On the first day, when they were still crossing the bay, Lawler had found himself wandering astern again and again to look back at Sorve Island as it receded into invisibility.
In those early hours of the voyage Sorve had risen behind them like a long tawny mound. It still seemed real and tangible then. He was able to make out the familiar central spine and the outcurving arms, the grey spires of the vaarghs, the power plant, the rambling buildings of Delagard’s shipyard. He thought he could even see the sombre line of Gillies who had come down to the shore to watch the six vessels depart.
Then the water began to change colour. The deep rich green of the shallow bay gave way to the ocean colour, which here was a dark blue tinged with grey. That was the true mark of cutting loose from shore, when you had left the bay behind. To Lawler it felt as if a trapdoor had been sprung, catapulting him into free fall. Now that the artificial bottom had dropped away beneath them Sorve began rapidly to shrink, becoming nothing but a dark line on the horizon, and then nothing at all.
Farther out the ocean would be other colours, depending on the microorganisms in it, the surrounding climate, the upwellings of particulate matter from the depths. The different seas were named according to their prevailing hue: the Red Sea, the Yellow, the Azure, the Black. The one to fear was the Empty Sea, the sea that was pale ice-blue, a desert sea. Great tracts of the ocean were like that and almost nothing lived in them. But the route of the expedition would pass nowhere near any of that.
The ships were travelling in a tight pyramid-shaped formation that they would try to hold to day and night. Each vessel was under the command of one of Delagard’s ferry captains except for the one on which the eleven women of the Sisterhood sailed all by themselves. Delagard had offered to give them one of his men to be their pilot, but they had refused, as he had expected them to do. “Sailing a ship’s no problem,” Sister Halla told him. “We’ll watch what you do and we’ll do the same thing.”
Delagard’s flagship, the Queen of Hydros, was in the lead, at the apex of the pyramid, with Gospo Struvin in charge. Then came two side by side, the Black Sea Star commanded by Poilin Stayvol and the Sorve Goddess under Bamber Cadrell, and behind them the other three ships in a broader line, the Sisterhood in the middle aboard the Hydros Cross flanked by the Three Moons under Martin Yanez and the Golden Sun commanded by Damis Sawtelle.
Now, with Sorve altogether gone from view, there was nothing in sight anywhere but sky and sea, the flat horizon, the gentle ocean swells. A curious sort of peace descended over Lawler. He found it surprisingly easy to submerge himself in the vastness of it all, to lose himself completely. The sea was calm and seemed likely to stay that way forever. Sorve could no longer be seen, that was true. Sorve had disappeared. What of it? Sorve no longer mattered.
He moved forward along the deck, savouring the force of the wind against his back as it pushed the ship steadily onward, every minute carrying him farther and farther from anything he had ever known.
Father Quillan was standing by the foremast. The priest wore a dark grey wrap of some unusual light woven material, airy and soft, something he must have brought with him from another world. There were no such fabrics available on Hydros.
Lawler paused by his side. Quillan gestured broadly toward the sea. It was like an enormous blue jewel, sparkling with fierce brilliance, its great glassy curve reaching outward on all sides as if the entire planet were a single shining polished sphere. “Looking at all that, you wouldn’t believe that anything but water exists anywhere in the world, would you?”
“Not here, no.”
“Such an enormous ocean. Such emptiness everywhere.”
“Makes you think there has to be a god, does it? The immensity of it all.”
Quillan looked at him, startled.
“Does it?”
“I don’t know. I was asking you.”
“Do you believe in God, Lawler?”
“My father did.”
“But not you?”
Lawler shrugged. “My father had a Bible. He used to read it to us. It got lost, somewhere, a long time back. Or stolen. I remember a little of it. “And God said, let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters… And God called the firmament Heaven.” That’s Heaven up there, right, Father Quillan? Behind the sky? And the waters that are supposed to be above it, that’s the ocean of space, isn’t it?” Quillan was staring at him in astonishment. “And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear, and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas.”
Quillan said, “You know the whole Bible by heart, do you?”
“Only this little bit. It’s the first page. I couldn’t make any sense out of the rest of it, all those prophets and kings and battles and such.”
“And Jesus.”
“That part was in the back. I never read it that far.” Lawler looked toward the endlessly retreating horizon, blue curving away under blue toward infinity. “Since there’s no dry land here, obviously God meant to create something different on Hydros from what He created on Earth. Wouldn’t you say? “God called the dry land Earth.” And He called the wet land Hydros, I guess. What a job it must have been, creating all those different worlds. Not just Earth, but every single world in the galaxy. Iriarte, Fenix, Megalo Kastro, Darma Barma, Mentirosa, Copperfield, Nabomba Zom, the whole bunch of them, the million and one planets. With a different purpose in mind for each world, or else why bother creating so many? It was all the same god that created them all, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” Quillan said.
“But you’re a priest!”
“That doesn’t mean I know everything. That doesn’t even mean I know anything.”
“Do you believe in God?” Lawler asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you believe in anything at all?”
Quillan was silent for a time. His face went completely dead, as if his spirit had momentarily left his body.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
The sea seemed flatter here, for some reason, than it did on the island. Darkness came suddenly, falling almost with a crash. The sun plummeted through the western sky, hovered for a moment just above the sea, and sank. Virtually at once the world turned black behind them and the Cross began to glow overhead.
“Mess call, first watch,” Natim Gharkid yelled, banging on a pan.
The working crew of the Queen of Hydros was divided into two watches, four hours on and four hours off. The members of each watch took their meals together. The first watch was Leo Martello, Gabe Kinverson, Pilya Braun, Gharkid, Dag Tharp and Gospo Struvin; the second watch was Neyana Golghoz, Sundira Thane, Dann Henders, Delagard, Onyos Felk, Lis Niklaus and Father Quillan. There was no special officers” mess: Delagard and Struvin, the owner and captain, took their meals in the galley with the others. Lawler, who had no fixed duty schedule himself but was on call round the clock, was the only one outside the watch system entirely. That suited Lawler’s biological rhythms: he took his morning mess with the second watch at dawn, his evening mess with the first watch at sundown. But it gave him an oddly free-floating sense of not really being part of things. Even here in the earliest days of the voyage the two watches were beginning to develop a kind of team spirit, and he belonged to neither team.