Shaktan to Velmise, Velmise to Kentrup, at last Kentrup to Sorve: a restless life and not a particularly happy one, so it would seem. There was always some new question beyond the last answer. More attempts to penetrate Gillie secrets; more trouble as a result. Other love affairs, coming to nothing. An isolated, fragmentary, roving existence. Why had she come to Sorve? “Why not? I wanted to leave Kentrup. Sorve was a place to go to. It was close, it had room for me. I would have stayed awhile and moved along.”
“Is that how you expected things to be for the rest of your life? Stay somewhere a little while, and then go somewhere else, and then leave that place too?”
“I suppose so,” she said.
“What were you looking for?”
“The truth.”
Lawler waited, offering no comment.
She said, “I still think something’s going on here that we only barely suspect. The Dwellers have a unitary society. It doesn’t vary from island to island. There’s a link: between one Dweller community and another, between the Dwellers and the divers, the Dwellers and the platforms, the Dwellers and the mouths. Between the Dwellers and the hagfish, for all I know. I want to know what the link is.”
“Why do you care so much?”
“Hydros is where I’m going to have to spend all the rest of my life. Doesn’t it make sense for me to learn as much about it as I can?”
“So you aren’t troubled, then, that Delagard has hijacked us and is dragging us off like this?”
“No. The more I see of this planet, the more I can understand of it.”
“You aren’t afraid to sail to the Face? To go into uncharted waters?”
“No,” she said. Then, after a moment: “Yes, maybe a little. Of course I’m afraid. But only a little.”
“If some of us tried to stop Delagard from carrying out his plan, would you be willing to join us?”
“No,” she said, without hesitation.
3
Some days there was no wind at all, and the ship lay like a dead thing in the water, altogether becalmed under a swollen sun that grew larger all the time. The air here in these deep tropics was dry and hot and often it was a struggle simply to breathe. Delagard performed wonders at the helm, ordering the sails to be swung around this way and that, that way and this, in order to catch the faintest puff of breeze, and somehow they moved along, most of the time, making their steady headway to the southwest, ever deeper into this barren wilderness of water. But there were the other days too, the terrible ones, when it seemed that there would be no gust of air again to fill the sails, not ever, and they would sit here forever until they turned to skeletons. “As idle as a painted ship,” Lawler said, “upon a painted sea.”
“What’s that?” Father Quillan asked.
“A poem. From Earth, an old one. One of my favourites.”
“You’ve quoted from it before, haven’t you? I remember the metre of it. Something about water, water everywhere.”
“Nor any drop to drink,” said Lawler.
The water was all but gone now. There was nothing but sticky shadows left at the bottom of most of the casks. Lis measured out the supply in dribbles.
Lawler was entitled to an extra ration, if he needed it for medicinal purposes. He wondered how to deal with the problem of administering his daily doses of the numbweed tincture. The stuff had to be taken in highly diluted form or it was dangerous; and he could hardly allow himself the luxury of that much water for a purely private indulgence. What then? Mix it with sea water? He could get away with that for a little while, at least; there’d be a cumulative effect on his kidneys if he kept it up very long, but he could always hope that some rain would come in a few days and he’d have a chance to flush himself clean.
There was always the possibility also of simply not taking the drug at all.
He tried that just as an experiment one morning. By midday his scalp felt strangely itchy. By late afternoon his skin was crawling as though infested with scale. He was trembling and sweaty with need by twilight.
Seven drops of numbweed and his agitation faded into the familiar welcome numbness.
But his supply of the drug was starting to run low. That seemed a worse problem to Lawler than the water shortage. There was always the hope that it would rain tomorrow, after all. But the numbweed plant didn’t seem to grow in these seas.
Lawler had counted on finding more when the ship reached Grayvard. The ship wasn’t ever going to get to Grayvard, though. He had just enough numbweed left to last him another few weeks, he estimated. Perhaps less. Before long it would all be gone.
What then? What then?
In the meantime, try mixing it with a little sea water.
Sundira told him more about her childhood on Khamsilaine, her turbulent adolescence, her later wanderings from island to island, her ambitions, her hopes, her strivings and failures. They sat together for hours in the musty darkness, stretching their long legs out before them amidst the crates, intertwining their hands like young lovers while the ship drifted placidly on the placid tropical sea. She asked Lawler about his life too, and he related the small tales of his simple boyhood and his quiet, steady, carefully self-circumscribed life as an adult on the one island he had ever known.
Then one afternoon he went belowdecks to rummage in his storage cases for fresh supplies and heard moans and gasps of passion coming from a dark corner of the hold. It was their special corner of the hold; it was a woman’s voice. Neyana was in the rigging, Lis was in the galley, Pilya was off duty and lounging on deck. The only other woman on board was Sundira. Where was Kinverson? He was first watch, like Pilya: he’d be off duty too. That must be Kinverson behind those crates, Lawler realized, urging those gasps and moans out of Sundira’s eager body.
So whatever it was that those two had between them—and Lawler knew what it was—hadn’t ended, not at all, not even in these new days of shared autobiographical confidences and sweetly intertwined hands.
Eight drops of numbweed helped him get through it, more or less.
He measured out what was left of his supply. Not much. Not very much at all.
Food was becoming a problem too. It was so long since they’d had any fresh catch that another attack by a hagfish swarm was almost beginning to seem like an appealing prospect. They lived on their dwindling supply of dried fish and powdered algae, as though they were in the depths of an arctic winter. Sometimes they were able to pull in a load of plankton by trawling a strip of fabric behind the ship, but eating plankton was like eating gritty sand, and the taste was bitter and difficult. Deficiency diseases began to make themselves felt. Wherever he looked Lawler saw cracked lips, dulled hair, blotchy skins, gaunt and haggard faces.
“This is crazy,” Dag Tharp muttered. “We’ve got to turn back before we all die.”
“How?” Onyos Felk asked. “Where’s the wind? When it blows at all here, it blows from the east.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Tharp said. “We’ll find a way. Throw that bastard Delagard overboard and swing the ship around. What do you say, doc?”
“I say we need some rain before long, and a good school of fish to come by.”
“You aren’t with us any more? I thought you were as hot to turn back as we are.”
“Onyos has a good point,” said Lawler cautiously. “The wind’s against us here. With or without Delagard, we may not be able to beat our way back east.”
“What are you saying, doc? That we just have to sail right on around the world until we come up on Home Sea again from the far side?”