“I didn’t lie to everybody. I told Gospo Struvin the truth. And Father Quillan.”
“Gospo I can understand, I guess. He was your top-of-the-line captain. But how come Quillan?”
“I tell him a lot of things.”
“You a Catholic now? He’s your confessor?”
“He’s my friend. He’s full of interesting ideas.”
“I’m sure. And what interesting idea did Father Quillan have about the course we should take?” Lawler asked. He felt as if he were dreaming this. “Did he tell you that through the wonders of prayer and spiritual fortitude he could work a miracle for us? Did he offer to conjure up some nice unoccupied island in the Empty Sea where we could set up housekeeping, maybe?”
“He told me that we ought to head for the Face of the Waters,” Delagard said coolly.
Another jolt, stronger than the last. Lawler’s eyes widened. He helped himself to a deep gulp of some of Delagard’s brandy, and waited a moment for it to achieve an effect. Delagard, facing him across the table, sat patiently watching, looking alert, calm, perhaps even amused.
“The Face of the Waters,” Lawler said, when he felt steady enough to speak again. “That’s what you said. The Face of the Waters.”
“Right, doc.”
“And why, can you tell me, did Father Quillan think it was such a great idea to head toward the Face?”
“Because he knew I had always wanted to go there.”
Lawler nodded. He felt the serenity of complete despair coming over him. Another drink seemed like a good idea. “Sure. Father Quillan believes in the gratification of irrational impulses. And since he had no place else to go anyway, you might just as well haul the entire fucking lot of us off halfway around the world to the strangest, most remote place on Hydros, about which we know absolutely nothing at all except that even the Gillies don’t have the guts to go anywhere near it?”
“That’s right.” Delagard shook off the sarcasm, smiling quietly.
“Father Quillan gives wonderful advice. That’s why he’s been such a success in the priesthood.”
Eerily calm, Delagard continued, “I asked you once if you remembered the stories Jolly used to tell about the Face.”
“A bunch of fairy tales, yes.”
“That’s more or less what you said the other time. But do you remember them?”
“Let’s see. Jolly claimed that he made it all the way across the Empty Sea by himself and found the Face, which he said was a huge island, a lot bigger than any of the Gillie islands, a warm, lush place with strange, tall plants bearing fruit, fresh water ponds, rich waters ripe for harvesting.” Lawler thought a moment, dredging into his memories. “He would have stayed there forever, it was such a sweet place to live. But one day when he was out fishing a storm blew him out to sea, and he lost his compass, and I think got caught in the Wave on top of everything else, and when he had control of his boat again he was halfway home with no way of getting back to the Face. So he kept going, on to Sorve, and tried to get people to go back there with him, but no one would. Everyone laughed at him. No one believed a thing he said. And eventually he went out of his mind. Right?”
“Yes,” Delagard said. “That’s the essential story.”
“It’s terrific. If I were still ten years old I’d be just thrilled out of my skull that we’re going to pay a visit to the Face of the Waters.”
“You ought to be, doc. It’s going to be the great adventure of our lives.”
“Is it, now?”
“I was fourteen years old when Jolly came back,” Delagard said. “And I listened to what he had to say. I listened very carefully. Maybe he was crazy, but he didn’t seem that way to me, at least not at first, and I believed him. A big, rich, fertile uninhabited island just waiting for us—and no stinking Gillies to get in our way! It sounds like paradise to me. A land of milk and honey. A place of miracles. You want to keep the community together, don’t you? Then why the hell should be crowd ourselves into some unwanted little corner of somebody else’s island and live like beggars on their charity? What better way can I make it up to everybody for what I did to them than by taking them around the world to live in paradise?”
Lawler stared.
“You’re out of your fucking mind, Nid.”
“I don’t think so. The Face is up for grabs, and we can grab it. The Gillies are so superstitious about it that they won’t go near it. Well, we can. And we can settle on it, we can build on it, we can farm it. We can make it give us the thing that we most want.”
“And what is it, the thing that we most want?” Lawler prompted, feeling as if he had begun to drift free of the planet and was floating off into the blackness of space.
“Power,” Delagard said. “Control. We want to run this place. We’ve lived on Hydros like pitiful pathetic refugees long enough. It’s time we made the Gillies kiss our asses. I’d like to build a settlement on the Face twenty times as big as any existing Gillie island—fifty times as big—and get a real community going there, five thousand people, ten thousand, and put a spaceport on it and open up commerce with the other human-inhabited planets of this fucking galaxy, and start to live like real human beings instead of having to scrape out a miserable soggy seaweed-eating life for ourselves drifting around randomly in the ocean the way we’ve been doing here for a hundred and fifty years.”
“You say all this so calmly, too. Such a rational tone of voice.”
“You think I’m crazy?”
“Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. What I do think is that you’re a monstrous selfish son of a bitch. Making us all hostages to this weird fantasy of yours this way. You could have dropped a few of us off at each of five or six different islands if Grayvard wouldn’t take us all.”
“You yourself said that you didn’t want that. Remember?”
“And this is better? Dragging us with you out here? Putting all our lives at risk while you go chasing after fairy tales?”
“Yes. It is.”
“You bastard. You absolute and utter bastard. You are crazy, then!”
“No, I’m not,” Delagard said. “I’ve been working this out for years, now. I’ve spent half my life thinking about it. I quizzed Jolly up and down, and I’m completely sure that he took the voyage he claimed to take and that the Face is what he says it is. I was planning for years to launch an expedition there. Gospo knew about it. He and I were going to go there together, maybe in another five years or so. Well, the Gillies gave me a good excuse, tossing us off Sorve the way they did, and then the other islands wouldn’t take us in, and I figured, here’s the moment, here’s the chance. Grab it, Nid. And I did.”
“So you had it in mind right from the time we left Sorve.”
“Yes.’
“But didn’t tell your captains, even.”
“Only Gospo.”
“Who thought it was a perfectly swell idea.”
“Correct,” Delagard said. “He was with me all the way. So was Father Quillan when I told him. The Father agrees with me completely.”
“Of course he does. The stranger the better, for him. The farther away from civilization he can hide himself, the more he likes it. The Face is the Promised Land to him. When we get there he can set up the Church in this land of milk and honey of yours with himself as high priest, cardinal, pope, whatever he wants to call himself—while you build an empire, eh, Nid. And everybody’s happy.”
“Yes. You’ve got it exactly.”
“And so it’s all set up. Here we are at the edge of the Empty Sea, getting deeper in every minute.”