The sea, in the wake of the surge, was gently perturbed, rocking like a cradle. When he went back up on deck Lawler could see the surge itself retreating to the southeast, a diminishing ripple cutting across the scummy surface of the water. He saw the yellow flag of the Golden Sun, the red one of the Three Moons, the green and black of the Sorve Goddess. Farther beyond he was able to make out the remaining two vessels, safe and apparently sound.
"Wasn't so bad," he said to Dag Tharp, who had come up just behind him.
"Wait," Tharp said. "Just wait."
4
The sea changed again. A fast cold current was sweeping through it here, coming out of the south, cutting a swathe through the yellow algae. At first there was only a narrow band of clear water through the scum, then a wider strip, and then, as the flotilla entered the main body of the current, all the water around them was a pure, clean blue again.
Kinverson asked Lawler if he thought the marine life here would be free of the parasitic plant. The voyagers had had no fresh fish for days. "Bring something up and let's see," Lawler told him. "Just be careful when you get it on deck."
But there was no catch for Kinverson to be careful with. His nets came up empty, his hooks went untaken. Fish lived in these waters, plenty of them. But they kept their distance from the ship. Sometimes schools of them could be seen, swimming vigorously away. The other ships reported the same thing. They might as well have been sailing through desert waters.
At mealtimes there was grumbling in the galley.
"I can't cook 'em if nobody catches 'em," Lis Niklaus said. "Talk to Gabe."
Kinverson was indifferent. "I can't catch 'em if they won't come near us. You don't like it, go out there and swim after them and grab 'em with your hands. Okay?"
The fish continued to stay away, but now the ships entered a zone that was rich with algae of several new kinds, floating masses of an intricate tightly-woven red species mingled with long strips of a wide-leafed, highly succulent blue-green type. Gharkid had a glorious time with them. "They will be fine to eat," he announced. "This I know. We will get much nourishment from them."
"But if you've never seen these kinds before-" Leo Martello objected.
"I can tell. These will be good for eating."
Gharkid tested them on himself in that innocent unfearing way of his that Lawler found so extraordinary. The red alga, he reported, would be suitable for salads. The blue-green one was best cooked in a little fish oil. He spent his days on the gantry bridge, reeling in load upon load, until half the deck was covered with piles of soggy seaweed.
Lawler went up to him as he sat sorting through the slimy mess, which still was streaming with water. Small creatures that had come up in the net wandered amidst the tangled algae: little snails and crablets and tiny crustaceans with very bright red shells that looked like fairy castles. Gharkid seemed unperturbed by the possibility that any of these minute passengers might have poisonous stingers, little jaws that could deliver big nips, toxic excretions, perils of unknown sorts. He was brushing them away from his algae with a comb made of reeds, and using his hands where that was quickest.
As Lawler approached, Gharkid gave him a broad smile, white teeth shining brilliantly against the dark background of his face, and said, "The sea has been good to us today. It has sent us a fine harvest."
"Where'd you learn all that you know about the sea plants, Natim?"
Gharkid looked puzzled. "In the sea, where else? From the sea comes our life. You go into it, you find what is good. You try this and you try that. And you remember." He plucked something from a knotted clump of the red weed and held it up delightedly for Lawler to inspect. "So sweet, it is. So delicate." It was a kind of sea-slug, yellow with little red speckles, almost like an animated chunk of the yellow scum in the sea that lay behind them. A dozen curiously intense black eyes the size of fingertips waved on stubby stalks. Lawler failed to see either sweetness or delicacy in the blobby yellow thing, but Gharkid seemed charmed by it. He brought it close to his face and smiled at it. Then he flipped it over the side into the water.
"The sea's blessed creature," Gharkid said, in a tone of such all-loving benevolence that it made Lawler feel sour and irritable.
"You wonder what purpose it was made for," he said.
"Oh, no, doctor-sir. No, I never wonder. Who am I to ask the sea why it does what it does?"
