He tiptoed around the deck, mystified. When he came by the rear mast he saw Pilya asleep on a pile of ropes, and Tharp nearby, snoring. Delagard would flay them if he knew. A little farther on was Kinverson, sitting against the side with his back to the rail. His eyes were open, but he didn’t seem awake either.
“Gabe?” Lawler said quietly. He knelt and waggled his fingers back and forth in front of Kinverson’s face. No response. “Gabe, what’s going on? Are you hypnotized?”
“He’s resting,” came the voice of Onyos Felk suddenly, from behind. “Don’t bother him. It was a busy night. We were hauling sail for hours and hours. But look now: there’s the land, dead ahead. We’re moving very nicely toward it.”
Land? When did anyone ever speak of land, on Hydros?
“What are you talking about?” Lawler asked.
“There. Do you see it?”
Felk gestured vaguely toward the bow. Lawler looked forward and saw nothing, just the vastness of the luminous sea, and a clear horizon marked only by a few low stars and a sprawling, heavy cloud at middle height. The dark backdrop of the sky seemed weirdly ablaze, a frightful aurora fiercely blazing. There was colour everywhere, bizarre colour, a fantastic show of strange light. But no land.
“In the night,” said Felk, “the wind shifted, and turned us toward it. What an incredible sight it is! Those mountains! Those tremendous valleys! Would you ever have believed it, doc? The Face of the Waters!” Felk seemed about to burst into tears. “All my life, staring at my sea-charts, seeing that dark mark on the far hemisphere, and now we’re looking it right in the eye—the Face, doc, the Face itself!”
Lawler pulled his arms close against his sides. In the tropic warmth of the night he felt a sudden chill.
He still saw nothing at all, only the endless roll of the empty water.
“Listen, Onyos, if Delagard comes on deck early and finds your whole watch sleeping, you know what’s going to happen. For God’s sake, if you won’t wake them up, I will!”
“Let them sleep. By morning we’ll be at the Face.”
“What Face? Where?
“There, man! There!”
Lawler still didn’t see. He strode forward. When he reached the bow he found Gharkid, the one missing member of the watch, sitting crosslegged, perched on top of the forecastle with his head thrown back and his eyes wide and staring like two orbs of glass. Like Kinverson he was in some other state of awareness entirely.
Bewilderedly Lawler peered into the night. The dazzling maze of colours danced before him, but he still saw only clear water and empty sky ahead. Then something changed. It was as though his vision had been clouded, and now at last it had cleared. It seemed to him that a section of the sky had detached itself and come down to the water’s surface and was moving about in an intricate way, folding and refolding upon itself until it looked like a sheaf of crumpled paper, and then like a bundle of sticks, and then like a mass of angry serpents, and then like pistons driven by some invisible engine. A writhing interwoven network of some incomprehensible substance had sprung up along the horizon. It made his eyes ache to watch it.
Felk came up alongside him.
“Now do you see? Now?”
Lawler realized that he had been holding his breath a long while. He let it out slowly.
Something that felt like a breeze, but was something else, was blowing toward his face. He knew it couldn’t be a breeze, for he could feel the wind also, blowing from the stern, and when he glanced up at the sails he saw them bellying outward behind him. Not a breeze, no. An emanation. A force. A radiation. Aimed at him. He felt it crackling lightly through the air, felt it striking his cheeks like fine wind-blown hail in a winter storm. He stood without moving, assailed by awe and fear.
“Do you see?” Felk said again.
“Yes. Yes, now I do.” He turned to face the mapkeeper. By the strange light that was bursting upon them from the west Felk’s face seemed painted, goblinish. “You’d better wake up your watch, anyway. I’m going to go down below and get Delagard. For better or for worse, he’s brought us this far. He doesn’t deserve to miss the moment of our arrival.”
7
In the waning darkness Lawler imagined that the sea that lay before them was retreating swiftly, pulling back as though it were being peeled away, leaving a bare, bewildering sandy waste between the ship and the Face. But when he looked again he saw the shining waters as they had always been.
Then a little while later dawn arrived, bringing with it strange new sounds and sights: breakers visible, the crisp slap of wavelets against the bow, a line of tossing luminous foam in the distance. By the first grey light Lawler found it impossible to make out more than that. There was land ahead, not very far, but he was unable to see it. All was uncertain here. The air seemed thick with mist that would not burn off even as the sun moved higher. Then abruptly he became aware of the great dark barrier that lay across the horizon, a low hump that might almost have been the coastline of a Gillie island, except that there weren’t any Gillie islands the size of this one on Hydros. It stretched before them from one end of the world to the other, walling off the sea, which thundered and crashed against it in the distance but could not impose its strength on it in any way.
Delagard appeared. He stood trembling on the bridge, face thrust forward, hands gripping the rail in eerie fervour.
“There it is!” he cried. “Did you believe me or didn’t you? There’s the Face at last! Look at it! Look at it!”
It was impossible not to feel awe. Even the dullest and simplest of the voyagers—Neyana, say, or Pilya, or Gharkid—seemed moved by its encroaching presence, by the strangeness of the landscape ahead, by the power of the inexplicable psychic emanations that came in pulsing waves from the Face. All eleven of the voyagers stood arrayed side by side on deck, nobody bothering to sail or to steer, staring in stunned silence as the ship drifted toward the island as if caught in some powerful magnetic grip.
Only Kinverson appeared, if not untouched, then at least unshaken. He had awakened from his trance. Now he too was staring fixedly at the approaching shore. His craggy face seemed riven by strong emotion of some sort. But when Dag Tharp turned to him and asked him if he was afraid at all, Kinverson replied with a blank look, as if the question had no meaning for him, and a flat incurious glare, as though he felt no need to have it explained.
“Afraid?” he said. “No. Should I be?”
The constant motion of everything on the island struck Lawler as its most bewildering aspect. Nothing was at rest. Whatever vegetation lay along its shore, if vegetation was indeed what it was, appeared to be in a process of intense, dynamic, churning growth. There was no stillness anywhere. There were no recognizable patterns of topography. Everything was moving, everything was writhing, flailing, weaving itself into the tangled web of shimmering substance and unweaving itself again, whipping about in a ceaseless lunatic dance of exhausting energy that might well have been going on this way since the beginning of time.
Sundira came up alongside Lawler and laid her hand gently on his bare shoulder. They stood facing outward, scarcely daring even to breath.
“The colours,” she said softly. “The electricity.”
It was a fantastic display. Light was constantly born from every millimetre of surface. Now it was a pure white, now a brilliant red, now the deepest of violets, verging on impenetrable black. And then came colours Lawler could barely name. They were gone before he could comprehend them, and others just as potent came in their place.