Well, then. Back to the vaargh to wait for morning, he supposed.
A grating bass voice behind him said, “Lawler?”
Caught by surprise, Lawler whirled abruptly, his heart thundering. He squinted into the greying darkness. He could just barely make out the figure of a short, stocky man with a heavy shock of long, greasy-looking hair standing in the shadows ten or twelve metres to the inland side of him.
“Delagard? That you?”
The stocky man stepped forward. Delagard, yes. The self-appointed top dog of the island, the chief mover and shaker. What the hell was he doing skulking around here at this hour?
Delagard always seemed to be up to something tricky, even when he wasn’t. He was short but not small, a powerful figure built low to the ground, thick-necked, heavy-shouldered, paunchy. He wore an ankle-length sarong that left his broad shaggy chest bare.
Even in the darkness the garment glowed in luminous ripples of scarlet and turquoise and hot pink. Delagard was the richest man in the settlement, whatever that meant on a world where money itself had no meaning, where there was hardly anything you could spend it on. He was Hydros-born, like Lawler, but he owned businesses on several islands and moved around a lot. Delagard was a few years older than Lawler, perhaps forty-eight or fifty.
“You’re out and about pretty early this morning, doc,” Delagard said.
“I generally am. You know that.” Lawler’s voice was tighter than usual. “It’s a good time of day.”
“If you like to be alone, yes.” Delagard nodded toward the power plant. “Checking it out, are you?”
Lawler shrugged. He would sooner throttle himself with his own hands than let Delagard have any inkling of the grandiose heroic fatuity that he had spent this long night engendering.
Delagard said, “They tell me it’ll be on line tomorrow.”
“I’ve been hearing that for a week.”
“No. No, tomorrow they’ll really have it working. After all this time. They’ve generated power already, low level, and today they’ll be bringing it up to capacity.”
“How do you know?”
“I know,” Delagard said. “The Gillies don’t like me, but they tell me things, anyway. In the course of business, you understand.” He came up alongside Lawler and clapped his hand down on the sea-wall railing in a confident, hearty way, as if this island were his kingdom and the railing his sceptre. “You haven’t asked me yet why I’m up this early.”
“No. I haven’t.”
“Looking for you, is why. First I went over to your vaargh, but you weren’t there. Then I looked down to the lower terrace and I caught sight of somebody moving around on the path heading down here and figured it might be you, and I came down here to find out if I was right.”
Lawler smiled sourly. Nothing in Delagard’s tone indicated that he had seen what had taken place out on the power-plant promontory.
“Very early to be paying a call on me, if it’s a professional thing,” Lawler said. “Or a social call, for that matter. Not that you would.” He pointed to the horizon. The moon was still gleaming there. No sign of the first light of morning was visible yet. The Cross, even more brilliant than usual with Sunrise not in the sky, seemed to throb and pulse against the intense blackness. “I generally don’t start my office hours before daybreak. You know that, Nid.”
“A special problem,” said Delagard. “Couldn’t wait. Best taken care of while it’s still dark.”
“Medical problem, is it?”
“Medical problem, yes.”
“Yours?”
“Yes. But I’m not the patient.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“You will. Just come with me.”
“Where?” Lawler said.
“Shipyard.”
What the hell. Delagard seemed very strange this morning. It was probably something important. “All right,” said Lawler. “Let’s get going, then.”
Without another word Delagard turned and started along the path that ran just inside the sea-wall, heading toward the shipyard. Lawler followed him in silence. The path here followed another little promontory parallel to the one on which the power-plant structure stood, and as they moved out on it they had a clear view of the plant. Gillies were going in and out, carrying armloads of equipment.
“Those slippery fuckers,” Delagard muttered. “I hope their plant blows up in their faces when they start it up. If they ever get it started up at all.”
They rounded the far side of the promontory and entered the little inlet where Delagard’s shipyard stood. It was the biggest human enterprise on Sorve by far, employing more than a dozen people. Delagard’s ships constantly went back and forth between the various islands where he did business, carrying trade goods from place to place, the modest merchandise turned out by the various cottage industries that humans operated: fishhooks and chisels and mallets, bottles and jars, articles of clothing, paper and ink, hand-copied books, packaged foods and such. The Delagard fleet also was the chief distributor of metals and plastics and chemicals and other such essential commodities which the various islands so painstakingly produced. Every few years Delagard added another island to his chain of commerce. From the very beginning of human occupation of Hydros, Delagards had been running entrepreneurial businesses here, but Nid Delagard had expanded the family operation far beyond its earlier levels.
“This way,” Delagard said.
A strand of pearly dawnlight broke suddenly across the eastern sky. The stars dimmed and the little moon on the horizon began to fade from sight as the day started to come on. The bay was taking on its emerald morning colour. Lawler, following Delagard down the path into the shipyard, glanced out into it and had his first clear view of the giant phosphorescent creatures that had been cruising around out there all night. He saw now that they were mouths: immense flattened baglike creatures, close to a hundred metres in length, that travelled through the sea with their colossal jaws agape, swallowing everything that lay before them. Once a month or so, a pod of ten or twelve of them turned up in Sorve harbour and disgorged the contents of their stomachs, still alive, into huge wickerwork nets kept there for that purpose by the Gillies, who harvested them at leisure over the weeks that followed. It was a good deal for the Gillies, Lawler thought—tons and tons of free food. But it was hard to see what was in the deal for the mouths.
Delagard said, chuckling, “There’s my competition. If I could only kill off the fucking mouths, I could be hauling in all sorts of stuff myself to sell to the Gillies.”
“And what would they pay you for it with?”
“The same things they use to pay me now for the things I sell them,” said Delagard scornfully. “Useful elements. Cadmium, cobalt, copper, tin, arsenic, iodine, all the stuff this goddamn ocean is made of. But in very much bigger quantities than the dribs and drabs they dole out now, or that we’re capable of extracting ourselves. We get the mouths out of the picture somehow, and then I supply the Gillies with their meat, and they load me up with all kinds of valuable commodities in return. A very nice deal, let me tell you. Within five years I’d make them dependent on me for their entire food supply. There’d be a fortune in it.”
“I thought you were worth a fortune already. How much more do you need?”
“You just don’t understand, do you?”
“I guess not,” Lawler said. “I’m only a doctor, not a businessman. Where’s this patient of yours?”