of the sea. It was lunacy.

  "What were you looking for?"

  "Manganese nuggets," Delagard said. "And there was supposed to be molybdenum down there too, and maybe some antimony. We trawled up a whole goddamned menagerie of mineral samples with the scoop."

  "Then you should have used the scoop to bring your manganese up," said Lawler angrily. "Not these."

  He felt the right-hand diver ripple and convulse and die as he held it. The other was still writhing, still moaning.

  A cold bitter fury took hold of him, fuelled as much by contempt as by wrath. This was murder, and stupid unthinking murder at that. Divers were intelligent animals-not as intelligent as the Gillies, but intelligent enough, surely smarter than dogs, smarter than horses, smarter than any of the animals of old Earth that Lawler had heard about in his storybook days. The seas of Hydros were full of creatures that could be regarded as intelligent; that was one of the bewildering things about this world, that it had evolved not just a single intelligent species, but, apparently, dozens of them. The divers had a language, they had names, they had some kind of tribal structure. Unlike nearly all the other intelligent life-forms on Hydros, though, they had a fatal flaw: they were docile and even friendly around human beings, gentle frolicking companions in the water. They could be induced to do favours. They could be put to work, even.

  They could be worked right to death, it seemed.

  Desperately Lawler massaged the one that hadn't yet died, still hoping in a hopeless way that he could work the nitrogen out of its tissues. For a moment its eyes brightened and it uttered five or six words in the barking, guttural diver language. Lawler didn't speak diver; but the creature's words were easy enough to guess at: pain, grief, sorrow, loss, despair, pain. Then the amber eyes glazed over again and the diver lapsed into silence.

  Lawler said, as he worked on it, "Divers are adapted for life in the deep ocean. Left to their own devices, they're smart enough to know not to rise from one pressure-zone to another too fast to handle the gases. Any sea creature knows that, no matter how dumb it is. A sponge would know that, let alone a diver. How did it happen that these three came up so fast?"

  "They got caught in the hoist," Delagard said miserably. "They were in the net and we didn't know it until it surfaced. Is there anything, anything at all that you can do to save them, doc?"

  "The other one on the end is dead too. This one has maybe five minutes left. The only thing I can do is break its neck and put it out of its misery."

  "Jesus."

  "Yeah. Jesus. What a shitty business."

  It took only an instant, one quick snap. Lawler paused for a moment afterward, shoulders hunched forward, exhaling, feeling a release himself as the diver died. Then he climbed out of the tank, shook himself off, and wrapped the water-lettuce garment around his middle again. What he wanted now, and he wanted it very badly, was a good shot of his numbweed tincture, the pink drops that gave him peace of a sort. And a bath, after having been in the tank with those dying beasts. But his bath quota for the week was used up. A swim would have to do, a little later on in the day. Though he suspected it would take more than that to make him feel clean again after what he had seen in here this morning.

  He looked sharply at Delagard.

  "These aren't the first divers you've done this to, are they?"

  The stocky man didn't meet his gaze.

  "No."

  "Don't you have any sense? I know you don't have any conscience, but you might at least have sense. What happened to the other ones?"

  "They died."

  "I assume that they did. What did you do with the bodies?"

  "Made feed out of them."

  "Wonderful. How many?"

  "It was a while ago. Four, five-I'm not sure."

  "That probably means ten. Did the Gillies find out about it?"

  Delagard's "Yes" was the smallest possible audible sound a man could have made.

  "Yes," Lawler mimicked. "Of course they found out. The Gillies always know it, when we fuck around with the local fauna. So what did they say, when they found out?"

  "They warned me." A little louder, not much, a sullen under-the-breath naughty-schoolboy tone.

  Here it comes, Lawler thought. We're at the heart of it at last.

  "Warned you what?" he asked.

  "Not to use divers in my operations any more."

  "But you did, is how it looks. Why the hell did you do it again, if they warned you?"

  "We changed the method. We didn't think there'd be any harm." Some energy returned to Delagard's voice. "Listen, Lawler, do you know how valuable those mineral nuggets could be? They could revolutionize our entire existence on this fucking watery hole of a planet! How was I to know the divers would swim right into the goddamned hoist net? How could I figure that they would let themselves stay in it after we signalled that we were lifting?"

  "They didn't let themselves stay in it. They must have been tangled up in it. Intelligent diving animals just don't let themselves stay in a net that's rising quickly from four hundred metres."

  Delagard glared defiantly. "Well, they did. For whatever reason, I don't know." Then the glare faded, and he offered Lawler the miracle-worker look again, eyes rolling upward imploringly. Still hoping, even now? "There was nothing whatever that you could do to save them, Lawler? Nothing at all?"

  "Sure there was. There were all sorts of things I could have done. I just wasn't in the mood, I guess."

  "Sorry. That was dumb." Delagard actually looked almost abashed. Huskily he said, "I know you did the best you could. Look, if there's anything I can send over to your vaargh by way of payment, a case of grapeweed brandy, maybe, or some good baskets, or a week's supply of banger steaks-"

  "The brandy," Lawler said. "That's the best idea. So I can get myself good and drunk and try to forget all about what I saw here this morning." He closed his eyes a moment. "The Gillies are aware that you've had three dying divers in here all night."

  "They are? How can you possibly know that?"

  "Because I ran into a few while I was wandering around down by the bayshore, and they practically bit my head off. They were frothing mad. You didn't see them chase me away?" Delagard, suddenly ashen-faced, shook his head. "Well, they did. And I hadn't done anything wrong, except maybe come a little too close to their power plant. But they never indicated before that the plant was off bounds. So it must have been these div
ers."

  "You think so?"

  "What else could it be?"

  "Sit down, then. We've got to talk, doc."

  "Not now."

  "Listen to me!"

  "I don't want to listen, okay? I can't stick around here any longer. I've got other things to do. People are probably waiting for me up at the vaargh. Hell, I haven't even had breakfast yet."

  "Doc, wait a second. Please."

  Delagard reached out to him, but Lawler shook him off. Suddenly the hot moist air of the shed, tinged now with the sweet odour of bodily decomposition, was sickening to him. His head began to swirl. Even a doctor had his limits. He stepped around the gaping Delagard and went outside. Pausing just by the door, Lawler rocked back and forth for a few moments, closing his eyes, breathing deeply, listening to the grumbling of his empty stomach and the creaking of the pier beneath his feet, until the sudden nausea had left him.

  He spat. Something dry and greenish came up. He scowled at it.

  Jesus. Some start to the morning.

  Daybreak had come by this time, the full show. With Sorve this close to the equator, the sun rose swiftly above the horizon in the morning and plummeted just as abruptly at nightfall. It was an unusually magnificent sky this morning, too. Bright pink streaks, interleaved with tinges of orange and turquoise, were splashed across the vault of the heavens. It looked almost like Delagard's sarong up there, Lawler thought. He had calmed quickly once he was outside the shack in the fresh sea air, but now he felt a new wave of rage churning within him, setting up bad resonances in his gut, and he looked away, down toward his feet, taking deep breaths again. What he needed to do, he told himself, was to get himself home. Home, and breakfast, and perhaps a drop or two of numbweed tincture. And then on to the day's rounds.