“That’s right,” Lawler said. “I didn’t.”
Delagard considered that for a moment. Then he shrugged and nodded. “All right, doc. I think I get your meaning.” He looked around. “Somebody clean up the deck,” he said. “I hate a messy ship.” He gestured to Felk, who looked dazed. “Onyos, take the wheel, as long as you seem to be awake. I’ve got to get this cut fixed. Come on, doc. I guess I can trust you to stitch me up.”
At midday a wind came up between one moment and the next, as if Henders” death had been a sacrifice to whatever gods ruled the weather on Hydros. In the vast quiet of the long calm there abruptly appeared the deep roaring of gusts that had travelled a long way: all the way from the pole, in fact, a sharp southerly blow, cold and crisp.
The sea grew high. The ship, stilled for so long, tumbled into a trough, heeled back, dropped into another. Then the sky darkened with a suddenness that was almost startling. The wind was bringing rain with it.
“Buckets!” Delagard bellowed. “Casks!”
No one needed to be urged. The watch below came awake in an instant and the deck was alive with busy hands. Anything that could hold water was set forth to catch it, not simply the usual jars and casks and pots, but also clean rags, blankets, clothes, whatever was absorbent and could be wrung out after the storm. It had been weeks since the last rainfall; it might be weeks until the next.
The rain was a distraction, easing the shock of Henders” abortive mutiny and violent death. Lawler, naked in the cool rain, rushing back and forth like everyone else to empty the smaller vessels into the larger storage containers, was grateful for it. The nightmare scene on deck had affected him in a wholly unexpected way, stripping him of layers of hard-won defences. It had been a long time since he had felt so naive, so callow. Spouting gouts of blood, raw torn flesh, even sudden death, they were all everyday things to him, part of his professional routine. He was accustomed to them; he took them casually. But a killing? He had never seen a murder before. He had never really even imagined the possibility of one. For all of Dag Tharp’s brave talk of throwing Delagard overboard in the past couple of weeks, Lawler could hardly believe that one man might actually be capable of taking another’s life. There was no question, certainly, that Delagard had killed Henders in self defence. But he had done it coolly, matter-of-factly, remorselessly. Lawler felt humiliatingly ingenuous, confronting these ugly realities. Wise old Doc Lawler, the man who has seen everything, shivering in his boots over a bit of archaic violence? It was absurd. And yet it was real. The impact on him was intense. It had been a shattering sight.
Archaic was the right word for it. The efficiency and indifference with which Delagard had rid himself of his pursuer had been positively medieval, if not downright prehistoric: a hand had risen up out of the shadowy past, a dark act out of mankind’s primeval dawn had been reenacted on the deck of the Queen of Hydros this morning. Lawler would hardly have been more surprised if Earth itself had appeared suspended in the sky, hanging just above the masts with blood dripping from every teeming continent. So much for all those centuries of civilization. So much for the earnest common belief that all such ancient passions were extinct, that raw violence of that bloody kind had evolved out of the race.
The rainstorm was a welcome distraction, yes, as well as a much-needed source of water. It washed the deck clean of the stain of sin. What had happened here today was something Lawler would just as soon forget as quickly as he could.
4
In the night came troubling dreams, dreams filled not with murder but with powerful erotic passions.
The shadowy figures of women danced around Lawler as he slept, women without faces, mere cavorting bodies, generic receptacles for desire. They could have been anyone, anonymous, mysterious, pure female essence without specific identity, blank tablets and nothing more: a procession of swaying breasts, broad hips, full buttocks, dense thick pubic triangles. Sometimes it seemed to him that the dance was made up of disembodied breasts alone, or a succession of endlessly parting thighs, or moist shining lips. Or wriggling fingers, or flicking tongues.
He tossed restlessly, drifting toward wakefulness but always subsiding again into sleep, which brought new flurries of fevered sensuality. Clouds of women surrounded his bunk, their eyes slitted and wanton, their nostrils flaring, their bodies bare. Now there were faces to go with the bodies, the faces of the Sorve women he had known and loved and all but forgotten, a legion of them, all the escapades of his busy youth recalled to life and surrounding him now, the unformed faces of adolescent girls, the leering faces of older women who were dallying with a boy half their age, the tense, sharp-eyed faces of women stricken with a love that they knew was futile. One by one they passed within Lawler’s reach, let him touch them, allowed him to pull them close, and then faded into smoke, to be replaced almost at once by another. Sundira—Anya Braun—Boda Thalheim, not yet Sister Boda—Mariam Sawtelle—Mireyl—Sundira again—Meela—Moira—Sundira—Sundira—Anya—Mireyl—Sundira—
Lawler felt all the torment that desire can bring, and no hope of relief from it. His penis was huge, aching, a log. His testicles were iron weights. A hot musky woman-smell, maddening and irresistible, covered his nose and mouth like a smothering blanket, choking him, seeping down deep into his throat and filling his lungs until they were fiery with discomfort.
And beneath the images, beneath the fantasies, beneath the aching sense of distress and frustration, was something else: a strange vibration, perhaps a sound or perhaps not, in any event a steady widening beam of strong sensory input that came stabbing up through his body from his loins to his skull. He could feel it entering him like an icy spear just behind his testicles and rising through all the steaming intricacies of his guts, through his diaphragm, his heart, piercing his throat, stabbing upward into his brain. He was skewered on it and turning slowly like a fish grilling on a spit; and as he turned the intensity of the erotic sensations grew and grew and grew until there seemed to Lawler that nothing else existed in the universe but the need to find a partner and couple with her at once.
He rose from his narrow bed, not sure whether he was awake or still dreaming, and went out into the passageway. Up the ladder, through the hatch, out on deck.
The night was mild and moonless. The Cross trailed across the lower sky like a cluster of jewels that someone had carelessly tossed aside. The sea was calm, with little rounded rippling swells glittering by starlight. There was an easy breeze. The sails were set and full.
Figures were moving about: sleepwalkers, dreamers.
They were as vague and ghostly to Lawler as the figures of his dreams. He understood that he knew them, but that was all. They had no names just now. They had no selves. He saw a short thick-bodied man and another with a bony, angular body and a tiny, emaciated one with wattles at his throat. Men were not what he was looking for, though. Far down by the stern there was a tall, slender dark-haired woman. He headed for her. But before he could reach for her another man appeared, a tall strapping one with big glowing eyes, who came gliding out of the shadows and caught her by the wrist. They sank down together on the deck.
Lawler turned. There were other women on this ship. He would find one. He had to.
The throbbing ache between his legs was unendurable. That strange vibratory sensation still spitted him, rising the whole length of his torso, past his gullet and into his skull. It had the cold burning force of an icicle, and an icicle’s knife-like insistence.