This book was
copied right, in
the dark, by
Illuminati.
About the
e-Book
TITLE: The Chrysalids
AUTHOR: Wyndham,
ABEB Version: 3.0
Hog Edition
THE
CHRYSALIDS
JOHN WYNDHAM
When I was quite small I would sometimes
dream of a city — which was strange because it began before I even knew what a
city was. But this city, clustered on the curve of a big blue bay, would come
into my mind. I could see the streets, and the buildings that lined them, the
waterfront, even boats in the harbour; yet, waking, I
had never seen the sea, or a boat....
And the
buildings were quite unlike any I knew. The traffic in the streets was strange,
carts running with no horses to pull them; and sometimes there were things in
the sky, shiny fish-shaped things that certainly were not birds.
Most often I
would see this wonderful place by daylight, but occasionally it was by night
when the lights lay like strings of glow-worms along the shore, and a few of
them seemed to be sparks drifting on the water, or in the air.
It was a
beautiful, fascinating place, and once, when I was still young enough to know
no better, I asked my eldest sister, Mary, where this lovely city could be.
She shook her
head, and told me that there was no such place — not now. But, perhaps, she
suggested, I could somehow be dreaming about times long ago. Dreams were funny
things, and there was no accounting for them; so it might be that what I was
seeing was a bit of the world as it had been once upon a time — the wonderful
world that the Old People had lived in; as it had been before God sent
Tribulation.
But after that
she went on to warn me very seriously not to mention it to anyone else; other
people, as far as she knew, did not have such pictures in their heads, either
sleeping or waking, so it would be unwise to mention them.
That was good
advice, and luckily I had the sense to take it. People in our district had a
very sharp eye for the odd, or the unusual, so that even my left-handedness
caused slight disapproval. So, at that time, and for some years afterwards, I
did not mention it to anyone — indeed, I almost forgot about it, for as I grew
older the dream came less frequently, and then very rarely.
But the advice
stuck. Without it I might have mentioned the curious understanding I had with
my cousin Rosalind, and that would certainly have led us both into very grave
trouble — if anyone had happened to believe me. Neither I nor she, I think,
paid much attention to it at that time: we simply had the habit of caution. I
certainly did not feel unusual. I was a normal little boy, growing up in a
normal way, taking the ways of the world about me for granted. And I kept on
like that until the day I met Sophie. Even then, the difference was not
immediate. It is hind-sight that enables me to fix that as the day when
my first small doubts started to germinate.
That day I had
gone off by myself, as I often did. I was, I suppose, nearly ten years old. My
next sister, Sarah, was five years older, and the gap meant that I played a
great deal alone. I had made my way down the cart-track to the south, along the
borders of several fields until I came to the high bank, and then along the top
of the bank for quite a way.
The bank was no
puzzle to me then: it was far too big for me to think of as a thing that men could have built, nor had it ever occurred to me to connect
it with the wondrous doings of the Old People whom I sometimes heard about. It
was simply the bank, coming round in a wide curve, and then running straight as
an arrow towards the distant hills; just a part of the world, and no more to be
wondered at than the river, the sky, or the hills themselves.
I had often
gone along the top of it, but seldom explored on the farther side. For some
reason I regarded the country there as foreign — not so much hostile, as
outside my territory. But there was a place I had discovered where the rain, in
running down the far side of the bank, had worn a sandy gully. If one sat in
the start of that and gave a good push off, one could go swishing down at a
fine speed, and finally fly a few feet through the air to land in a pile of
soft sand at the bottom.
I must have
been there half a dozen times before, and there had never been anyone about,
but on this occasion, when I was picking myself up after my third descent and
preparing for a fourth, a voice said: 'Hullo!'
I looked round.
At first I could not tell where it came from; then a shaking of the top twigs
in a bunch of bushes caught my eye. The branches parted, and a face looked out
at me. It was a small face, sunburned, and clustered about by dark curls. The
expression was somewhat serious, but the eyes sparkled. We regarded one another
for a moment, then:
'Hallo,' I
responded.
She hesitated, then pushed the bushes farther apart. I saw a girl a little
shorter than I was, and perhaps a little younger. She wore reddish-brown
dungarees with a yellow shirt. The cross stitched to the front of the dungarees
was of a darker brown material. Her hair was tied on either side of her head
with yellow ribbons. She stood still for a few seconds as though uncertain
about leaving the security of the bushes, then curiosity got the better of her
caution, and she stepped out.
I stared at her
because she was completely a stranger. From time to time there were gatherings
or parties which brought together all the children for miles around, so that it
was astonishing to encounter one that I had never seen before.
'What's your
name?' I asked her.
'Sophie,' she
told me. 'What's yours?'
'David,' I
said. 'Where's your home?'
'Over there,'
she said, waving her hand vaguely towards the foreign country beyond the bank.
Her eyes left
mine and went to the sandy runnel down which I had been sliding.
'Is that fun?'
she inquired, with a wistful look.
I hesitated a
moment before inviting her, then:
'Yes,' I told
her. 'Come and try.'
She hung back,
turning her attention to me again. She studied me with a serious expression for
a second or two, then made up her mind quite suddenly.
She scrambled to the top of the bank ahead of me.
She sped down
the runnel with curls and ribbons flying. When I landed she had lost her
serious look, and her eyes were dancing with excitement.
'Again,' she
said, and panted back up the bank.
It was on her
third descent that the misadventure occurred. She sat down and shoved off as
before. I watched her swish down and come to a stop in a Hurry of sand. Somehow
she had contrived to land a couple of feet to the left of the usual place. I
made ready to follow, and waited for her to get clear. She did not.
'Go on,' I told
her impatiently.
She tried to
move, and then called up,
'I can't. It
hurts.'
I risked pushing
off, anyway, and landed close beside her.
'What's the
matter?' I asked.
Her face was
screwed up. Tears stood in her eyes.
'My foot's
stuck,' she said.
Her left foot
was buried. I scrabbled the soft sand clear with my
hands. Her shoe was jammed in a narrow space between two up-pointed stones. I
tried to move it, but it would not budge.
'Can't you sort
of twist it out?' I suggested.
She tried, lips
valiantly compressed.
'It won't
come.'
'I'll help
pull,' I offered.
'No, no! It
hurts,' she protested.
I did not know
what to do next. Very clearly her predicament was painful. I considered the
problem.
'We'd better
cut the laces so you can pull your foot out of the shoe. I can't reach the
knot,' I decided.
'No!' she said,
alarmed. 'No, I mustn't.'
She was so emphatic
that I was baffled. If she were to pull the foot out of the shoe, we might
knock the shoe itself free with a stone, but if she would not, I didn't see
what was to be done. She lay back on the sand, the knee of the trapped leg
sticking up in the air.
'Oh, it is
hurting so,' she said. She could not hold back the tears any longer. They ran
down her face. But even then she didn't howl: she made small puppyish noises.
'You'll have
to take it off,' I told her.
'No!' she
protested again. 'No, I mustn't. Not ever. I mustn't.'
I sat down
beside her, at a loss. Both her hands held on to one of mine, gripping it
tightly while she cried. Clearly the pain of her foot was increasing. For
almost the first time in my life I found myself in charge of a situation which
needed a decision. I made it.
'It's no good.
You've got to get it off,' I told her. 'If you don't, you'll probably
stay here and die, I expect.'
She did not
give in at once, but at last she consented. She watched apprehensively while I
cut the lace. Then she said:
'Go away! You
mustn't look.'
I hesitated,
but childhood is a time thickly beset with incomprehensible, though important,
conventions, so I withdrew a few yards and turned my back. I heard her
breathing hard. Then she was crying again. I turned round.
'I can't,' she
said, looking at me fearfully through her tears, so I knelt down to see what I
could do about it.
'You mustn't
ever tell,' she said. 'Never, never! Promise?'
I promised.
She was very
brave. Nothing more than the puppy noises.
When I did
succeed in getting the foot free, it looked queer: I mean, it was all twisted
and puffy - I didn't even notice then that it had more than the usual number of
toes. . . .
I managed to
hammer the shoe out of the cleft, and handed it to her. But she found she could
not put it on her swollen foot. Nor could she put the foot to the ground. I
thought I might carry her on my back, but she was heavier than I expected, and
it was clear that we should not get far like that.
'I'll have to
go and fetch somebody to help,' I told her.
'No. I'll
crawl,' she said.
I walked beside
her, carrying the shoe, and feeling useless. She kept going gamely for a
surprisingly long way, but she had to give it up. Her trousers were worn
through at the knees, and the knees themselves were sore and bleeding. I had
never known anyone, boy or girl, who would have kept on till that pitch; it
awed me slightly. I helped her to stand up on her sound foot, and steadied her
while she pointed out where her home was, and the trickle of smoke that marked
it. When I looked back she was on all fours again, disappearing into the
bushes.
I found the
house without much difficulty, and knocked, a little nervously. A tall woman
answered. She had a fine, handsome face with large bright eyes. Her dress was
russet and a little shorter than those most of the women at home wore, but it
carried the conventional cross, from neck to hem and breast to breast, in a
green that matched the scarf on her head.
'Are you
Sophie's mother?' I asked.
She looked at
me sharply and frowned. She said, with anxious abruptness:
'What is it?'
I told her.
'Oh!' she
exclaimed. 'Her foot!'
She looked hard
at me again for a moment, then she leant the broom she
was holding against the wall, and asked briskly:
'Where is she?'
I led her by
the way I had come. At the sound of her voice Sophie crawled out of the bushes.
Her mother
looked at the swollen, misshapen foot and the bleeding knees.
'Oh, my poor
darling!' she said, holding her and kissing her. Then she added: 'He's seen
it?'
'Yes,' Sophie
told her. 'I'm sorry, Mummy. I tried hard, but I couldn't do it myself, and it
did hurt so.'
Her mother
nodded slowly. She sighed.
'Oh, well, it
can't be helped now. Up you get.'
Sophie climbed
on to her mother's back, and we all went back to the house together.
The
commandments and precepts one learns as a child can be remembered by rote, but
they mean little until there is example — and, even then, the example needs to
be recognized.
Thus, I was
able to sit patiently and watch the hurt foot being washed, cold-poulticed, and bound up, and perceive no connexion between it and the affirmation which I had heard
almost every Sunday of my life.
'And God
created man in His own image. And God decreed that man should have one body,
one head, two arms and two legs: that each arm should be jointed in two places
and end in one hand: that each hand should have four fingers and one thumb:
that each finger should bear a flat finger-nail. . .'
And so on
until:
'Then God
created woman, also, and in the same image, but with these differences,
according to her nature: her voice should be of higher pitch than man's: she should grow no beard: she should have two breasts...'
And so on
again.
I knew it all,
word for word — and yet the sight of Sophie's six toes stirred nothing in my
memory. I saw the foot resting in her mother's lap. Watched her mother pause to
look down at it for a still moment, lift it, bend to kiss it gently, and then
look up with tears in her eyes. I felt sorry for her distress, and for Sophie,
and for the hurt foot — but nothing more.
While the
bandaging was finished I looked round the room curiously. The house was a great
deal smaller than my home, a cottage, in fact, but I liked it better. It felt
friendly. And although Sophie's mother was anxious and worried she did not give
me the feeling that I was the one regrettable and unreliable factor in an
otherwise orderly life, the way most people did at home. And the room itself
seemed to me the better, too, for not having groups of words hanging on the
wall for people to point to in disapproval. Instead, this room had several
drawings of horses, which I thought very fine.
Presently,
Sophie, tidied up now, and with the tear-marks washed away, hopped to a chair
at the table. Quite restored, but for the foot, she inquired with grave
hospitality whether I liked eggs.
Afterwards, Mrs.
Wender told me to wait where I was while she carried her upstairs. She returned
in a few minutes, and sat down beside me. She took my hand in hers and looked
at me seriously for some moments. I could feel her anxiety strongly; though
quite why she should be so worried was not, at first, clear to me. I was
surprised by her, for there had been no sign before
that she could think in that way. I thought back to her, trying to reassure her
and show her that she need not be anxious about me, but the thought didn't
reach her. She went on looking at me with her eyes shining, much as Sophie's
had when she was trying not to cry. Her own thoughts were all worry and
shapelessness as she kept looking at me. I tried again, but still couldn't
reach them. Then she nodded slowly, and said in words:
'You're a good
boy, David. You were very kind to Sophie. I want to thank you for that.'
I felt awkward,
and looked at my shoes. I couldn't remember anyone saying before that I was a
good boy. I knew no form of response designed to meet such an event.
'You like
Sophie, don't you?' she went on, still looking at me.
'Yes,' I told
her. And I added: 'I think she's awfully brave, too. It must have hurt a lot.'
'Will you keep
a secret — an important secret — for her sake?' she asked.
'Yes — of
course,' I agreed, but a little uncertain in my tone for not realizing what the
secret was.
'You — you saw
her foot?' she said, looking steadily into my face. 'Her — toes?'
I nodded.
'Yes,' I said again.
'Well, that is
the secret, David. Nobody else must know about that. You are the only person
who does, except her father and me. Nobody else must know. Nobody
at all — not ever.'
'No,' I agreed,
and nodded seriously again.
There was a
pause — at least, her voice paused, but her thoughts went on, as if 'nobody'
and 'not ever' were making desolate, unhappy echoes there. Then that changed,
and she became tense and fierce and afraid inside. It was no good thinking back
to her, so I tried clumsily to emphasize in words that I had meant what I said.
'Never — not
anybody at all,' I assured her earnestly.
'It's very,
very important,' she insisted. 'How can I explain to you?' But she didn't
really need to explain. Her urgent, tight-strung feeling of the importance was
very plain. Her words were far less potent. She said:
'If anyone were to find out, they'd — they'd be terribly unkind to her.
We've got to see that that never happens.'
It was as if
the anxious feeling had turned into something hard, like an iron rod.
'Because
she has six toes?' I
asked.
'Yes. That's
what nobody but us must ever know. It must be a secret
between us,' she repeated, driving it home. 'You'll promise, David?'
'I'll promise.
I can swear, if you like,' I offered.
'The promise is
enough,' she told me.
It was so heavy
a promise that I was quite resolved to keep it completely — even from my
cousin, Rosalind. Though, underneath, I was puzzled by its evident importance.
It seemed a very small toe to cause such a degree of anxiety. But there was
often a great deal of grown-up fuss that seemed disproportionate to causes. So
I held on to the main point — the need for secrecy.
Sophie's mother
kept on looking at me with a sad but unseeing expression until I became
uncomfortable. She noticed when I fidgeted, and smiled. It was a kind smile.
'All right,
then,' she said. 'We'll keep it secret, and never talk about it again?'
'Yes,' I
agreed.
On the way down
the path from the door, I turned round.
'May I come and
see Sophie again soon?' I asked.
She hesitated,
giving the question some thought, then she said:
'Very well —
but only if you are sure you can come without anyone knowing,' she agreed.
Not until I had
reached the bank and was making my homeward way along the top of it did the
monotonous Sunday precepts join up with reality. Then they did it with a click
that was almost audible. The Definition of Man recited itself in my head: '. .
. and each leg shall be jointed twice and have one foot, and each foot five
toes, and each toe shall end with a flat nail....' And so on, until finally:
'And any creature that shall seem to be human, but is not formed thus is not
human. It is neither man nor woman. It is a blasphemy against the true Image of
God, and hateful in the sight of God.'
I was abruptly
perturbed — and considerably puzzled, too. A blasphemy was, as had been
impressed upon me often enough, a frightful thing. Yet there was nothing
frightful about Sophie. She was simply an ordinary little girl — if a great
deal more sensible and braver than most. Yet, according to the Definition . . .
Clearly there
must be a mistake somewhere. Surely having one very small toe extra — well, two
very small toes, because I supposed there would be one to match on the other
foot — surely that couldn't be enough to make her 'hateful in the sight of God
. . .'?
The ways of the
world were very puzzling. . . .
I reached home by my usual method. At a
point where the woods had lapped up the side of the bank and grown across it I
scrambled down on to a narrow, little-used track. From there on I was watchful,
and kept my hand on my knife. I was supposed to keep out of the woods, for it
did occasionally — though very rarely — happen that large creatures penetrated
as far into civilized parts as Waknuk, and there was just a chance that one
might encounter some kind of wild dog or cat. However, and as usual, the only
creatures I heard were small ones, hurriedly making off.
After a mile or
so I reached cultivated land, with the house in sight across three or four
fields. I worked along the fringe of the woods, observing carefully from cover,
then crossed all but the last field in the shadows of the hedges, and paused to
prospect again. There was no one in sight but old Jacob slowly shovelling muck in the yard. When his back was safely
turned I cut swiftly across the bit of open ground, climbed in through a
window, and made my way cautiously to my own room.
Our house is not
easy to describe. Since my grandfather, Elias Strorm, built the first part of
it, over fifty years earlier, it had grown new rooms and extensions at various
times. By now it rambled off on one side into stock-sheds, stores, stables, and
barns, and on the other into wash-houses, dairies, cheese-rooms, farm-hands' rooms,
and so on until it three-quarters enclosed a large, beaten-earth yard which lay
to leeward of the main house and had a midden for its
central feature.
Like all the
houses of the district, it was constructed on a frame of solid, roughly-dressed
timbers, but, since it was the oldest house there, most of the spaces in the
outer walls had been filled in with bricks and stones from the ruins of some of
the Old People's buildings, and plastered wattle was used only for the internal
walls.
My grandfather,
in the aspect he wore when presented to me by my father, appeared to have been
a man of somewhat tediously unrelieved virtue. It was only later that I pieced
together a portrait that was more credible, if less creditable.
Elias Strorm
came from the East, somewhere near the sea. Why he came is not quite clear. He
himself maintained that it was the ungodly ways of the East which drove him to
search for a less sophisticated, stauncher-minded region; though I have heard
it suggested that there came a point when his native parts refused to tolerate
him any longer. Whatever the cause, it persuaded him to Waknuk — then
undeveloped, almost frontier country — with all his worldly goods in a train of
six wagons, at the age of forty-five. He was a husky man, a dominating man, and
a man fierce for rectitude. He had eyes that could flash with evangelical fire
beneath bushy brows. Respect for God was frequently on his lips, and fear of
the devil constantly in his heart, and it seems to have been hard to say which
inspired him the more.
Soon after he
had started the house he went off on a journey and brought back a bride. She
was shy, pretty in the pink and golden way, and twenty-five years younger than himself. She moved, I have been told, like a lovely colt
when she thought herself unwatched; as timorously as a rabbit when she felt her
husband's eye upon her.
All her
answers, poor thing, were dusty. She did not find that a marriage service
generated love; she did not enable her husband to recapture his youth through
hers; nor could she compensate for that by running his home in the manner of an
experienced housekeeper.
