Delagard, still bleeding, came by again as Neyana and Gharkid made ready to dump their pile of hagfish overboard. “Hold on, here,” he said brusquely. “We haven’t had fresh fish for days.”
Gharkid gave him a look of sheer wonder. “You would eat hagfish, captain-sir?”
“We can try it, can’t we?” Delagard said.
Baked hagfish turned out to taste like rags that had been steeped in urine for a couple of weeks. Lawler managed three mouthfuls before he gave up, gagging. Kinverson and Gharkid refused to have any; Dag Tharp, Henders and Pilya did without their portions also. Leo Martello gamely ate half a fish. Father Quillan picked at his with obvious distaste but dogged determination, as though he had taken some vow to the Virgin to eat whatever was set before him, no matter how loathsome.
Delagard finished his entire serving, and called for another.
“You like it?” Lawler asked.
“Man’s got to eat, don’t he? Man’s got to keep his strength up, doc. Don’t you agree? Protein is protein. Eh, doc? What do you say, doc? Here, have some more yourself.”
“Thanks,” said Lawler. “I think I’ll try to get along without it.”
He noticed a change in Sundira. The shift in the direction and purpose of the voyage appeared to have released her from whatever self-imposed restraints on intimacy she had bound herself with, and no longer were their periods of lovemaking marked by long spells of brittle silence broken only by bursts of shallow chatter. Now, as they lay together in the dark and mildewed corner of the cargo hold that was their special place, she revealed herself to him in long unexpected bursts of autobiographical monologue.
“I was always a curious little girl. Too curious for my own good, I suppose. Wading in the bay, picking up things in the shallows, getting nipped and bitten. When I was about four I put a little crab in my vagina.” Lawler winced: she laughed. “I don’t know whether I was trying to find out what would happen to the crab or to my vagina. The crab apparently didn’t mind it much. But my parents did.”
Her father had been Mayor of Khamsilaine Island. Mayor, apparently, was a term that signified the head of a government among the islanders in the Azure Sea. The human settlement on Khamsilaine was a big one, close to five hundred people. To Lawler’s way of thinking that was an enormous multitude, an unimaginably complex aggregation. Sundira was vague about her mother: a scholar of some sort, perhaps a historian, a student of the human galactic migration, but she had died very young and Sundira barely remembered her. Evidently Sundira had inherited some of her mother’s searching intellect. The Gillies in particular fascinated her—the Dwellers ; she was forever careful to call them by the more formal term, which to Lawler was awkward and ponderous. When she was fourteen Sundira and an older boy had begun spying on the secret ceremonies of the Dwellers of Khamsilaine Island. She and the boy had engaged in some sexual experimentation, too, her first; she mentioned that in a matter-of-fact way to Lawler, who was surprised to find himself bitterly envying him. To have had a dazzling girl like Sundira for a lover, when you were so young? What a privilege that would have been! There had been a sufficiency of girls in Lawler’s own adolescence, and then some, whenever he had managed to escape from the endless hours of medical studies that kept him penned so much of the time in his father’s vaargh. But it hadn’t been their questing minds that had attracted him to those girls. He wondered for a moment what his life would have been like if there had been a Sundira on Sorve Island when he had been growing up. What if he had married her instead of Mireyl? It was an astounding supposition: decades of close partnership with this extraordinary woman instead of the solitary, marginal life that he had actually chosen to lead. A family. A deep continuity.
He pushed the distracting thoughts aside. Useless fantasies, these were: he and Sundira had grown up thousands of kilometres and many years apart. And even if things had been different in this way, whatever continuity they would have built on Sorve would have been shattered by the expulsion in any case. All paths led to this point of floating exile, bobbing in a tiny ship in the midst of the Empty Sea.
Sundira’s questing mind had eventually taken her into deep scandal. She was in her early twenties; her father was still Mayor; she lived by herself at the edge of the human community on Khamsilaine and spent as much of her time among the Dwellers as they would allow. “It was an intellectual challenge. I wanted to learn all I could about the world. Understanding the world meant understanding the Dwellers. There was something going on here, I was sure: something that none of us were seeing.”
She became fluent in the Dweller language—not a common skill, it appeared, on Khamsilaine. Her father appointed her the island’s ambassador to the Dwellers: all contact with them was carried on through her. She spent as much time in the Dweller village at the island’s south end as she did in her own community. Most of them merely tolerated her presence, as Dwellers customarily did; some were bluntly hostile, as Dwellers often were; but there were a few that seemed almost friendly. Sundira felt she was coming to know some of those as actual individuals, not merely as the hulking ominous undifferentiated alien creatures that Dwellers seemed to most human beings to be.
That was my mistake, and theirs: getting too close to them. I presumed on that closeness. I remembered certain things that I had seen when I was a girl, when Tomas and I were sneaking around where we shouldn’t have gone. I asked questions. I got evasive answers. Tantalizing answers. I decided I needed to go sneaking again.”
Whatever it was that Sundira had seen in the secret chambers of the Gillies, she didn’t seem able to communicate its nature to Lawler: perhaps she was being secretive with him, perhaps she simply hadn’t seen enough to comprehend anything. She hinted at ceremonies, communions, rituals, mysteries; but the vagueness in her descriptions seemed to be centred in her own perceptions, not in her willingness to share what she knew with him. “I went back to the same places I had crept into with Tomas years before. This time I was caught. I thought they were going to kill me. Instead they took me to my father and told him to kill me. He promised that he’d drown me, and they seemed to accept that. We went out in a fishing boat and I jumped over the side. But he had arranged for a boat from Simbalimak to pick me up, around at the back of the island. I had to swim for three hours to get to it. I never went back to Khamsilaine. And I never saw my father or spoke with him again.”
Lawler touched her cheek gently.
“So you know something about exile too.”
“Something, yes.”
“You never said a word to me.”
She shrugged. “What did it matter? You were hurting so much. Would it have made you feel any better if I told you that I had had to leave my native island too?”
“It might have.”
“I wonder,” she said.
A day or two later and they were in the hold again; and again afterward she spoke of the life she had left behind. A year on Simbalimak—a serious love affair there, which she had alluded to once before, and further attempts to probe the secrets of the Gillies that ended nearly as disastrously as her illicit prowlings on Khamsilaine—and then she had moved along, out of the Azure Sea entirely, off to Shaktan. Whether it was Gillie pressure or the collapse of the affair that caused her to leave was a point about which Lawler wasn’t quite certain, and he didn’t care to ask.