* * *
He had rarely seen the sky as clear, or the Hydros Cross as brilliant, as it was this night. The air was utterly still. The sea was calm. How could the ship be moving, in such a glassy sea, on such a windless night? And yet it moved. As though by a magic spell, gliding smoothly through the darkness. They had been travelling for hours. The brightness of the Face had dwindled until it was only a purple glow on the horizon, and then less than that, and now it could hardly be seen at all. When morning came they would be far off in the Empty Sea.
Lawler lay by himself, on a pile of netting near the stern.
He had never felt so alone in his life.
The others moved about the deck in silence, doing things with the sails, the ropes, the backstays, the booms, the whole intricate rig of nautical paraphernalia that he had never really understood and now had banished from his mind. They had no need of him; and he wanted nothing to do with them. They were machines, part of a greater machine. Tick. Tick.
Sundira had come to him soon after they sailed. "It's all right," she said. "Nothing's changed."
He shivered and turned away when she approached him. He couldn't look at her.
"You're wrong," he said. "Everything's changed. You're part of the machine, now. And you want me to be in there with you. It ticks and you dance to it."
"It isn't like that, Val. You'd be the machine. You'd be the ticking too. You'd be the dance."
"I don't understand."
"Of course not. How could you?" She touched him lovingly, and he pulled away as if she had the power to transform him with a touch. She looked at him in regret. "Okay," she said softly. "Whatever you want."
That had been hours ago. He hadn't gone to the galley to join the others for evening mess, but he felt no hunger. If he never ate again, that would be all right. The idea of sitting down at table with them was unthinkable. The one unchanged man, in this ship of zombies-the only one still real-
Alone, alone, all, all alone
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
Words. Fragments of memory. A lost poem out of a lost ancient world.
The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out:
At one stride comes the dark:
With far-heard whisper, o'er the sea
Off shot the spectre-bark.
Lawler looked up at the cold blaze of the distant stars. An unexpected calmness had come over him. He was surprised at how calm he felt, as though he had passed beyond any realm where storms might reach. Even in the days when he had had the numbweed to ease him he had hardly ever felt as peaceful as this.
Why? Had the Face worked some mystery on him even at long range, as it had on Sundira?
He doubted it. Nor could it be affecting him now. Surely he was outside its range. There was nothing here to work on his mind now but the dark vault of the sky, and the quietly surging sea, and the hard clear light of the stars. There was the Cross, spanning the southern sky, the great double arch of suns-billions of them, someone had once told him. Billions of suns! And tens of billions of worlds! His mind staggered under the image. Those teeming multitudes of worlds-cities, continents, creatures of a thousand thousand thousand kinds-
He stared upward at them all, and as he stared a new vision grew in him, slowly, formless at first, then clarifying itself with a mighty rush, until there was scarcely room in his mind for anything else. He saw the stars as one vast web, one single immense metaphysical construct, linked into a mysterious galactic unity in just the same way that all the separate particles of this water-world were bound in union.
Lines of force pulsed in the void, streaming through the firmament like rivers of blood, connecting everything to everything. An infinite connectivity throbbed between the worlds. He could feel the universe breathing, a living entity, aflame with unquenchable vitality.
Hydros belonged to the heavens; and the heavens were a single great fiery sensate thing. Enter Hydros and you were a part of the All. The offer was there. And only he, of all the universe, had chosen to refuse entry into that one thing.
Only he. Only he.
Was that what he truly wanted? This solitude, this terrible independence of spirit?
The Face offered immortality-godhood, even-within one enormous united organism. And yet he had chosen to remain Valben Lawler and nothing but Valben Lawler. Proudly had he turned away from what had been extended to those who had made this voyage. Let poor troubled Quillan deliver himself up gladly to the god he had sought all his life; let little Dag Tharp find whatever comfort he could in the Face; let the mysterious Gharkid, who had searched for something greater than himself, go to the Face. Not me. I am not like them.
He thought of Kinverson. Even he, that rugged, solitary man, had opted ultimately for the Face. Delagard. Sundira.
Well, so be it, Lawler told himself. I am who I am. For better or for worse.
He lay back, staring at the stars, letting the fierce brightness of the Cross fill his mind. How peaceful it is here now, he thought. How quiet.
I woke, and we were sailing on
As in a gentle weather:
'Twas night, calm night, the Moon was high;
The dead men stood together.
"Val? It's me."
He looked up. A starlight-shadow crossed his face. He saw Sundira close by him.
"Can I sit with you?" she asked.
"If you want."
She dropped down beside him. "I looked for you at mess. You weren't there. You should have eaten."
"I wasn't hungry. You still eat, do you, now that you've been changed?"
"Of course we do. It's not that kind of change."
"I suppose. How would I know?"
"How would you, yes." She ran her hand lightly across his arm. This time he didn't flinch. "Not as much has changed as you'd think. I still love you, Val. I said I would, and it's true."
He nodded. There was nothing he could say.
Did he still love her, he wondered? Was it possible even to imagine that he did?
He slipped his arm around her shoulders. Her skin was smooth, cool, familiar. Pleasing. She nestled against him. They might have been the only two people in the world. She still seemed human to him. He bent forward and kissed her softly in the hollow between her chin and her shoulder, and she laughed.
"Val," she said. "Oh, Val."
That was all, just his name. What was she thinking, what had she left unsaid? That she wished he had gone to the Face with her? That she still hoped that he would? That she prayed that he would go to Delagard, and beg to have the ship turned around, and taken back to the island so that he too could undergo the transformation?