Elias was not a
man to let shortcomings pass unremarked. In a few
seasons he straitened the coltishness with admonitions, faded the pink and gold
with preaching, and produced a sad, grey wraith of wifehood who
died, unprotesting, a year after her second son was
born.
Grandfather
Elias had never a moment's doubt of the proper pattern for his heir. My father's
faith was bred into his bones, his principles were his sinews, and both
responded to a mind richly stored with examples from the Bible, and from
Nicholson's Repentances. In faith father and son were at one; the
difference between them was only in approach; the evangelical flash did not
appear in my lather s eye; his virtue was inure
legalistic.
Joseph Strorm,
my father, did not marry until Elias was dead, and when he did he was not a man
to repeat his father's mistake. My mother's views harmonized with
his own. She had a strong sense of duty, and never doubted where it lay.
Our district,
and, consequently, our house as the first there, was called Waknuk because of a
tradition that there had been a place of that name there, or thereabouts, long,
long ago, in the time of the Old People. The tradition was, as usual, vague,
but certainly there had been some buildings of some kind, for the remnants and
foundations had remained until they were taken for new buildings. There was
also the long bank, running away until it reached the hills and the huge scar
that must have been made by the Old People when, in their superhuman fashion,
they had cut away half a mountain in order to find something or other that interested
them. The place may have been called Waknuk then; anyway, Waknuk it had become;
an orderly, law-abiding, God-respecting community of some hundred scattered
holdings, large and small.
My father was a
man of local consequence. When, at the age of sixteen, he had made his first
public appearance by giving a Sunday address in the church his father had
built, there had still been fewer than sixty families in the district. But as
more land was cleared for farming and more people came to settle, he was not
submerged by them. He was still the largest landowner, he still continued to
preach frequently on Sundays and to explain with practical clarity the laws and
views held in heaven upon a variety of matters and practices, and, upon the
appointed days, he administered the laws temporal, as a magistrate. For the
rest of the time he saw to it that he, and all within his control, continued to
set a high example to the district.
Within the
house, life centred, as was the local custom, upon
the large living-room which was also the kitchen. As the house was the largest
and best in Waknuk, so was the room. The great fireplace there was an object of
pride — not vain pride, of course; more a matter of being conscious of having
given worthy treatment to the excellent materials that the Lord had provided: a
kind of testament, really. The hearth was solid stone blocks. The whole chimney
was built of bricks and had never been known to catch fire. The area about its
point of emergence was covered with the only tiles in the district, so that the
thatch which covered the rest of the roof had never caught fire, either.
My mother saw
to it that the big room was kept very clean and tidy. The floor was composed of
pieces of brick and stone and artificial stone cleverly fitted together. The
furniture was whitely-scrubbed tables and stools, with a few chairs. The walls
were whitewashed. Several burnished pans, too big to go in the cupboards, hung
against them. The nearest approach to decoration was a number of wooden panels
with sayings, mostly from Repentances, artistically burnt into them. The
one on the left of the fireplace read: ONLY THE IMAGE OF GOD IS MAN. The one on
the right: KEEP PURE THE STOCK OF THE LORD. On the opposite wall two more said:
BLESSED IS THE NORM, and IN PURITY OUR SALVATION. The largest was the one on
the back wall, hung to face the door which led to the yard. It reminded
everyone who came in: WATCH THOU FOR THE MUTANT!
Frequent
references to these texts had made me familiar with the words long before I was
able to read, in fact I am not sure that they did not
give me my first reading lessons. I knew them by heart, just as I knew others
elsewhere in the house, which said things like: THE NORM IS THE WILL OF GOD,
and, REPRODUCTION IS THE ONLY HOLY PRODUCTION and, THE DEVIL IS THE FATHER OF
DEVIATION, and a number of others about Offences and Blasphemies.
Many of them
were still obscure to me; others I had learnt something about. Offences, for instance. That was because the occurrence of
an Offence was sometimes quite an impressive occasion. Usually the first sign
that one had happened was that my father came into the house in a bad temper.
Then, in the evening, he would call us all together, including everyone who
worked on the farm. We would all kneel while he proclaimed our repentance and
led prayers for forgiveness. The next morning we would all be up before
daylight and gather in the yard. As the sun rose we would sing a hymn while my
father ceremonially slaughtered the two-headed calf, four-legged chicken, or
whatever other kind of Offence it happened to be. Sometimes it would be a much
queerer thing than those. . . .
Nor were
Offences limited to the livestock. Sometimes there would be some stalks of
corn, or some vegetables, that my father produced and cast on the kitchen table
in anger and shame. If it were merely a matter of a few rows of vegetables,
they just came out and were destroyed. But if a whole field had gone wrong we
would wait for good weather, and then set fire to it, singing hymns while it
burnt. I used to find that a very fine sight.
It was because
my father was a careful and pious man with a keen eye for an Offence that we
used to have more slaughterings and burnings than
anyone else: but any suggestion that we were more afflicted with Offences than
other people hurt and angered him. He had no wish at all to throw good money
away, he pointed out. If our neighbours were as
conscientious as ourselves, he had no doubt that their liquidations would far
outnumber ours: unfortunately there were certain persons with elastic
principles.
So I learnt
quite early to know what Offences were. They were things which did not look right
— that is to say, did not look like their parents, or parent-plants.
Usually there was only some small thing wrong, but however much or little was
wrong it was an Offence, and if it happened among people it was a Blasphemy —
at least, that was the technical term, though commonly both kinds were called
Deviations.
Nevertheless,
the question of Offences was not always as simple as one might think, and when
there was disagreement the district's inspector could be sent for. My father,
however, seldom called in the inspector, he preferred to be on the safe side
and liquidate anything doubtful. There were people who disapproved of his meticulousness,
saying that the local Deviation-rate, which had shown a steady overall
improvement and now stood at half what it had been in my grandfather's time,
would have been better still, but for my father. All the same, the Waknuk
district had a great name for Purity.
Ours was no
longer a frontier region. Hard work and sacrifice had produced a stability of
stock and crops which could be envied even by some communities to the east of
us. You could now go some thirty miles to the south or south-west before you
came to Wild Country — that is to say parts where the chance of breeding true
was less than fifty per cent. After that, everything grew more erratic across a
belt which was ten miles wide in some places and up to twenty in others, until
you came to the mysterious Fringes where nothing was dependable, and where, to
quote my father, 'the Devil struts his wide estates, and the laws of God are
mocked.' Fringes country, too, was said to be variable in depth, and beyond it
lay the
It was not the
Occasional
small raids used to happen two or three times a year, and nobody took much
notice of them as a rule — except the people who got raided, of course. Usually
they had time to get away and lost only their stock. Then everybody would
contribute a little in kind, or in money, to help them set up again. But as
time went on and the frontier was pushed back there were more Fringes people
trying to live on less country. Some years they got very hungry, and after a
time it was no longer just a matter of a dozen or so making a quick raid and
then running back into Fringes country; they came instead in large, organized
bands and did a lot of damage.
In my father's
childhood mothers used to quieten and awe troublesome
infants by threatening: 'Be good now, or I'll fetch Old Maggie from the Fringes
to you. She's got four eyes to watch you with, and four ears to hear you with,
and four arms to smack you with. So you be careful.' Or Hairy Jack was another
ominous figure who might be called in '... and he'll take you off to his cave
in the Fringes where all his family lives. They're all hairy, too, with long tails;
and they eat a little boy each for breakfast every morning, and a little girl
each for supper every evening.' Nowadays, however, it was not only small
children who lived in nervous awareness of the Fringes people not so far away.
Their existence had become a dangerous nuisance and their depredations the
cause of many representations to the Government in Rigo.
For all the
good the petitions did, they might never have been sent. Indeed, with no one
able to tell, over a stretch of five or six hundred miles, where the next
attack would come, it is difficult to see what practical help could have been
given. What the Government did do, from its comfortable situation far, far to
the east, was to express sympathy in encouraging phrases, and suggest the
formation of a local militia: a suggestion which, as all able-bodied males had
as a matter of course been members of a kind of unofficial militia since
frontier days, was felt to amount to disregard of the situation.
As far as the
Waknuk district was concerned the threat from the Fringes was more of a
nuisance than a menace. The deepest raid had come no nearer than ten miles, but
every now and then there were emergencies, and seemingly more every year, which
called the men away, and brought all the farm work to a stop. The interruptions
were expensive and wasteful; moreover, they always brought anxiety if the
trouble was near our sector: nobody could be sure that they might not come
farther one time....
Mostly,
however, we led a comfortable, settled, industrious existence. Our household
was extensive. There were my father and mother, my two sisters, and my Uncle
Axel to make the family, but also there were the kitchen girls and dairymaids,
some of whom were married to the farm men, and their children, and, of course, the
men themselves, so when we were all gathered for the meal at the end of the
day's work there were over twenty of us; and when we assembled for prayers
there were still more because the men from the adjoining cottages came in with
their wives and children.
Uncle Axel was
not a real relative. He had married one of my mother's sisters, Elizabeth. He
was a sailor then, and she had gone East with him and died in Rigo while he was
on the voyage that had left him a cripple. He was a useful all-round man, though
slow in getting about because of his leg, so my father let him live with us: he
was also my best friend.
My mother came
of a family of five girls and two boys. Four of the girls were full sisters;
the youngest girl and the two boys were half-sister and half-brothers to the
rest. Hannah, the eldest, had been sent away by her husband, and nobody had
heard of her since. Emily, my mother, was next in age. Then came
Harriet who was married to a man with a big farm at Kentak, almost fifteen
miles away. Then Elizabeth, who had married Uncle Axel.
Where my half-aunt Lilian and my half-uncle Thomas
were I did not know, but my half-uncle, Angus Morton, owned the farm next to
us, and a mile or more of our boundaries ran together, which annoyed my father
who could scarcely agree with half-uncle Angus about anything. His daughter,
Rosalind, was, of course, my cousin.
Although Waknuk
itself was the biggest farm in the district, most of them were organized along
the same lines, and all of them growing larger, for with the improving
stability-rate there was the incentive to extend; every year felling of trees
and clearing went on to make new fields. The woods and spurs of forest were
being nibbled away until the countryside was beginning to look like the old,
long-cultivated land in the east.
It was said
that nowadays even people in Rigo knew where Waknuk was without looking it up
on the map.
I lived, in
fact, on the most prosperous farm in a prospering district. At the age of ten,
however, I had little appreciation of that. My impression was of an
uncomfortably industrious place where there always seemed to be more jobs than
people, unless one was careful, so on this particular evening I contrived to
lie low until routine sounds told me that it was near enough to the mealtime
for me to show myself safely.
I hung about,
watching the horses being unharnessed and turned out.
Presently the bell on the gable-end tolled a couple of times. Doors opened, and
people came into the yard, making for the kitchen. I went along with them. The
warning: WATCH THOU FOR THE MUTANT! faced me as I went
in, but it was much too familiar to stir a thought. What interested me
exclusively at the moment was the smell of food.
I usually went over to see Sophie once or
twice a week after that. What schooling we had — which was a matter of half a
dozen children being taught to read and write and do some sums by one or
another of several old women — took place in the mornings. It was not difficult
at the midday meal to slip away from the table early and disappear until
everyone would think someone else had found a job for me.
When her ankle
was quite recovered she was able to show me the favourite
corners of her territory.
One day I took
her over our side of the big bank to see the steam-engine. There wasn't another
steam-engine within a hundred miles, and we were very proud of it. Corky, who
looked after it, was not about, but the doors at the end of its shed were open,
letting out the sound of a rhythmic groaning, creaking, and puffing. We
ventured on to the threshold and peered into the gloom inside. It was
fascinating to watch the big timbers moving up and down with wheezing noises
while up in the shadows of the roof a huge cross-beam rocked slowly backwards
and forwards, with a pause at the end of each tilt as though it were summoning
up energy for the next effort. Fascinating — but, after a
time, monotonous.
Ten minutes of
it were enough, and we withdrew to climb to the top of
the wood-pile beside the shed. We sat there with the whole heap quivering
beneath us as the engine chugged ponderously on.
'My Uncle Axel
says the Old People must have had much better engines than this,' I told her.
'My father says
that if one-quarter of the things they say about the Old People are true, they
must have been magicians: not real people, at all,' Sophie countered.
'But they were
wonderful,' I insisted.
'Too wonderful
to be true, he says,' she told me.
'Doesn't he
think they were able to fly, like people say?' I asked.
'No. That's
silly. If they could've, we'd be able to.'
'But there are
lots of things they could do that we are learning to do again,' I protested.
'Not flying.'
She shook her head. 'Things can either fly, or they can't, and we can't,' she
said.
I thought of
telling her about my dream of the city and the things flying over it, but after
all, a dream isn't much evidence of anything, so I let it pass. Presently we
climbed down, leaving the engine to its panting and creaking, and made our way
over to her home.
'Hullo, Chicky,' he said.
He greeted me
more gravely. We had an unspoken understanding that we were on a man to man
basis. It had always been like that. When he first saw me he had looked at me
in a way that had scared me and made me afraid to speak in his presence.
Gradually, however, that had changed. We became friends. He showed me and told
me a lot of interesting things — all the same I would look up sometimes to find
him watching me uneasily.
And no wonder.
Only some years later could I appreciate how badly troubled he must have been
when he came home to find Sophie had sprained her ankle, and that it had been
David Strorm, the son of Joseph Strorm, of all people, who had seen her foot.
He must, I think, have been greatly tempted by the thought that a dead boy
could break no promise. . . . Perhaps Mrs. Wender saved me. . . .
But I think he
could have been reassured had he known of an incident at my home about a month
after I met Sophie.
I had run a
splinter into my hand and when I pulled it out it bled a lot. I went to the
kitchen with it only to find everybody too busy getting supper to be bothered
with me, so I rummaged a strip out of the rag-drawer for myself. I tried
clumsily for a minute or two to tie it, then my mother noticed. She made tchk-tchk noises
of disapproval and insisted on it being washed. Then she wound the strip on
neatly, grumbling that of course I had to go and do it just when she was busy.
I said I was sorry, and added:
'I could have
managed it all right by myself if I'd had another hand.'
My voice must
have carried, for silence fell on the whole room like a clap.
My mother
froze. I looked round the room at the sudden quiet. Mary, standing with a pie
in her hands, two of the farm men waiting for their meal, my father about to
take his seat at the head of the table, and the others; they were all staring
at me. I caught my father's expression just as it was turning from amazement to
anger. Alarmed, but uncomprehending, I watched his mouth tighten, his jaw come
forward, his brows press together over his still incredulous eyes. He demanded:
'What was that
you said, boy?'
I knew the
tone. I tried to think in a desperate hurry how I had offended this time. I
stumbled and stuttered.
'I — I said I
couldn't manage to tie this for myself,' I told him.
His eyes had
become less incredulous, more accusing.
'And you wished
you had a third hand!'
'No,
father. I only said if
I had another hand...'
'. . . you would be able to tie it. If that was not a wish, what
was it?'
'I only meant if,'
I protested. I was alarmed, and too confused to explain that I had only
happened to use one way of expressing a difficulty which might have been put in
several ways. I was aware that the rest had stopped gaping at me, and were now
looking apprehensively at my father. His expression was grim.
'You — my own son — were calling upon the Devil to give you another hand!'
he accused me.
'But I wasn't.
I only —'
'Be quiet, boy.
Everyone in this room heard you. You'll certainly make it no better by lying.'
'But —'
'Were you, or
were you not, expressing dissatisfaction with the form of the body God gave you
— the form in His own image?'
'I just said if
I—'
'You
blasphemed, boy. You found fault with the Norm. Everybody here heard you. What
have you to say to that? You know what the Norm is?'
I gave up
protesting. I knew well enough that my father in his present mood would not try
to understand. I muttered, parrot-like:
'"The Norm
is the Image of God".'
'You do
know — and yet, knowing this, you deliberately wished yourself a Mutant. That
is a terrible thing, an outrageous thing. You, my son,
committing blasphemy, and before his parents!' In his sternest pulpit
voice, he added:
'What is a
Mutant?'
'"A thing
accursed in the sight of God and man", 'I mumbled.
'And that
is what you wished to be! What have you to say?'
With a
heart-sunk certainty that it would be useless to say anything, I kept my lips
shut and my eyes lowered.
'Down on your knees!'
he commanded. 'Kneel and pray!'
The others all
knelt, too. My father's voice rose:
'Lord, we have
sinned in omission. We beg Thy forgiveness that we have not better instructed
this child in Thy laws...' The prayer seemed to go
booming on for a long time. After the 'Amen' there was a pause, until my father
said:
'Now go to your
room, and pray. Pray, you wretched boy for a forgiveness you do not deserve,
but which God, in His mercy, may yet grant you. I will come to you later.'
In the night,
when the anguish which had followed my father's visit was somewhat abated, I
lay awake, puzzling. I had had no idea of wishing for a third hand, but even if
I had . . .? If it was such a terrible thing just to think of having
three hands, what would happen if one really had them — or anything else wrong;
such as, for instance, an extra toe —?
And when at
last I fell asleep I had a dream. We were all gathered in the yard, just as we
had been at the last Purification. Then it had been a little hairless calf that
stood waiting, blinking stupidly at the knife in my father's hand; this time it
was a little girl, Sophie, standing barefooted and trying uselessly to hide the
whole long row of toes that everyone could see on each foot. We all stood
looking at her, and waiting. Presently she started to run from one person to
another, imploring them to help her, but none of them moved, and none of their
faces had any expression. My father started to walk towards her, the knife
shining in his hand. Sophie grew frantic; she flitted from one unmoving person
to another, tears running down her face. My father, stern, implacable, kept on
coming nearer; still no one would move to help her. My father came closer
still, with long arms outspread to prevent her bolting as he cornered her.
He caught her,
and dragged her back to the middle of the yard. The sun's edge began to show
above the horizon, and everyone started to sing a hymn. My father held Sophie
with one arm just as he had held the struggling calf. He raised his other hand
high, and as he swept it down the knife flashed in the light of the rising sun,
just as it had flashed when he cut the calf's throat....
If
This was a time when I passed out of a
placid period into one where things kept on happening. There wasn't much reason
about it; that is to say, only a few of the things were connected with one
another: it was more as if an active cycle had set in, just as a spell of
different weather might come along.
My meeting with
Sophie was, I suppose, the first incident; the next was that Uncle Axel found
out about me and my half-cousin, Rosalind Morton. He — and it was lucky it was
he, and no one else — happened to come upon me when I was talking to her.
It must have
been a self-preserving instinct which had made us keep the thing to ourselves,
for we'd no active feeling of danger - I had so little, in fact, that when
Uncle Axel found me sitting behind a rick chatting
apparently to myself, I made very little effort to dissemble. He may have been
there a minute or more before I became aware of somebody just round the corner
of my eye, and turned to see who it was.
