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.
He began to head upslope.
Farther inland on the island, people were up, people were moving around.
Nobody slept much past dawn here. The night was for sleeping, the day for working. In the course of making his way back toward his vaargh to wait for the morning batch of genuine sufferers and chronic complainers to start showing up, Lawler encountered and greeted a significant percentage of the island’s entire human population. Here at the narrow end where the humans lived, everyone was on top of everyone else all the time.
Most of those to whom he nodded as he walked up the easy slope of the hard, bright yellow wickerwork path were people he had known for decades. Practically all the population of Sorve was Hydros-born, and more than half of those had been born and raised right here on this island, like Lawler himself. And so most of them were people who had never specifically chosen to spend their entire lives on this alien ball of water, but were doing it anyway, because they hadn’t been given any choice. The lottery of life had simply handed them a ticket to Hydros at birth; and once you found yourself on Hydros you couldn’t ever get off, because there were no spaceports here, there was no way of leaving the planet except by dying. It was a life sentence, being born here. That was strange, in a galaxy full of habitable and inhabited worlds, not to have had any choice about where you live. But then there were the others, the ones who had come plummeting in from outside via drop-capsule, who had had a choice, who could have gone anywhere in the universe and had chosen to come here, knowing that there was no going away again. That was even stranger.
Dag Tharp, who ran the radio unit and did dental work on the side and sometimes served as Lawler’s anaesthetist, was the first to go by, a tiny angular man, red-faced and fragile-looking, with a scraggy neck and a big, sharply hooked nose emerging between little eyes and practically fleshless lips. Behind him down the path came Sweyner, the toolmaker and glassblower, a little old fellow, knotted and gnarled, and his knotted, gnarled wife, who looked like his twin sister. Some of the newer settlers suspected that she was, but Lawler knew better. Sweyner’s wife was Lawler’s second cousin, and Sweyner was no kin to him—or her—at all. The Sweyners, like Tharp, were both Hydros-born, and native to Sorve. It was a little irregular to marry a woman from your own island, as Sweyner had done, and that—along with their physical resemblance—accounted for the rumours.
Lawler was near the high spine of the island now, the main terrace. A wide wooden ramp led to it. There were no staircases on Sorve: the stubby inefficient legs of the Gillies weren’t well designed for using stairs. Lawler took the ramp at a quick pace and stepped out onto the terrace, a flat stretch of stiff, hard, tightly bound yellow sea-bamboo fibres fifty metres wide, varnished and laminated with seppeltane sap and supported by a trellis of heavy black kelp-timber beams. The island’s long, narrow central road cut across it. A left turn took you to the part of the island where the Gillies lived, a right turn led into the shantytown of the humans. He turned right.
“Good morning, doctor-sir,” Natim Gharkid murmured, twenty paces or so down the road, moving aside to let Lawler go by.
Gharkid had come to Sorve four or five years ago from some other island: a soft-eyed soft-faced man with dark smooth skin, who had not yet managed to fit himself into the life of the community in any very significant way. He was an algae farmer, who was going down to spend his day harvesting seaweeds in the shallows. That was all that he did. Most of the humans on Hydros followed a variety of occupations: in such a small population, it was necessary for people to attempt to master several skills. But Gharkid didn’t seem concerned about that. Lawler was not only the island’s doctor but also the pharmacist, the meteorologist, the undertaker, and—so Delagard apparently thought—the veterinarian. Gharkid, though, was an algae-farmer and nothing else. Lawler thought he was probably Hydros-born, but he wasn’t certain of it, so rarely did the man reveal anything at all about himself. Gharkid was the most self-effacing person Lawler had ever known, quiet and patient and diligent, amiable but unfathomable, a vague silent presence and not much more.
They exchanged automatic smiles as they passed each other now.
Then came three women in a row, all of them in loose green robes: Sisters Halla, Mariam and Thecla, who a couple of years ago had formed some sort of convent down at the tip of the island, past the ashmasters” yard, where bone of all sorts was stored to be processed into lime and then into soap, ink, paint and chemicals of a hundred uses. No one but ashmasters went there, ordinarily; the Sisters, living beyond the boneyard, were safe from all disturbance. It was an odd place to choose to live, all the same. Since setting up their convent the Sisters had had as little to do with men as they could manage. There were eleven of them altogether by now, nearly a third of all the human women on Sorve: a curious development, unique in the island’s short history. Delagard was full of lewd speculations about what went on down there. Very likely he was right.
“Sister Halla,” he said, saluting. “Sister Mariam. Sister Thecla.”
They looked at him the way they might have done if he had said something filthy. Lawler shrugged and went on.
The main reservoir was just up ahead, a covered circular tank three metres high and fifty metres across, constructed of varnished poles of sea-bamboo bound together with bright orange hoops of algae fronds and caulked within with the red pitch that was made from water-cucumbers. A berserk maze of wooden pipes emerged from it and fanned out toward the vaarghs that began just beyond it. The reservoir was probably the most important structure in the settlement. The first humans to get here had built it, five generations ago in the early twenty-fourth century when Hydros was still being used as a penal colony, and it required constant maintenance, endless patching and caulking and rehooping. There had been talk for at least ten years of replacing it with something more elegantly made, but nothing had ever been done about it, and Lawler doubted that anything ever would. It served its purpose well enough.
As Lawler approached the great wooden tank he saw the priest who had lately come to live on Hydros, Father Quillan of the Church of All Worlds, edging slowly around it from the far side, doing something extremely strange. Every ten paces or thereabouts Quillan would halt, face the reservoir wall, and stretch his arms out against it in a sort of hug, pressing his fingertips thoughtfully against the wall here and there as though probing for leaks.
“Afraid that the wall’s going to pop?” Lawler called to him. The priest was an offworlder, a newcomer. He had been on Hydros less than a year and had arrived on Sorve Island only a few weeks before. “You don’t need to worry about that.”
Quillan looked quickly around, visibly embarrassed. He took his hands away from the side of the reservoir.