"You don't understand these things, doc," Lis said. "You never did. You never could."
Lawler studied her in bewilderment, trying to comprehend. She was as alien to him as a Gillie right now.
"I guess I don't," he said.
* * *
After the windstorm the sea was quiet for a while, never exactly tranquil but not especially challenging, either. There came another zone thick with the clustering sea-plants, though these were less dense than the first one and they got through without needing Dr Nikitin's lethal aphrodisiac oil. A little farther on was a place where close-packed clumps of mysterious lanky yellow-green algae drifted. They humped themselves up above the surface of the sea as the ship went by and emitted sad whooshing exhalations from dark waggling bladders dangling on short prickly stems: "Go back," they seemed to be saying. "Go back, go back, go back." It was a disturbing and troublesome sound. This was plainly an unlucky place to be. But before long the strange algae were no longer to be seen, though it was still possible, for another half a day or so, to hear their distant melancholy murmur occasionally riding on the gusts of a following wind.
* * *
The next day another unfamiliar life-form appeared: a gigantic floating colonial creature, a whole population in itself, hundreds or perhaps thousands of different kinds of specialized organisms suspended from one huge float nearly the size of a platform or a mouth. Its fleshy transparent central body glistened up out of the water at them like a barely submerged island; and as they drew closer they could see the innumerable components of the thing quivering and whirring and churning about in their individual duties, this group of organisms paddling, this set trawling for fish, these little fluttering organs around the edges serving as stabilizers for the whole vast organism as it moved in its stately way through the sea.
When the ship came near it the creature extruded several dozen clear pipe-like structures, a couple of metres in height, that rose like thick glossy chimneys above the surface of the water.
"What are those things, do you think?" Father Quillan asked.
"Visual apparatus?" Lawler suggested. "Periscopes of some sort?"
"No, look, now there's something coming out of them-"
"Watch out!" Kinverson yelled from overhead. "It's shooting at us!"
Lawler pulled the priest down with him to the deck just as a blob of some gooey reddish substance went whistling past. The blob fell in mid-deck, two or three metres behind them. It looked like a large orange turd, shapeless and quivering. Steam began to rise from it. Half a dozen similar projectiles landed at other points along the deck, and more were arriving every moment.
"Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!" Delagard roared, stomping around wildly. "The stuff is burning the deck. Buckets and shovels! Buckets and shovels! Tack! Tack, Felk! Get us the hell out of here, damn you!"
The deck was sizzling and steaming where the blobs were eating into it. Felk, at the wheel, struggled to pull away from the bombardment, shoving and dodging and manoeuvring the ship with frantic zeal. Under his hoarse commands the duty watch pulled the ropes about, swung the yards, reset the sails. Lawler, Quillan and Lis Niklaus rushed about the deck, shovelling up the soft corrosive projectiles and tossing them overboard. Dark charred scars remained wherever one of the acid lumps had touched the pale yellow wood of the planks. The colonial creature, distant now, continued to hurl its missiles at the ship with methodical unthinking hostility, though now they dropped harmlessly into the water, stirring up puffs of vapour as they boiled downwards and disappeared.
The charred marks in the deck were too deep to remove. Lawler suspected that the sticky projectiles, if they hadn't been swept up immediately, would have burned right down from deck to deck until they emerged through the hull.
* * *
The following morning Gharkid saw a grey cloud of whizzing airborne forms far off to starboard.
"Hagfish in mating frenzy."
Delagard swore and gave the order for a change of course.
"No," Kinverson said. "That won't work. There's no time to manoeuvre. Lower the sails."
"What?"
"Take them down or they'll act as hagfish nets when the swarm hits us. We'll be up to our asses in hagfish on deck."
Cursing mightily, Delagard ordered the sails to be struck. Soon the Queen of Hydros was drifting with bare poles rising into a hard white sky. And then the hagfish came.