My Uncle Axel
was a tall man, neither thin nor fat, but sturdy, and with a seasoned look to
him. I used to think when I watched him at work that his weathered hands and
forearms had some sort of kinship with the polished wood of the helves they
used. He was standing in his customary way, with much of his weight upon the
thick stick he used because his leg had been wrongly set when it was broken at
sea. His bushy eyebrows, a little touched with grey, were drawn closer by a
half-frown, but the lines on his tanned face were half-amused as he regarded
me.
'Well,
I just shook my
head. He limped closer, and sat down beside me, chewing on a stalk of grass
from the rick.
'Feeling
lonely?' he inquired.
'No,' I told
him.
He frowned a
bit again. 'Wouldn't it be more fun to do your chattering with some of the
other kids?' he suggested. 'More interesting than just
sitting and talking to yourself?'
I hesitated,
and then because he was Uncle Axel and my best friend among the grown-ups, I
said:
'But I was.'
'Was what?' he
asked, puzzled.
'Talking to one
of them,' I told him.
He frowned, and
went on looking puzzled.
'Who?'
'Rosalind,' I
told him.
He paused a
bit, looking at me harder.
'H'm — I didn't see her around,' he remarked.
'Oh, she isn't
here. She's at home — at least, she's near home, in a little secret tree-house
her brothers built in the spinney,' I explained. 'It's a favourite
place of hers.'
He was not able
to understand what I meant at first. He kept on talking as though it were a
make-believe game; but after I had tried for some time to explain he sat quiet,
watching my face as I talked, and presently his expression became very serious.
After I'd stopped he said nothing for a minute or two, then he asked:
'This isn't
play-stuff — it's the real truth you're telling me,
'Yes, Uncle
Axel, of course,' I assured him.
'And you never
told anyone else — nobody at all?'
'No. It's a
secret,' I told him, and he looked relieved.
He threw away
the remains of his grass-stalk, and pulled another out of the rick. After he had thoughtfully bitten a few pieces off
that and spat them out he looked directly at me again.
'
'Yes, Uncle
Axel?'
'It's this,' he
said, speaking very seriously. 'I want you to keep it secret. I want you
to promise that you will never, never tell anyone else
what you have just told me — never. It's very important: later on you'll
understand better how important it is. You mustn't do anything that would even
let anyone guess about it. Will you promise me that?'
His gravity
impressed me greatly. I had never known him to speak with so much intensity. It
made me aware, when I gave my promise, that I was vowing something more
important than I could understand. He kept his eyes on mine as I spoke, and
then nodded, satisfied that I meant it. We shook hands on the agreement. Then
he said:
'It would be
best if you could forget it altogether.'
I thought that
over, and then shook my head.
'I don't think
I could, Uncle Axel. Not really. I mean, it just is. It'd be like trying
to forget —' I broke off, unable to express what I wanted to.
'Like trying to
forget how to talk, or how to hear, perhaps?' he suggested.
'Rather like
that — only different,' I admitted.
He nodded, and
thought again.
'You hear the
words inside your head?' he asked.
'Well, not
exactly "hear", and not exactly "see",' I told him. 'There
are — well, sort of shapes — and if you use words you make them clearer so that
they're easier to understand.'
'But you don't have
to use words — not say them out loud as you were doing just now?'
'Oh, no — it
just helps to make it clearer sometimes.'
'It also helps
to make things a lot more dangerous, for both of you. I want you to make
another promise — that you'll never do it out loud any more.'
'All right,
Uncle Axel,' I agreed again.
'You'll
understand when you're older how important it is,' he told me, and then he went
on to insist that I should get Rosalind to make the same promises. I did not
tell him anything about the others because he seemed so worried already, but I
decided I'd get them to promise, too. At the end he put out his hand again, and
once more we swore secrecy very solemnly.
I put the
matter to Rosalind and the others the same evening. It crystallized a feeling
that was in all of us. I don't suppose that there was a single one of us who
had not at some time made a slip or two and brought upon himself, or herself,
an odd, suspicious look. A few of these looks had been warnings enough to each;
it was such looks, not comprehended, but clear enough as signs of disapproval
just below the verge of suspicion, that had kept us out of trouble. There had
been no acknowledged, co-operative policy among us. It was simply as individuals
that we had all taken the same self-protective, secretive course. But now, out
of Uncle Axel's anxious insistence on my promise, the feeling of a threat was
strengthened. It was still shapeless to us, but it was more real. Furthermore,
in trying to convey Uncle Axel's seriousness to them I must have stirred up an
uneasiness that was in all their minds, for there was no dissent. They made the
promise willingly; eagerly, in fact, as though it was a burden they were
relieved to share. It was our first act as a group; it made us a group
by its formal admission of our responsibilities towards one another. It changed
our lives by marking our first step in corporate self-preservation, though we
understood little of that at the time. What seemed most important just then was
the feeling of sharing . . .
Then, almost on
top of that personal event came another which was of general concern; an
invasion in force from the Fringes.
As usual there
was no detailed plan to deal with it. As near as anyone came to organization
was the appointment of headquarters in the different sectors. Upon an alarm it
was the duty of all able-bodied men in the district to rally at their local
headquarters, when a course of action would be decided according to the
location and extent of the trouble. As a method of dealing with small raids it
had proved good enough, but that was all it was intended for. As a result, when
the Fringes people found leaders who could promote an organized invasion there
had been no adequately organized system of defence to
delay them. They were able to push forward on a broad front, mopping up little
bands of our militia here and there, and looting as they liked, and meeting
nothing to delay them seriously until they were twenty-five miles or more into
civilized parts.
By that time we
had our forces in somewhat better order, and neighbouring
districts had pulled themselves together to head off a further widening, and harry the flanks. Our men were better armed, too. Quite a
lot of them had guns, whereas the Fringes people had only a few that they had
stolen, and depended chiefly on bows, knives, and spears. Nevertheless, the
width of their advance made them difficult to deal with. They were better
woodsmen and cleverer at hiding themselves than proper human beings, so that
they were able to press on another fifteen miles before we could contain them
and bring them to battle.
It was exciting
for a boy. With the Fringes people little more than seven miles away, our yard
at Waknuk had become one of the rallying points. My father, who had had an
arrow through his arm early in the campaign, was helping to organize the new
volunteers into squads. For several days there was a
great bustling and coming and going as men were registered and sorted, and
finally rode off with a fine air of determination, and the women of the
household waving handkerchiefs at them.
When
they had all departed, and our workers, too, the place seemed quite uncannily
quiet for a day. Then
there came a single rider, dashing back. He paused long enough to tell us that
there had been a big battle and the Fringes people, with some of their leaders
taken prisoner, were running away as fast as they could, then he galloped on
with his good news.
That same
afternoon a small troop of horsemen came riding into the yard, with two of the
captured Fringes leaders in the middle of them.
I dropped what
I was doing, and ran across to see. It was a bit disappointing at first sight.
The tales about the Fringes had led me to expect creatures with two heads, or
fur all over, or half a dozen arms and legs. Instead, they seemed at first
glance to be just two ordinary men with beards - though unusually dirty, and
with very ragged clothes. One of them was a short man with fair hair which was
tufted as though he had trimmed it with a knife. But when I looked at the other
I had a shock which brought me up dumbfounded, and staring at him. I was so
jolted I just went on staring at him, for, put him in decent clothes, tidy up
his beard, and he'd be the image of my father. . . .
As he sat his
horse, looking round, he noticed me; casually at first, in passing, then his
gaze switched back and he stared hard at me. A strange look that I did not
understand at all came into his eyes. . . .
He opened his
mouth as if to speak, but at that moment people came out of the house — my
father, with his arm still in a sling, among them — to see what was going on.
I saw my father
pause on the step and survey the group of horsemen, then
he, too, noticed the man in the middle of them. For a moment he stood staring,
just as I had done — then all his colour
drained away, and his face went blotchy grey.
I looked
quickly at the other man. He was sitting absolutely rigid on his horse. The
expression on his face made something clutch suddenly in my chest. I had never
seen hatred naked before, the lines cut deep, the eyes glittering, the teeth
suddenly looking like a savage animal's. It struck me with a slap, a horrid
revelation of something hitherto unknown, and hideous; it stamped itself on my
mind so that I never forgot it....
Then my father,
still looking as though he were ill, put out his good hand to steady himself
against the door-post, and turned back into the house.
One of the escort cut the rope which held the prisoner's arms. He
dismounted, and I was able to see then what was wrong with him. He stood some
eighteen inches taller than anyone else, but not because he was a big man. If
his legs had been right, he would have stood no taller than my father's
five-feet-ten; but they were not: they were monstrously long and thin, and his
arms were long and thin, too. It made him look half-man, half-spider. . . .
His escort gave
him food and a pot of beer. He sat down on a bench, and his bony knees stuck up
to seem almost level with his shoulders. He looked round the yard, noticing
everything as he munched his bread and cheese. In the course of his inspection
he perceived me again. He beckoned. I hung back, pretending not to see. He
beckoned again. I became ashamed of being afraid of him. I went closer, and
then a little closer still, but keeping warily out of range, I judged, of those
spidery arms.
'What's your
name, boy?' he asked.
'David,' I told
him. 'David Strorm.'
He nodded, as
if that were satisfactory.
'The man at the
door, with his arm in a sling, that would be your
father, Joseph Strorm?'
'Yes,' I told
him.
Again he
nodded. He looked round the house and the outbuildings.
'This place,
then, would be Waknuk?' he asked.
'Yes,' I said
again.
I don't know
whether he would have asked more, for at that point somebody told me to clear
off. A little later they all remounted, and soon they moved away, the spidery
man with his arms tied together once more. I watched them ride off in the
Kentak direction, glad to see them go. My first encounter with someone from the
Fringes had not, after all, been exciting; but it had been unpleasantly
disturbing.
I heard later
that both the captured Fringes men managed to escape that same night. I can't
remember who told me, but I am perfectly certain it was not my father. I never
once heard him refer to that day, and I never had the courage to ask him about
it. ...
Then scarcely,
it seemed, had we settled down after the invasion and got the men back to
catching up with the farm work, than my father was in the middle of a new row
with my half-uncle, Angus Morton.
Differences of
temperament and outlook had kept them intermittently at war with one another
for years. My father had been heard to sum up his opinion by declaring that if
Angus had any principles they were of such infinite width as to be a menace to
the rectitude of the neighbourhood; to which Angus
was reputed to have replied that Joseph Strorm was a flinty-souled
pedant, and bigoted well beyond reason. It was not, therefore, difficult for a
row to blow up, and the latest one occurred over Angus' acquisition of a pair
of great-horses.
Rumours of
great-horses had reached our district though none had been seen there. My
father was already uneasy in his mind at what he had heard of them, nor was the
fact that Angus was the importer of them a commendation; consequently, it may
have been with some prejudice that he went to inspect them.
His doubts were
confirmed at once. The moment he set eyes on the huge creatures standing
twenty-six hands at the shoulder, he knew they were wrong. He turned his
back on them with disgust, and went straight to the inspector's house with a
demand that they should be destroyed as Offences.
'You're out of
order this time,' the inspector told him cheerfully, glad that for once his position
was incontestable.' They're Government-approved, so they are beyond my
jurisdiction, anyway.'
'I don't
believe it,' my father told him. 'God never made horses the size of these. The
Government can't have approved them.'
'But they
have,' said the inspector. 'What's more,' he added with satisfaction, 'Angus
tells me that knowing the neighbourhood so well he
has got attested pedigrees for them.'
'Any government
that could pass creatures like that is corrupt and immoral,' my father
announced.
'Possibly,'
admitted the inspector, 'but it's still the Government.'
My father
glared at him.
'It's easy to
see why some people would approve them,' he said. 'One of those brutes
could do the work of two, maybe three, ordinary horses — and for less than
double the feed of one. There's a good profit there, a good incentive to get
them passed — but that doesn't mean that they're right. I say a horse
like that is not one of God's creatures — and if it isn't His, then it's an
Offence, and should be destroyed as such.'
'The official
approval states that the breed was produced simply by mating for size, in the
normal way. And I'd defy you to find any characteristic that's identifiably
wrong with them, anyway,' the inspector told him.
'Somebody would
say that when he saw how profitable they could be. There's a word for that kind
of thinking,' my father replied.
The inspector
shrugged.
'It does not
follow that they are right,'
my father persisted. 'A horse that size is not right — you know that
unofficially, as well as I do, and there's no getting away from it. Once we
allow things that we know are not right, there's no telling where it will end.
A god-fearing community doesn't have to deny its faith just because there's
been pressure brought to bear in a government licensing office. There are
plenty of us here who know how God intended his creatures to be, even if the
Government doesn't.'
The inspector
smiled. 'As with the Dakers' cat?' he suggested.
My father
glared at him again. The affair of the Dakers' cat rankled.
About a year
previously it had somehow come to his knowledge that Ben Dakers' wife housed a
tailless cat. He investigated, and when he had collected evidence that it had
not simply lost its tail in some way, but had never possessed one, he condemned
it, and, in his capacity as a magistrate, ordered the inspector to make out a
warrant for its destruction as an Offence. The inspector had done so, with
reluctance, whereupon Dakers promptly entered an appeal. Such shilly-shallying
in an obvious case outraged my father's principles, and he personally attended
to the demise of the Dakers' cat while the matter was still sub judice. His position, when a notification subsequently
arrived stating that there was a recognized breed of tailless cats with a
well-authenticated history, was awkward, and somewhat expensive. It had been
with very bad grace that he had chosen to make a public apology rather than
resign his magistracy.
'This,' he told
the inspector sharply, 'is an altogether more important affair.'
'Listen,' said
the inspector patiently. 'The type is approved. This particular pair has
confirmatory sanction. If that's not good enough for you, go ahead and shoot
them yourself — and see what happens to you.'
'It is your
moral duty to issue an order against these so-called horses,' my father
insisted.
The inspector
was suddenly tired of it.
'It's part of
my official duty to protect them from harm by fools and bigots,' he snapped.
My father did
not actually hit the inspector, but it must have been a near thing. He went on
boiling with rage for several days and the next Sunday we were treated to a
searing address on the toleration of Mutants which sullied the Purity of our
community. He called for a general boycott of the owner of the Offences,
speculated upon immorality in high places, hinted that some there might be
expected to have a fellow-feeling for Mutants, and wound up with a peroration
in which a certain official was scathed as an unprincipled hireling of
unprincipled masters and the local representative of the Forces of Evil.
Though the
inspector had no such convenient pulpit for reply, certain trenchant remarks of
his on persecution, contempt of authority, bigotry, religious mania, the law of
slander, and the probable effects of direct action in opposition to Government
sanction achieved a wide circulation.
It was very
likely the last point that kept my father from doing more than talk. He had had
plenty of trouble over the Dakers' cat which was of no value at all: but the
great-horses were costly creatures; besides, Angus would not be one to waive
any possible penalty. . . .
So there was a
degree of frustration about that made home a good place to get away from as
much as possible.
Now that the
countryside had settled down again and was not full of unexpected people, Sophie's
parents would let her go out on rambles once more, and I slipped away over
there when I could get away unnoticed.
Sophie couldn't
go to school, of course. She would have been found out very quickly, even with
a false certificate; and her parents, though they taught her to read and write,
did not have any books, so that it wasn't much good to her. That was why we
talked — at least I talked — a lot on our expeditions, trying to tell her what
I was learning from my own reading books.
The world, I
was able to tell her, was generally thought to be a pretty big place, and
probably round. The civilized part of it — of which Waknuk was only a small
district — was called
It was said,
too, though nobody was sure, that in the time of the Old People Labrador had
been a cold land, so cold that no one could live there for long, so they had
used it then only for growing trees and doing their mysterious mining in. But
that had been a long, long time ago. A thousand years? — two
thousand years? — even more, perhaps? People guessed, but nobody really knew.
There was no telling how many generations of people had passed their lives like
savages between the coming of Tribulation and the start of recorded history.
Only Nicholson's Repentances had come out of the wilderness of
barbarism, and that only because it had lain for, perhaps, several centuries
sealed in a stone coffer before it was discovered. And only the Bible had
survived from the time of the Old People themselves.
Except for what
these two books told, the past, further back than three recorded centuries, was
a long oblivion. Out of that blankness stretched a few strands of legend, badly
frayed in their passage through successive minds. It was this long line of
tongues that had given us the name
For a long time
it had been disputed whether any parts of the world other than Labrador and the
big
Altogether, not
much seemed to be known about the world, but at least it was a more interesting
subject than Ethics which an old man taught to a class of us on Sunday
afternoons. Ethics was why you should, and shouldn't, do things. Most of the
don'ts were the same as my father's, but some of the reasons were different, so
it was confusing.
According to
Ethics, mankind — that was us, in civilized parts — was in the process of
climbing back into grace; we were following a faint and difficult trail which led
up to the peaks from which we had fallen. From the true trail branched many
false trails that sometimes looked easier and more attractive; all these really
led to the edges of precipices, beneath which lay the abyss of eternity. There
was only one true trail, and by following it we should, with God's help and in
His own good time, regain all that had been lost. But so faint was the trail,
so set with traps and deceits, that every step must be
taken with caution, and it was too dangerous for a man to rely on his own judgment.
Only the authorities, ecclesiastical and lay, were in a position to judge
whether the next step was a rediscovery, and so, safe to take; or whether it
deviated from the true re-ascent, and so was sinful.
The penance of
Tribulation that had been put upon the world must be worked out, the long climb
faithfully retraced, and, at last, if the temptations by the way were resisted,
there would be the reward of forgiveness — the restoration of the Golden Age.
Such penances had been sent before: the expulsion from
Most of the
numerous precepts, arguments, and examples in Ethics were condensed for us into
this: the duty and purpose of man in this world is to fight unceasingly against
the evils that Tribulation loosed upon it. Above all, he must see that the
human form is kept true to the divine pattern in order that one day it may be
permitted to regain the high place in which, as the image of God, it was set.
However, I did
not talk much about this part of Ethics to Sophie. Not, I think, because I ever
actually classified her in my mind as a Deviation, but it had to be admitted
that she did not quite qualify as a true image, so it seemed more tactful to
avoid that aspect. And there were plenty of other things to talk about.
Nobody at Waknuk seemed to trouble about
me if I was out of sight. It was only when I hung about that they thought of
jobs that needed doing.
The season was
a good one, sunny, yet well watered so that even farmers had little to complain
of other than the pressure to catch up with the work that the invasion had
interrupted. Except among the sheep the average of Offences in the spring births
had been quite unusually low. The impending crops were so orthodox that the
inspector had posted only a single field, belonging to Angus Morton, for
burning. Even among the vegetables there was little deviation; the solonaceae as usual provided most of what there was.
