The Face of the Waters

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To Charlie Brown, the focus of the LOCUS—and probably about time, too.

There was blue above and a different blue below, two immense inaccessible voids, and the ship appeared almost to be hovering suspended between one blue void and the other, touching neither, motionless, perfectly becalmed. But in fact it was in the water, right where it belonged, not above it, and it was moving all the time. Night and day for four days now it had headed steadily outward, travelling away from Sorve, sailing ever farther into the trackless sea.

When Valben Lawler came up on the deck of the flagship early on the morning of the fifth day there were hundreds of long silvery snouts jutting out of the water on all sides. That was new. The weather had changed, too: the wind had dropped, the sea was listless, not merely calm now but quiet in a peculiarly electric, potentially explosive way. The sails were slack. Limp ropes dangled. A thin sharp line of grey haze cut across the sky like an invader from some other part of the world. Lawler, a tall, slender man of middle years with an athlete’s build and grace, grinned down at the creatures in the water. They were so ugly that they were almost charming. Sinister brutes, he thought.

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