“Three dead divers aren’t so trivial!” Sundira called out. “You’re talking about intelligent creatures!”
“Intelligent?” Dag Tharp said mockingly.
“You bet they are. And if I were a Gillie and I found out that the goddamned humans were killing off divers, I’d want to be rid of them too.”
Henders said, “Well, whatever. I say that if the Gillies succeed in throwing us out of here, we’ll find the whole goddamned ocean rising up against us once we’re out to sea. And not by any accident. The Gillies control the sea animals. Everybody knows that. And they’ll use them against us to wipe us out.”
“What if we simply don’t let the Gillies throw us out?” Damis Sawtelle asked. “What if we fight back?”
“Fight?” said Bamber Cadrell. “Fight how? Fight with what? You out of your mind, Damis?”
They were both ferry-captains, solid practical men, friends since boyhood. Right now they were looking at each other with the dull, glowering look of lifelong enemies.
“Resistance,” Sawtelle said. “Guerrilla warfare.”
“We sneak down to their end of the island and grab something that looks important from that holy building of theirs,” Nimber Tanamind suggested. “And refuse to give it back unless they agree to let us stay.”
“That sounds dumb to me,” Cadrell said.
Nicko Thalheim said, “To me too. Stealing their jujus won’t get us anywhere. Armed resistance is the ticket, just like Damis says. Guerrilla warfare, absolutely. Gillie blood flowing in the streets until they back down on the expulsion order. They don’t even have the concept of war on this planet. They won’t know what the hell we’re doing if we put up a fight.”
“Shalikomo,” somebody said from the back. “Remember what happened there.”
“Shalikomo, yes,” another voice called. “They’ll slaughter us the same way they did them. And there won’t be a damned thing we can do to stop it.”
“Right,” Marya Hayn said. “We’re the ones who don’t have the concept of war, not them. They know how to kill when they want to. What are we going to attack them with, scaling knives? Hammers and chisels? We aren’t fighters. Our ancestors were, maybe, but we don’t even know what the idea means.”
“We have to learn,” said Thalheim. “We can’t let ourselves be driven from our homes.”
“Can’t we?” Marya Hain asked. “What choice do we have? We’re here only by their sufferance. Which they have now withdrawn. It’s their island. If we try to resist, they’ll pick us up one by one and throw us into the sea, the way they did on Shalikomo.”
“We’ll take plenty of them with us,” Damis Sawtelle said, with heat in his voice.
Dann Henders burst into laughter. “Into the sea? Right. Right. We’ll hold their heads under water until they drown.”
“You know what I meant,” Sawtelle grumbled. “They kill one of us, we kill one of them. Once they start dying they’ll change their minds pretty damn fast about making us leave.”
“They’ll kill us faster than we could kill them,” said Poitin Stayvol’s wife Leynila. Stayvol was Delagard’s second most senior captain, after Gospo Struvin. He was off sailing the Kentrup ferry just then. Leynila, short and fiery, could always be counted on to speak up against anything that Damis Sawtelle favoured. They had been that way since they were children. “Even one for one, where’s that going to get us?” Leynila demanded.
Dana Sawtelle nodded. She crossed the room to stand next to Marya and Leynila. Most of the women were on one side of the room and the handful of men who constituted the war faction were on the other. “Leynila’s right. If we try to fight we’ll all be killed. What’s the sense of it? If there’s a war and we fight like terrific heroes and at the end of it we’re all dead, how will we be better off than if we had simply got into a ship and gone somewhere else?”
Her husband swung around to face her. “Keep quiet, Dana.”
“The hell I will, Damis! The hell I will! You think I’m going to sit here like a child while you people talk about launching an attack on a physically superior group of alien beings who outnumber us about ten to one? We can’t fight them.”
“We have to.”
“No. No.”
“This is all foolishness, this talk of fighting. They’re only bluffing,” Lis Niklaus said. “They won’t really make us go.”
“Oh, yes, they will—”
“Not if Nid has anything to say about it!”
“It’s your precious Nid that got us into this in the first place!” Marya Hain yelled.
“And he’ll get us out of it. The Gillies are angry just now, but they won’t—”
“What do you think, doc?” someone called out.
Lawler had kept silent during the debate, waiting for emotions to play themselves out. It was always a mistake to jump into these things too soon.
Now he rose. Suddenly it was very quiet in the room. Every eye was on him. They wanted The Answer from him. Some miracle, some hope of reprieve. They were confident he’d deliver it. Pillar of the community, descendant of a famous Founder; the trusted doctor who knew everyone’s body better than they did themselves; wise and cool head, respected dispenser of shrewd advice.
He looked around at them all before he began to speak.
“I’m sorry, Damis, Nicko. Nimber. I think all this talk of resistance gets us nowhere useful. We need to admit to ourselves that that isn’t an option.” There was grumbling at once from the war faction. Lawler silenced it with a cool glare. “Trying to fight the Gillies is like trying to drink the sea dry. We’ve got no weapons. We’ve got maybe forty able-bodied fighters at best, against hundreds of them. It isn’t even worth thinking about.” The silence became glacial. But he could see his calm words sinking in: people exchanging glances, heads nodding. He turned toward Lis Niklaus. “Lis, the Gillies aren’t bluffing and Nid doesn’t have any way of getting them to take back their order. He spoke to them and so did I. You know that. If you still think the Gillies are going to change their minds, you’re dreaming.”
How solemn they all looked, how sombre! The Sweyners, Dag Tharp, a cluster of Thalheims, the Sawtelles. Sidero Volkin and his wife Elka, Dann Henders, Martin Yanez. Young Josc Yanez. Lis. Leo Martello. Pilya Braun. Leynila Stayvol. Sundira Thane. He knew them all so well, all but just a few. They were his family, just as he had told Delagard that boozy night. Yes. Yes. It was so. Everyone on this island.
“Friends,” he said, “we’d better face the realities. I don’t like this any more than you do, but we have no choice. The Gillies say we have to leave? Okay. It’s their island. They have the numbers, they have the muscle. We’re going to be living somewhere else soon and that’s all there is to it. I wish I could offer something more cheery, but I can’t. Nobody can. Nobody.”
He waited for some fiery rejoinder from Thalheim or Tanamind or Damis Sawtelle. But they had nothing more to say. There wasn’t anything anyone could say. All this talk of armed resistance had been only whistling in the wind. The meeting broke up inconclusively. There was no choice but to submit: everyone saw that now.
Lawler was standing by the sea-wall between Delagard’s shipyard and the Gillie power plant, looking out at the changing colours in the bay late one afternoon in the second week since the ultimatum, when Sundira Thane went swimming by below. In mid-stroke she glanced up quickly and nodded to him. Lawler nodded back and waved. Her long slender legs flashed in a scissor kick, and she surged forward, torso bending in a sudden swift surface dive.
For a moment Lawler saw Sundira’s pale boyish buttocks gleaming above the water; then she was travelling rapidly just beneath the surface, a lean naked tawny wraith swimming away from shore in steady, powerful strokes. Lawler followed her with his eyes until she was lost to his sight. She swims like a Gillie, he thought. She hadn’t come up for air in what felt to him like three or four minutes. Didn’t she need to breathe at all?