The ugly bristle-backed winged worms, berserk with lust, were spread out by the millions, just windward of the fleet. It was a sea of hagfish: you could hardly see the water for the thrashing bodies. In surging waves they took to the air-the females in the lead, uncountable numbers of them, blotting out the sunlight. Furiously they beat their shiny sharp-angled little wings; desperately they held their snub-nosed heads aloft; onward they came, maddened platoons of them. And the males were right behind them.
It didn't matter to them that there were ships in their way. Ships were mere incidental distractions to hagfish in heat. Mountains would have been. They had their genetically programmed course to follow, and they followed it blindly, unresistingly. If it meant that they would smash head on into the side of the Queen of Hydros, so be it. If it meant that they would clear the deck of the ship by a few metres and go cracking into the base of a mast or the door of the forecastle, so be it. So be it. So be it. There was no one on the ship's deck when the hagfish armada reached it. Lawler already knew what it was like to be struck by an immature one. A full-grown one in the high frenzy of its mating urge would probably be travelling with ten times the force of the one that had hit him: a collision would be fatal, most likely. A glancing blow of a wing-tip would cut through skin to the bone. The touch of those fierce bristles would leave a bloody track.
The only thing to do was hide and wait. And wait, and wait. All hands took refuge below. For hours the buzzing whoosh of their passage filled the air, punctuated by strange whining cries and the sound of brutal, abrupt impacts.
At last there was silence. Cautiously, Lawler and a couple of the others went up on deck.
The air was clear. The swarm had moved on. But dead and dying hagfish were everywhere, piled like vermin wherever some structure of the deck had created an obstacle to their flight. Broken as they were, some still had enough life left in them to hiss and nip and try to rise and fly into the faces of the cleanup crew. It took all day to get rid of them.
After the hagfish came a dark cloud that promised welcome rain, but dropped instead a coating of slime: a migrating mass of some foul-smelling little airborne microorganism that enveloped the ship in its nearly infinite multitudes and left a slick gluey brown pall on sails and rigging and masts and every square millimetre of the deck. Cleaning that off took three days more.
And after that came more rammerhorns, and Kinverson bestrode the deck once more, pounding on his drum to drive them into confusion.
And after the rammerhorns…
* * *
Lawler began to think of the great planetary sea as a stubborn, implacably hostile force that was tirelessly throwing one thing after another at them in an irritable response to their presence on its broad bosom. Somehow the voyagers were making the ocean itch, and it was scratching at them. Some of the scratching was pretty intense. Lawler wondered if they would manage to survive long enough to reach Grayvard.
There was a blessed day of heavy rain, at last. It cleaned away the slime of the microorganisms and the reek that the dead hagfish had left on deck, and allowed them to refill their storage casks just when the water situation had been starting to seem critical again. In the wake of the rain a school of divers appeared and frolicked in a genial playful way alongside the ship, leaping in the foam like elegant dancers welcoming tourists to their native land. But no sooner had the divers moved on out of sight than another of the turd-throwing colonial things drifted near, or perhaps it was the same one as before, and bombarded the ship with moist incendiary missiles all over again. It was as though the ocean had belatedly become aware th
at by sending the rain and then the divers it was showing the voyagers too amiable a face, and wanted to remind them of its true nature.
Then for a time all was quiet again. The winds were fair, the creatures of the ocean relented from the pattern of constant assault. The six ships moved onward serenely toward their goal. Their wakes, long and straight, stretched out behind them like retreating highways through the immense solitude that they had already crossed.
In the calm of a perfect dawn-the sea almost without waves, the breeze steady, the sky shimmering, the lovely blue-green globe of Sunrise visible just above the horizon and one moon still in view also-Lawler came up on deck to find a conference taking place on the bridge. Delagard was there, and Kinverson, and Onyos Felk, and Leo Martello. After a moment Lawler saw Father Quillan too, half hidden behind Kinverson's bulk.
Delagard had his spy-glass with him. He was scanning the distance with it and reporting on something to the others, who were pointing, staring, commenting.
Lawler clambered up the ladder.
