“It sounded like Quillan. Quillan and something else, but Quillan even so.”
“If you like to think so.”
“I do,” said Delagard. Abruptly he stood up, swaying a little as though the effort made him dizzy. “I’m going to go over there and join up.”
Lawler stared at him.
“You too?” he said in wonder.
“Me, yes. Don’t try to stop me. I’ll kill you if you try. Remember what Lis did to me when I tried to stop her. We can’t be stopped, doc.”
Lawler was still staring. He means it, he thought. He actually means it. He’s really going to go. Could this really be Delagard? Yes. Yes. Delagard had always been one for doing what seemed best for Delagard, no matter what effect it might have on those around him.
To hell with him, then. Good riddance.
“Stop you?” Lawler said. “I wouldn’t dream of it. Go ahead, Nid. If you think you’ll be happy there, go. Go. Why should I stop you? What difference does anything make now?”
Delagard smiled. “No difference to you, maybe. But to me, plenty. I’m so fucking tired, doc. I was full of big dreams. I tried this scheme, I tried that one, and for a long time everything worked out, and then I came here and it all fell apart. I fell apart. Well, fuck it. I just want to rest now.”
“To kill yourself, you mean?”
“You think that’s what it means. But I’d never do that. I’m tired of being the captain of the ship. I’m tired of telling people what to do, especially when I see now that I don’t really know what the fuck I’m doing myself. I’ve had it, doc. I’m going to go over.” Delagard’s eyes brightened with newfound energy. “Maybe this is what I came here to do all along, only I never realized it until this minute. Maybe the Face sent Jolly home to bring the rest of us to it—only it took forty years, and then only a few of us came.” He looked almost jaunty now. “So long, doc. Sundira. It was nice knowing you. Come visit me some time.”
They watched him go.
“It’s just you and me, kid,” Lawler said to her. And they laughed. What else was there to do, but laugh?
Night came: a blazing night of comets and wonders, of flaring lights of a hundred different coruscating colours. Lawler and Sundira remained on deck as darkness came, sitting quietly near the mainmast, saying little to each other. He felt numb, burned out by the things that had happened this day. She was silent, exhausted.
Great explosions of colour burst overhead. A celebration of the newly conquered, Lawler thought. The auras of his former shipmates seemed to sparkle in the sky. That great slash of stormy blue: was that Delagard? And that warm amber glow: Quillan? Could that scarlet pillar be Kinverson, and the splash of molten gold near the horizon, Pilya Braun? And Felk—Tharp—Neyana—Lis—Gharkid—
It felt as though they were close at hand, every one of them. The sky boiled with radiant colour. But when Lawler listened for their voices, he was unable to hear them. All he could make out was a warm harmony of undifferentiated sounds.
On the darkening horizon the frenzied fertility of the island across the strait went on unabated: things sprouted, writhed, quivered against the deep hue of the sky, sending up showers of luminous energy. Waves of streaming light rose toward the heavens. There was never any rest over there. Lawler and Sundira sat watching the show far into the night, until at last he rose and said, “Are you hungry at all?”
“Not a bit.”
“Neither am I. Let’s get some sleep, then.”
“Yes. All right.”
She stretched her hand toward him and he pulled her to her feet. For a moment they stood close together by the rail, staring at the island across the strait.
“Do you feel any sort of pull?” she asked.
“Yes. It’s always there—biding its time, I think. Waiting for the moment when it catches us off guard.”
“I feel it too. It isn’t as strong as it was, but I know that that’s only a trick. I have to hold my mind clenched against it all the time.”
“I wonder why we were the only ones who were able to hold fast against the urge to go,” Lawler said. “Are we stronger and saner than the others, better able to live within our own identities? Or just so accustomed to feeling alienated from the society around us that we can’t possibly let ourselves go and plunge into a group mind.”
“Did you really feel so alienated when you lived on Sorve, Val?”
He considered that. “Maybe “alienated” is too strong a word. I was part of the Sorve community, and it was part of me. But I wasn’t part of it the way most of the others were. I was always a little to one side.”
“The same with me on Khamsilaine. I was never much of a belonger, I suppose.”
“Nor I.”
“Or even wanted to be. Some do, and can’t manage it. Gabe Kinverson was just as much a loner as we are. More, even. But suddenly a time came when he didn’t want to be, any more. And there he is, dwelling in the Face. But it gives me the shivers to think of yielding myself up and going over there to join some alien mind.”
“I never understood that man,” Lawler said.
“Neither did I. I tried to. But he was locked up in himself all the time. Even in bed.”
“I don’t need to know about that.”
“Sorry.”
“That’s okay.”
She pressed close against him.
“Just the two of us,” she said. “Stranded at the ass end of nowhere, all alone on a castaway ship. Very romantic, for however long we last. What are we going to do, Val?”
“We’ll go down below and make wild love. We can have the big bunk tonight in Delagard’s cabin.”
“And after that?”
“We’ll worry about after that after that,” said Lawler.
9
He awoke just before dawn. Sundira was sleeping peacefully, her face as smooth and unworried as a child’s. He slipped from the cabin and went up on deck. The sun was rising; the dazzling show of colours that the Face constantly emitted seemed more subdued this morning than it had been yesterday, far less flamboyant. He could still feel the pull of the Face tickling at the corners of his mind, but that was all it was just now, a tickle.
The figures of Lawler’s former companions were moving about on shore.
He watched them. Even at this distance he was able easily to identify them: towering Kinverson and little Tharp, stocky Delagard, bandy-legged Felk. Father Quillan, nothing but bones and sinew. Gharkid, darker-skinned than the others and light as a wraith. And the three women, heavy-breasted Lis and sturdy square-shouldered Neyana and lithe handsome Pilya. What were they doing? Wading along the edge of the water? No, no, they were walking out into the bay, they were coming this way, they were returning to the ship. All of them. Easily, calmly, they were paddling through the shallow water toward the Queen of Hydros.
Lawler felt a tremor of fear. It was like a procession of the dead coming through the water toward him.
He went below and woke Sundira.
“They’re coming back,” he told her.
“What? Who are? Oh. Oh.”
“The whole bunch of them. Swimming out to the ship.”
She nodded, as though it were no great chore for her to take in the concept that the physical shells of their former shipmates were returning from the inconceivable entity that had devoured their souls. Perhaps she wasn’t quite awake yet, Lawler thought. But she rose from the bunk and went up on deck with him. There were figures bobbing all around the ship now, just below the rail. Lawler peered down at them.
“What do you want?” he called.
“Throw down the rope ladder,” the Kinverson-figure replied, in what was recognizably Kinverson’s voice. “We’re coming on board.”