Four.
Where was Pilya, though? Lawler glanced around and saw her in the rigging, naked, glistening in the sunlight, climbing higher, higher—was she going to dive from there? Yes. Yes, she was.
Splash.
Three.
“Just us,” Sundira said. She looked at Lawler and then at Delagard, who sat dismally propped against the base of the mainmast with his hands over his face. “We’re the ones it doesn’t want, I guess.”
“No,” said Lawler. “The only ones strong enough to fight it off.”
“Hurray for us,” Delagard said gloomily, without looking up.
“Are three of us enough to sail this ship?” she asked. “What do you think, Val?”
“We can try, I suppose.”
“Don’t talk garbage,” Delagard said. “You can’t possibly run this ship with a crew of three.”
“We could set the sails to the prevailing breezes and simply ride the current,” Lawler said. “Maybe if we did that we’d get to some inhabited island sooner or later. It’s better than staying here. What do you say, Nid?”
Delagard shrugged.
Sundira was looking towards the Face.
“Can you see any of them?” Lawler asked.
“Not a one. But I hear something. I feel something. Father Quillan, I think, coming back.”
Lawler peered toward shore. “Where?” The priest was nowhere in sight. But yet, but yet—no doubt of it, Lawler too felt a Quillan-like presence. It was as though the priest were right here beside them on the deck. Another trick of the Face, he decided.
“No,” Quillan said. “Not a trick. I am here.”
“It isn’t so. You’re still on the island,” said Lawler tonelessly.
“On the island, and here with you, at one and the same time.”
Delagard made a hollow sound of disgust. “Son of a bitch. Why won’t the thing leave us alone?”
“It loves you,” Quillan said. “It wants you. We want you. Come and join us.”
Lawler saw that their victory was only a tentative one. The pull was still there—subtler now, as if holding itself in abeyance, but ready to seize them the moment they let down their guard. Quillan was intended as a distraction—a seductive distraction.
He said, “Are you Father Quillan, or are you the Face speaking?”
“Both. I am of the Face now.”
“But you still perceive yourself as the priest Father Quillan, dwelling within the entity that is the Face of the Waters?”
“Yes. Yes, exactly.”
“How can that be?” Lawler asked.
“Come and see,” said Quillan. “You remain yourself. And yet you become something infinitely greater.”
“Infinitely?”
“Infinitely, yes.”
“It’s like a dream,” Sundira said. “Talking to something that you can’t see, and having it answer you in the voice of someone you know.” She sounded very calm. Like Delagard, she seemed past all fear now, past all tumult. Either the Face would have them or it wouldn’t, but it was almost at the point of being beyond their control. “Father, can you hear me too?”
“Of course, Sundira.”
“Do you know what the Face is? Is it God? Can you tell us?”
“The Face is Hydros, and Hydros is the Face,” said the priest’s quiet voice. “Hydros is a great corporate mind, a collective organism, a single intelligent entity that spans the entire planet. This island which we have come to, this place that we call the Face of the Waters, is a living thing, the brain of the planet. And more than a brain: the central womb of everything is what the Face is. The universal mother from which all life on Hydros flows.”
“Is that why the Dwellers won’t come here?” Sundira asked. “Because it’s sacrilege to return to the place from which you’ve come?”
“Something like that, yes.”
“And the multitude of intelligent life-forms of Hydros,” Lawler said, seeing the connection suddenly. “That came about because everything is linked to the Face, isn’t that so? The Gillies and the divers and the rammerhorns and everything else? One giant conglomerate world-mind?”
“Yes. Yes. One universal intelligence.”
Lawler nodded. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine what it was like to be part of such an entity. The world as a single huge clockwork mechanism, ticking, ticking, ticking, and every living thing on it dancing to the ryhthm of the ticks.
Quillan was part of it now. Gharkid. Lis, Pilya, Neyana, Tharp, Felk, even poor tortured Kinverson. Swallowed up in the godhead. Lost in the immensity of the divine.
Delagard said suddenly, still not lifting his head from the posture of darkest depression in which he sat slumped, “Quillan? Tell me this, Quillan: what about the undersea city? Is there one or isn’t there?”
“A myth,” the voice of the unseen Quillan replied. “A fable.”
“Ah,” said Delagard bitterly. “Ah.”
“Or a metaphor, more truthfully. Your wandering seaman had something of the fundamental idea, but he garbled it. The great city is everywhere on Hydros, under the sea and in it and at its surface. The planet is a single city; every living creature on it is a citizen of it.”
Delagard looked up. His eyes were dull with exhaustion.
Quillan went on, “The beings who live here have always dwelled in the water. Guided by the Face, united with the Face. At first they were completely aquatic, and then the Face showed them how to build the floating islands, to prepare them for the time in the distant future when land would begin to rise from the depths. But there was never any secret undersea city. This is a water-world and nothing else. And everything in it is bound harmoniously within the power of the Face.”
“Everything except us,” said Sundira.
“Everything except the few wandering humans who have found their way to this world, yes,” Quillan said. “The exiles. Who out of ignorance have continued to be exiles here. Insisting on it, even. Aliens choosing to live apart from the harmony that is Hydros.”
“Because they have no business being part of that harmony,” Lawler said.
“Not true. Not true. Hydros welcomes everyone.”
“But only on its own terms.”
“Not true,” said Quillan.
“But once you cease to be yourself—” Lawler said. “Once you become part of some larger entity—”
He frowned. Something had changed just then. He felt silence all around him. The aura, the enveloping blanket of thought, that had surrounded them during their colloquy with Quillan had vanished.
“I don’t think he’s here any more,” Sundira said.
“No, he isn’t,” said Lawler. “He’s pulled back from us. It has.” The Face itself, the sense of a vast nearby presence, seemed to be gone. For the moment, at least.
“How strange it feels to be alone again.”
“It feels good, I’d say. Just the three of us, each in our own head, and nobody talking to us out of the sky. For however long it is until it starts up again.”
“It will start up again, won’t it?” said Sundira.
“I suppose,” Lawler said. “And we’ll have to fight it all over again. We can’t allow ourselves to be swallowed up. Human beings have no business becoming part of an alien world. We weren’t meant for that.”
Delagard said in an odd tone, soft and wistful, “He sounded happy, didn’t he?”
“You think so?” Lawler asked.
“Yes, I do. He was always so strange, so sad, so distant. Wondering where God was. Well, now he knows. He’s with God at last.”
Lawler gave him a curious look. “I didn’t know that you believed in God, Nid. Now you think that the Face is God?”
“Quillan does. And Quillan’s happy. For the first time in his life.”
“Quillan’s dead, Nid. Whatever was talking to us just now wasn’t Quillan.”