"Something going on?"
"Something sure is, yes," Delagard said. "One of our ships is missing."
"Are you serious?"
"Take a look." Delagard handed Lawler the spy-glass. "An easy night. Nothing unusual between midnight and dawn, the lookouts tell me. Count the ships you can see. One, two, three, four."
Lawler put the glass to his eye.
One. Two. Three. Four.
"Which one isn't there?"
Delagard tugged at his thick, greasy coils of hair. "Not sure yet. They don't have their flags up. Gabe thinks it's the Sisters who are gone. Splitting off during the night, taking some independent course of their own."
"That would be crazy," Lawler said. "They've got no real idea how to navigate a ship."
"They've been doing all right so far," Leo Martello said.
"That's by simply following along in the convoy. But if they tried to go off on their own-"
"Well, yes," Delagard said. "It would be crazy. But they are crazy. Those fucking dyke bitches, I wouldn't for a moment put it past them to do something like-"
He broke off. There was the sound of footsteps on the ladder below them.
"Dag, that you?" Delagard called. To Lawler he explained, "I sent him down to the radio room to do some calling around."
Tharp's shrivelled little head appeared, and then the rest of him.
"The Golden Sun's the one that's missing," Tharp announced.
"Sisters are on the Hydros Cross," Kinverson said.
"Right," said Tharp sourly. "But Hydros Cross answered when I called them just now. So did the Star, the Three Moons and the Goddess. All silent out of the Golden Sun."
"You absolutely certain? Couldn't raise them at all?" Delagard asked. "Wasn't any way at all you could bring them in?"
"You want to try, you go and try. I called around the fleet. Four ships answered."
"Including the Sisters?" Kinverson persisted.
"I talked to Sister Halla herself, okay?"
Lawler said, "Whose ship is the Golden Sun? I forget."
"Damis Sawtelle's," Leo Martello replied.
"Damis would never go off on his own. He isn't like that."
"No," Delagard said, with a look of suspicion and distrust. "He isn't, is he, doc?"
Tharp kept on trying to pick up the Golden Sun's frequency all day long. The radio operators of the other four ships tried also.
Silence on the Golden Sun channel. Silence. Silence. Silence.
"A ship just doesn't vanish in the night," Delagard said, pacing ferociously.
"Well, this one seems to have," said Lis Niklaus.
"Shut your fucking mouth!"
"Oh, nice, Nid, very nice."
"Shut it or I'll shut it for you!"
"This isn't helping," Lawler said. He turned toward Delagard. "You ever lose one of your ships like this before? Just quietly disappearing, no SOS, nothing?"
"I never lost a ship. Period."
"They would have radioed, if there was trouble, right?"
"If they could have," Kinverson said.
"What does that mean?" Delagard asked.
"Suppose a whole bunch of those net-things came crawling up on board during the night. The watch changes at three in the morning, the people in the rigging come down, the watch below goes up on deck, they all step on nets and get pulled over the side. And you've got half the ship's complement gone just like that. Damis or whoever comes down out of the wheel-box while the massacre is going on to see what's what and a net gets him too. And then the rest, one by one-"
"Gospo yelled like crazy when the net got him," Pilya Braun pointed out. "You think a whole shipload of people is going to get tangled up in those things and dragged overboard and not one person will make enough noise to warn the others of what's going on?"
"So it wasn't nets," said Kinverson. "It was something else that came on board. Or it was nets plus something else. And they all died."
"And then a mouth came along and swallowed the ship too?" Delagard asked. "Where the fuck is the ship? Everybody on it may be gone, but what happened to the ship?"
"A ship under sail can drift a long way in a few hours, even in a quiet sea," Onyos Felk observed. "Ten, fifteen, twenty kilometres-who knows? And still moving. We'd never find it if we looked for a million years."
"Or maybe it sank," Neyana Golghoz said. "Something came up beneath it and drilled a hole in its bottom and it went right down just like that."