All in all, the season looked like setting up a Purity record, and
condemnations were so few that even my father was pleased enough to announce
guardedly in one of his addresses that Waknuk would seem to be giving the
forces of Evil quite a setback this year — and it was a matter for thanksgiving
that retribution for the importation of the great-horses had been visited upon
their owner himself, and not upon the whole community.
With everyone
so busy I was able to get away early, and during those long summer days Sophie
and I roamed more widely than before, though we did our adventuring with
caution, and kept it to little-used ways in order to avoid encounters. Sophie's
upbringing had given her a timidity towards strangers that was nearly an
instinct. Almost before one was visible she vanished noiselessly. The only
adult she had made friends with was Corky, who looked after the steam-engine.
Everyone else was dangerous.
We discovered a
place up the stream where there were banks of shingle. I liked to take off my
shoes, roll up my trousers, and paddle there, examining the pools and crannies.
Sophie used to sit on one of the large, flat stones that shelved into the
water, and watch me wistfully. Later we went there armed with two small nets
that Mrs.. Wender had made,
and a jar for the catch. I waded about fishing for the little shrimp-like
creatures that lived there while Sophie tried to scoop them up by reaching from
the bank. She did not do very well at it. After a time she gave up, and sat
watching me enviously. Then, greatly daring, she pulled off a shoe, and looked
at her naked foot reflectively. After a minute she pulled off the other. She
rolled her cotton trousers above her knees, and stepped into the stream. She
stood there for a thoughtful moment, looking down through the water at her foot
on the washed pebbles. I called to her:
'Come over this
way. There's lots of them here.'
She waded
towards me, laughing and excited.
When we had had
enough of it we sat on the flat rock, letting our feet dry in the sun.
'They're not
really horrible, are they?' she said, regarding hers judicially.
'They're not
horrible at all. They make mine look all knobbly,' I
told her, honestly. She was pleased about that.
A few days
later we went there again. We stood the jar on the flat stone beside our shoes
while we fished, and industriously scampered back to it now and then with our
catch, oblivious of all else until a voice said:
'Hullo, there,
David!'
I looked up,
aware of Sophie standing rigid behind me.
The boy who had
called stood on the bank, just above the rock where our things lay. I knew him.
Alan, the son of
'Oh, hullo,
Alan,' I said, unencouragingly.
I waded to the
rock and picked up Sophie's shoes.
'Catch!' I
called as I threw them to her.
One she caught,
the other fell into the water, but she retrieved it.
'What are you
doing?' Alan asked.
I told him we
were catching the shrimp-things. As I said it I stepped casually out of the
water on to the rock. I had never cared much for what I knew of Alan at the
best of times, and he was by no means welcome now.
'They're no
good. Fish are what you want to go after,' he said contemptuously.
He turned his
attention to Sophie, who was wading to the bank, shoes in hand, some yards
farther up.
'Who's she?'
he inquired,
I delayed
answering while I put on my shoes. Sophie had disappeared into the
bushes now.
'Who is she?'
he repeated. 'She's not one of the —' He broke off suddenly. I looked up and
saw that he was staring down at something beside me. I turned quickly. On the
flat rock was a footprint, still undried. Sophie had
rested one foot there as she bent over to tip her catch into the jar. The mark
was still damp enough to show the print of all six toes clearly. I kicked over
the jar. A cascade of water and struggling shrimps poured down the rock,
obliterating the footprint, but I knew, with a sickly feeling, that the harm
had been done.
'Ho!' said
Alan, and there was a gleam in his eye that I did not like. 'Who is she?' he
demanded again.
'She's a friend
of mine,' I told him.
'What's her
name?'
I did not
answer that.
'Huh, I'll soon
find out, anyway,' he said with a grin.
'It's no
business of yours,' I told him.
He took no notice
of that; he had turned and was standing looking along the bank towards the
point where Sophie had disappeared into the bushes.
I ran up the
stone and flung myself on him. He was bigger than I was, but it took him by
surprise, and we went down together in a whirl of arms and legs. All I knew of
fighting was what I had learnt from a few sharp scuffles. I simply hit out, and
did my furious best. My intention was to gain a few minutes for Sophie to put
her shoes on and hide; if she had a little start, he would never be able to
find her, as I knew from experience. Then he recovered from his first surprise
and got in a couple of blows on my face which made me forget about Sophie and
sent me at it, tooth and nail, on my own account.
We rolled back
and forth on a patch of turf. I kept on hitting and struggling furiously, but
his weight started to tell. He began to feel more sure
of himself, and I, more futile. However, I had gained something: I'd stopped
him going after Sophie straight away. Gradually he got the upper hand, presently he was sitting astride of me, pummelling me as I squirmed. I kicked out and struggled,
but there wasn't much I could do but raise my arms to protect my head. Then,
suddenly, there was a yelp of anguish, and the blows ceased. He flopped down on
top of me. I heaved him off, and sat up to see Sophie standing there with a
large rough stone in her hand.
'I hit him,'
she said proudly, and with a touch of wonderment. 'Do you think he's dead?'
Hit him she
certainly had. He lay white-faced and still, with the blood trickling down his
cheek, but he was breathing all right, so he certainly wasn't dead.
'Oh, dear,'
said Sophie in sudden reaction, and dropped the stone.
We looked at
Alan, and then at one another. Both of us, I think, had the impulse to do
something for him, but we were afraid.
'No one must
ever know. No one!' Mrs. Wender had said, so
intensely. And now this boy did know. It frightened us.
I got up. I
reached for Sophie's hand and pulled her away.
'Come along,' I
told her urgently.
'You're quite
sure he saw? It wasn't simply that he was curious because Sophie was a
stranger?' he asked at the end.
'No,' I said.
'He saw the footmark; that's why he wanted to catch her.'
He nodded
slowly.
'I see,' he
said, and I was surprised how calmly he said it.
He looked
steadily at our faces. Sophie's eyes were big with a mixture of alarm and
excitement. Mine must have been pink-rimmed, with dirty smears trailing from
them. He turned his head and met his wife's gaze steadily.
'I'm afraid
it's come, my dear. This is it,' he said.
'Oh,
'Sorry, Martie, but it is, you know. We knew it had to come sooner
or later. Thank God it's happened while I'm here. How long will it take you to
be ready?'
'Not long,
'Good. Let's
get busy, then.'
He got up and
went round the table to her. He put his arms round her, bent down and kissed
her. Tears stood in her eyes.
'Oh,
They looked
steadily into one another's eyes for a moment, then, without a word, they both
turned to look at Sophie.
Mrs.. Wender became her usual self again. She went briskly to a
cupboard, took out some food, and put it on the table.
'Wash first,
you dirty things,' she told us. 'Then eat this up. Every bit
of it.'
While I washed
I put the question I had wanted to ask often before.
'Mrs. Wender,
if it's just Sophie's toes, couldn't you have cut them off when she was a
little baby? I don't expect it would have hurt her much then, and nobody need
have known.'
'There'd have
been marks, David, and when people saw them they'd know why. Now hurry up and
eat that supper,' she told me, and went busily off into the other room,
'We're going
away,' Sophie confided to me presently, through a mouthful of pie.
'Going away?' I
repeated blankly.
She nodded.' Mummy
said we'd have to go if anybody ever found out. We nearly did when you saw
them.'
'But - you
mean, right away? Never come back?' I asked in dismay.
'Yes, I think
so.'
I had been
hungry, but I suddenly lost my appetite. I sat fiddling with the food on my
plate. The sounds of bustling and bumping elsewhere in the house took on an
ominous quality. I looked across the table at Sophie. In my throat there was a
lump that wouldn't be swallowed.
'Where?' I asked, unhappily.
'I don't know —
a long way, though,' she told me.
We sat on.
Sophie prattled between mouthfuls; I found it hard to swallow because of the
lump. Everything was abruptly bleak to the horizon, and beyond. Nothing, I
knew, was going to be quite the same ever again. The desolation of the prospect
engulfed me. I had to struggle hard to keep back tears.
Mrs. Wender
brought in a series of satchels and packs. I watched glumly as she dumped them
close to the door, and went away again. Mr. Wender came in from outside and
collected some of them. Mrs. Wender reappeared and took Sophie away into the
other room. The next time Mr. Wender came for some more of the packs I followed
him out.
The two horses,
Spot and
'A cart keeps
you to the tracks; with pack-horses you go where you like,' he told me.
I watched him
strapping more bundles on while I gathered courage.
'Mr. Wender,' I
said, 'please can't I come too?'
He stopped what
he was doing, and turned to look at me. We faced one another for some moments, then slowly, regretfully, he shook his head. He must have
seen that tears were close behind my eyes, for he put his hand on my shoulder
and let it rest there.
'Come along
inside,
Mrs.
Wender was back in the living-room, standing in the middle of the floor, and
looking round, as if for things forgotten.
'He wants to
come with us, Martie,' said Mr. Wender.
She sat down on
a stool, and held her arms out to me. I went to her, unable to speak. Looking
over my head, she said:
'Oh,
Close to her
like that I could catch her thoughts. They came faster, but easier to
understand, than words. I knew how she felt, how she genuinely wished I could
go with them, how she leapt on, without examining the reasons, to knowing that
I could not and must not go with them. I had the complete answer before
'I know, Martie. But it's Sophie I'm afraid for — and you. If we
were to be caught we'd be charged with kidnapping as well as concealment....'
'If they take
Sophie nothing could make things worse for me,
'But it's not
just that, dear. Once they are satisfied that we are out of the district we'll
be someone else's responsibility, and they'll not bother much more about us.
But if Strorm were to lose his boy there'd be hue and cry for miles around, and
I doubt whether we'd have a chance of getting clear. They'd have posses out
everywhere looking for us. We can't afford to increase the risk to Sophie, can
we?'
Mrs. Wender was
silent for some moments. I could feel her fitting the reasons into what she had
known already. Presently her arm tightened round me.
'You do
understand that, don't you, David? Your father would be so angry if you came
with us that we'd have much less chance of getting Sophie away safely. I
want you to come, but for Sophie's sake we daren't do it. Please be brave about
it, David. You're her only friend, and you can help her by being brave. You
will, won't you?'
The words were
like a clumsy repetition. Her thoughts had been much clearer, and I had already
had to accept the inevitable decision. I could not trust myself to speak. I
nodded dumbly, and let her hold me to her in a way my own mother never did.
The packing-up
was finished a little before dusk. When everything was ready Mr. Wender took me
aside.
'
'Yes,' I told
him. 'What is it, Mr. Wender?'
'It's this.
When we've gone don't go home at once. Will you stay here till tomorrow
morning? That'll give us more time to get her safely away. Will you do that?'
'Yes,' I said,
reliably.
We shook hands
on it. It made me feel stronger and more responsible — rather like I had on
that first day when she twisted her ankle.
Sophie held out
her hand with something concealed in it as we came back.
'This is for
you, David,' she said, putting it into my hand.
I looked at it.
A curling lock of brown hair, tied with a piece of yellow ribbon. I was still
staring at it when she flung her arms round my neck and kissed me, with more
determination than judgment. Her father picked her up and swung her high on top
of the leading horse's load.
Mrs. Wender
bent to kiss me, too.
'Good-bye,
David, dear.' She
touched my bruised cheek with a gentle forefinger. "We'll never forget,'
she said, and her eyes were shiny.
They set off.
The sun was
getting high and the men were long ago out in the fields when I reached home.
There was no one in the yard, but the inspector's pony stood at the
hitching-post near the door, so I guessed my father would be in the house.
I hoped that I
had stayed away long enough. It had been a bad night. I had started with a
determinedly stout heart, but in spite of my resolutions it weakened somewhat when
darkness fell. I had never before spent a night anywhere but in my own room at
home. There, everything was familiar, but the Wenders'
empty house seemed full of queer sounds. I managed to find some candles and
light them, and when I had blown up the fire and put some more wood on, that,
too, helped to make the place less lonely - but only a little less. Odd noises
kept on occurring inside and outside the house.
For a long time
I sat on a stool, pressing my back against the wall so that nothing should approach
me unaware. More than once my courage all but gave out. I wanted painfully to
run away. I like to think it was my promise and the thought of Sophie's safety
that kept me there; but I do remember also how black it looked outside, and how
full of inexplicable sounds and movements the darkness seemed to be.
The night
stretched out before me in a prospect of terrors, yet nothing actually
happened. The sounds like creeping footsteps never brought anything into view,
the tapping was no prelude to anything at all, nor were the occasional dragging
noises; they were beyond explanation, but also, luckily, apparently beyond
manifestation, too, and at length, in spite of them all I found my eyes
blinking as I swayed on my stool. I summoned up courage and dared to move, very
cautiously, across to the bed. I scrambled across it, and very thankfully got
my back to a wall again. For a time I lay watching the candles and the uneasy
shadows they cast in the corners of the room, and wondering what I should do
when they were gone, when, all of a sudden, they were gone — and the sun
was shining in. ...
I had found
some bread for my breakfast in the Wenders' house,
but I was hungry again by the time I reached home. That, however, could wait.
My first intention was to get to my room unseen, with the very thin hope that
my absence might not have been noticed, so that I would be able to pretend that
I had merely overslept, but my luck was not running: Mary caught sight of me
through the kitchen window as I was slipping across the yard. She called out:
'You come here
at once. Everybody's been looking all over for you. Where've you been?' And
then, without waiting for an answer, she added: 'Father's on the rampage.
Better go to him before he gets worse.'
My father and
the inspector were in the seldom-used, rather formal room at the front. I
seemed to arrive at a crucial time. The inspector looked much as usual, but my
father was thunderous.
'Come here!' he
snapped, as soon as I appeared in the doorway.
I went nearer,
reluctantly.
'Where've you
been?' he demanded. 'You've been out all night. Where?'
I did not
answer.
He fired half a
dozen questions at me, looking fierier every second when I did not answer them.
'Come on now.
Sullenness isn't going to help you. Who was this child — this Blasphemy — you
were with yesterday?' he shouted.
I still did not
reply. He glared at me. I had never seen him angrier. I felt sick with fright.
The inspector
intervened then. In a quiet, ordinary voice he said to me:
'You know,
David, concealment of a Blasphemy — not reporting a human deviation — is a
very, very serious thing. People go to prison for it. It is everybody's duty to
report any kind of Offence to me — even if they aren't sure — so that I can
decide. It's always important, and very important indeed
if it is a Blasphemy. And in this case there doesn't seem to be any doubt about
it — unless young Ervin was mistaken. Now he says this child you were with has
six toes. Is that true?'
'No,' I told
him.
'He's lying,'
said my father.
'I see,' said
the inspector calmly. 'Well, then if it isn't true, it can't matter if we know
who she is, can it?' he went on in a reasonable tone.
I made no reply
to that. It seemed the safest way. We looked at one another.
'Surely, you
see that's so? If it is not true —'he was going on persuasively, but my
father cut him short.
'I'll deal with
this. The boy's lying.' To me he added: 'Go to your room.'
I hesitated. I
knew well enough what that meant, but I knew, too, that with my father in his
present mood it would happen whether I told or not. I set my jaw, and turned to
go. My father followed, picking up a whip from the table as he came.
'That,' said
the inspector curtly, 'is my whip.'
My father
seemed not to hear him. The inspector stood up. 'I said that is my
whip,' he repeated, with a hard, ominous note in his voice.
My father
checked his step. With an ill-tempered gesture he threw the whip back on the
table. He glared at the inspector, and then turned to follow me.
I don't know
where my mother was, perhaps she was afraid of my
father. It was Mary who came, and made little comforting noises as she dressed
my back. She wept a little as she helped me into bed, and then fed me some
broth with a spoon. I did my best to put up a brave show in front of her, but
when she had gone my tears soaked into my pillow. By now it was not so much the
bodily hurts that brought them: it was bitterness, self-contempt, and
abasement. In wretchedness and misery I clutched the yellow ribbon and the
brown curl tight in my hand.
'I couldn't
help it, Sophie,' I sobbed, 'I couldn't help it.'
In the evening, when I grew calmer, I
found that Rosalind was trying to talk to me. Some of the others were anxiously
asking what was the matter, too. I told them about
Sophie. It wasn't a secret any more now. I could feel that they were shocked. I
tried to explain that a person with a deviation — a small deviation, at any
rate — wasn't the monstrosity we had been told. It did not really make any
difference — not to Sophie, at any rate.
They received that
very doubtfully indeed. The things we had all been taught were against their
acceptance — though they knew well enough that what I was telling them must be
true to me. You can't lie when you talk with your thoughts. They wrestled with
the novel idea that a Deviation might not be disgusting and evil — not very
successfully. In the circumstances they could not give me much consolation, and
I was not sorry when one by one they dropped out and I knew that they had
fallen asleep.
I was tired out
myself, but sleep was a long time coming. I lay there, picturing Sophie and her
parents plodding their way southward towards the dubious safety of the Fringes,
and hoping desperately that they would be far enough off now for my betrayal
not to hurt them.
And then, when
sleep did come, it was full of dreams. Faces and people moved restlessly
through it, scenes, too. Once more there was the one where we all stood round
in the yard while my father disposed of an Offence which was Sophie, and I woke
up from that hearing my own voice shouting to him to stop. I was frightened to
go to sleep again, but I did, and that time it was quite different. I dreamed
again of the great city by the sea, with its houses and streets, and the things
that flew in the sky. It was years since I had dreamed about that, but it still
looked just the same, and in some quite obscure way it soothed me.
My mother
looked in in the morning, but she was detached and
disapproving. Mary was the one who took charge, and she decreed that there was
to be no getting up that day. I was to lie on my front, and not wriggle about,
so that my back would heal more quickly. I took the instruction meekly, for it
was certainly more comfortable to do as she said. So I lay there and considered
what preparations I should have to make for running away, once I was about
again and the stiffness had worn off. It would, I decided, be much better to
have a horse, and I spent most of the morning concocting a plan for stealing
one and riding away to the Fringes.
The inspector
looked in in the afternoon, bringing with him a bag
of buttery sweets. For a moment I thought of trying to get something out of him
— casually, of course — about the real nature of the Fringes: after all, as an
expert on Deviation he might be expected to know more about them than anyone
else. On second thoughts, however, I decided it might be unwise.
He was
sympathetic and kindly enough, but he was on a mission. He put his questions in
a friendly way. Munching one of the sweets himself, he asked me:
'How long have
you known that Wender child — what is her name, by the way?'
I told him,
there was no harm in that now.
'How long have
you known that Sophie deviates?'
I didn't see
that telling the truth could make things much worse.
'Quite a long
time,' I admitted.
'And how long
would that be?'
