Quillan’s reply was lost in a sudden gusting breeze.
There was another long cool silence. Lawler could still hear Quillan saying, “A person is what he seems to others to be. What you happen to think about yourself is completely unreliable and irrelevant.’ Total nonsense, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? Of course it was.
And then Lawler heard his own voice saying, without giving him any warning, “Father Quillan, why did you decide to come to Hydros in the first place?”
“Why?”
“Yes, why. This is a damned inhospitable planet, if you happen to be human. It wasn’t designed for us and we manage to live here only in uncomfortable circumstances and it isn’t possible to leave once you get here. Why would you want to maroon yourself forever on a world like that?”
Quillan’s eyes became curiously animated. With some fervour he said, “I came here because I found Hydros irresistibly attractive.”
That’s not really an answer.”
“Well, then.” There was a new edge on the priest’s voice, as though he felt that Lawler was pushing him into saying things he would just as soon not say. “Let’s put it that I came because it’s a place where all galactic refuse ultimately winds up. It’s a world populated entirely by discards, rejects, the odds and ends of the cosmos. That’s what it is, isn’t it?”
“Of course not.”
“All of you are the descendants of criminals. There aren’t any criminals in the rest of the galaxy any more. On the other worlds everyone is sane now.”
“I doubt that very much.” Lawler couldn’t believe that Quillan was serious. “We’re the descendants of criminals, yes, some of us. That isn’t any secret. People who were said to be criminals, at any rate. My great-great-grandfather, for instance, was sent here because he had some bad luck, that was all. He accidentally killed a man. But let’s say that you’re right, that we’re merely so much debris and the descendants of debris. Why would you want to live amongst us, then?”
The priest’s chilly blue eyes gleamed. “Isn’t it obvious? This is where I belong.”
“So you could do your holy work among us, and lead us to grace?”
“Not in the slightest. I came here for my needs, not yours.”
“Ah. So you came out of pure masochism, some kind of need to punish yourself. Is that it, Father Quillan?” Quillan was silent. But Lawler knew that he must be right. “Punishment for what? A crime? You just told me there aren’t any more criminals.”
“My crimes have been directed against God. Which makes me one of you fundamentally. An outcast, an exile by my inherent nature.”
“Crimes against God,” Lawler said, musing. God was as remote and mysterious a concept to him as monkeys and jungles, crags and goats. “What kind of crime could you possibly commit against God? If he’s omnipotent, presumably he’s invulnerable, and if he isn’t omnipotent how can he be God? Anyway, you told me only a week or two ago that you didn’t even know whether or not you believed in God.”
“Which in itself is a crime against Him.”
“Only if you believe in him. If he doesn’t exist, you certainly can’t do him any injury.”
“You have a priest’s way with a sneaky argument,” Quillan said approvingly.
“Were you serious, that other time, when you said you weren’t sure of your faith?”
“Yes.”
“Not playing verbal games with me? Not just offering me a little dollop of quick cheap cynicism for the sake of a moment’s quick amusement?”
“No. Not at all. I swear it.” Quillan reached out and put his hand across Lawler’s wrist, an oddly intimate, confiding sort of gesture which at another time Lawler might have regarded as an unacceptable encroachment but which now seemed almost endearing. In a low, clear voice he said, “I dedicated myself to the service of God when I was still a very young man. That sounds pretty pompous, I know. But in practice what it’s meant has been a lot of hard and disagreeable work, not just long sessions of prayer in cold draughty rooms at unlikely hours of the morning and night, but also the doing of chores so nasty that only a doctor, I suppose, would understand. The washing of the feet of the poor, so to speak. All right, so be it. I knew that that was what I was volunteering for, and I don’t want any medals for it. But what I didn’t know, Lawler, what I never remotely imagined at the outset, was that the deeper I got into serving God through serving suffering humanity, the more vulnerable I’d become to periods of absolute spiritual deadness. To long stretches when I felt cut off from all connection with the universe about me, when human beings became as alien to me as aliens are, when I didn’t have the slightest shred of belief in the higher Power to which I had pledged to devote my life. When I felt so completely alone that I can’t even begin to describe it to you. The harder I worked, the more pointless it all became. A very cruel joke: I was hoping to earn God’s grace, I suppose, and instead He’s given me some good stiff doses of His absence. Are you following me, Lawler?”
“And what causes this deadness in you, do you think?”
“That’s what I came here to find out.”
“Why here, though?”
“Because there’s no Church here. Because there are only the most fragmentary human communities. Because the planet itself is hostile to us. And because it’s a place of no return, like life itself.” Something beyond Lawler’s comprehension was dancing in Quillan’s eyes now, something as baffling as a candle flame that burned downward instead of up. He seemed to be staring at Lawler out of some deep annihilating eternity from which he knew he had come and to which he yearned to return. “I wanted to lose myself here, do you see? And in that way maybe to find myself. Or at least to find God.”
“God? Where? Someplace down there at the bottom of this enormous ocean?”
“Why not? He doesn’t seem to be anywhere else, does He?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Lawler began to say. But then from high overhead came a startling cry.
“Land ho!” Pilya Braun sang out. She was in the foremast rigging, standing on the yard. “Island to the north! Island to the north!”
There were no islands in these waters, neither to the north or south, nor to the east or west. If there were, everyone aboard would have been looking forward to the sighting for days. But no one had said a word about islands here.
Onyos Felk, in the wheel-box, let loose a bellow of disbelief. Shaking his head, the mapkeeper came stumping toward Pilya on his short bandy legs. “What are you saying, girl? What island? What would an island be doing in this part of the sea?”
“How would I know?” Pilya called. She held on to the ropes with one hand and swung herself far out over the deck. “did I put it there?”
“There can’t be an island.”
“Come up here and see for yourself, you dried-up old fish!”
“What? What?”
Lawler shaded his eyes and peered into the distance. All he saw were the bobbing water-flowers. But Quillan tugged eagerly at his arm. “There! Do you see?”
Did he? Yes, yes, Lawler thought he saw something: a thin yellow-brown line, perhaps, on the northern horizon. An island, though? How could he tell?
Everyone was on deck, now, milling around. In the midst of it all was Delagard, carrying the precious sea-chart globe cradled in one arm and a stubby spy-glass fashioned of a yellowish metal in the other. Onyos Felk went scurrying up to him and reached for the globe. Delagard gave him a poisonous look and shook him off with a hiss.