Should I have gone with her?
Was it a mistake to have refused?
For a moment he saw himself inside the machine, part of it, part of the All-surrendering at last, dancing with all the rest.
No. No. No. No.
I am who I am. I have done what I have done because I am who I am.
He lay back, with Sundira curled against him, and looked upward at the stars again. And one more vision came to him: the Earth that once had been, the Earth that had been lost.
His great romantic fantasy of old vanished Earth, that blue and shining planet, the shattered mother world of humanity, filled him once again: he saw it as he wanted it to have been, a peaceful and harmonious world teeming with loving human beings, a haven, a perfect entity. Had it ever really been like that? Probably not, he thought. Almost certainly not. It had been a place like any other, evil mixed with the good, flaws, failings. And in any case that world was gone from the universe, swept away by malign fate.
And here we are. Here lie we. Rest in peace.
Lawler peered into the night, imagining that he was looking toward the place in the heavens where that world had been. But he knew that for Earth's surviving people scattered through the universe there was no hope of regaining the lost ancestral home. They must mov
e on, they must discover some new place for themselves in this vast universe into which they had been flung as exiles. They must transform themselves.
They must transform themselves.
They must transform themselves.
He sat up as if jolted by a blast of burning light. It was all so wondrously clear to him, suddenly. The people he had known who lived their lives from day to day as though Earth had never existed had been right, and he, hopelessly dreaming of what once had been, long ago and far away, had been wrong. Earth would never return. For the Earthmen on Hydros there was only Hydros, now and forever more. To hold yourself apart, clinging desperately to your ancestral Earth identity amidst the native life-forms of your adopted world, was folly. On whatever world you might find yourself living, it is your task to make yourself fully a part of that world. Otherwise you will always be an outsider, alien and alienated.
And so it was. Here I am. More alone than I have ever been before.
And Hydros had offered to take him in, but he had said no and made the refusal stick, and now it was too late.
He closed his eyes and saw Earth bright and beautiful in the heavens once again. That vision of lost Earth that he had carried in his mind for so long was gleaming more vividly than he had ever seen it before. The blue Earth, lovely and strange, with its great golden-green land-masses shining by the light of a sun he had never seen. As he watched, the broad blue seas began to boil. Steam rose from them. The land was swept by flame. The golden-green immensities parched and blackened. Deep jagged fissures darker than night sprang up across their broad surfaces.
And after the flames: ice, death. Darkness.
A shower of small dead things, falling through space. A coin, a bit of statuary, a potsherd, a map, a rusted weapon, a chunk of stone. Tumbling helter-skelter, plummeting through the windless wastes of the galaxy. He followed them with his gaze, tracking them as they fell.
All gone, he thought. Let it all go. Forget it. Begin a new life.
The sudden thought astounded him.
What was that? he asked himself. What are you saying?
Surrender? Join? Was that what he had meant? Lawler began to tremble. Sweat broke out all over him. He sat up and looked out to sea, back in the direction of the Face.
It seemed to him that he could feel its force after all, reaching him even over this much distance, infiltrating his mind, wrapping its tentacles around his soul, pulling at him, drawing him in.
He fought it. Frantically, furiously, he struggled with it, hacking with desperate urgency at the strands of alien power that seemed to be invading him. For a long silent moment he worked at it, fiercely trying to cleanse himself of its intruding energies. The image came to him of Gospo Struvin, all the way back at the outset of the voyage, battling with that tangle of moist yellow fibres that had come up out of the sea to ensnare him. Struvin kicking in the air, shaking his foot, attempting vainly to extricate himself from that sticky, persistent thing that enfolded him. It was like that now. Lawler knew he was fighting for his life, as Gospo had done; and Gospo had lost.
Get… away… from… me…
He summoned all his energies for one great cleansing thrust. And launched it.
Against nothing. There was nothing there. No nets held him. No mysterious force entwined him in its snare. Lawler understood that and had no doubt of it: he was struggling against shadows, he was fighting with himself, really, only with himself, no one but himself.
So you want to go to it? he asked himself numbly. Despite everything, you actually do want to go? Even you? Is that what you want? What is it that you want, anyway?
Once again he saw the blue Earth gleaming in his mind as it had been before, and then once again it began to boil and blacken, and he beheld once again the ice, the death, the darkness, and the tiny objects falling.
And the answer came: I don't want to be alone any more. God help me, I don't want to be the last Earthman when there's no more Earth.
Sundira stirred, warm against him. "What are you thinking, Val?"
"That I love you," he said.
"Do you? You love what I am now?"
He drew a deep breath, the deepest he had ever drawn, pulling the air of Hydros far down into his lungs.
"Yes," Lawler said.
Where Earth had been in his mind, there was only a flawless sphere of shimmering water. The scattering of tiny objects that had fallen from the dying world hovered for a moment above the surface of that great sea, dropped into it, vanished without a trace.
He felt a great easing, a sudden thawing. Something breaking within him like an ice-floe at the end of winter. Breaking up, streaming away, flowing. Flowing.
He sat up and turned toward her to tell her what had happened. But there was no need. She was smiling. She knew. And he could feel the ship moving in a big arc beneath him, already swinging about, heading back through the luminous sea toward the Face of the Waters.
eBook history
v2.0, ePUB: OCR, formatting and proofing by p0llar.
Robert Silverberg, The Face of the Waters
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends