The Gillie village was arrayed in an irregular circle, the most important buildings in the centre, the others strung raggedly along the periphery. The main difference between the inner buildings and the outer ones seemed to be one of permanence: the inner ones, which appeared to have ceremonial uses, were constructed of the same wood-kelp timber that the island itself was built from, and the outer ones, in which the Gillies lived, were slapdash tent-like things made of moist green seaweed wrapped loosely over sea-bamboo poles. They gave off a ghastly odour of rot as the sun baked them, and when they reached a certain degree of dryness the seaweed coverings were stripped away and replaced with fresh ones. What appeared to be a special caste of Gillies was constantly at work tearing down the huts and building new ones.
It would take about half a day to walk completely across the Gillie end of the island. By the time Lawler and Delagard had entered the inner circle of the village, Sunrise had set and the Hydros Cross was bright in the sky.
“Here they come,” Delagard said. “Let me do the talking, first. If they start getting snotty with me, you take over. I don’t mind if you tell them what a shit you think I am. Whatever works.”
“Do you really think anything’s going to work?”
“Shh. I don’t want to hear you talking like that.”
Half a dozen Gillies—males, Lawler guessed—were approaching them from the innermost part of the village. When they were ten or twelve metres away they halted and arranged themselves in front of the two humans in a straight line.
Delagard raised his hands in the gesture that meant, “We come in peace.” It was the universal humans-to-Gillies greeting. No conversation ever began without it.
The Gillies now were supposed to reply with the funereal wheezing sounds that meant, “We accept you as peaceful and we await your words.” But they didn’t say a thing. They simply stood there and stared.
“I don’t have a good feeling about this, do you?” Lawler said quietly.
“Wait. Wait.”
Delagard made the peace gesture again. He went on to make the hand-signals that meant, “We are your friends and regard you with the highest respect.”
One of the Gillies emitted what sounded like a fart.
Their glittering little yellow eyes, set close together at the base of their small heads, studied the two humans in what seemed like an icy and indifferent way.
“Let me try,” Lawler murmured.
He stepped forward. The wind was blowing from behind the Gillies: it brought him their damp heavy musky smell, mingled with the sharp reek of rotting seaweed from their ramshackle huts.
He made the We-come-in-peace sign. That produced no response, nor did the cognate We-are-your-friends one. After an appropriate pause he proceeded to make the signal that meant, “We seek an audience with the powers that reign.”
From one of the Gillies came the farting sound again. Lawler wondered if it was the same Gillie that had rumbled and snorted at him so menacingly in the early hours of the day, down by the power plant.
Delagard offered I-ask-forgiveness-for-an-unintended-transgression. Silence: cold indifferent eyes remotely watching.
Lawler tried How-may-we-atone-for-departure-from-right-conduct. He got nothing back.
“The lousy fuckers,” Delagard muttered. “I’d like to put a spear right through their fat bellies.”
“They know that,” Lawler said. “That’s why they don’t want to dicker with you.”
“I’ll go away. You talk to them by yourself.”
“If you think it’s worth trying.”
“You have a clean record with them. Remind them who you are. Who your father was and what he did for them.”
“Any other suggestions?” Lawler asked.
“Look, I’m just trying to be helpful. But go on, do it any way you like. I’ll be at the shipyard. Stop off there when you get back and let me know how it goes.”
Delagard slipped off into the darkness.
Lawler took a few steps closer to the six Gillies and began again with the initiating gesture. Next he identified himself: Valben Lawler, doctor, son of Bernat Lawler the doctor. The great healer whom they surely remembered, the man who had freed their young ones from the menace of fin-rot.
He felt the strong irony of it: this was the opening of the speech he had spent half the night rehearsing in his sleepless mind. He was getting a chance to deliver it after all. In the context of a very different situation, though.
They looked at him without responding.
At least they didn’t fart this time, Lawler thought.
He signalled, “We are ordered to leave the island. Is this so?”
From the Gillie on the left came the deep soughing tone that meant an affirmative.
“This brings us great sorrow. Is there any way that we can cause this order to be withdrawn?”
Negative, boomed the Gillie on the right.
Lawler stared at them hopelessly. The wind picked up, flinging their heavy odour into his face by the bucketful, and he fought back nausea. Gillies had never seemed other than strange and mysterious to him, and a little repellent. He knew that he should take them for granted, simply one aspect of the world where he had always lived, like the ocean or the sky. But for all their familiarity they remained, to him, creatures of another creation. Star-things. Aliens: us and them, humans and aliens, no kinship. Why was that? he wondered. I’m as much a native of this world as they are.
He held his ground and told them, “It was simply an unfortunate accident that those divers died. There was no malice involved.”
Boom. Wheeze. Hwsssh.
Meaning: We are not interested in why it happened, only that it happened at all.
Behind the six Gillies, bleak greenish lights flashed on and off, illuminating the curious structures—statues? machines? idols?—that occupied the open space at the centre of the village, strange lumps and knobs of metals that had been patiently extracted from the tissues of small sea-creatures and assembled into random-looking, rust-caked heaps of junk.
“Delagard promises never to use divers again,” Lawler told the Gillies, cajoling them now, looking hopefully for an opening.
Wheeze. Boom. Indifference.
“Won’t you tell us how we can make things good again? We regret what happened. We regret it intensely.”
No response. Cold yellow eyes, staring, aloof.
This is idiocy, Lawler thought. It’s like arguing with the wind.
“Damn it, this is our home !” he cried, matching the words with furious equivalent gestures. “It always has been!”
Three rumbling tones, descending in thirds.
“Find another home?” Lawler asked. “But we love this place! I was born here. We’ve never done harm to you before, any of us. My father—you knew my father, he was helpful to you when—”
The farting sound again.
It meant exactly what it sounded like, Lawler thought.
There was no sense in going on. He understood fully the futility of it. They were losing patience with him. Soon would come the rumbling, the snorting, the anger. And then anything might happen.
With a wave of a flipper one of the Gillies indicated that the meeting was at its end. The dismissal was unmistakable.
Lawler made a gesture of disappointment. He signalled sadness, anguish, dismay.
To which one of the Gillies replied, surprisingly, with a quick rolling phrase that might almost have been one of sympathy. Or was that only his optimistic imagination? Lawler couldn’t be sure. And then, to his amazement, the creature stepped out of the line and came shuffling toward him with unexpected speed, its flipper-arms extended. Lawler was too startled to move. What was this? The Gillie loomed over him like a wall. Here it comes, he thought, the onslaught, the casual lethal outburst of irritation. He stood as though rooted. Some frantic impulse toward self-preservation shrieked within him, but he couldn’t find the will to try to flee. The Gillie caught him by one arm and pulled him close and enfolded him with its flippers in a tight, smothering embrace. Lawler felt the sharp curved claws lightly digging into his flesh, gripping him with strange, mystifying delicacy. He remembered the red marks Delagard had shown him.