'About six
months, I think,' I told him.
He raised his
eyebrows, and then looked serious.
'That's bad,
you know,' he said, 'It's what we call abetting a concealment. You must have
known that was wrong, didn't 'you?'
I dropped my
gaze. I wriggled uncomfortably under his straight look, and then stopped
because it made my back twinge.
'It sort of
didn't seem like the things they say in church,' I tried to explain.' Besides,
they were awfully little toes.'
The inspector
took another sweet and pushed the bag back to me.
'". . .
and each foot shall have five toes,"' he quoted. 'You remember that?'
'Yes,' I
admitted, unhappily.
'Well, every
part of the definition is as important as any other; and if a child doesn't
come within it, then it isn't human, and that means it doesn't have a soul. It
is not in the image of God, it is an imitation, and in the imitations there is
always some mistake. Only God produces perfection, so although deviations may
look like us in many ways, they cannot be really human. They are something
quite different.'
I thought that
over.
'But Sophie isn't
really different — not in any other way,' I told him.
'You'll find it
easier to understand when you are older, but you do know the definition, and
you must have realized Sophie deviated. Why didn't you tell your father, or me,
about her?'
I explained
about my dream of my father treating Sophie as he did one of the farm Offences.
The inspector looked at me thoughtfully for some seconds, then
he nodded:
'I see,' he
said. 'But Blasphemies are not treated the same way as Offences.'
'What happens
to them?' I asked.
He evaded that.
He went on:
'You know, it's
really my duty to include your name in my report. However, as your father has
already taken action, I may be able to leave it out. All the same, it is a very
serious matter. The Devil sends Deviations among us to weaken us and tempt us
away from Purity. Sometimes he is clever enough to make a nearly-perfect
imitation, so we have always to be on the look-out for the mistake he has made,
however small, and when we see one it must be reported at once. You'll remember
that in future, won't you?'
I avoided his
eye. The inspector was the inspector, and an important person; all the same I
could not believe that the Devil sent Sophie. I found it hard to see how the
very small toe on each foot could make much difference either.
'Sophie's my
friend,' I said. 'My best friend.'
The inspector
kept on looking at me, then he shook his head and
sighed.
'Loyalty is a
great virtue, but there is such a thing as misplaced loyalty. One day you will
understand the importance of a greater loyalty. The Purity of the Race —' He
broke off as the door opened. My father came in.
'They got them
— all three of them,' he said to the inspector, and gave a look of disgust at
me.
The inspector
got up promptly, and they went out together. I stared at the closed door. The
misery of self-reproach struck me so that I shook all over. I could hear myself
whimpering as the tears rolled down my cheeks. I tried to stop it, but I
couldn't. My hurt back was forgotten. The anguish my father's news had caused
me was far more painful than that. My chest was so tight with it that it was
choking me.
Presently the
door opened again. I kept my face to the wall. Steps crossed the room. A hand
rested on my shoulder. The inspector's voice said:
'It wasn't
that, old man. You had nothing to do with it. A patrol picked them up, quite by
chance, twenty miles away.'
A couple of
days later I said to Uncle Axel:
'I'm going to
run away.'
He paused in
his work, and gazed thoughtfully at his saw.
'I'd not do
that,' he advised. 'It doesn't usually work very well. Besides,' he added after
a pause, 'where would you run to?'
'That's what I
wanted to ask you,' I explained.
He shook his head.
'Whatever district you're in they want to see your
Normalcy Certificate,' he told me. 'Then they know who you are and where you're
from.'
'Not in the
Fringes,' I suggested.
He stared at
me. 'Man alive, you'd not want to go to the Fringes. Why, they've got nothing
there — not even enough food. Most of them are half starving, that's why they
make the raids. No, you'd spend all the time there just trying to keep alive, and lucky if you did.'
'But there must
be some other places,' I said. 'Only if you can find a ship that'll take you —
and even then —' He shook his head again. 'In my experience,' he told me, 'if
you run away from a thing just because you don't like it, you don't like what
you find either. Now, running to a thing, that's a different matter, but
what would you want to run to? Take it from me, it's a
lot better here than it is most places. No, I'm against it,
There was
something in that. I was beginning to learn the meaning of the word '
humiliation', and did not want any more of it at present. But from what he said
the question of where to go would not be easily solved even then. It looked as
if it would be advisable to learn what one could of the world outside
'All right,
'You mean it's secret?' I asked, puzzled.
'Not quite
that,' he said. 'But when people are used to believing a thing is such-and-such
a way, and the preachers want them to believe that that's the way it is;
it's trouble you get, not thanks, for upsetting their
ideas. Sailors soon found that out in Rigo, so mostly they only talk about it
now to other sailors. If the rest of the people want to think it's nearly all
'My book says
it's all
'There are
other books that don't, but you'll not see them about much — not even in Rigo,
let alone in the backwoods here,' he said. 'And, mind you, it doesn't do to
believe everything every sailor says either — and you're often not sure whether
any couple of them are talking about the same place or not, even when they
think they are. But when you've seen some of it, you begin to understand that
the world's a much queerer place than it looks from Waknuk. So you'll keep it
to yourself?'
I assured him I
would.
'All
right. Well, it's
this way —' he began.
To reach the
rest of the world (my Uncle Axel explained) you start by sailing down river
from Rigo until you get to the sea. They say that it's no good sailing on
straight ahead, to the east, that is, because either the
sea goes on for ever, or else it comes to an end suddenly, and you sail over
the edge. Nobody knows for sure.
If you make north
and keep along the coast, and still keep along when it turns west and then
south, you reach the other side of
To the
north-east they say there is a great land where the plants aren't very
deviational, and the animals and people don't look deviational, but the
women are very tall and strong. They rule the country entirely, and do all the
work. They keep their men in cages until they are about twenty-four years old,
and then eat them. They also eat shipwrecked sailors. But as no one ever seems
to have met anyone who has actually been there and escaped, it's difficult to
see how that can be known. Still, there it is — no one has ever come back
denying it either.
The only way I
know is south — I've been south three times. To get there you keep the coast to
starboard as you leave the river. After a couple of hundred miles or so you
come to the Straits of Newf. As the Straits widen out you keep the coast of
A day or two's
sail farther on there's plenty of
When sailors
first saw those parts they were pretty scared. They felt they were leaving all
Purity behind, and sailing farther and farther away from God, where He'd not be
able to help them. Everybody knows that if you walk on
And a shocking
sight it must have been at first, too. You can see giant, distorted heads of
corn growing higher than small trees; big saprophytes growing on rocks, with
their roots trailing out on the wind like bunches of hair, fathoms long; in
some places there are fungus colonies that you'd take at first sight for big
white boulders; you can see succulents like barrels, but as big as small
houses, and with spines ten feet long. There are plants which grow on the
cliff-tops and send thick, green cables down a hundred feet and more into the
sea; and you wonder whether it's a land plant that's got to the salt water, or
a sea plant that's somehow climbed ashore. There are hundreds of kinds of queer
things, and scarcely a normal one among them — it's a kind of jungle of
Deviations, going on for miles and miles. There don't seem to be many animals,
but occasionally you catch sight of one, though you'd never be able to name it.
There are a fair number of birds, though, sea-birds mostly; and once or twice
people have seen big things flying in the distance, too far away to make out
anything except that the motion didn't look right for birds. It's a weird, evil
land; and many a man who sees it suddenly understands what might happen here if
it weren't for the Purity Laws and the inspectors.
It's bad — but
it isn't the worst.
Farther south
still, you begin to find patches where only coarse plants grow, and poorly at
that, and soon you come to stretches of coast, and land behind it, twenty, thirty,
forty miles long, maybe, where nothing grows — nothing at all.
The whole
seaboard is empty — black and harsh and empty. The land
behind looks like a huge desert of charcoal. Where there are cliffs they
are sharp-edged, with nothing to soften them. There are no fish in the sea
there, no weed either, not even slime, and when a ship has sailed there the
barnacles and the fouling on her bottom drop off, and leave her hull clean. You
don't see any birds. Nothing moves at all, except the waves breaking on the
black beaches.
It is a
frightful place. Masters order their ships well out
for fear of it; and very relieved the sailors are to keep clear.
And yet it
can't always have been like that because there was one ship whose captain was
foolhardy enough to sail close inshore. Her crew were
able to make out great stone ruins. They were all agreed that they were far too
regular to be natural, and they thought they might be the remains of one of the
Old People's cities. But nobody knows any more about them. Most of the men in
that ship wasted away and died, and the rest were never the same afterwards, so
no other ship has risked keeping close in.
For hundreds of
miles the coast goes on being
The preachers
and the church people were pleased to hear it, for that was very much what they
had been teaching, and for a time it made people lose interest in exploring.
But later on
curiosity revived, and better-found ships sailed south again. An observer on
one of these, a man called Marther, wrote in a
journal which he published, something like this:
The Black
Coasts would appear to be an extreme form of
Such study as
has been possible at a distance, however, does not confirm the view of the
Right Wing Church Party that they are the result of unchecked deviation. There
is no evidence whatever that they are a form of sore on the earth's surface
destined to spread to all impure regions. Indeed, the contrary appears more
likely. This is to say that just as Wild Country becomes tractable, and
Badlands country slowly gives way to habitable Fringes country, so, it would
seem, are the Blacklands contracting within the
That was one of
the parts of the journal that got Marther into a lot
of trouble with orthodox people, for it implied that deviations, so far from
being a curse, were performing, however slowly, a work of reclamation. Along
with half a dozen more heresies it landed Marther in
court, and started agitation for a ban on further exploration.
In the middle
of all the fuss, however, a ship called the Venture which had long been
given up for lost, came sailing home to Rigo. She was battered and undermanned,
her canvas was patched, her mizzen jury-rigged, and her condition foul, but she
triumphantly claimed the honour of being the first to
reach the lands beyond the Black Coasts. She brought back a number of objects
including gold and silver and copper ornaments, and a cargo of spices to prove
it. The evidence had to be accepted, but there was a lot of trouble over the
spices, for there was no means of telling whether they were deviational, or the
product of a pure strain. Strict churchgoers refused to touch them for fear
they might be tainted; other people preferred to believe that they were the
kind of spices referred to in the Bible. Whatever they were, they are
profitable enough now for ships to sail south in search of them.
The lands down
there aren't civilized. Mostly they don't have any sense of sin so they don't
stop Deviations; and where they do have a sense of sin, they've got it mixed
up. A lot of them aren't ashamed of Mutants; it doesn't seem to worry them when
children turn out wrong, provided they're right enough to live and to learn to
look after themselves. Other places, though, you'll find Deviations who think
they are normal. There's one tribe where both the men and women are hairless,
and they think that hair is the devil's mark; and there's another where they
all have white hair and pink eyes. In one place they don't think you're
properly human unless you have webbed fingers and toes; in another, they don't
allow any woman who is not multi-breasted to have children.
You'll find
islands where the people are all thickset, and others where they're thin; there
are even said to be some islands where both the men and women would be passed
as true images if it weren't that some strange deviation has turned them all
completely black — though even that's easier to believe than the one about a
race of Deviations that has dwindled to two feet high, grown fur and a tail,
and taken to living in trees. All the same, it's queerer there than you'd ever
credit; pretty nearly anything seems possible once you've seen it.
It's pretty
dangerous in those parts, too. The fish and the other things in the sea are
bigger and fiercer than they are here. And when you do go ashore you never know
how the local Deviations are going to take you. Some places they are friendly;
in others they shoot poisoned arrows at you. On one island they throw bombs
made of pepper wrapped in leaves, and when it gets in your eyes they charge
with spears. You just never know.
Sometimes when
the people are friendly you can't understand a thing they're trying to say and
they can't understand you, but more often if you listen a bit you'll find out
that a lot of their words are like our own but pronounced differently. And you
find out some strange, disturbing things. They all have pretty much the same
legends of the Old People as we have — how they could fly, how they used to
build cities that floated on the sea, how any one of them could speak to any
other, even hundreds of miles away, and so on. But what's more worrying is that
most of them — whether they have seven fingers, or four arms, or hair all over,
or six breasts, or whatever it is that's wrong with them — think that their
type is the true pattern of the Old People, and anything different is a
Deviation.
That seems
silly at first, but when you find more and more kinds just as convinced of it
as we are ourselves — well, you begin to wonder a bit. You start asking
yourself: well, what real evidence have we got
about the true image? You find that the Bible doesn't say anything to
contradict the people of that time being like us, but on the other hand it
doesn't give any definition of Man, either. No, the definition comes from
Nicholson's Repentances — and he admits that he was writing some
generations after Tribulation came, so you find yourself wondering whether he knew
he was in the true image, or whether he only thought he was. . . .
Uncle Axel had
a lot more to say about Southern parts than I can remember, and it was all very
interesting in its way, but it didn't tell me what I wanted to know. At last I
asked him point-blank.
'Uncle Axel,
are there any cities there?'
'Cities?' he
repeated. 'Well, here and there you'll find a town, of a kind. As big as Kentak, maybe, but built differently.'
'No,' I told
him. 'I mean big places.' I described the city in my dream, but without telling
him it was a dream.
He looked at me
oddly. 'No, I never heard of any place like that,' he told me.
'Farther
on, perhaps. Farther
than you went?' I suggested.
He shook his
head. 'You can't go farther on. The sea gets full of weed. Masses of weed with
stems like cables. A ship can't make her way through it, and it's trouble
enough to get clear of it once you get in it at all.'
'Oh,' I said. 'You're
quite sure there's no city?'
'Sure,' he
said. 'We'd have heard of it by this time if there was.'
I was
disappointed. It sounded as if running away to the South, even if I could find
a ship to take me, would be little better than running away to the Fringes. For
a time I had hoped, but now I had to go back to the idea that the city I dreamt
of must be one of the Old People's cities after all.
Uncle Axel went
on talking about the doubts of the true image that his voyage had given him. He
laboured it rather a lot, and after a while he broke
off to ask me directly:
'You
understand, don't you,
I was not sure
that I did. Moreover, I was reluctant to admit the flaw in the tidy, familiar
orthodoxy I had been taught. I recalled a phrase which I had heard a number of
times.
'You lost your
faith?' I inquired.
Uncle Axel
snorted, and pulled a face.
'Preacher-words!'
he said, and thought for a moment. 'I'm telling you,' he went on, 'that a lot
of people saying that a thing is so, doesn't prove it is so. I'm telling
you that nobody, nobody really knows
what is the true image. They all think they know — just as we think we
know, but, for all we can prove, the Old People themselves may not have been
the true image.' He turned, and looked long and steadily at me again.
'So,' he said,
'how am I, and how is anyone to be sure that this "difference" that
you and Rosalind have does not make you something nearer to the true image than
other people are? Perhaps the Old People were the image: very well then, one of
the things they say about them is that they could talk to one another over long
distances. Now we can't do that — but you and Rosalind can. Just think
that over,
I hesitated for
perhaps a minute, and then took a decision.
'It isn't just
Rosalind and me, Uncle Axel,' I told him. 'There are others, too.'
He was
startled. He stared at me.
'Others?' he
repeated. 'Who are they? How many?'
I shook my
head.
'I don't know
who they are — not names, I mean. Names don't have any thinking-shapes, so
we've never bothered. You just know who's thinking, like you know who's talking. I only found out who Rosalind was by
accident.'
He went on
looking at me seriously, uneasily.
'How many of
you?' he repeated.
'Eight,' I told
him. 'There were nine, but one of them stopped about a month ago. That's what I
wanted to ask you, Uncle Axel, do you think somebody found out —? He just
stopped suddenly. We've been wondering if anybody knows. . . . You see, if they
found out about him —' I let him draw the inference himself.
Presently he
shook his head.
'I don't think
so. We should be pretty sure to have heard of it. Perhaps he's gone away, did
he live near here?'
'I think so — I
don't know really,' I said, 'but I'm sure he'd have told us if he was going
away.'
'He'd have told
you if he thought anybody had found out, too, wouldn't he?' he suggested. 'It
looks to me more as if it'd be an accident of some kind, being quite sudden
like that. You'd like me to try to find out?'
'Yes, please.
It's made some of us afraid,' I explained.
'Very
well.' He nodded.
'I'll see if I can. It was a boy, you say. Not very far from
here, probably. About a month ago. Any more?'
I told him what
I could, which was very little. It was a relief to know that he would try to
find out what had happened. Now that a month had gone by without a similar
thing happening to any of the rest of us we were less anxious than we had been,
but still far from easy.
Before we
parted he returned to his earlier advice to remember that no one could be
certain of the true image.
Later, I
understood why he gave it. I realized, too, that he did not greatly care what was the true image. Whether he was wise or not in trying to
forestall both the alarm and the sense of inferiority that he saw lying in wait
for us when we should become better aware of ourselves and our difference, I
cannot say. It might have been better to have left it awhile — on the other
hand, perhaps it did something to lessen the distress of the awakening. . . .
At any rate, I
decided, for the moment, not to run away from home. The practical difficulties
looked formidable.
The arrival of my sister,
There had been
a slight, not quite attributable, sense of expectation about the house for the
previous week or two, but it remained unmentioned and unacknowledged. For me,
the feeling that I was being kept unaware of something afoot was unresolved
until there came a night when a baby howled. It was penetrating, unmistakable,
and certainly within the house, where there had been no baby the day before.
But in the morning nobody referred to the sound in the night. No one, indeed,
would dream of mentioning the matter openly until the inspector should have
called to issue his certificate that it was a human baby in the true image.
Should it unhappily turn out to violate the image and thus be ineligible for a
certificate, everyone would continue to be unaware of it, and the whole
regrettable incident would be deemed not to have occurred.
As soon as it
was light my father sent a stable-hand off on a horse to summon the inspector,
and, pending his arrival, the whole household tried to disguise its anxiety by
pretending we were just starting another ordinary day.
The pretence
grew thinner as time went on, for the stable-hand, instead of bringing back the
inspector forthwith, as was to be expected when a man of my father's position
and influence was concerned, returned with a polite message that the inspector
would certainly do his best to find time to pay a call in the course of the
day.
It is very
unwise for even a righteous man to quarrel with his local inspector and call
him names in public. The inspector has too many ways of hitting back.
My father
became very angry, the more so since the conventions did not allow him to admit
what he was angry about. Furthermore, he was well aware that the inspector
intended him to be angry. He spent the morning hanging around the house and
yard, exploding with bad temper now and then over trivial matters, so that
everyone crept about on tiptoe and worked very hard indeed, in order not to
attract his attention.
One did not
dare to announce a birth until the child had been officially examined and
approved; and the longer the formal announcement was delayed, the more time the
malicious had to invent reasons for the delay. A man of standing looked to
having the certificate granted at the earliest possible moment. With the word
'baby' unmentionable and unhintable, we all had to go
on pretending that my mother was in bed for some slight cold, or other
indisposition.
