“I’ll let you see it whenever you like.”
“No,” he said. He wondered who he was saving it for. “I’m sorry. I wish I could let you have it, but I can’t. Not those things.”
She nodded, making no attempt to hide her disappointment. “Earth,” she said again, savouring the mysterious name. “Earth!” She put the coin back on the shelf and said, “You will tell me what the other Earth things are, another time. But we have work to do on you and we are forgetting. The salve for your hands. Where is the salve?”
He pointed it out to her. She found it and squeezed a little from the tube. Then, turning his hands upward as she had on deck, she shook her head sadly. “Look at them. You’ll have scars.”
“Probably not.”
“That thing could have pulled you over the side too.”
“No,” Lawler said. “It couldn’t. It didn’t. Gospo was close to the side to begin with, and it got him before he knew what was happening to him. I was in a better position to resist.”
He saw the fear in her lovely gold-flecked eyes.
“If not this time, it’ll get us the next. We’ll all die before we reach wherever it is we’re going,” she said.
“No. No, we’ll be all right.”
Pilya laughed. “You always see a good side to things. This is going to be a sorrowful deadly trip all the same. If we could turn around and go back to Sorve, doctor, wouldn’t you want to do that?”
“But we can’t go back, Pilya. You know that. You might just as well talk about turning around and going back to Earth. There’s no way we’re ever going to see Sorve again.”
ONE
Sorve Island
1
In the night had come the pure, simple conviction that he was the man of destiny, the one who could turn the trick that would make everything ever so much simpler and better for the seventy-eight humans who lived on the artificial island of Sorve on the watery world called Hydros.
It was a cockeyed idea and Lawler knew it. But it had wrecked his sleep, and none of his usual methods seemed to work to fix that, not meditation, not multiplication tables, not even a few pink drops of the algae-derived tranquillizer on which he was perhaps becoming a little too dependent. From a little after midnight until somewhere close to dawn he lay awake, possessed by his brilliant, heroic, cockeyed idea. And then at last, in the small hours of the morning when the sky was still dark, before any patients could show up to complicate his day and ruin the purity of his sudden new vision, Lawler left the vaargh near the middle of the island where he lived by himself and went down to the sea-wall to see whether the Gillies really had managed to start up their new power plant during the night.
He would congratulate them profusely if they had. He would call forth his whole vocabulary of sign-language gestures to tell them how impressed he was with their awesome technological prowess. He would praise them for having transformed the entire quality of life on Hydros—not just on Sorve, but on the whole planet—in a single masterly stroke.
And then he would say, “My father, the great Dr Bernat Lawler whom you all remember so well, saw this moment coming. “One day,” he would often remark to me when I was a boy, “our friends the Dwellers will achieve the dependable production of a steady supply of electricity. And then a new age will dawn here, when Dweller and human will work side by side in heartfelt cooperation—”
And so on and so on and so on. Subtly intertwining his congratulations with an expression of the need for harmony between the two races. Eventually working his way around to the explicit proposition that Hydran and human should put aside all past coolness and at last begin to toil together in the name of further technological progress. Evoking the sacred name of the late beloved Dr Bernat Lawler as often as he could, reminding them how in his day he had laboured to the full extent of his formidable medical skills on behalf of Dweller and human alike, performing many a miracle of healing, devoting himself unselfishly to the needs of both island communities—laying it on thicker and thicker, making the air throb with emotion, until the Gillies, teary-eyed with newfound interspecies affection, yielded gladly to his casual suggestion that a good way to start the new era off would be to allow the humans to adapt the power plant so that it could produce a supply of fresh water as well as electricity. And then his underlying proposaclass="underline" the humans would design and build the desalinization unit by themselves, the condenser, the conveyer pipes, the complete item, and hand it over to the Gillies. Here: just plug it in. It costs you nothing and we won’t be dependent on rain catch for our fresh water supply any longer. And we will all be the best of friends forever, you Dwellers and we humans.
That was the fantasy that had pulled Lawler from his sleep. He wasn’t usually given to entangling himself in such far-fetched enterprises as this one. His years as a doctor—not the medical genius that his father had been, but a hard-working and reasonably effective physician, who did a pretty good job, considering the difficulties—had led him to be realistic and practical about most things. But somehow he had convinced himself this night that he was the only person on the island who might actually be able to talk the Gillies into letting water-desalinization equipment be tacked onto their power plant. Yes. He would succeed where all others had failed.
A fat chance, Lawler knew. But in the small hours of the night chances sometimes tend to look fatter than they do in the clear light of morning.
Such electricity as the island had now came from clumsy, inefficient chemical batteries, piles of zinc and copper discs separated by strips of crawlweed paper soaked in brine. The Gillies—the Hydrans, the Dwellers, the dominant beings of the island and of the world where Lawler had spent his entire life—had been working on a better means of electrical generation as long as Lawler could remember, and by now, so the scuttlebutt in town had it, the new power plant was almost ready to go on line—today, tomorrow, next week for sure. If the Gillies actually could manage to achieve that, it would be a tremendous thing for both species. They had already agreed, not very graciously, to let the humans make use of some of the new electricity, which everyone admitted was altogether terrific of them. But it would be even more terrific for the seventy-eight humans who scratched out narrow little subsistence-level lives on the hard narrow little place that was Sorve if the Gillies would relent and let the plant be used for water desalinization also, so that the humans wouldn’t have to depend on the random and infrequent mercies of Sorve rainfall patterns for their fresh water. It must have been obvious even to the Gillies that life would become ever so much easier for their human neighbours if they could count on a reliable and unlimited supply of water.
But of course the Gillies had given no indication so far that they cared about that. They had never shown any particular interest in making anything easier for the handful of humans who lived in their midst. Fresh water might be vital to human needs, but it didn’t matter a damn to the Gillies. What the humans might need, or want, or hope to have, was no concern of the Gillies. And it was the vision of changing all that by single-handed persuasion that had cost Lawler his sleep this night.
What the helclass="underline" nothing ventured, nothing gained.
On this tropical night Lawler was barefoot and wore only a twist of yellow cloth made from water-lettuce fronds around his waist. The air was warm and heavy and the sea was calm. The island, that webwork of living and semi-living and formerly living tissue drifting on the breast of the vast world-spanning ocean, swayed almost imperceptibly beneath his feet. Like all the inhabited islands of Hydros, Sorve was rootless, a free-floating wanderer, moving wherever the currents and winds and the occasional tidal surge cared to carry it. Lawler was able to feel the tightly woven withes of the flooring giving and spreading as he walked, and he heard the sea lapping at them just a couple of metres below. But he moved easily, lightly, his long lean body attuning itself automatically to the rhythms of the island’s movements. They were the most natural thing in the world to him.