From his reverent tone it seemed almost as though he regarded the sea as his god. Perhaps he did. One way or another it was a question that required no answer, an impossible question for anyone of Lawler's cast of mind to deal with. He had no wish to patronize Gharkid and certainly none to offend him. Feeling almost unclean in the face of Gharkid's innocence and delight, Lawler smiled quickly and moved along. Farther up the deck he caught sight of Father Quillan studying them from a distance.
"I've been watching him work," the priest said as Lawler came by. "Picking through all that seaweed, pulling it apart, stacking it up. He never stops. He seems so gentle, but there's a fury inside that man somewhere. What do you know about him, anyway?"
"Gharkid? Not very much. Keeps to himself, doesn't say a lot. I'm not sure where he lived before he showed up on Sorve a few years back. Nothing seems to interest him except algae."
"A mystery."
"Yes, a mystery. I used to think he was a thinker, working out the Lord only knows what philosophical problem in the privacy of his own head. But now I'm not so sure that anything goes on in there except contemplating the different kinds of seaweed. It's easy enough to mistake silence for profundity, you know. I'm coming around these days to the view that he's every bit as simple as he appears to be."
"Well, that could be," the priest said. "But I'd be very surprised. I've never actually met a truly simple man."
"Do you mean that?"
"You may think they are, but you're always wrong. In my line of work you eventually get a chance to see into people's souls, when they finally come to trust you, or when they finally begin to believe that a priest is nothing but a thin curtain that stands between them and God. And then you discover that even the simple ones aren't simple at all. Innocent, perhaps, but never simple. The human mind at its most minimal is too complex ever to be simple. So forgive me, doctor, if I suggest that you return to your first hypothesis about Gharkid. I believe that he thinks. I believe that he is a seeker after God, just like all the rest of us."
Lawler smiled. Believing in God was one thing, seeking after God something else entirely. Gharkid might well be a believer, on some basic unquestioning level, for all Lawler knew. But it was Quillan who was the seeker. It always amused Lawler the way people projected their own needs and fears on the world about them and elevated them to the status of fundamental laws of the universe.
And was finding God really what they were all trying to do, every one of them? Quillan, yes. He had a professional need, so to speak. But Gharkid? Kinverson? Delagard? Lawler himself?
Lawler took a long close look at Quillan. By this time he had learned how to read the priest's face. Quillan had two modes of expression. One was the pious and sincere one. The other was the cold, dead, cynical, God-empty one. He shifted from one to the other in accordance with whatever spiritual storms were raging within his troubled mind. Right now Lawler suspected he was getting the pious Quillan, the sincere Quillan.
He said, "You think I'm a seeker after God too?"
"Of course you are!"
"Because I can quote a few lines of the Bible?"
"Because you think that you can live your life in His shadow and not for a moment accept the fact of His existence. Which is a situation that automatically calls its own opposite into being. Deny God and you are doomed to spend your life searching for Him, if only for the sake of finding out whether you're right about His nonexistence."
"Which is your situation exactly, Father."
"Of course."
Lawler glanced down the deck toward Gharkid, who was patiently sorting through his latest c
atch of algae, trimming away the dead strands and flinging them over the side. He was singing to himself, a little tuneless song.
"And if you neither deny God nor accept him, what then?" Lawler asked. "Wouldn't you then be a truly simple person?"
"I suppose you would, yes. But I'm yet to find any person like that."
"I suggest you have a chat with our friend Gharkid, then."
"Oh, but I have," the priest said.
* * *
Still there was no rain. The fish decided to come back within reach of Kinverson's fishing gear, but the skies remained unyielding. The voyage was well into its third week, and the water they had brought with them from Sorve was seriously depleted now. What was left of it had begun to take on a dank, brackish taste. Rationing was second nature to them all, but the prospect of struggling through the entire eight-week journey to Grayvard on what was presently in their storage tubs was a grim one.
It was still too soon to start living on the eyeballs and blood and spinal fluid of sea-creatures-techniques which Kinverson cited as things he had done during long solitary rainless voyages-and the situation wasn't yet critical enough to get out the equipment by which fresh water could be distilled from the sea. That was a last resort, inefficient and wearisome, a matter of the slow, steady accumulation of single drops, good only for a desperation supply.
