Then in the midst of the immense uproar of the storm, the terrifying percussive fury that was hammering them, the shrill cry of the wind and the rumble of the thunder and the drumming of the rain, there came a sudden sound that was more frightening than anything that had preceded it: the sound of silence, the utter absence of noise, falling as though magically like a curtain over the tumult. Everyone on the ship perceived it at the same moment, and paused and looked up, startled, bewildered, scared.
It lasted for perhaps ten seconds, that strange silence: an eternity, just then.
And after it came a sound that was even stranger—incomprehensible, even—and so overwhelmingly awesome that Lawler had to fight against the urge to drop down to his knees. It was a low roaring sound that rose swiftly in intensity from second to second, so that in a few moments it filled the air like the outcry of a throat bigger than the galaxy. Lawler was deafened by it. Someone ran by him—it was Pilya Braun, he realized afterward—and tugged furiously on his arm. She pointed windward and shouted at him. Lawler stared at her, not understanding a word; and she said it again, and this time her voice, infinitesimal against the monstrous roar that filled the heavens, reached him clearly enough.
“What are you doing on deck?” she asked. “Go below! Go below! Don’t you see, it’s the Wave!”
Lawler peered into the blackness and saw something long and high and glowing with a golden inner fire lying on the breast of the ocean far away: a bright line that stretched along the horizon, something higher than any wall, streaming with its own radiance. He looked at it in wonder. Two figures rushed past him, crying out warnings to him, and Lawler nodded to them: Yes, yes, I see, I understand. He was still unable to draw his eyes away from that distant onrushing thing. Why was it glowing that way? How high was it? Where had it come from? There was a kind of beauty about it: the snowy white tongues of foam along its crest, the crystalline gleam of its heart, the purity of its unbroken advancing motion. It was devouring the storm as it came, imposing a titanic order of its own on the storm’s chaos. Lawler watched until there was almost no time left. Then he rushed toward the forward hatch. He paused for an instant to look back and saw the Wave looming above the ship like a god astride the sea. He dived through the opening and shut it behind him. Kinverson rose up beside him to drive home the battens. Without a word Lawler sprawled down the ladder into the heart of the ship and huddled down with his shipmates to await the moment of impact.
THREE
The Face of the Waters
1
The ship was on a greased track, sliding freely across the world. Beneath him Lawler could feel the long roll of the world-ocean, the great swinging planetary surge of it, as the colossal wall of water on which they rode swept them resistlessly along. They were mere flotsam. They were an isolated atom tossing in the void. They were nothing at all and the immensity of the maddened sea was everything.
He had found a place amidships where he could crouch and brace himself, jammed up against one of the bulkheads with a thick wad of blankets wedging him into place. But he had no real expectation of surviving. That wall of water had been too huge, the sea too stormy, the ship too flimsy.
From sound and motion alone Lawler tried to imagine what must be happening abovedecks now.
The Queen of Hydros was scudding over the surface of the sea, caught up in the forward motion of the Wave and carried helplessly along by it, riding on its lower curl. Even if Delagard had managed to switch on his magnetron device in time it must have had little or no effect in shielding the ship from the impact of the oncoming surge, or from being scooped up and swept forward by it. Whatever the velocity of the Wave was, that was how fast the ship must be travelling now as the great mass of water pushed it onward. Lawler had never seen a Wave so great. Probably no one had in the brief one hundred and fifty years of human settlement on Hydros. Some unique concatenation of the three moons and the sister world, most likely: some diabolical conflux of gravitational forces, it was, that had lifted this unthinkable bulge of water and sent it careening around the belly of the planet.
Somehow the ship was still afloat. Lawler had no idea why. But he was certain that it still hovered like a bobbing cork on the breast of the water, for he could feel the steady force of acceleration as the Wave drove onward. That unyielding force hammered him back against the bulkhead and pegged him to it so he was unable to move. If they had already capsized, he reasoned, the Wave would have passed on by this time, leaving them quietly sinking in its lee. But no: no. They were travelling. Within the Wave, they were, spinning over and over, keel upward, keel downward, keel upward, keel downward, everything within the ship that wasn’t pinned down breaking loose and rattling around. He could hear the sounds of that, things clattering as though the ship were being shaken in the grasp of a giant, which indeed it was. Over and over and over. He found himself struggling for breath, gasping as though it were he himself and not the topdeck that was constantly being submerged and allowed to rise again. Down, up, down, up. There was a pounding in his chest. Dizziness assailed him, and a kind of drunken lightheadness that stripped all possibility of panic from him. He was being whirled around too wildly to feel fear: there was no room in his mind for it.
When do we finally sink? Now? Now? Now?
Or would the Wave never release them, but carry them endlessly around the world, turning forever like a wheel under the force of its terrible power?
A time came when everything was steady again. We’re free of it, he thought, we’re drifting on our own. But no: no. Only an illusion. After a moment or two the whirling began again, more intense than before. Lawler felt his blood streaming from his head to his feet, his feet to his head, his head to his feet, his feet to his head. His lungs ached. His nostrils burned at every intake of breath.
There were thumps and bangs that seemed to come from within the ship, furniture flying about, and louder thumps and bangs that seemed to come from without. He heard distant voices shouting, sometimes shrieking. There was the sound of the roaring of the wind, or at least the illusion of the sound of the roaring of the wind. There was the deeper booming of the Wave itself. There was a high seething hiss, shading into a harsh snarling, that Lawler couldn’t identify at alclass="underline" some angry confrontation of water and sky at their meeting-place, perhaps. Or perhaps the Wave was a thing of varying densities, and its own component waters, held together helter-skelter only by the overriding momentum of the larger force, were quarrelling among themselves.
Then finally came another spell of stillness, and this one seemed to last and last and last. We are sinking now, Lawler thought. We are fifty metres below the surface, and descending. We are about to drown. At any moment the pressure of the water outside will burst the little bubble that is the ship and the sea will come rushing in, and it will all be over.
He waited for that inward gush to come. A quick death, it would be. The water’s fist against his chest would choke the flow of blood to his brain: he’d be unconscious in an instant. He would never know the rest of the story, the slow drifting descent, the crushed timbers cracking open, the curious creatures of the deeps wandering in to stare and ponder and eventually to feed.