My sister Mary
disappeared now and then towards my mother's room, and for the rest of the time
tried to hide her anxiety by loudly bossing the household girls. I felt
compelled to hang about in order not to miss the announcement when it should
come. My father kept on prowling.
The suspense
was aggravated by everyone's knowledge that on the last two similar occasions
there had been no certificate forthcoming. My father must have been well aware
— and no doubt the inspector was aware of it, too — that there was plenty of
silent speculation whether my father would, as the law allowed, send my mother
away if this occasion should turn out to be similarly unfortunate. Meanwhile,
since it would have been both impolite and undignified to go running after the
inspector, there was nothing to be done but bear the suspense as best we could.
It was not
until mid-afternoon that the inspector ambled up on his pony. My father pulled
himself together, and went out to receive him; the effort to be even formally
polite nearly strangled him. Even then the inspector was not brisk. He
dismounted in a leisurely fashion, and strolled into the house, chatting about
the weather. Father, red in the face, handed him over to Mary who took him
along to mother's room. Then followed the worst wait of all.
Mary said
afterwards that he hummed and ha'd for an unconscionable
time while he examined the baby in minutest detail. At last, however, he
emerged, with an expressionless face. In the little-used sitting-room he sat
down at the table and fussed for a while about getting a good point on his
quill. At last he took a form from his pouch, and in a slow, deliberate hand
wrote that he officially found the child to be a true female human being, free
from any detectable form of deviation. He regarded that thoughtfully for some
moments, as though not perfectly satisfied. He let his hand hesitate before he
actually dated and signed it, then he sanded it carefully, and handed it to my
enraged father, still with a faint air of uncertainty. He had, of course, no
real doubt in his mind, or he would have called for another opinion; my father
was perfectly well aware of that, too.
At last
She looked so
pink and wrinkled to me that I did not see how the inspector could have been
quite sure about her. However, there was nothing obviously wrong with her, so
she had got her certificate. Nobody could blame the inspector for that; she did
appear to be as normal as a new-born baby ever looks....
While we were
taking turns to look at her somebody started to ring the stable bell in the
customary way. Everyone on the farm stopped work, and very soon we were all
assembled in the kitchen for prayers of thanksgiving.
Two, or it may
have been three, days after
I was sitting
quietly in the room next to my parents' bedroom where my mother still lay in
bed. It was a matter of chance, and strategy, too. It was the latest place that
I had found to stay hidden awhile after the midday meal until the coast was
clear and I could slip away without being given an afternoon job; so far,
nobody had thought of looking there for me. It was simply a matter of putting
in half an hour or so. Normally the room was very convenient, though just at
present its use required caution because the wattle wall between the rooms was
cracked and I had to move very cautiously on tiptoe lest my mother should hear
me.
On that
particular day I was just thinking that I had allowed nearly enough time for
people to be busy again when a two-wheeled trap drove up. As it passed the
window I had a glimpse of my Aunt Harriet holding the reins.
I had only seen
her some eight or nine times, for she lived fifteen miles away in the Kentak
direction, but what I knew of her I liked. She was some three years younger
than my mother. Superficially they were not dissimilar, and yet, in Aunt
Harriet each feature had been a little softened, so that the effect of them all
together was different. I used to feel when I looked at her that I was seeing
my mother as she might have been — as, I thought, I would have liked her to be.
She was easier to talk to, too; she did not have a somewhat damping manner of
listening only to correct.
I edged over
carefully on stockinged feet to the window, watched
her tether the horse, pick a white bundle out of the trap, and carry it into
the house. She cannot have met anyone, for a few seconds later her steps passed
the door, and the latch of the next room clicked.
'Why, Harriet!'
my mother's voice exclaimed in surprise, and not altogether in approval. 'So soon! You don't mean to say you've brought a tiny baby
all that way!'
'I know,' said
Aunt Harriet's voice, accepting the reproof in my mother's tone, 'but I had to,
Emily. I had to. I heard your baby had come early, so I — oh, there she is! Oh,
she's lovely, Emily. She's a lovely baby.' There was a pause. Presently she
added: 'Mine's lovely, too, isn't she? Isn't she a lovely darling?'
There was a
certain amount of mutual congratulation which did not interest me a lot. I
didn't suppose the babies looked much different from other babies, really. My
mother said:
'I am
glad, my dear. Henry must be delighted.'
'Of course he
is,' said Aunt Harriet, but there was something wrong about the way she said
it. Even I knew that. She hurried on: 'She was born a week ago. I didn't know
what to do. Then when I heard your baby had come early and was a girl, too, it
was like God answering a prayer.' She paused, and then added with a casualness
which somehow failed to be casual: 'You've got the certificate for her?'
'Of
course.' My mother's
tone was sharp, ready for offence. I knew the expression which went with the
tone. When she spoke again there was a disturbing quality in her voice.
'Harriet!' she
demanded sharply. 'Are you going to tell me that you have not got a
certificate?'
My aunt made no
reply, but I thought I caught the sound of a suppressed sob. My mother said
coldly, forcibly:
'Harriet, let
me see that child — properly.'
For some
seconds I could hear nothing but another sob or two from my aunt. Then she
said, unsteadily:
'It's such a
little thing, you see. It's nothing much.'
'Nothing
much!' snapped my
mother. 'You have the effrontery to bring your monster into my house, and tell
me it's nothing much!'
'Monster!' Aunt Harriet's voice sounded as though
she had been slapped. 'Oh! Oh! Oh! ...' She broke into little moanings.
After a time my
mother said:
'No wonder you didn't
dare to call the inspector.'
Aunt Harriet
went on crying. My mother let the sobs almost die away before she said:
'I'd like to
know why you have come here, Harriet? Why did you
bring it here?'
Aunt Harriet
blew her nose. When she spoke it was in a dull, flat voice:
'When she came
— when I saw her, I wanted to kill myself. I knew they would never approve her,
although it's such a little thing. But I didn't, because I thought perhaps I
could save her somehow. I love her. She's a lovely baby — except for that. She
is, isn't she?'
My mother said
nothing. Aunt Harriet went on:
'I didn't know
how, but I hoped. I knew I could keep her for a little while before they'd take
her away — just the month they give you before you have to notify. I
decided I must have her for that long at least.'
'And
Henry? What does he
say?'
'He — he said
we ought to notify at once. But I wouldn't let him — I couldn't, Emily. I couldn't.
Dear God, not a third time! I kept her, and prayed, and prayed, and hoped. And
then when I heard your baby had come early I thought perhaps God had answered
my prayers.'
'Indeed,
Harriet,' said my mother coldly, 'I doubt whether that had anything to do with
it. Nor,' she added pointedly, 'do I see what you mean.'
'I thought,'
Aunt Harriet went on, spiritlessly now, but forcing herself
to the words, 'I thought that if I could leave my baby with you, and borrow
yours—'
My mother gave
an incredulous gasp. Apparently words eluded her.
'It would only
be for a day or two; just while I could get the certificate,' Aunt Harriet went
doggedly on. 'You are my sister, Emily — my sister, and the only person in the
world who can help me to keep my baby.'
She began to
cry again. There was another longish pause, then my mother's voice:
'In all my life
I have never heard anything so outrageous. To come here suggesting that I
should enter into an immoral, a criminal conspiracy to ... I think you must be
mad, Harriet. To think that I should lend—' She broke
off at the sound of my father's heavy step in the passage.
'Joseph,' she
told him as he entered. 'Send her away. Tell her to leave the house — and take that
with her.'
'But,' said my
father in a bewildered tone, 'but it's Harriet, my
dear.'
My mother
explained the situation, fully. There wasn't a sound from Aunt Harriet. At the
end he demanded incredulously:
'Is this true?
Is this why you've come here?'
Slowly,
wearily, Aunt Harriet said:
'This is the
third time. They'll take my baby away again like they took the others. I can't
stand that - not again. Henry will turn me out, I think. He'll find another
wife, who can give him proper children. There'll be nothing — nothing in the
world for me — nothing. I came here hoping against hope for sympathy and help.
Emily is the only person who can help me. I — I can see now how foolish I was
to hope at all . . .'
Nobody said
anything to that.
'Very well — I
understand. I'll go now,' she told them in a dead voice.
My father was
not a man to leave his attitude in doubt.
'I do not
understand how you dared to come here, to a God-fearing house, with such a
suggestion,' he said. 'Worse still, you don't show an atom of shame or
remorse.'
Aunt Harriet's
voice was steadier as she answered:
'Why should I?
I've done nothing to be ashamed of. I am not ashamed — I am only
beaten.'
'Not ashamed!'
repeated my father. 'Not ashamed of producing a mockery of your Maker — not
ashamed of trying to tempt your own sister into criminal conspiracy!' He drew a
breath and launched off in pulpit style. 'The enemies of God besiege us. They
seek to strike at Him through us. Unendingly they work to distort the true
image; through our weaker vessels they attempt to defile the race. You have
sinned, woman, search your heart, and you will know that you have sinned. Your
sin has weakened our defences, and the enemy has
struck through you. You wear the cross on your dress to protect you. but you have not worn it always in your heart. You have not
kept constant vigilance for impurity. So there has been a Deviation; and
deviation, any deviation from the true image is blasphemy — no less. You
have produced a defilement.'
'One poor
little baby!'
'A baby which,
if you were to have your way, would grow up to breed, and, breeding, spread
pollution until all around us there would be mutants and abominations. That is
what has happened in places where the will and faith were weak: here it shall never
happen. Our ancestors were of the true stock: they have handed on a trust. Are
you to be permitted to betray us all? To cause our ancestors
to have lived in vain? Shame on you, woman! Now go! Go home in humility,
not defiance. Notify your child, according to law. Then do your penances that
you may be cleansed. And pray. You have much to pray for. Not only have you
blasphemed by producing a false image, but in your arrogance you have set
yourself against the law, and sinned in intent. I am a merciful man; I shall
make no charge of that. It will be for you to clean it from your conscience; to
go down on your knees and pray — pray that your sin of intention, as well as
your other sins, may be forgiven you.'
There were two
light footsteps. The baby gave a little whimper as Aunt Harriet picked it up.
She came towards the door and lifted the latch, then
she paused.
'I shall pray,'
she said. 'Yes, I shall pray.' She paused, then she
went on, her voice steady and harder: 'I shall pray God to send charity into
this hideous world, and sympathy for the weak, and love for the unhappy and
unfortunate. I shall ask Him if it is indeed His will that a child should
suffer and its soul be damned for a little blemish of
the body. . . . And I shall pray Him, too, that the hearts of the
self-righteous may be broken....'
Then the door
closed and I heard her pass slowly along the passage.
I moved
cautiously back to the window, and watched her come out and lay the white
bundle gently in the trap. She stood looking down on it for a few seconds, then she unhitched the horse, climbed up on the seat, and
took the bundle on to her lap, with one arm guarding it in her cloak.
She turned, and
left a picture that is fixed in my mind. The baby cradled in her arm, her cloak
half open, showing the upper part of the brown, braid-edged cross on her fawn
dress; eyes that seemed to see nothing as they looked towards the house from a
face set hard as granite. ... Then she shook the reins, and drove off. Behind
me, in the next room, my father was saying:
'Heresy,
too! The attempt at
substitution could be overlooked; women sometimes get strange ideas at such
times. I was prepared to overlook it, provided the child is notified. But
heresy is a different matter. She is a dangerous as well as a shameless woman;
I could never have believed such wickedness in a sister of yours. And for her
to think that you might abet her, when she knows that you yourself have had to
make your own penances twice! To speak heresy in my house,
too. That cannot be allowed to pass.'
'Perhaps, she
did not realize what she was saying,' my mother's voice said, uncertainly.
'Then it is
time she did. It is our duty to see that she does.'
My mother
started to answer, but her voice cracked. She began to cry: I had never heard
her cry before. My father's voice went on explaining about the need for Purity
in thought as well as in heart and conduct, and its very particular importance
to women. He was still talking when I tiptoed away.
I could not
help feeling a great curiosity to know what was the 'little thing' that had
been wrong with the baby — wondering if, perhaps, it were just an extra toe,
like Sophie's. But I never found out what it was.
When they broke
the news to me next day that my Aunt Harriet's body had been found in the
river, no one mentioned a baby....
My father included Aunt Harriet's name in
our prayers on the evening of the day the news came, but after that she was never
referred to again. It was as though she had been wiped out of every memory but
mine. There, however, she remained very clearly, given form at a time when I
had only heard her, as an upright figure with a face drained of hope, and a
voice saying clearly: 'I am not ashamed — I am only beaten.' And, too, as I had last seen her, looking up at the house.
Nobody told me
how she came to die, but somehow I knew that it had not been by accident. There
was a great deal that I did not understand in what I had overheard, and yet, in
spite of that, it was quite the most disturbing occurrence I had known yet — it
alarmed me with a sense of insecurity far greater, for some unperceived reason,
than I had suffered over Sophie. For several nights I dreamed of Aunt Harriet
lying in the river, still clasping the white bundle to her while the water
swirled her hair round her pale face, and her wide-open eyes saw nothing. And I
was frightened. ...
This had
happened simply because the baby was just a bit different in some way from
other babies. It had something, or lacked something, so that it did not exactly
accord with the Definition. There was the 'little thing' that made it not quite
right, not quite like other people....
A mutant, my
father had called it.... A mutant!... I thought of
some of the poker-work texts. I recalled the address of a visiting preacher;
the detestation there had been in his voice when he thundered from the pulpit: 'Accursed
is the Mutant!'
Accursed is the
mutant. ... The mutant, the enemy, not only of the human race, but of all the
species God had decreed; the seed of the Devil within, trying unflaggingly,
eternally to come to fruition in order that it might destroy the divine order
and turn our land, the stronghold of God's will upon Earth, into a lewd chaos
like the Fringes; trying to make it a place without the law, like the lands in
the South that Uncle Axel had spoken of, where the plants and the animals and
the almost-human beings, too, brought forth travesties; where true stock had
given place to unnameable creatures, abominable
growths flourished, and the spirits of evil mocked the Lord with obscene
fantasies.
Just a small
difference, the 'little thing,' was the first step. . . .
I prayed very
earnestly those nights.
'Oh, God,' I
said, 'please, please, God, let me be like other people. I don't want to be
different. Won't you make it so that when I wake up in the morning I'll be just
like everyone else, please, God, please!'
But in the
morning, when I tested myself I'd soon pick up Rosalind or one of the others,
and know that the prayer hadn't altered anything. I had to get up still just
the same person who had gone to bed the night before, and I had to go into the
big kitchen and eat my breakfast facing the panel which had somehow stopped
being just part of the furniture and seemed to stare back at me with the words:
ACCURSED IS THE MUTANT IN THE SIGHT OF GOD AND MAN!
And I went on
being very frightened.
After about the
fifth night that praying hadn't done any good, Uncle Axel caught me leaving the
breakfast-table and said I'd better come along and help him mend a plough.
After we'd worked on that for a couple of hours he declared a rest, so we went
out of the forge to sit in the sun, with our backs against a wall. He gave me a
chunk of oatcake, and we munched for a minute or two. Then he said:
'Well, now,
'Have what?' I
said, stupidly.
'Whatever it is
that's been making you look as if you were sickening for something the last day
or two,' he told me. 'What's your trouble? Has somebody found out?'
'No,' I said.
He looked greatly relieved.
'Well, what is
it, then?'
So I told him
about Aunt Harriet and the baby. Before I had finished I was talking through
tears — it was such a relief to be able to share it with someone.
'It was her
face as she drove away.' I explained. 'I've never seen anyone look like that
before. I keep on seeing it in the water.'
I looked up at
him as I finished. His face was as grim as I'd ever seen it, with the corners
of his mouth pulled down.
'So that was it
—' he said, nodding once or twice.
'It was all
because the baby was different,' I repeated. 'And there was Sophie, too ... I
didn't understand properly before ... I — I'm frightened, Uncle Axel. What'll
they do when they find out I'm different...?'
He put his hand
on my shoulder.
'No one else is
ever going to know about it,' he told me again. 'No one but me
— and I'm safe.'
It did not seem
as reassuring now as it had been when he said it before.
'There was that
one who stopped,' I reminded him, 'perhaps they found out about him . . . ?'
He shook his
head. 'I reckon you can rest easy on that,
'Where?' I asked.
'About nine or
ten miles away, on a farm over by Chipping,' he said.
I thought back.
The Chipping direction certainly fitted, and it was just the kind of accident
that would account for a sudden unexplained stop.... Without any ill-will to
the unknown Walter I hoped and thought that was the explanation.
Uncle Axel
backtracked a bit.
'There's no
reason at all why anyone should find out. There's nothing to show — they can
only know if you let them. Learn to watch yourself,
'What did
they do to Sophie?' I asked once more. But again he refused to be drawn on
that. He went on:
'Remember what
I told you. They think they are the true image — but they can't know for
sure. And even if the Old People were the same kind as I am and they are, what
of it? Oh, I know people tell tales about how wonderful they were and how
wonderful their world was, and how one day we'll get back again all the things
they had. There's a lot of nonsense mixed up in what they say about them, but
even if there's a lot of truth, too, what's the good of trying so hard to keep
in their tracks? Where are they and their wonderful world now?'
'"God sent
Tribulation upon them,"' I quoted.
'Sure,
sure. You certainly
have taken in the preacher-words, haven't you? It's easy enough to say — but
not so easy to understand, specially when you've seen
a bit of the world, and what it has meant. Tribulation wasn't just tempests,
hurricanes, floods and fires like the things they had in the Bible. It was like
all of them together — and something a lot worse, too. It made the
'Except in
'Not except in Labrador — but less in
I did not see
his real difficulty. After all, God, being omnipotent, could cause anything He
liked. I tried to explain this to Uncle Axel, but he shook his head.
'We've got to
believe that God is sane,
'But
Tribulation —' I began.
Uncle Axel
moved impatiently. 'A word,' he said, 'a rusted mirror, reflecting nothing.
It'd do the preachers good to see it for themselves.
They'd not understand, but they might begin to think. They might begin to ask
themselves: "What are we doing? What are we preaching? What were the Old
People really like? What was it they did to bring this frightful disaster down
upon themselves and all the world?" And after a
bit they might begin to say: "Are we right? Tribulation has made the world
a different place; can we, therefore, ever hope to build in it the kind of
world the Old People lost? Should we try to? What would be gained if we were to
build it up again so exactly that it culminated in another Tribulation?"
For it is clear, boy, that however wonderful the Old People were, they were not
too wonderful to make mistakes — and nobody knows, or is ever likely to know,
where they were wise and where they were mistaken.'