But there were other things they could do. Raw fish, full of moisture and relatively low on salt, was part of everyone's daily diet now. Lis Niklaus did her best to clean and trim it into neat appealing fillets; but even so it quickly became a tiresome regimen and sometimes a nauseating one. Wetting one's skin and clothing down with sea water was useful also. It was a way of reducing body temperature and thereby cutting back on the internal need for water. And it was the only way to keep clean, since the fresh water on board was too precious to use for washing.
Then one afternoon the sky darkened unexpectedly and a cloudburst broke over them. "Buckets!" Delagard yelled. "Bottles, casks, flasks, anything! Get them out on deck!"
Like demons they ran up and down the ladders, hauling out anything that might hold water until the deck was covered with receptacles of all sorts. Then they stripped, every one of them, and danced naked in the rain like lunatics, washing the salt crusts from their skins and from their clothes. Delagard cavorted on the bridge, a burly satyr with a hairy chest as fleshy as a woman's. With him was Lis, laughing and shouting and jumping beside him, her long yellow hair pasted to her shoulders, her big globular breasts bouncing like planets threatening to leave their orbits. Emaciated little Dag Tharp danced with sturdy Neyana Golghoz, who looked strong enough to flip him over her shoulder. Lawler was savouring the downpour by himself near the rear mast when Pilya Braun came dancing by, eyes shining, lips drawn back in a fixed grin of invitation. Her olive skin was glossy and splendid in the rain. Lawler danced with her for a minute or so, admiring her strong thighs and deep bosom, but when by her motions Pilya seemed to indicate dancing off with him to some snug place belowdecks, Lawler pretended not to understand what she was trying to communicate, and after a time she moved away.
Gharkid capered on the gantry-bridge next to his pile of seaweed. Dann Henders and Onyos Felk had joined hands and were prancing around near the binnacle. Father Quillan, bony and pale with his robe cast aside, seemed to be in a trance, head turned to the sky, eyes glassy, arms outstretched, shoulders working rhythmically. Leo Martello was dancing with Sundira, the two of them looking good together, slim, agile, vigorous. Lawler glanced around for Kinverson and found him up by the bow, not dancing at all, just standing matter-of-factly naked in the rain letting the water stream down his powerful frame.
The storm lasted no more than fifteen minutes. Lis calculated afterward that it had provided them with half a day's additional supply of water.
* * *
There was constant doctoring for Lawler to do, the shipboard accidents, the blisters, the sprains, some mild dysentery, one day a broken collarbone aboard Bamber Cadrell's ship. Lawler felt the strain of trying to spread himself over the entire fleet. Much of what he had to do he did by radio, crouching in front of Dag Tharp's incomprehensible jumble of equipment in the Queen of Hydros' radio room. But broken bones couldn't be set by radio. He went by water-strider to Cadrell's Sorve Goddess to handle the job.
Riding in the strider was an uneasy business. The thing was a lightweight human-powered hydrofoil, as flimsy as one of the long-legged giant crabs that Lawler sometimes had seen delicately picking their way across the floor of Sorve Bay: a mere shell made of laminated strips of the lightest wood, equipped with pedals, pontoon floats, underwater outrigger wings to provide lift, and a high-efficiency propeller. A semi-live coating of slimy microorganisms that minimized frictional drag grew on its skin.
Dann Henders rode with Lawler on his trip over to the Sorve Goddess. The strider was lowered into the water by davits and they descended to it by ropes, hand over hand. Lawler's feet rested at a distance of no more than centimetres from the surface of the sea when he took his place on the frontmost of the strider's two seats. The fragile little vehicle rocked lightly on the gentle swells. It felt as though only a thin film protected him from a yawning abyss. Lawler imagined tentacles rising from the depths, mocking eyes big as platters staring at him out of the waves, silvery jaws opening to bite.
Henders settled in behind him. "Ready, doc? Let's go."
Together, pedalling flat out, they were just strong enough to get the strider up to takeoff speed. The first moments were the hardest. Once they had come up to speed the uppermost set of hydrofoils that had launched them on their way rose up out of the water, reducing drag, and the smaller pair of high-speed foils beneath was able to carry them swiftly along.
