“Yes,” Lawler said. “I guess they do.”
She stared straight into his eyes. She was nearly on eye level with him. “You’ve lived here a long time, haven’t you, Lawler?”
“All my life.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. This is going to be rough for you.”
“I’ll deal with it,” he said. “Every island can use another doctor. Even a half-baked doctor like me.” He laughed. “Listen, how’s that cough doing?”
“I haven’t coughed once since you gave me that dope.”
“I didn’t think you would.”
Delagard suddenly was at Lawler’s elbow again. Without apologizing for breaking in on his conversation with Sundira, he said, “Will you come with me to the Gillies, doc?”
“What for?”
“They know you. They respect you. You’re your father’s son and that gives you points with them. They think of you as a serious and honourable man. If I have to promise to leave the island, you can vouch for me, that I mean it when I say I’ll go away and never come back.”
“They’ll believe you without my help, if you tell them that. They don’t expect any intelligent being to tell lies, even you. But that still won’t change anything.”
“Come with me all the same, Lawler.”
“It’s a waste of time. What we need to be doing is starting to plan the evacuation.”
“Let’s try it, at least. We can’t be sure if we don’t try.”
Lawler considered that. “Right now?”
“After dark,” Delagard said. “They don’t want to see any of us now. They’re too busy celebrating the opening of the new power plant. They got it going about two hours ago, you know. They’ve got a cable running from the waterfront to their end of the island and it’s carrying juice.”
“Good for them.”
“I’ll meet you down by the sea-wall at sunset, all right? And we’ll go and talk to them together. Will you do that, Lawler?”
In the afternoon Lawler sat quietly in his vaargh, trying to comprehend what it would mean to have to leave the island, working at the concept, worrying at it. No patients came to see him. Delagard, true to his promise of the early morning, had sent some flasks of grapeweed brandy over, and Lawler drank a little, and then a little more, without any particular effect. Lawler thought of allowing himself another dose of his tranquillizer, but somehow that seemed not to be a good idea. He was tranquil enough as it was, right now: what he felt wasn’t his usual restlessness, but rather a sodden dullness of spirit, a heavy weight of depression, for which the pink drops weren’t likely to be of any use.
I am going to leave Sorve Island, he thought.
I am going to live somewhere else, on an island I don’t know, among people whose names and ancestries and inner natures are absolute mysteries to me.
He told himself that it was all right, that in a few months he’d feel just as much at home on Thibeire, or Velmise, or Kaggeram, or whatever island it was that he ultimately settled on, as he did on Sorve. He knew that that wasn’t true, but that was what he told himself, all the same.
Resignation seemed to help. Acceptance, even indifference. The trouble was that he couldn’t stay on that numbed-down level consistently. From time to time a sudden flare of shock and bewilderment would hit him, a sense of intolerable loss, even of out-and-out fear. And then he had to start all over again.
When it began to grow dark Lawler left his vaargh and headed down to the sea-wall.
Two moons had risen, and a faint sliver of Sunrise had returned to the sky. The bay was alive with twilight colours, long streaks of reflected gold and purple, fading quickly into the grey of night as he watched. The dark shapes of mysterious sea-creatures moved purposefully in the shallow waters. It was all very peacefuclass="underline" the bay at sundown, calm, lovely.
But then thoughts of the voyage that awaited him crept into his mind. Lawler looked outward beyond the harbour to the vastness of the unfriendly, inconceivable sea. How far would they have to sail before they found an island willing to take them in? A week’s journey? Two weeks? A month? He had never been to sea at all, not even for a day. That time he had gone over to Thibiere, it had been a simple journey by coracle, just beyond the shallows to the other island that had come up so close by Sorve.
Lawler realized that he feared the sea. The sea was a great world-sized mouth, which he sometimes imagined must have swallowed up all of Hydros in some ancient convulsion, leaving nothing but the little drifting islands that the Gillies had created. It would swallow him too, if he set out to cross it.
Angrily he told himself that this was foolishness, that men like Gabe Kinverson went out into the sea every day and survived it, that Nid Delagard had made a hundred voyages between the islands, that Sundira Thane had come to Sorve from an island in the Azure Sea, which was so far away that he had never heard of it. It would be all right. He would board one of Delagard’s ships and in a week or two it would bring him to the island that would be his new home.
And yet—the blackness, the immensity, the surging power of the terrible world-spanning sea—
“Lawler?” a voice called.
He looked around. For the second time this day Nid Delagard stepped out of the shadows behind him.
“Come on,” the shipyard owner said. “It’s getting late. Let’s go talk to the Gillies.”
5
There were electric lights glowing in the Gillie power plant, just a little way farther along the curve of the shore. Other lights, dozens of them, maybe hundreds, could be seen blazing in the streets of Gillie-town beyond. The unexpected catastrophe of the expulsion had completely overshadowed the other big event of the day, the inauguration of turbine-driven electrical generation on Sorve Island.
The light coming from the power plant was cool, greenish, faintly mocking. The Gillies had a technology of sorts, which had reached an eighteenth or nineteenth-century Earth-equivalent level, and they had invented a kind of light bulb, using filaments made from the fibres of the exceedingly versatile sea-bamboo plant. The bulbs were costly and difficult to make, and the big voltaic pile that had been the island’s main source of power was clumsy and recalcitrant, producing electricity only in a sluggish, intermittent fashion and constantly breaking down. But now—after how many years of work? Five? Ten?—the island’s bulbs were being lit from a new and inexhaustible source, power from the sea, warm water from the surface converted to steam, steam making the generator’s turbines turn, electricity streaming forth from the generator to light the lamps of Sorve Island.
The Gillies had agreed to let the humans at the other end of the island draw off some of the new power in return for labour—Sweyner would make light bulbs for them, Dann Henders would help with the stringing of cable, and so forth. Lawler had been instrumental in setting up that arrangement, along with Delagard, Nicko Thalheim and one or two others. That was the one little triumph of inter-species cooperation that the humans had been able to manage in recent years. It had taken about six months of slow and painstaking negotiation.
Only this morning, Lawler remembered, he had hoped to work out another such cooperative enterprise with them entirely by himself. That seemed a million years ago. And here they were at nightfall, setting forth to beg just to be allowed to continue living on the island at all.
Delagard said, “We’ll go straight to the honcho cabin, okay? No sense not starting at the top for this one.”
Lawler shrugged. “Whatever you say.”
They walked around the power plant and headed into Gillie territory, still following the shore of the bay. The island widened rapidly here, rising from the low bayfront levels behind the sea-wall to a broad circular plateau that contained most of the Gillie settlement. On the far side of the plateau there was a steep drop where the island’s thick wooden sea-bulwark descended in a straight sheer line to the dark ocean far below.