Circular purple medallions the size of a thumbnail were moving slowly up and down along the chart, some thirty or forty of them, perhaps even more, driven by the mechanism within. Most went in a straight line, heading from one pole toward the other, but occasionally one would glide almost imperceptibly into an adjacent longitudinal strip, the way an actual island might wander a little to the east or to the west while riding the main current carrying it toward the pole. Lawler marvelled at the thing’s ingenuity.
Delagard said, “You know how to read one of these? These here are the islands. This is Home Sea. This island here is Sorve.”
A little purple blotch, making its slow way upward near the equator of the globe against the green background of the strip on which it was travelling: an insignificant speck, a bit of moving colour, nothing more. Very small to be so dear, Lawler thought.
“The whole world is shown here, at least as we understand it to be. These are the inhabited islands, in purple—inhabited by humans. This is the Black Sea, this is the Red Sea, this is the Yellow Sea over here.”
“What about the Azure Sea?” Lawler asked.
Delagard seemed a little surprised. “Way up over here, practically in the other hemisphere. What do you know about the Azure Sea, doc?”
“Nothing much. Someone mentioned it to me recently, that’s all.”
“A hell of a trip from here, the Azure Sea. I’ve never been there.” Delagard turned the globe to show Lawler the other side. “Here’s the Empty Sea. This big dark thing down here is the Face of the Waters. Do you remember the great stories old Jolly used to tell about the Face?”
“That grizzly old liar. You don’t actually believe he got anywhere near it, do you?”
Delagard winked. “It was a terrific story, wasn’t it?”
Lawler nodded and let his mind wander for a moment back close to thirty-five years, thinking of the weatherbeaten old man’s oft-repeated tale of his lonely crossing of the Empty Sea, of his mysterious and dreamlike encounter with the Face, an island so big you could fit all the other islands of the world into it, a vast and menacing thing filling the horizon, rising like a black wall out of the ocean in that remote and silent corner of the world. On the sea-chart, the Face was merely a dark motionless patch the size of the palm of a man’s hand, a ragged black blemish against the otherwise blank expanse of the far hemisphere, down low almost in the south polar region.
He turned the globe back to the other hemisphere and watched the islands slowly moving about.
Lawler wondered how a sea-chart made so long ago could predict the current positions of the islands in any useful way. Surely they were deflected from their primary courses by all sorts of short-term weather phenomena. Or had the maker of the chart taken that all into account, using some sort of scientific magic inherited from the great world of science in the galaxy beyond? Things were so primitive on Hydros that Lawler was always surprised when any kind of mechanism worked; but he knew that it was different on the other inhabited worlds of space, where there was land, and a ready supply of metals, and a way to move from world to world. The technological magics of Earth, of the old lost mother world, had carried over to those worlds. But there was nothing like that here.
He said, after a moment, “How accurate do you imagine this chart is? Considering that it’s fifty years old, and all.”
“Have we learned anything new about Hydros in the past fifty years? This is the best sea-chart we have. Old Felk was a master craftsman, and he talked to everyone who went to sea, anywhere. And checked his information against observations made from space, on Sunrise. It’s accurate, all right. Damned accurate.”
Lawler followed the movements of the islands as though mesmerized by them. Maybe the chart really did give reliable information, maybe not: he was in no position to tell. He had never understood how anyone at sea ever could find his way back to his own island, let alone reach some distant one, considering that both the ship and the island were in motion all the time. I ought to ask Gabe Kinverson about that sometime, Lawler thought.
“All right. What’s your plan?”
Delagard pointed toward Sorve on the chart. “You see this island southwest of us, coming up out of the next strip? That’s Velmise. It’s drifting north and east, moving at a higher velocity than we are, and it’ll pass within relatively easy reach about a month from now. At that time it’ll be maybe a ten-day journey from here, maybe even less. I’m going to put through a message to my son there and ask him if they’d be willing to take us in, all seventy-eight of us.”
“And if they aren’t? Velmise is pretty damned small.”
“We have other choices. Here’s Salimil moving up from the other side. It’ll be something like two and a half weeks from us when we have to leave here.”
Lawler considered the prospect of spending two and a half weeks in a ship on the open sea. Under the blazing eye of the sun, in the constant parching blast of the salt sea-breeze, eating dried fish, pacing back and forth on a little deck with nothing to see but ocean and more ocean.
He reached for the brandy bottle and filled his cup again himself.
Delagard said, “If Salimil won’t take us, we’ve got Kaggeram down here, or Shaktan, or Grayvard, even. I have kin on Grayvard. I think I can arrange something. That would be an eight-week journey.”
Eightweeks? Lawler tried to imagine what that would be like.
He said, after a time, “Nobody’s going to have room for seventy-eight people on thirty days” notice. Not Velmise, not Salimil, not anybody.”
“In that case we’ll just have to split up, a few of us going here, a few of us going there.”
“No!” Lawler said with sudden vehemence.
“No?”
“I don’t want that. I want the community to stay together.”
“What if it can’t be done?”
“We have to find a way. We can’t take a group of people who have been together all their lives and scatter them all over the goddamned ocean. We’re a family, Nid.”
“Are we? I guess I don’t think of it that way.”
“Think of it that way now.”
“Well, then,” Delagard said. He sat quietly, frowning. “I guess as a last resort we could simply present ourselves on one of the islands that isn’t currently inhabited by humans and ask the Gillies living there for sanctuary. It’s happened before.”
“The Gillies there would know that we were thrown out by our Gillies here. And why.”
“Maybe it wouldn’t matter. You know Gillies as well as I do, doc. A lot of them are pretty tolerant of us. To them we’re just one more example of the inscrutable way of the universe, something that simply happened to wash up on their shores out of the great sea of space. They understand that it’s a waste of breath questioning the inscrutable way of the universe. Which I suppose is why they simply shrugged and let us move in on them when we first came here.”
“The wisest ones think that way, maybe. The rest of them detest us and don’t want a damned thing to do with us. Why the hell should the Gillies of some other island take us in when the Sorve Gillies have tossed us out as murderers?”
“We’ll be all right,” Delagard said serenely, not reacting in any visible way to the ugly word. He nursed his brandy cup with both hands, staring into it. “We’ll go to Velmise. Or Salimil, or Grayvard if we have to, or someplace completely new. And we’ll all stay together and make a new life for ourselves. I’ll see to that. Count on it, doc.”