“You don’t like it, doc? You want to get off the ship? Go right ahead. We’re going forward whether you like it or not.”
“And your captains? You think they’re going to go with you once they know what the real destination is?”
“You bet they will. They go where I say. Always have, always will. The Sisters may not follow, if they pick up any idea of what’s really going on, but that’s okay. What good are they anyway, those crazy bitches? They’ll just make trouble for us when we get to the Face. But Stayvol will sail anywhere I want him to. And Bamber, and Martin. And poor fucking Damis would have, too. Right straight on to the Face. No question of it. We’ll get there, and we’ll build the biggest, richest goddamned place Hydros has ever seen, and we’ll all live happily ever after. Trust me, we will. You want some more brandy, doc? Yes. Yes, I think you do. Here. Have a good stiff one. You look like you need it.”
Father Quillan, standing at the rail staring out ecstatically at an emptiness that seemed even emptier than the endless skein of sea they had already crossed, seemed to be in his high spiritual mode at the moment. His face was ruddy, his eyes were glowing.
“Yes,” he said. “I told Delagard that he should make the journey to the Face.”
“When was this? While we were still on Sorve?”
“Oh, no. When we were at sea. It was a little while after Gospo Struvin was killed. Delagard took Gospo’s death very hard, you know. He came to me and said, Father, I’m not a religious man, but I need to talk to somebody and you’re the only one available that I trust. Maybe you can help me, he said. And he told me about the Face. What it was like, why he wanted to there. And about the plan that he and Gospo had worked out. He didn’t know what to do now that Gospo was gone. He still wanted to go to the Face but he wasn’t sure he could bring the voyage off. We discussed the Face of the Waters at great length. He explained its nature to me very fully, as he had heard it from that old sailor long ago. And when he had told me the story I urged him to carry through with his scheme, even without Gospo. I saw the importance of it and told him that he was the only man on this planet who could possibly achieve it. Nothing must be allowed to stand in your way, I told him. Go on: bring us to this paradise, this unspoiled island where we’ll have a fresh start. And he turned the ship and started heading south.”
“And why,” Lawler said carefully, “do you think we’re going to be able to make any sort of workable fresh start on this unspoiled island you and Delagard are taking us to? Just a handful of people settling in an unknown wilderness, where we don’t know anything about anything?”
“Because,” said Quillan, in a calm, flat voice hard enough to have inscribed his words on metal plates, “I believe that the Face is literally a paradise. I think it’s Eden. Literally.”
Lawler blinked. “You’re serious? The actual Eden where Adam and Eve lived?”
“The actual Eden, yes. Eden is anywhere that has not been touched by original sin.”
“So Delagard got that idea from you, about the Face being a paradise? I should have guessed. And I suppose you think God lives there too. Or is it just his vacation home?”
“I don’t know. But I would like to think that He is there. He always is wherever Paradise is.”
“Sure,” Lawler said. “The Creator of the Universe is living right here on Hydros on a gigantic marshy island covered with a tangle of seaweed. Don’t make me laugh, Father. I’m not even sure you believe in God. Half the time I don’t think you’re sure either.”
“Half the time I’m not sure,” the priest said.
“When you have your “dead” times.”
“Yes. The times when I find myself absolutely convinced that we evolved out of the lower animals for no purpose at all. When I think that the whole long process of rising from amoeba to man on Earth, from microorganism of any kind to sentient being of whatever sort on whichever planet, is as automatic as the movements of a planet about its sun, and just as meaningless. When I think that nothing set it in motion. That nothing keeps it going but its own innate nature.”
“This is what you believe half the time.”
“Not half. But sometimes. Most of the time not.”
“And when it’s not what you believe? What then?”
“Then I believe that there was a First Cause which set it all in motion for reasons that we may never know. And who keeps it all going, out of His great love for His creatures. For God is love, just as Jesus said, in the part of the Bible you didn’t get around to reading: He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. God is connection, God is the end of aloneness, the ultimate communion. Who will one day gather all of us, however unworthy, to His bosom, where we will live everlastingly in glory, free from pain of every sort.”
“You believe this most of the time.”
“Yes. Do you think you can?”
“No,” Lawler said. “I wish I could. But I can’t.”
“So you feel that everything is without purpose?”
“Not exactly. But we’ll never know what that purpose is. Or whose it is. Things happen, the way the Golden Sun happened to disappear in the night, and we don’t necessarily find out why. And when we die, there’ll be no bosom to welcome us, no further life in glory. There won’t be anything.”
“Ah,” Quillan said, nodding. “My poor friend. You spend every day in the condition I reach at my moments of bleakest despair.”
“Maybe so. Somehow I endure it.” Lawler narrowed his eyes and looked off toward the southwest across the glaring surface of the sea, as though he expected a dark vast island to be coming into view out there at any moment. His head was throbbing. He wanted to drown the ache in numbweed tincture.
“What I pray for you is that you’ll be able one day soon to yield up your pain at last,” Quillan said.
“I see,” Lawler said darkly.
“Doyou see? Do you really?”
“What I see is that in your hunger for paradise you didn’t think twice about selling us all out to Delagard.”
“You put it very harshly,” Quillan said.
“Yes. I suppose I do. I’m sorry about that. You don’t think I have any reason to be annoyed, do you?”
“My child—”
“I’m not your child!”
“You are His child, at least.”
Lawler sighed. Two lunatics, he thought: Delagard, Quillan. One willing to do anything for redemption’s sake, the other out to conquer the world.
Quillan put his hand lightly on Lawler’s hand and smiled.
“God loves you,” he said gently. “God will bring you His grace, never fear.”
“Tell me what you know about the Face of the Waters,” Lawler said to Sundira. “Everything.”
They were in his cabin. She said, “It isn’t a lot. I know that it’s some kind of gigantic island or island-like object, immensely bigger than any of the known and inhabited islands. It covers thousands of hectares, an enormous permanently anchored land mass.”
“That much I know already. But did you learn anything about it in all those conversations you used to have with the Gillies? Pardon me: the Dwellers.”
“They didn’t like to talk about it. Except one, a female Dweller I used to know on Simbalimak. She was willing to answer a few of my questions.”
“And?”
“She said it’s the forbidden place, a place where no one may go.”
“Is that all? Tell me more.”
“It’s pretty murky stuff.”
“I imagine it is. Tell me, Sundira. Please.”
“She was pretty cryptic. Deliberately so, it seemed to me. But I got the impression from her that the Face is not simply taboo, or sacred, and therefore to be avoided, but that it’s literally uninhabitable—physically dangerous. “It is the fountain of creation,” she said. A dead Dweller is thought of as returning to the source. When a Dweller dies, she said, the phrase that they use is that it “has gone to the Face". I got the impression of something boiling with energy—something hot and fierce and very, very powerful. As though a nuclear reaction is going on there all the time.”