He looked at her in astonishment. That was a phrase that had never arisen between them. He had never imagined that it would. It was so long since he had last heard it that he couldn’t remember who it was who had said it to him.
What now? Was he expected to say it too?
She was grinning. She wasn’t expecting him to say anything. She knew him too well for that.
“Come here, doctor,” she said. “I need some more intense examination.”
Lawler glanced around to see if the infirmary door was locked. Then he went to her.
“Watch out for my blisters,” she said.
5
Things like giant periscopes rose from the sea, glistening stalks twenty metres high topped with five-sided blue polygons. From distances of half a kilometre or so they regarded the ship with a cool, unwavering gaze for hours. They were eye-stalks, obviously. But the eyes of what?
The periscopes slipped down into the water and didn’t reappear. Next came great yawning mouths, vast creatures similar to those of Home Sea, but even larger: large enough, it would seem, for them to swallow the Queen of Hydros at a single gulp. They too stayed at a distance, lighting up the sea day and night with their greenish phosphorescence. Mouths had never been known to create difficulties for ships on Hydros, but these were the mouths of the Empty Sea, capable of anything. The dark chasms of their open gullets were a threatening, troublesome sight.
The water itself grew phosphorescent. The effect was mild at first, just a little tingle of colour, a faint charming glow. But then it intensified. At night the ship’s wake was a line of fire across the sea. Even by day the waves looked fiery. The spray that occasionally broke across the rail had a bright sparkle.
There was a rain of stinging jellyfish. There was a display of madly frolicking divers, breaking the surface and leaping so high they seemed to be trying to take wing and fly. In one place something that looked like a collection of wooden poles tied together by a bundle of shabby cords came walking across the surface of the sea, with a tiny many-eyed globular creature in an open capsule at the centre of it, as though travelling on stilts.
Then one morning Delagard, peering over the edge of the rail—he was constantly on patrol now, wary of attack from any quarter—reared back abruptly and cried out, “What the fuck? Kinverson, Gharkid, will you come here and look at this?”
Lawler joined the group. Delagard was pointing straight down. At first Lawler saw nothing unusual; but then he noticed that the ship had sprouted a skirt of some sort about twenty centimetres below the surface, an outgrowth of yellowish fibrous stuff that extended outward all along the hull for a distance of a metre or so. No, not a skirt, Lawler decided: more like a ledge, a woody shelf.
Delagard turned to Kinverson. “You ever see anything like that before?”
“Not me.”
“You, Gharkid?”
“No, captain-sir, never.”
“Some sort of seaweed growing on us? A cross between a seaweed and a barnacle? What do you think, Gharkid?”
Gharkid shrugged. “It is a mystery to me, captain-sir.”
Delagard had a rope-ladder flung over the rail and went over the side to inspect. Hanging from the ladder by one arm, dangling just above the surface of the water and leaning far out and down, he used a long-handled barnacle-scraper to prod at the strange excresence. He came back up red-faced and cursing.
The problem, he said, was with the network of sea-finger weed that grew on the hull as a constantly self-repairing coating, protecting and reinforcing the ship’s outer timbers. “Some local plant has hooked up with it. A related species, maybe. Or a symbiote. Whatever it is, it’s clustering around the sea-finger, attaching itself as fast as it can, and it’s growing like crazy. The shelf that’s jutting out of us now is big enough already to be causing a perceptible drag. But if it keeps going at the rate it’s expanding, in a couple of days we’re going to find ourselves sealed in for good.”
“What are we going to do about it?” Kinverson asked.
“You have any suggestions?”
“That somebody go out there in the water-strider and cut the damned stuff off while it can still be done.”
Delagard nodded. “Good idea. I’ll volunteer to take the first shift. Will you go with me?”
“Sure.” Kinverson said. “Why not?”
Delagard and Kinverson climbed into the water-strider. Martello, operating the davits, lifted it and swung it far out past the rail, well beyond the new ledge, before lowering it to the surface of the water.
The trick was to pedal fast enough to keep the strider afloat, but not so fast that the man operating the barnacle-scraper would be unable to cut away the intrusive growths. That was hard to manage at first. Kinverson, holding the scraper, made the most of his long reach to lean over and chop at the ledge; but he took only a couple of strokes and then the strider went shooting past the place where he was working, and when they backed up and tried to hold it in one position for a longer time it began to lose lift and slip down into the water.
After a time they got the hang of it. Delagard pedalled, Kinverson chopped. When Kinverson became visibly weary they changed places, precariously creeping around the rocking vehicle until Delagard was in front and Kinverson was at the pedals.
“All right, next shift,” Delagard called finally. He had been working with his usual manic zeal and he looked worn out. “Two more volunteers! Leo, did I hear you say you’d take the next turn? And was that you, Lawler?”
Pilya Braun worked the davits to lower Martello and Lawler over the side. The sea was fairly calm, but even so the flimsy strider bobbed and rocked constantly. Lawler imagined himself being flung out into the water by some unusually strong swell. When he looked down he could see individual fibres of the invading seaplant tossing on the swells just beyond the border of the shelf that had already formed. As the movements of the sea brought them against the side of the ship he was sure that he saw some of them affixing themselves to it.
He also could see small shining ribbony shapes coiling and writhing in the water. Worms, serpents, maybe eels. They looked quick and agile. Hoping for a snack, were they?
The ledge resisted chopping. Lawler had to grip the barnacle-scraper with both hands and ram it downward with all his strength. Often it slipped harmlessly aside, deflected by the toughness of the strange new growth. He nearly lost it altogether a couple of times.
“Hey!” Delagard yelled from above. “We don’t have any of those things to spare!”
Lawler found a way of striking edge-on at a slight angle that allowed the scraper to get between individual strands of the fibrous mass. Chunk after huge chunk of the stuff now came loose and went drifting away. He fell into the rhythm of it, slicing and slicing. Sweat rolled down his skin. His arms and wrists began to protest. Pain spread upward toward his armpits, his chest, his shoulders. His heart pounded.
“Enough,” he said to Martello. “Your turn, Leo.”
Martello seemed tireless. He hacked away with a joyous vigour that Lawler found humiliating. He had thought he had done pretty well during his stint; but in Martello’s first five minutes with the scraper he chopped away as much as Lawler had managed in his whole time. Lawler supposed that Martello even now was composing the Chopping Canto of his great epic in his head while he worked:
Onyos Felk and Lis Niklaus went down next. After them it was the turn of Neyana and Sundira, and after them, Pilya and Gharkid.