But there was no easing off once they had begun. Like any swift vessel, the strider had to climb constantly through its own bow wave: if they slackened the pace even a moment, wave drag would carry them under. No tentacles slithered toward them during the short journey, though. No toothy jaws nibbled at their toes. Friendly ropes were waiting to pull them onto the deck of the Sorve Goddess.
The broken collarbone belonged to Nimber Tanamind, an egregious hypochondriac whose medical problem this time, for once, was unequivocably genuine. A falling boom had cracked his left clavicle, and the whole upper side of his stocky body was swollen and blue. For once, also, Nimber wasn't uttering any complaints. Perhaps it was shock, perhaps fear, perhaps he was dazed by the pain; he sat quietly against a heap of netting, looking stunned, his eyes out of focus, his arms trembling, his fingers doing odd little jerking things. Brondo Katzin and his wife Eliyana stood beside him, and Nimber's wife Salai was nearby, fretfully pacing.
"Nimber," Lawler said, with some affection. They were almost the same age. "You damned idiot, Nimber, what have you done to yourself now?"
Tanamind raised his head a little. He looked frightened. He said nothing, only moistened his lips. A glossy line of sweat lay across his forehead, though the day was cool.
"How long ago did this happen?" Lawler asked Bamber Cadrell.
"Maybe half an hour," the captain said.
"He's been conscious the whole time?"
"Yes."
"You give him anything? A sedative?"
"Just a little brandy," Cadrell said.
"All right," said Lawler. "Let's get to work. Lay him out on his back-that's it, stretch him out flat. Is there a pillow or something we can stick under him? There, yes, right between his shoulderblades." He took a paper packet of pain-killer from his kit. "Get me some water to put this in. I need some cloth compresses, too. Eliyana? About this long, and heat them in warm water-"
Nimber groaned only once, when Lawler spread his shoulders out so that his clavicles would flex and the fracture drop back into its proper place. After that he closed his eyes and seemed to disappear into meditation while Lawler did what he could to reduce the swelling and immobilize Nimber's arm to keep him from reopening the break.
"Give him s
ome more brandy," Lawler said when he was done. He turned to Nimber's wife. "Salai, you'll have to be the doctor now. If he starts running a fever, let him have one of these every morning and night. If the side of his face swells up, call me. If he complains about numbness in his fingers, let me know that too. Anything else that might bother him is likely not to be very important." Lawler looked toward Cadrell. "Bamber, I'll have a little of that brandy myself."
"Everything going well for you guys?" Cadrell asked.
"Other than losing Gospo, yes. And here?"
"We're doing just fine."
"That's good to hear."
It wasn't much of a conversation. But the reunion had been a strangely stilted one from the moment he had come on board. How are you, doc, nice to see you, welcome to our ship, yes, but nothing in the way of real contact, no exchange of inner feelings offered or solicited. Even Nicko Thalheim, coming on deck a little belatedly, had simply smiled and nodded. It was like being among strangers. These people had become unfamiliar to him in just a few weeks. Lawler realized how thoroughly he had become embedded in the insular life of the flagship. And they in the microcosm of the Sorve Goddess. He wondered what the island community was going to be like when it finally reconstituted itself in its new home.
His return to the flagship was uneventful. He went straight to his cabin.
Seven drops of numbweed tincture. No, make it ten.
* * *
Thoughts of lost Earth came to Lawler often as he stood by the rail by night, listening to the heavy mysterious sounds of the sea and staring into the empty impenetrable darkness that pressed down on them. His obsession with the mother world seemed to be growing as the six ships made their daily way across the vast face of the water-planet. For the millionth time he tried to imagine what it was like when it was alive. The large islands called countries, ruled by kings and queens, wealthy and powerful beyond all comprehension. The fierce wars. Spectacular weapons, capable of wrecking worlds. And then that great migration into space, when they had sent the myriad starships outward, bearing the ancestors of all the human beings who lived anywhere in the galaxy today. Everyone. All had sprung from a single source, that one small world that had died.