"Without even sending a signal?" Delagard asked. "Ships don't sink in two minutes. Somebody would have had time to radio to us."
"Do I know?" said Neyana. "Let's say fifty things came up beneath it and drilled holes. It was full of holes all at once. And it went down faster than you can fart. It just sank, bam, no time to do anything. I don't know. I'm just suggesting."
"Who was on board the Golden Sun?" Lawler asked.
Delagard counted up on his fingers, "Damis and Dana and their little boy. Sidero Volkin. The Sweyners. That's six."
Each name fell like an axe. Lawler thought of the gnarled old toolmaker and his gnarled old wife. How clever Sweyner had been with his hands, how adept at employing the limited materials that Hydros made available to them. Volkin, the shipwright, tough and hard working. Damis. Dana.
"Who else?"
"Let me think. I've got the list somewhere, but let me think. The Hayns? No, they're with Yanez on the Three Moons. But Freddo Wong was on board, and his wife-what the hell was her name-"
"Lucia," Lis said.
"Lucia, right. Freddo and Lucia Wong, and that girl Berylda, the one with the tits. And Martin Yanez' kid brother, I think. Yes. Yes."
"Josc," someone said.
Josc, yes.
Lawler felt a savage pain. That eager bright-eyed boy. The future doctor, the one who was going to take the burden of being the healer from him some day.
He heard a voice saying, "All right, that's ten. What were there, fourteen on board? So we have to account for four more."
People began to suggest names. It was hard to remember who had been on which ship, so many weeks after the departure from Sorve. But there had been fourteen on board the Golden Sun, everyone agreed on that.
Fourteen deaths, Lawler thought, dazed by the enormity of the loss. He felt it in his bones. Felt personally diminished. These people had shared his life, his past. Gone. Gone without warning, forever. Nearly a fifth of the community gone in a single stroke. On Sorve Island, in a bad year, they might have had two or three deaths. In most years, none. And now fourteen all at once. The disappearance of the Golden Sun had ripped a ragged hole in the fabric of the community. But wasn't the community shattered already? Would they ever be able to restore on Grayvard anything resembling what they had been forced to abandon on Sorve?
Josc. The Sawtelles. The Sweyners. The Wongs. Volkin. Berylda Cray. And four others.
Lawler left them still discussing it on the bridge and went below. The numbweed flask
was in his hand a moment after he entered his cabin. Eight drops, nine, ten, eleven. Let's say a dozen for this, shall we? Yes. Yes. A dozen. What the hell. A double dose: that should take the sting out of anything.
"Val?" Sundira's voice, outside the cabin door. "Are you all right?"
He let her in. Her eyes went to the glass in his hand, then back to his face.
"God, it really hurts you, doesn't it?"
"Like losing some of my fingers."
"Did they mean a lot to you?"
"Some of them did." The numbweed was hitting, now. He felt the sharp edge of the pain blurring. His voice sounded furry in his ears. "Others were just people I knew, part of the island scene, old familiar faces. One was my apprentice."
"Josc Yanez."
"You knew him?"
She smiled sadly. "A sweet boy. I was swimming, once, and he came along, and we talked for a while. Mostly about you. He worshipped you, Val. Even more than he did his brother, the sea-captain." A frown crossed her face. "I'm making it worse, not better."
"Not… really…?"
His tongue was thick. He knew he had had too much numbweed.
She took the glass from his hand and put it down.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I wish I could help."
Come closer, Lawler wanted to say, but somehow he couldn't, and didn't.
She seemed to understand anyway.
* * *
For two days the fleet lay at anchor in the middle of nowhere while Delagard had Dag Tharp run through the whole spectrum of radio frequencies, trying to bring in the Golden Sun. He picked up radio operators on half a dozen islands, he picked up a ship called Empress of Sunrise that was running ferry service in the Azure Sea, he picked up a floating mining station working somewhere in the far northeast, the existence of which came as a complete surprise, and not a welcome one, to Delagard. But from the Golden Sun Tharp heard not a whisper.