Now, though, there was no one else waiting to see him and a little fresh air seemed like a good prescription for the doctor himself. Lawler stepped out into the bright noontime sun, stretched, did a few pinwheels with his extended arms. He peered downslope toward the waterfront. There was the bay, friendly and familiar, its calm enclosed waters rippling gently. It looked wonderfully beautiful just now: a glassy sheet of luminous gold, a glowing mirror. The dark fronds of the varied sea-flora waved lazily in the shallows. Farther out, occasional shining fins breached the glistening surface. A couple of Delagard’s ships lolled by the shipyard pier, swaying gently to the rhythm of the easy tide. Lawler felt as though this moment of summer noon could go on forever, that night and winter would never come again. An unexpected feeling of peace and well-being infiltrated his souclass="underline" a gift, a bit of serendipitous joy.
“Lawler,” a voice said from his left.
A dry frayed croak of a voice, a boneyard voice, a voice that was all ashes and rubble. It was a dismal burned-out unrecognizable wreck of a voice that Lawler recognized, somehow, as that of Nid Delagard.
He had come up along the southern path from the water-front and was standing between Lawler’s vaargh and the little tank where Lawler kept his current stock of freshly picked medicinal algae. He was flushed and rumpled and sweaty and his eyes looked strangely glassy, as though he had had a stroke.
“What the hell has happened now?” Lawler asked, exasperated.
Delagard made a wordless gaping movement with his mouth, like a fish out of water, and said nothing.
Lawler dug his fingers into the man’s thick, meaty arm. “Can you speak? Come on, damn you. Tell me what’s happened.”
“Yeah. Yeah.” Delagard moved his head from side to side in a slow, ponderous, pole-axed way. “It’s very bad. It’s worse than I ever imagined.”
“What is?”
“Those fucking divers. The Gillies are really furious about them. And they’re going to come down on us very hard. Very very very hard. It’s what I was trying to tell you about this morning in the shed, when you walked out on me.”
Lawler blinked a couple of times. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”
“Give me some brandy first.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Come inside.”
He poured a strong jolt of the thick sea-coloured liquor for Delagard, and, after a moment’s consideration, a smaller drink for himself. Delagard put his away in a single gulp and held out the cup. Lawler poured again.
After a little while Delagard said, picking his way warily through his words as if struggling with some speech impediment, “The Gillies came to visit me just now, about a dozen of them. Walked right up out of the water down at the shipyard and asked my men to call me out for a talk.”
Gillies? At the human end of the island? That hadn’t happened in decades. Gillies never went farther south than the promontory where they had built their power plant. Never.
Delagard gave him a tortured look. “What do you want,” I said. Using the politest gestures, Lawler, everything very very courteous. I think the ones that were there were the big Gillie honchos, but how can you be sure? Who can tell one of them from the next? They looked important, anyway. They said, “Are you Nid Delagard” as if they didn’t know. And I said I was, and then they grabbed me.”
“Grabbedyou?”
“I mean, physically grabbed me. Put their little funny flippers on me. Pushed me up against the wall of my own building and restrained me.”
“You’re lucky you’re still around to talk about it.”
“No kidding. I tell you, doc, I was scared shitless. I thought they were going to gut me and fillet me right there. Look, look here, the marks of their claws on my arm.” He showed fading reddish spots. “My face is swollen, isn’t it? I tried to pull my head away and one of them bumped me, maybe by accident, but look. Look. Two of them held me and a third one put his nose in my face and started telling me things, and I mean telling me, big booming noises, oom whang hoooof theeeezt, ooom whang hooof theeezt. At the beginning I was so shaken up I couldn’t understand any of it. But then it came clear. They said it again and again until they made sure I understood. An ultimatum, it was.” Delagard’s voice dropped into a lower register. “We’ve been thrown off the island. We have thirty days to clean ourselves out of here. Every last one of us.”
Abruptly Lawler felt the ground disappearing beneath his feet.
“What?”
The other man’s hard little brown eyes had taken on a frantic glitter. He signalled for more brandy. Lawler poured without even looking at the cup. “Any human remaining on Sorve when the time’s up will be tossed into the lagoon and not allowed back up on shore. Any structures we’ve erected here will be demolished. The reservoir, the shipyard, these buildings here in the plaza, everything. Things we leave behind in the vaarghs go into the sea. Any ocean-going vessels we leave in the harbour will be sunk. We are terminated, doc. We are ex-residents of Sorve Island. Finished, done for, gone.”
Lawler stared, incredulous. A quick cycle of turbulent emotions ran through him: disorientation, depression, despair. Confusion assailed him. Leave Sorve? Leave Sorve?
He began to tremble. With an effort he got himself under control, fighting his way back to inner equilibrium.
Tightly he said, “Killing some divers in an industrial accident is definitely not a good thing to have done. But this is too much of an overreaction. You must have misunderstood what they were saying.”
“Like shit I did. Not a chance. They made themselves very very clear.”
“We all have to go?”
“We all have to go, yes. Thirty days.”
Am I hearing him correctly, Lawler wondered? Is any of this really happening?
“And did they give a reason?” he asked. “Was it the divers?”
“Of course it was,” Delagard said in a low husky voice clotted by shame. “It was just like you said this morning. The Gillies always know everything that we do.”
“Christ. Christ.” Anger was beginning to take the place of shock. Delagard had casually gambled with the lives of everyone on the island, and he had lost. The Gillies had warned him: Don’ t ever do that again, or we’ ll throw you out of here. And he had done it again anyway. “What a contemptible bastard you are, Delagard!”
“I don’t know how they found out. I took precautions. We brought them in by night, we kept them covered until they were in the shed, the shed itself was locked—”