“Christ,” Lawler said tonelessly. Warm as it was in the humid little cabin, he felt a chill starting to move up his legs. His fingers were cold too, and twitchy. Turning, he took down the flask of numbweed tincture and poured a little dose for himself. He looked inquiringly at Sundira, but she shook her head. “Hot and fierce and powerful,” he said. “A nuclear reaction.”
“You understand that that wasn’t her concept. It’s mine, based on the vague and no doubt metaphorical phrases she was using. You know how hard it is to understand what the Dwellers say to us.”
“Yes.”
“But I found myself wondering, while she was talking about these things with me, whether some Dweller experiment might have taken place there long ago, maybe some kind of atomic power project that went astray, something along that line. It’s only a guess, you understand. But I could see from the way she was talking, how uneasy she was, how she kept putting up walls when I asked too many questions, that she believes that there’s something very much to be avoided on the Face. Something she doesn’t even want to think about, let alone talk about.”
“Shit. Shit.” Lawler drank the numbweed in a single gulp and felt its steadying effect almost at once. “A nuclear wasteland. A perpetual chain reaction. That doesn’t fit very well with the things that Delagard was telling me. Or Father Quillan.”
“You’ve been talking about the Face of the Waters with them? Why? What’s so interesting about the Face, suddenly?”
“It’s the big topic of the moment.”
“Val, will you be kind enough to tell me what’s going on?”
He hesitated a moment. Then he said quietly, “We haven’t been travelling in the direction of Grayvard for days. We’re south of the equator and moving steadily deeper into the Empty Sea.” She gave him a startled look. He went right on. “What we’re heading for,” he told her, “is the Face of the Waters.”
“You say that as though you’re actually serious.”
“I am.”
She pulled back from him, the sort of little reflexive jerking gesture she might have made if he had raised his hand in a menacing way.
“Is this Delagard’s doing?”
“Right. He told me so himself, half an hour ago, when I braced him with some questions about the route we seemed to be following.” Quickly Lawler summed it up for her: Jolly’s tale of his voyage to the Face; Delagard’s dream of establishing a city there and using it to gain power over the whole planet. Dwellers and all; his plan to build a spaceport, eventually, and open Hydros to interstellar commerce.
“And Father Quillan? How does he fit into this?”
“He’s cheering Delagard on. He’s decided, don’t ask me why, that the Face is some sort of Paradise, and that God—his God, the one he’s been trying to find all his life—makes his headquarters there when he’s in the neighbourhood. So he’s eager to have Delagard take him there so he can finally say hello.”
Sundira was staring at him with the disconcerted expression of a woman who has just discovered a small snake crawling upward along the inside of her thigh.
“Are they both crazy, do you think?”
“Anybody who talks about things like “seizing control” and “gaining power” seems crazy to me,” Lawler said. “Likewise somebody who’s concerned with a concept like “finding God". These are nonsensical ideas to me. Anyone who embraces nonsensical ideas is crazy, by my definition of the word. And one of them happens to be in command of this fleet.”
The sky was darkening when Lawler returned to the main deck, and the midday watch was scampering around in the rigging, swiftly shortening sail under Onyos Felk’s direction. A brisk wind was blowing toward the north; it was already hard and strong, with the clear potential of turning into a screaming gale at any minute. A heavy storm was coming down upon them, a ragged black mass of turbulence advancing out of the south. Lawler could see it on the march far in the distance, hurling down torrents of rain, churning the bosom of the sea into wild crests of white foam. Lightning flickered across the sky, a rare sight, a terrifying forked yellow flash. It was followed almost immediately by a heavy booming roll of thunder.
“Buckets! Casks! Here comes water!” Delagard was yelling.
“Yeah, enough water to swamp us but good,” Dag Tharp said under his breath, as he trotted up the deck past Lawler.
“Dag! Wait!”
The radioman turned. “What is it, doc?”
“You and I have to do some calling around the fleet when this storm is over. I’ve been talking to Delagard. He’s taking us to the Face of the Waters, Dag.”
“You’ve got to be joking.”
“I wish I was.” Lawler glanced upward at the rapidly shifting sky. It had taken on a weird metallic tone, a sinister dull greyish glow, and little hissing tongues of lightning were flickering at the edges of the great black storm-cloud that now hung just to the south of the ships. The ocean was beginning to look as fierce as it had during the three-day windstorm. “Listen, we don’t have time to discuss this now. But he’s got a whole raft of berserk reasons for doing what he’s doing. We have to stop him.”
“And how are we going to do that?” Tharp asked. A wave rose against the starboard side with whipcrack ferocity.
“We’ll speak with the captains. Call a convocation of all the ships. Tell everyone what’s going on, put it to a vote if necessary, depose Delagard somehow.” Lawler saw the scheme clearly in his mind: a meeting of all the Sorve people, a revelation of the bizarre truth of their journey, a passionate denunciation of the ship-owner’s insane ambition, a straightforward appeal to the common sense of the community. His reputation for logic and sanity staked against Delagard’s grandiose vision and tempestuous headstrong nature. “We can’t just let him drag us off willy-nilly into whatever lunatic place he’s heading for. He has to be prevented from doing it.”
“The captains are loyal to him.”
“Will they stay loyal when they find out what the actual situation is?”
Another wave struck the ship, a hard back-of-the-hand blow that sent it heeling toward portside. A sudden cascade came roiling over the rail. A moment later there was a terrible lightning flash and an almost simultaneous earsplitting crack of thunder, and then the rain descended in a single drenching sheet.
“We’ll talk about it,” Lawler called to Tharp. “Later. When the storm blows itself out!”
The radioman went off toward the bow. Lawler clung to the rail, engulfed in water, choking as it hit him from several sides at once, the wildly leaping foaming sea and the great downward weight of the almost solid mass of rain. His mouth and nostrils were full of water, fresh water and salt water mixed. He gasped and turned his head away, feeling half drowned, and choked and wheezed and coughed until he could breathe again. A midnight blackness had descended on the ship. The sea was invisible, except when a flash of lightning revealed vast yawning black caverns rising all around them, like secret chambers opening to swallow them up. Dark figures could still be seen moving about the deck, running frenziedly to and fro as Delagard and Felk screamed orders. The sails were down, now. The Queen of Hydros, rocking and heeling wildly under the full brunt of the storm, turned its bare spars to windward. Now it rose on a towering sea, now it plunged downward into a gaping hollow, striking its foaming floor with a tremendous bang. Lawler heard distant shrieks. He had an overwhelming sense of great volumes of relentless water descending from every side.