“Hello, Lawler.”
The priest was a compact, austere-looking man, balding and clean-shaven, who might have been any age at all between forty-five and sixty. He was thin, as if all the flesh had been sweated off him, with a long oval face and a strong, bony nose. His eyes, set deep in their sockets, were a chilly light blue and his skin was very pale, almost bleached-looking, though a steady diet of the maritime-derived things that people ate on Hydros was starting to give him the dusky sea-tinged complexion that the old-time settlers had: the algae cropping out in the skin, so to speak.
Lawler said, “The reservoir’s extremely sturdy. Believe me, Father. I’ve lived here all my life and that reservoir hasn’t burst its walls even once. We couldn’t afford to let that happen.”
Quillan laughed self-consciously. “That isn’t what I was doing actually. I was embracing its strength, as a matter of fact.”
“I see.”
“Feeling all that contained power. Experiencing a sense of great force under restraint—tons of water held back by nothing more than human will and determination.”
“And a lot of sea-bamboo and hooping, Father. Not to mention God’s grace.”
“That too,” Quillan said.
Very peculiar, hugging the reservoir because you wanted to experience its strength. But Quillan was always doing curious things like that. There seemed to be some kind of desperate hunger in the man: for grace, for mercy, for surrender to something larger than himself. For faith itself, perhaps. It seemed odd to Lawler that a man who claimed to be a priest would be so needy of spirit.
He said, “My great-great-grandfather designed it, you know. Harry Lawler, one of the Founders. He could do anything he put his mind to, my grandfather used to say. Take out your appendix, sail a ship from one island to another, design a reservoir.” Lawler paused. “He was sent here for murder, old Harry was. Manslaughter, I should say.”
“I didn’t know. So your family has always lived on Sorve?”
“Since the beginning. I was born here. Just about a hundred and eighty metres from where we’re standing, actually.” Lawler slapped the side of the reservoir affectionately. “Good old Harry. We’d be in real trouble here without this. You see how dry our climate is.”
“I’m starting to find out,” said the priest. “doesn’t it ever rain here at all?”
“Certain times of the year,” Lawler said. “This isn’t one of the times. You won’t see any rain around here for another nine, ten months. That’s why we took care to build our reservoirs so that they wouldn’t spring any leaks.”
Water was scarce on Sorve: the kind of water that humans could use, at any rate. The island travelled through arid territory most of the year. That was the work of the inexorable currents. The floating islands of Hydros, though they drifted more or less freely in the sea, were nevertheless penned for decades at a time within clearly defined longitudinal belts by powerful ocean currents, strong as great rivers. Every year each island carried out a rigidly defined migration from one pole to the other and back again; each pole was surrounded by a vortex of swift water that seized the incoming islands, swung them around, and sent them off toward the opposite end of the planet. But though the islands passed through every latitudinal belt in their annual north-south migrations, east-west fluctuations were minimal because of the force of the prevailing currents. Sorve, in its endless travelling up and down the world, had stayed between the fortieth and sixtieth degrees of west longitude as long as Lawler could remember. That seemed basically to be an arid belt in most latitudes. Rain was infrequent except when the island was moving through the polar zones, where heavy downfalls were the rule.
The almost perpetual droughts were no problem for the Gillies, who were constructed for drinking sea-water anyway. But they made existence complicated for the humans. Water rationing was a routine fact of life on Sorve. There had been two years—when Lawler was twelve, and again when he was twenty, the dark year of his father’s death—when freakish rainfall had pelted the island for weeks without ceasing, so that the reservoirs had overflowed and the rationing had been abandoned. That had been an interesting novelty for the first week or so, each time, and then the unending downpours, the grey days and the rank smell of mildew, had become a bore. On the whole Lawler preferred drought: he was accustomed to it, at least.
Quillan said, “This place fascinates me. It’s the strangest world I’ve ever known.”
“I could say the same thing, I suppose.”
“Have you travelled much? Around Hydros, I mean.”
“I was on Thibeire Island once,” Lawler said. “It came very close, floated up right out there in the harbour, and a bunch of us took a coracle over to it and spent the whole day there. I was fifteen, then. That’s the only time I’ve been anywhere else.” He gave Quillan a wary glance. “But you’re a real traveller, I understand. They tell me you’ve seen quite a chunk of the galaxy in your day.”
“Some,” Quillan said. “Not all that much. I’ve been to seven worlds altogether. Eight, counting this one.”
“That’s seven more than I’ll ever see.”
“But now I’ve reached the end of the line.”
“Yes,” Lawler said. “That you certainly have.”
Offworlders who came to live on Hydros were beyond Lawler’s comprehension. Why did they do it? To let yourself be stuffed into a drop-capsule on Sunrise, next door in the sky just a dozen or so million kilometres away, and be flipped out into a landing orbit that would dump you down in the sea near one of the floating islands—knowing that you could never leave Hydros again? Since the Gillies refused to countenance the building of a spaceport anywhere on Hydros, coming here was strictly a one-way journey, and everyone out there understood that. But still they came—not many, but a steady trickle of them, choosing to live forever after as castaways on a shoreless shore, on a world without trees or flowers, birds or insects or green fields of grass, without furry animals or hooved ones—without ease, without comfort, without any of the benefits of modern technology, awash on the ceaseless tides, drifting from pole to pole and back again aboard islands made of wickerwork on a world fit only for creatures with fins or flippers.
Lawler had no idea why Quillan had wanted to come to Hydros, but it wasn’t the thing you asked someone. A kind of penance, perhaps. An act of self-abnegation. Certainly it wasn’t to perform church functions. The Church of All Worlds was a schismatic post-Papal Catholic sect without any adherents, so far as Lawler knew, anywhere on the planet. Nor did the priest seem to be here as a missionary. He had made no attempts to make converts since his arrival on Sorve, which was just as well, for religion had never been a matter of much interest among the islanders. “God is very far away from us on Sorve Island,” Lawler’s father had liked to say.
Quillan looked sombre for a moment, as though contemplating the realities of his having stranded himself on Hydros for the rest of his days. Then he said, “You don’t mind always staying in the same place? You don’t ever get restless? Curious about the other islands?”
“Not really,” Lawler said. “Thibeire was pretty much like Sorve, I thought. The same general layout, the same general feel. Only there was nobody there that I knew. If one place is just like another, why not stay in the place you know, among the people you’ve always lived with?” His eyes narrowed. “It’s the other worlds I wonder about. The dry-land ones. Actual solid planets. I wonder what it’s like to go and go for days and never see open water even once, to be on a hard surface all the time, not just an island but a whole huge continent where you can’t see right across from one end of the place where you live to the other, an enormous land mass that has cities and mountains and rivers on it. Those are just empty words to me. Cities. Mountains. I’d like to know what trees are like, and birds, and plants that have flowers. I wonder about Earth, you know? I dream sometimes that it still exists, that I’m actually on it, breathing its air, feeling its soil under my feet. Getting it under my fingernails. There’s no soil anywhere on Hydros, do you realize that? Only the sand of the sea bottom.”