Much of what he
was saying went right over my head, but I thought I caught its gist. I said:
'But, Uncle, if
we don't try to be like the Old People and rebuild the things that have been
lost, what can we do?'
'Well, we might
try being ourselves, and build for the world that is, instead of for one that's
gone,' he suggested.
'I don't think
I understand,' I told him. 'You mean not bother about the True Line or the True
Image? Not mind about Deviations?'
'Not quite
that,' he said, and then looked sidelong at me. 'You heard some heresy from
your aunt; well, here's a bit more, from your uncle. What do you think it is
that makes a man a man?'
I started on
the Definition. He cut me off after five words.
'It is not!'
he said. 'A wax figure could have all that, and he'd still be a wax figure,
wouldn't he?'
'I suppose he
would.'
'Well, then,
what makes a man a man is something inside him.'
'A
soul?' I suggested.
'No,' he said,
'souls are just counters for churches to collect, all the same value, like
nails. No, what makes man man is mind; it's not a thing, it's a quality, and minds aren't
all the same value; they're better or worse, and the better they are, the more
they mean. See where we're going?'
'No,' I
admitted.
'It's this way,
I did not, of
course, follow him clearly through that the first time. Some of it stayed in my
mind, the rest of it I reconstructed in half-memory from later talks. I began
to understand better later on, particularly after Michael had gone to school.
That evening I
told the others about Walter. We were sorry about his accident — nevertheless, it was a relief to all of them to know that it
had been simply an accident. One odd thing I discovered was that he was
probably some kind of distant relation; my grandmother's name had been Brent.
After that, it
seemed wiser for us to find out one another's names in order to prevent such an
uncertainty occurring again.
There were now
eight of us in all — well, when I say that, I mean that there were eight who
could talk in thought-shapes; there were some others who sometimes sent traces,
but so weak and so limited that they did not count. They were like someone who
is not quite blind, but is scarcely able to see more than to know whether it is
day or night. The occasional thought-shapes we caught from them were
involuntary and too fuzzy and damped to make sense.
The other six
were Michael who lived about three miles to the north, Sally and Katherine
whose homes were on neighbouring farms two miles
farther on, and therefore across the border of the adjoining district, Mark,
almost nine miles to the north-west, and Anne and Rachel, a pair of sisters
living on a big farm only a mile and a half to the west. Anne, then something
over thirteen, was the eldest; Walter Brent had been the youngest by six
months.
Knowing who we
were was our second stage in gaining confidence. It somehow increased a
comforting feeling of mutual support. Gradually I found that the texts and
warnings against mutants on the walls stood out at me less vividly. They toned
down and merged once more into the general background. It was not that memories
of Aunt Harriet and of Sophie were dulled; it was rather that they did not jump
so frighteningly and so often into my mind.
Also, I was
soon helped by having a great many new things to think about.
Our schooling,
as I have said, was sketchy; mostly writing, reading from a few simple books
and the Bible and Repentances, which were not at all simple or easy to
understand, and a little elementary figuring. It was not much equipment.
Certainly it was far too little to satisfy Michael's parents, so they sent him
to a school over in Kentak. There, he began to learn a lot of things our old
ladies had never thought of. It was natural for him to want the rest of us to
know about them, too. At first he was not very clear and the distance being so
much more than we were used to gave us all trouble. But presently, after a few
weeks' practice, it became much sharper and better, and he was able to hand on
to the rest of us pretty nearly everything he was being taught — even some of
the things he did not understand properly himself became clearer when we all
thought about them, so that we were able to help him a little, too. And it
pleased us to know that he was almost always at the top of his class,
It was a great
satisfaction to learn and know more, it helped to ease one over a lot of
puzzling matters, and I began to understand many of the things Uncle Axel
talked about much better, nevertheless, it brought, too, the first taste of
complications from which we would never again be free. Quite quickly it became
difficult always to remember how much one was supposed to know. It called for a
lot of restraint to remain silent in the face of simple errors, to listen
patiently to silly arguments based on misconceptions, to do a job in the
customary way when one knew there was a better way. ...
There were bad
moments, of course; the careless remark that raised some eyebrows, the note of
impatience towards those one should respect, the incautious suggestion; but the
missteps were few, for the sense of danger now lay closer to the surface in all
of us. Somehow, through caution, luck, and quick recoveries we managed to
escape direct suspicion and live our two diverging lives for the next six years
without the sense of peril becoming sharp.
Until, in fact,
the day when we discovered that the eight of us had suddenly become nine.
It was a funny thing about my little
sister,
We were
harvesting. Up in the twelve-acre there were six men mowing in echelon. I had
just given up my scythe to another man, and was helping with the stocking by
way of a breather when, without any warning, I was struck. ... I had never
known anything like it. One moment I was contentedly, unhurriedly binding and
propping up sheaves; the next, it was as if something had hit me physically,
inside my head. Very likely I actually staggered under it. Then there was pain,
a demand pulling like a fish-hook embedded in my mind. There was, in the
surprise of the first few moments at any rate, no question whether or not I
should go; I was obeying it, in a daze. I dropped the sheaf I was holding, and
pelted off across the field, past a blur of amazed faces. I kept on running, I
did not know why, except that it was urgent; across half the twelve-acre, into
the lane, over the fence, down the slope of the East Pasture towards the river.
. . .
Pounding across
the slope on a slant I could see the field that ran down to the far side of the
river, one of Angus Morton's fields, crossed by a path that led to the
footbridge, and on the path was Rosalind, running like the wind.
I kept on, down
to the bank, along past the footbridge, downstream towards the deeper pools. I
had no uncertainty, I kept right on to the brink of
the second pool, and went into a dive without a check. I came up quite close to
The compulsion
ebbed suddenly and faded away. I towed her to an easier landing-place. When I
found bottom and could stand up I saw Rosalind's startled face peering
anxiously at me over the bushes.
'Who is it?'
she asked, in real words, and a shaky voice. She put her hand on her forehead.
'Who was able to do that?'
I told her.
'
I carried my
little sister ashore, and laid her on the grass. She was exhausted, and only
semi-conscious, but there did not seem to be anything seriously wrong with her.
Rosalind came
and knelt on the grass on the other side of her. We looked down at the sopping
dress and the darkened, matted curls. Then we gazed across her, at one another.
'I didn't
know,' I told her. 'I'd no idea she was one of us.'
Rosalind put
her hands to her face, finger-tips on her temples. She shook her head slightly
and looked at me from disturbed eyes.
'She isn't,'
she said. 'Something like us, but not one of us. None
of us could command like that. She's something much more than we are.'
Other people
came running up then; some who had followed me from the twelve-acre, some from
the other side, wondering what had made Rosalind go tearing out of the house as
if it were on fire. I picked
'But how did you
know?' he asked. 'I didn't hear a thing.'
Rosalind turned
an incredulous expression of surprise towards him.
'What! With the
way she was yelling! I'd've thought anybody who
wasn't deaf would have heard her half-way to Kentak.'
The man shook
his head doubtfully, but the fact that we had both apparently heard it seemed
confirmation enough to make them all uncertain.
I said nothing.
I was busy trying to fend off agitated questions from the others, telling them
to wait until either I or Rosalind was alone and could attend to them without
rousing suspicions.
That night, for
the first time for years, I had a once-familiar dream, only this time when the
knife gleamed high in my father's right hand, the deviation that struggled in
his left was not a calf, it was not Sophie, either; it was Petra. I woke up
sweating with fright....
The next day I
tried to send thought-shapes to
'It must have
been panic that brought it out,' she said. 'If she isn't aware of it now, she
probably doesn't even know it happened, so it might easily be an unnecessary
danger to tell her about it at all. She's only a little over six, remember. I
don't think it is fair, or safe, to burden her until it's necessary.'
There was
general agreement with Rosalind's view. All of us knew that it is not easy to
keep on watching each word all the time, even when you've had to practise it for years. We decided to postpone telling
We saw no
reason then why it should not continue to stand as it did, for all of us; no
alternative, indeed. If we did not remain hidden, we should be finished.
In the last few
years we had learnt more of the people round us, and the way they felt. What
had seemed, five or six years ago, a kind of rather
disquieting game had grown grimmer as we understood more about it. Essentially,
it had not changed. Still our whole consideration if we were to survive must be
to keep our true selves hidden; to walk, talk, and live indistinguishably from
other people. We had a gift, a sense which, Michael complained bitterly, should
have been a blessing, but was little better than a curse. The stupidest norm
was happier; he could feel that he belonged. We did not, and because we did
not, we had no positive — we were condemned to negatives, to not revealing
ourselves, to not speaking when we would, to not using what we knew, to not
being found out — to a life of perpetual deception, concealment, and lying. The
prospect of continued negativeness stretching out
ahead chafed him more than it did the rest of us. His imagination took him
further, giving him a clearer vision of what such frustrations were going to
mean, but it was no better at suggesting an alternative than ours were. As far
as I was concerned a firm grasp of the negative in the cause of survival had
been quite enough to occupy me; I was only just beginning to perceive the
vacancy left by the absent positive. It was chiefly my appreciation of danger
that had sharpened as I grew up. That had become hardened one afternoon of the
summer in the year before we discovered
It was a bad
season, that. We had lost three fields, so had Angus Morton. Altogether there
had been thirty-five field-burnings in the district. There had been a higher
deviation rate among the spring-births of the stock — not only our own stock,
but everyone's, and particularly among the cattle — than had been known for
twenty years. There seemed to be more wildcats of various sizes prowling out of
the woods by night than ever before. Every week someone was before the court
charged with attempted concealment of deviational crops, or the slaughter and
consumption of undeclared Offences among stock, and to cap it all there had
been no less than three district alerts on account of raids in force from the
Fringes. It was just after the stand-down following the last of these that I
happened across old Jacob grumbling to himself as he forked muck in the yard.
'What is it?' I
asked him, pausing beside him.
He jabbed the
fork into the muck and leant one hand on the shaft. He had been an old man
forking muck ever since I could remember, I couldn't imagine that he had ever
been, or would be, anything else. He turned to me a lined face mostly hidden in
white hair and whiskers which always made me think of Elijah.
'Beans,' he
said. 'Now my bloody beans are wrong. First my potatoes, then my
tomatoes, then my lettuces, now my goddam
beans. Never knew a year like it. The others I've had before, but who ever
heard of beans getting tabulated?'
'Are you sure?'
I said.
'Sure. 'Course
I am. Think I don't know the way a bean ought to look, at my age?'
He glared at me
out of the white fuzz.
'It's certainly
a bad year,' I agreed.
'Bad,' he said,
'it's ruination. Weeks of work gone up in smoke, pigs, sheep and cows gobbling
up good food just to produce 'bominations. Men making
off and standing-to so's a fellow can't get on with
his own work for looking after theirs. Even my own bit of
garden as tribulated as hell itself. Bad!
You're right. And worse to come, I reckon.' He shook his head. 'Aye, worse to
come,' he repeated, with gloomy satisfaction.
'Why?' I
inquired.
'It's a judgment,'
he told me. 'And they deserve it. No morals, no principles. Look at
young Ted Norbet — gets a bit of a fine for hiding a
litter of ten and eating all but two before he was found out. Enough to bring his father up out of his grave. Why, if he'd
done a thing like that — not that he ever would, mind you — but if he
had, d'you know what he'd have got?' I shook my head.
'It'd have been a public shaming on a Sunday, a week of penances, and a
tenth of all he had,' he told me, forcibly. 'So you'd not
find people doing that kind of thing much then — but now —! What do they
care about a bit of fine?' He spat disgustedly into the muck-pile. 'It's the
same all round. Slackness, laxness, nobody caring beyond a
bit of lip-service. You can see it everywhere nowadays. But God is not
mocked. Bringing Tribulation down on us again, they are: a season like this is
the start. I'm glad I'm an old man and not likely to see the fall of it. But
it's coming, you mark my words.
'Government
regulations made by a lot of snivelling,
weak-hearted, weak-witted babblers in the East. That's what the trouble is. A lot of
namby-pamby politicians, and churchmen who ought to know better, too; men
who've never lived in unstable country, don't know anything about it, very
likely never seen a mutant in their lives, and they sit there whittling away
year after year at the laws of God, reckoning they know better. No wonder we
get seasons like this sent as a warning, but do they read the warning and heed
it, do they —?' He spat again.
'How do they
think the south-west was made safe and civilized for God's people? How do they
think the mutants were kept under, and the Purity standards set up? It wasn't
by fiddling little fines that a man could pay once a week and not notice. It was by honouring the
law, and punishing anybody who transgressed it so that they knew they were
punished.
'When my father
was a young man a woman who bore a child that wasn't in the image was whipped
for it. If she bore three out of the image she was uncertified, outlawed, and
sold. It made them careful about their purity and their prayers. My father
reckoned there was a lot less trouble with mutants on account of it, and when
there were any, they were burnt, like other deviations.'
'Burnt!' I exclaimed.
He looked at
me. 'Isn't that the way to cleanse deviations?' he demanded fiercely.
'Yes,' I
admitted, 'with crops and stock, but —'
'The other kind
is the worst,' he snapped, 'it is the Devil mocking the true image. Of course
they should be burnt like they used to be. But what happened? The
sentimentalists in Rigo who never have to deal with them themselves said:
"Even though they aren't human, they look nearly human, therefore
extermination looks like murder, or execution, and that troubles some
people's minds." So, because a few wishy-washy minds did not have enough
resolution and faith, there were new laws about near-human deviations. They
mustn't be cleansed, they must be allowed to live, or die naturally. They must
be outlawed and driven into the Fringes, or, if they are infants, simply
exposed there to take their chance — and that is supposed to be more
merciful. At least the Government has the sense to understand that they mustn't
be allowed to breed, and sees to it that they shan't — though I'd be willing to
bet there's a party against that, too. And what happens? You get more Fringes
dwellers, and that means you get more and bigger raids and lose time and money
holding them back — all lost because of a namby-pamby dodging of the main
issue. What sort of thinking is it to say "Accursed is the Mutant,"
and then treat him like a half-brother?'
'But a mutant
isn't responsible for —' I began.
'"Isn't
responsible,"' sneered the old man. 'Is a tiger-cat responsible for being
a tiger-cat? But you kill it. You can't afford to have it around loose. Repentances
says to keep pure the stock of the Lord by fire, but
that's not good enough for the bloody Government now.
'Give me the
old days when a man was allowed to do his duty and keep the place clean.
Heading right for another dose of Tribulation we are now.' He went on
muttering, looking like an ancient and wrathful prophet of doom.
'All these concealments
— and they'll try again for want of a proper lesson; women who've given
birth to a Blasphemy just going to church and saying how sorry they are and
they'll try not to do it again; Angus Morton's great-horses still around, an
"officially approved" mockery of the Purity Laws; a damned inspector
who just wants to hold his job and not offend them in Rigo — and then people
wonder why we get tribulated seasons ...' He went on
grumbling and spitting with disgust, a venomously puritanical old man. .. .
I asked Uncle
Axel whether there were a lot of people who really felt the way old Jacob
talked. He scratched his cheek, thoughtfully.
'Quite
a few of the old ones.
They still feel it's a personal responsibility — like it used to be before
there were inspectors. Some of the middle-aged are that way, too, but most of
them are willing enough to leave it as it is. They're not so
set on the forms as their fathers were. They don't reckon it matters much what
way it's done so long as the mutants don't breed and things go along all right
— but give them a run of years with instability as high as it is this year, and
I'd not say for certain they'd take it quietly.'
'Why should the
deviation-rate suddenly get high some years?' I asked him.
He shook his
head. 'I don't know. Something to do with the weather, they say. Get a bad
winter with gales from the south-west, and up goes the deviation-rate — not the
next season, but the one after that. Something comes over from the
I had taken the
hint and passed it on to the others. Sure enough the season had been almost as tribulated as the one before, and
there was a tendency to look for scapegoats. Public feeling towards
concealments was noticeably less tolerant than it had been the previous summer,
and it increased the anxiety we should in any case have felt over our discovery
of
For a week
after the river incident we listened with extra care for any hint of suspicion
about it. We found none, however. Evidently it had been accepted that both
Rosalind and I, in different directions, had happened to hear cries for help
which must, in any case, have been faint at the distance. We were able to relax
again — but not for long. Only about a month went by before we had a new source
of misgiving.
Anne announced
that she was going to marry....
There was a shade of defiance in Anne,
even when she told us.
At first we did
not take it very seriously. We found it difficult to believe, and we did not
want to believe, that she was serious. For one thing, the man was Alan Ervin,
the same Alan I had fought on the bank of the stream, and who had informed on
Sophie. Anne's parents ran a good farm, not a great deal smaller than Waknuk
itself; Alan was the blacksmith's son, his prospects were those of becoming the
blacksmith himself in his turn. He had the physique for it, he was tall and
healthy, but that was about as far as he went. Quite certainly Anne's parents
would be more ambitious for her than that; so we scarcely expected anything to
come of it.
We were wrong.
Somehow she brought her parents round to the idea, and the engagement was
formally recognized. At that point we became alarmed. Abruptly, we were forced
to consider some of the implications, and, young as we were, we could see
enough of them to make us anxious. It was Michael who put it to Anne first.
'You can't,
Anne. For your own sake you mustn't,' he told her. 'It'd be like tying yourself
for life to a cripple. Do think, Anne, do really think what it is going to
mean.'
She came back
at him angrily.
'I'm not a
fool. Of course I've thought. I've thought more than you have. I'm a woman —
I've a right to marry and have children. There are three of you and five of us.
Are you saying that two of us must never marry? Never have any lives or homes
of our own? If not, then two of us have got to marry norms. I'm in love with
Alan, and I intend to marry him. You ought to be grateful. It'll help to
simplify things for the rest of you.'
"That
doesn't follow,' Michael argued. 'We can't be the only
ones. There must be others like us — beyond our range, somewhere. If we wait a
little —'
'Why should I
wait? It might be for years, or for always. I've got Alan — and you want me to
waste years waiting for someone who may never come — or whom I may hate if he
does. You want me to give up Alan, and risk being cheated of everything. Well,
I don't intend to. I didn't ask to be the way we are; but I've as much right to
get what I can out of life as anyone else. It isn't going to be easy: but do
you think I'd find it easier going on like this year after year? It can't be
easy for any of us, but it isn't going to make it any better if two of us have
to give up all hope of love and affection. Three of us can marry three of you.
What is going to happen to the other two then — the two who'll be on the
outside? They won't be in any group. Do you mean they ought to be cheated out
of everything?
'It's you who
haven't thought, Michael — or any of you. I know
what I intend to do: the rest of you don't know what you intend to do because
you're none of you in love — except David and Rosalind — and so you've none of
you faced it.'
