“Don’t forget the Face,” Dann Henders put in. “We’ll get to the Face before we start up the other side of the world.”
“The Face,” said Tharp darkly. “The Face, the Face, the Face! Fuck the Face!”
“The Face will fuck us first,” Henders said.
The breeze freshened finally and chopped around from northeast to east-southeast, and blew with surprising chilly vigour, while the sea grew high and confused, breaking frequently across the stern. Suddenly there were fish again, a teeming silvery mass of them, and Kinverson netted a heave load.
“Easy there,” Delagard cautioned, when they sat down at table. “don’t stuff yourselves or you’ll burst.”
Lis outdid herself preparing the meals, conjuring up a dozen different sauces out of what seemed like nothing at all. But there was still no water, which made eating a taxing chore. Kinverson urged them to eat their fish raw once again, to get the benefit of the moisture it contained. Dipping the fresh bleeding chunks in sea water helped to make them more palatable, although it compounded the problem of thirst.
“What’ll happen to us if we drink salt water, doc?” Neyana Golghoz asked. “Will we die? Will we go crazy?”
“We already are crazy,” Dag Tharp said softly.
“We can tolerate a certain amount of salt water,” Lawler said, thinking of the amount he had consumed himself lately. But he wasn’t going to say anything about that. “If we had any fresh water, we could actually stretch the supply by diluting it ten or fifteen per cent with ocean water and it wouldn’t hurt us. In fact it would help us to replace the salt we’re sweating out of ourselves all the time in this hot weather. But we can’t live on straight sea water very long. Our bodies would manage to filter it and turn it into pure water, but our kidneys wouldn’t be able to get rid of the salt buildup without pulling water out of other body tissues to do it. We’d dry up pretty fast. Fever, vomiting, delirium, death.”
Dann Henders set up a row of little solar stills, stretching clear plastic over the mouths of pots partly filled with sea water. Each pot had a cup inside it, placed carefully to catch the drops of fresh water that condensed on the underside of the plastic. But that was a tortuous business. It seemed impossible to produce enough usable water this way to meet their needs.
“What if it doesn’t rain soon?” Pilya Braun asked. “What are we going to do?”
Lawler gestured toward Father Quillan. “We could try praying,” he said.
Late the following evening when the heat held them as tightly as a glove and the ship was standing almost perfectly still in the water, Lawler heard Henders and Tharp whispering in the radio room as he headed back to his cabin to go to sleep. There was something irritatingly abrasive about the scratchy sounds of their voices.
As Lawler halted in the passageway for a moment Onyos Felk came down the ladder and gave him a quick nod of greeting; then Felk went on to the radio room too. Lawler, pausing outside his cabin door, heard Felk say, “The doc’s out here. You want me to ask him in?”
Lawler couldn’t hear the reply. But it must have been affirmative, because Felk turned and beckoned to him and said, “Would you come over here for a minute, doc?”
“It’s late, Onyos. What is it?”
“Just for a minute.”
Tharp and Henders were sitting practically knee-to-knee in the tiny radio room with a guttering candle casting a sombre light between them. There was a flask of grapeweed brandy on the table, and two cups. Tharp ordinarily wasn’t a drinker, Lawler remembered.
Henders said, “Some brandy, doc?”
“I don’t think so, thanks.”
“Everything going all right?”
“I’m tired,” Lawler said, not very patiently. “What’s up, Dann?”
“We’ve been talking about Delagard, Dag and I. And Onyos. Discussing this idiotic fucked-up mess of a voyage that he’s dragged us off on. What do you think of him, doc?”
“Delagard?” Lawler shrugged. “You know what I think.”
“We all know what all of us think. We’ve all known each other too goddamned long. But tell us anyway.”
“A very determined man. Stubborn, strong, completely unscrupulous. Totally sure of himself.”
“Crazy?’
“That I can’t say.”
“I bet you could,” Dag Tharp put in. “You think he’s out of his fucking head.”
“That’s very possible. Or then again, not. Sometimes it’s not easy to tell the difference between singlemindedness and insanity. A lot of geniuses have seemed like madmen, in their times.”
“You think he’s a genius?” Henders asked.
“Not necessarily. But he’s unusual, at least. I’m not in a position to say what goes on in his mind. He may well be crazy. But he can give you perfectly rational-sounding reasons for what he’s doing, I’d be willing to bet. This Face of the Waters thing may make perfect sense to him.”
Felk said, “Don’t pretend to be so innocent, doc. Every lunatic thinks that his lunacy makes perfect sense. Isn’t a man in the world who ever believed he was crazy.”
“Do you admire Delagard?” Henders said to Lawler.
“Not particularly.” Lawler shrugged. “He’s got his strong points, you have to admit. He’s a man of vision. I don’t necessarily think his visions are very admirable ones.”
“Do you like him?”
“No. Not in the slightest.”
“You’re straightforward on that, anyway.”
“Look, is there a point to all this?” Lawler asked. “Because if you’re simply having a good time sitting here over a bottle of brandy telling each other what a miserable bastard Delagard is, I’d just as soon go to bed, okay?”
“We’re just trying to find out where you stand, doc,” Dann Henders said. “Tell us, do you want the voyage to continue the way it’s been going?”
“No.”
“Well, what are you prepared to do to change things?”
“Is there anything we can do?”
“I asked you a question. Asking me a question back doesn’t amount to an answer.”
“You planning on a mutiny, are you?”
“Did I say that? I don’t remember saying that, doc.”
“A deaf man could hear you saying it.”
“A mutiny,” Henders said. “Well, now, what if some of us did try to take some active role in deciding which way the ship ought to be travelling. What would you say if that were to happen? What would you do?”
“It’s a lousy idea, Dann.”
“You think so, doc?”
“There was a time when I was just as eager as you are to make Delagard turn the ship around. Dag knows that. I spoke to him about it. Delagard was to be stopped, I told him. You remember that. Dag? But that was before the Wave brought us way the hell out here. Since then I’ve had plenty of time to think about it, and I’ve changed my mind.”
“Why?”
“Three reasons. One is that this is Delagard’s ship, for better or for worse, and I don’t much like the notion of taking it away from him. A moral issue, you might say. You could justify doing it on the grounds that he’s risking our lives without our consent, I suppose. But even so I don’t think it’s a smart idea. Delagard’s too tricky. Too dangerous. Too strong. He’s on guard all the time. And a lot of the others on board are loyal to him, or afraid of him, which amounts to the same thing. They won’t help us. They’re likely to help him. You try any funny stuff with him and you very likely will find yourself regretting it.”
Henders” expression was a wintry one. “You said you had three reasons. That was two.”
Lawler said, “The third is the thing that Onyos was talking about the other day. Even if you grabbed the ship, how would you make it take us back to Home Sea? Be realistic about it. There’s no wind. We’re running out of food and water faster than I want to think about. Unless we can somehow pick up a westerly wind, the best we can hope for at this point is to keep on heading toward the Face on the chance that we’ll be able to reprovision ourselves when we get there.”