That was
partially true as far as it went — but, if we had not faced all the problems
before they arose, we were well aware of those that were constantly with us,
and of those the main one was the need of dissembling, of leading all the time
a suffocating half-life with our families. One of the things we looked forward
to most was relief some day from that burden, and though we'd few positive
ideas how it could be achieved, we could all realize that marriage to a norm
would become intolerable in a very short while. Our position in our present
homes was bad enough; to have to go on living intimately with some one who had
no thought-shapes would be impossible. For one thing, any of us would still
have more in common with the rest and be closer to them than to the norm that he
or she had married. It could not be anything but a sham of a marriage when the
two were separated by something wider than a different language, which had
always been hidden by the one from the other. It would be misery, perpetual
lack of confidence, and insecurity; there'd be the prospect of a lifetime's
guarding against slips — and we knew well enough already that occasional slips
were inevitable.
Other people
seem so dim, so half-perceived, compared with those whom one knows through
their thought-shapes; and I don't suppose 'normals',
who can never share their thoughts, can understand how we are so much more a
part of one another. What comprehension can they have of 'thinking-together' so
that two minds are able to do what one could not? And we don't have to flounder
among the shortcomings of words; it is difficult for us to falsify or pretend a
thought even if we want to; on the other hand, it is almost impossible for us
to misunderstand one another. What, then, could there be for any of us tied
closely to a half-dumb 'normal' who can never at best make more than a clever
guess at anyone else's feelings or thoughts? Nothing but prolonged unhappiness
and frustration — with, sooner or later, a fatal slip; or else an accumulation
of small slips gradually fostering suspicion. . . .
Anne had seen
this just as well as the rest of us, but now she pretended to ignore it. She
began to defy her difference by refusing to respond to us, though whether she
shut her mind off altogether, or continued to listen without taking part we
could not tell. We suspected the former as being more in character, but, being
unsure, we were not even able to discuss among ourselves what course, if any,
we ought to take. Possibly there was no active course. I myself could think of
none. Rosalind; too, was at a loss.
Rosalind had
grown into a tall, slim young woman, now. She was handsome, with a face you
could not help watching; she was attractive, too, in
the way she moved and carried herself. Several of the younger men had felt the
attraction, and gravitated towards her. She was civil to them, but no more. She
was competent, decisive, self-reliant; perhaps she
intimidated them, for before long they drifted their attentions elsewhere. She
would not be entangled with any of them. Very likely it was for that reason
that she was more shocked than any of us by what Anne proposed to do.
We used to
meet, discreetly and not dangerously often. No one but the others, I think,
ever suspected anything between us. We had to make love in a snatched, unhappy
way when we did meet, wondering miserably whether there would ever be a time
when we should not have to hide ourselves. And somehow the business of Anne
made us more wretched still. Marriage to a norm, even the kindest and best of
them, was unthinkable for both of us.
The only other
person I could turn to for advice was Uncle Axel. He knew, as did everyone
else, about the forthcoming marriage, but it was news to him that Anne was one
of us, and he received it lugubriously. After he had turned it over in his
mind, he shook his head.
'No. It won't
do,
I nodded. 'She
wouldn't listen to us,' I told him. 'Now she's gone further. She won't respond
at all. She says that's over. She never wanted to be different from normals, now she wants to be as like them as she can. It
was the first real row we've ever had. She ended up by telling us she hated all
of us, and the very idea of us — at least, that's what she tried to tell us,
but it's not actually that. It's really that she wants Alan so badly that she's
determined not to let anything stop her from having him. I — I never knew
before that anybody could want anybody else quite like that. She's so fierce
and blind about it that she simply doesn't care what may happen later. I don't
see what we can do.'
'You don't
think that perhaps she can make herself live like a norm — cut out the
other altogether? It'd be too difficult?' Uncle Axel asked.
'We've thought
about that, of course,' I told him. 'She can refuse to respond. She's doing
that now, like somebody refusing to talk — but to go on with it.... It'd be
like taking a vow of silence for the rest of her life. I mean, she can't just
make herself forget, and become a norm. We can't believe that's
possible. Michael told her it'd be like pretending to have only one arm because
the person one wants to marry has only one arm. It wouldn't be any good — and
you couldn't keep it up, either.'
Uncle Axel
pondered for a bit.
'You're
convinced she's crazy about this Alan — quite beyond reason, I mean?' he asked.
'She's not like
herself at all. She doesn't think properly any more,' I told him.' Before she
stopped responding her thought-shapes were all queer with it.'
Uncle Axel
shook his head disapprovingly again. 'Women like to think they're in love when
they want to marry; they feel it's a justification which helps their
self-respect,' he observed. 'No harm in that; most of them are going to need
all the illusions they can keep up, anyway. But a woman who is in love
is a different proposition. She lives in a world where all the old perspectives
have altered. She is blinkered, single-purposed, undependable
in other matters. She will sacrifice anything, including herself, to one
loyalty. For her, that is quite logical; for everyone else it looks not quite
sane; socially it is dangerous. And when there is also a feeling of guilt to be
overcome, and, maybe, expiated, it is quite certainly dangerous for someone
—'He broke off and reflected in silence awhile. Then he added, 'It is too
dangerous,
I thought so,
too.
'But what can
we do?' I repeated, miserably.
He turned
steady, serious eyes on me.
'How much are
you justified in doing? One of you is set on a course which is going to
endanger the lives of all eight. Not altogether knowingly, perhaps, but none
the less seriously, for all that. Even if she does intend to be loyal to you,
she is deliberately risking you all for her own ends — just a few words in her
sleep would be enough. Does she have a moral right to create a constant threat
hanging over seven heads just because she wants to live with this man?'
I hesitated. 'Well,
if you put it like that —'I began.
'I do
put it like that. Has she that right?'
'We've done our
best to dissuade her,' I evaded, inadequately.
'And
failed. So now what?
Are you just going to sit down under it, not knowing what day she may crack,
and give you all away?'
'I don't know,'
was all I could tell him.
'Listen,' said
Uncle Axel. 'I knew a man once who was one of a party who were adrift in a boat
after their ship had burnt. They'd not much food and very little water. One of
them drank sea water and went mad. He tried to wreck the boat so that they'd
all drown together. He was a menace to all of them. In the end they had to
throw him overboard — with the result that the other three had just enough food
and water to last until they reached land. If they hadn't done it he'd have
died, anyway — and the rest of them, too, most likely.'
I shook my
head. 'No,' I said decisively, 'we couldn't do that.'
He went on
looking at me steadily.
'This isn't a
nice cosy world for anyone — especially not for
anyone that's different,' he said. 'Maybe you're not the kind to survive it,
after all.'
'It isn't just
that,' I told him. 'If it were Alan you were talking about, if it would help to
throw him overboard, we'd do it. But it's Anne you're
meaning, and we can't do it — not because she's a girl, it'd be the same with
any of us; we just couldn't do it. We're all too close together. I'm much
closer to her and the others than' I am to my own sisters. It's difficult to explain
—' I broke off, trying to think of a way of showing him what we meant to one
another. There didn't seem to be any clear way of putting it into words. I
could only tell him, not very effectively.
'It wouldn't be
just murder, Uncle Axel. It'd be something worse, as well; like
violating part of ourselves for ever. ... We couldn't do it....'
'The
alternative is the sword over your heads,' he said.
'I know,' I
agreed unhappily. 'But that isn't the way. A sword inside us would be worse.'
I could not
even discuss that solution with the others for fear that Anne might catch our
thoughts; but I knew with certainty what their verdict on it would be. I knew
that Uncle Axel had proposed the only practical solution; and I knew, too, its
impossibility meant recognizing that nothing could be done.
Anne now
transmitted nothing whatever, we caught no trace of her, but whether she had
the strength of will not to receive we were still uncertain. From Rachel, her
sister, we learnt that she would listen only to words, and was doing her best
to pretend to herself that she was a norm in every way, but that could not give
us enough confidence for us to exchange our thoughts with freedom.
And in the
following weeks Anne kept it up, so that one could almost believe that she had
succeeded in renouncing her difference and becoming a norm. Her wedding-day
arrived with nothing amiss, and she and Alan moved into the house which her
father gave them on the edge of his own land. Here and there one encountered
hints that she might have been unwise to marry beneath her, but otherwise there
was little comment.
During the next
few months we heard scarcely anything of her. She discouraged visits from her
sister as though she were anxious to cut even that last link with us. We could
only hope that she was being more successful and happier than we had feared.
One of the
consequences, as far as Rosalind and I were concerned, was a more searching
consideration of our own troubles. Quite when it was that we had known we were
going to marry one another, neither of us has been able to remember. It was one
of those things that seem ordained, in such proper accord with the law of
nature and our own desires, that we felt we had always
known it. The prospect coloured our thoughts even
before we acknowledged it to ourselves. To me, it had never been thinkable that
anything else should happen, for when two people have grown up thinking
together as closely as we had, and when they are drawn even closer together by
the knowledge of hostility all round them they can feel the need of one another
even before they know they are in love.
But when they
do know they are in love they suddenly know, too, that there are ways in which
they differ not at all from norms. . . . Also, they face the same obstacles
that norms would. . . .
The feud
between our families which had first come into the open over the matter of the
great-horses had now been established for years. My father and half-uncle Angus, Rosalind's father, had settled down to a
regular guerilla. In their efforts to score points, each kept a hawk-like watch
upon the other's land for the least Deviation or Offence, and both had been
known for some time now to reward the informer who would bring news of
irregularities in the other's territory.
My father, in
his determination to maintain a higher level of rectitude than Angus, had made
considerable personal sacrifices. He had, for instance, in spite of his great
liking for tomatoes, given up growing the unstable solonaceae
family at all; we bought our tomatoes now, and our potatoes. Certain other
species, too, were blacklisted as unreliable at some inconvenience and expense,
and though it was a state of affairs which promoted high normality rates on
both farms, it did nothing whatever to make for good neighbourliness.
It was
perfectly clear that neither side would be anything but dead-set against a
union of the families.
For both of us
the situation was bound to grow more difficult. Already Rosalind's mother had
attempted some matchmaking; and I had seen my mother measuring one or two girls
with a calculating, though so far unsatisfied, eye.
We were sure
that, at present, neither side had an idea of anything between us. There was no
more than acrid communication between the Strorms and the Mortons,
and the only place where they could be found beneath the same roof was church.
Rosalind and I met infrequently and very discreetly.
For the present
there was an impasse, and it looked like an impasse of indefinite duration
unless we should do something to force the situation. There was a possible way,
and could we have been sure that Angus' wrath would have taken the form of
forcing a shotgun wedding we would have taken it; but we were by no means
certain about that. Such was his opposition to all Strorms that there was, we considered,
a strong likelihood that he might be prompted to use the gun another way.
Moreover, we were sure that even if honour were
forcibly preserved we should both of us be disowned by our families thereafter.
We discussed
and explored lengthily for some pacific way out of the dilemma, but even when
half a year had passed since Anne's marriage we were no nearer reaching it.
As for the rest
of our group, we found that in that six months the first alarm had lost its
edge. That is not to say that we were easy in our minds: we had never been that
since we discovered ourselves, but we had had to get used to living with a
degree of threat, and once the crisis over Anne had passed we got used to
living with a slightly-increased degree of threat.
Then, one
Sunday at dusk, Alan was found dead in the field-path that led to his home,
with an arrow through his neck.
We had the news
first from Rachel, and we listened anxiously as she tried to make contact with
her sister. She used all the concentration she could manage, but it was
useless. Anne's mind remained as firmly closed against us as it had been for
the last eight months. Even in distress she transmitted nothing.
'I'm going over
to see her,' Rachel told us. 'She must have someone by her.'
We waited
expectantly for an hour or more. Then Rachel came through again, very
perturbed.
'She won't see
me. She won't let me into the house. She's let a neighbour in, but not me. She
screamed at me to go away.'
'She must think
one of us did it,' came Michael's response. 'Did any
of you do it — or know anything about it?'
Our denials
came in emphatically, one after another.
'We've got to
stop her thinking that,' Michael decided.' She mustn't go on believing it. Try
to get through to her.'
We all tried.
There was no response whatever.
'No good,'
Michael admitted. 'You must get a note to her somehow, Rachel,' he added. 'Word
it carefully so that she'll understand we had nothing to do with it, but so
that it won't mean anything to anyone else.'
'Very
well. I'll try,'
Rachel agreed doubtfully. Another hour passed, before we heard from her once
more. 'It's no good. I gave the note to the woman who's there, and waited. When
the woman came back she said Anne just tore it up without opening it. My
mother's in there now, trying to persuade her to come home.' Michael was slow
in replying to that. Then he advised:
'We'd best be
prepared. All of you make ready to run for it if necessary — but don't rouse
any suspicions. Rachel, keep on trying to find out what you can, and let us
know at once if anything happens.'
I did not know
what to do for the best.
The house had
retired for the night before Rachel came through again.
'We're going
home, mother and me,' she told us. 'Anne's turned everyone out, and she's alone
there now. Mother wanted to stay, but Anne is beside herself and hysterical.
She made them go. They were afraid she'd be worse if they insisted on
staying. She's told Mother she knows who's responsible for Alan's death, but
she wouldn't name anybody.'
'You do think
she means us? After all, it is possible that Alan may have had some
bitter quarrel of his own that we know nothing about,' Michael suggested.
Rachel was more
than dubious. 'If it were only that, she'd surely have let me in. She wouldn't
have screamed at me to go away,' she pointed out. 'I'll go over early in the
morning, and see if she's changed her mind.'
With that we
had to be content for the moment. We could relax a little for a few hours at
least.
Rachel told us
later what happened the following morning.
She had got up
an hour after dawn and made her way across the fields to Anne's house. When she
reached it she had hesitated a little, reluctant to face the possibility of the
same sort of screaming repulse that she had suffered the previous day. However,
it was useless simply to stand there looking at the house; she plucked up
courage and raised the knocker. The sound of it echoed inside and she waited.
There was no result.
She tried the
knocker again, more decisively. Still no one answered.
Rachel became
alarmed. She hammered the knocker vigorously and stood listening. Then slowly
and apprehensively she lowered her hand from the knocker, and went over to the
house of the neighbour who had been with Anne the previous day.
With one of the
logs from the woodpile they pushed in a window, and then climbed inside. They
found Anne upstairs in her bedroom, hanging from a beam.
They took her
down, between them, and laid her on the bed. They were too late by some hours
to help her. The neighbour covered her with a sheet.
To Rachel it
was all unreal. She was dazed. The neighbour took her by the arm to lead her
out. As they were leaving she noticed a folded sheet of paper lying on the
table. She picked it up.
'This'll be for
you, or maybe your parents,' she said, putting it into Rachel's hand.
Rachel looked
at it dully, reading the inscription on the outside.
'But it's not
—' she began automatically.
Then she
checked herself, and pretended to look at it more closely, as it occurred to
her that the woman could not read.
'Oh, I see —
yes, I'll give it to them,' she said, and slipped into the front of her dress the
message that was addressed neither to herself, nor to her parents, but to the
inspector.
The neighbour's
husband drove her home. She broke the news to her parents. Then, alone in her
room, the one that Anne had shared with her before she had married, she read
the letter.
It denounced
all of us, including Rachel herself, and even
Rachel read it
through twice, and then carefully burnt it.
The tension
eased for the rest of us after a day or two. Anne's suicide was a tragedy, but
no one saw any mystery about it. A young wife, pregnant with her first child,
thrown off her mental balance by the shock of losing her husband in such
circumstances; it was a lamentable result, but understandable.
It was Alan's
death that remained unattributable to anyone, and as
much of a mystery to us as to the rest. Inquiries had revealed several persons
who had a grudge against him, but none with a strong enough motive for murder,
nor any likely suspect who could not convincingly account for himself at the
time when Alan must have been killed.
Old William Tay acknowledged the arrow to be one of his making, but
then, most of the arrows in the district were of his making. It was not a
competition shaft, or identifiable in any way; just a plain everyday hunting
arrow such as might be found by the dozen in any house. People gossiped, of
course, and speculated. From somewhere came a rumour that Anne was less devoted
than had been supposed, that for the last few weeks she had seemed to be afraid
of him. To the great distress of her parents it grew into a rumour that she had
let fly the arrow herself, and then committed suicide out of either remorse or
the fear of being found out. But that, too, died away when, again, no
sufficiently strong motive could be discovered. In a few weeks speculation
found other topics. The mystery was written off as unsolvable — it might even
have been an accident which the culprit dared not acknowledge. . . .
We had kept our
ears wide open for any hint of guesswork or supposition that might lead
attention towards us, but there was none at all, and as the interest declined
we were able to relax.
But although we
felt less anxiety than we had at any time for nearly a year, an underlying
effect remained, a sense of warning, with a sharpened awareness that we were
set apart, with the safety of all of us lying in the hands of each.
We were grieved
for Anne, but the grief was made less sharp by the feeling that we had really
lost her some time before, and it was only Michael who did not seem to share in
the lightening of anxiety. He said:
'One of us has
been found not strong enough...'
The spring inspections that year were
propitious. Only two fields in the whole district were on the first cleansing
schedule, and neither of them belonged to my father, or to half-uncle Angus.
The two previous years had been so bad that people who had hesitated during the
first to dispose of stock with a tendency to produce deviational offspring had
killed them off in the second, with the result that the normality-rate was high
on that side, too. Moreover, the encouraging trend was maintained. It put new
heart into people, they became more neighbourly and
cheerful. By the end of May there were quite a lot of bets laid that the
deviation figures were going to touch a record low. Even Old Jacob had to admit
that divine displeasure was in abeyance for the time being. 'Merciful, the Lord
is,' he said, with a touch of disapproval. 'Giving 'em one last chance. Let's hope they mend their ways,
or it'll be bad for all of us next year. Still time for
plenty to go wrong this year, for the matter of that.'
There was,
however, no sign of a falling-off. The later vegetables showed nearly as high a
degree of orthodoxy as the field-crops. The weather, too, looked set to give a
good harvest, and the inspector spent so much of his time sitting quietly in
his office that he became almost popular.
For us, as for
everyone else, it looked like being a serene, if industrious, summer, and
possibly it would have been so, but for
It was one day
early in June that, inspired apparently by a feeling
for adventure, she did two things she knew to be forbidden. First, although she
was alone, she rode her pony off our own land; and, secondly, she was not
content to keep to the open country, but went exploring in the woods.
The woods about
Waknuk are, as I have said, considered fairly safe, but it does not do to count
on that. Wild cats will seldom attack unless desperate; they prefer to run
away. Nevertheless, it is unwise to go into the woods without a weapon of some
kind, for it is possible for larger creatures to work their way down the necks
of forest which thrust out of the Fringes, almost clear across Wild Country in
some places, and then slink from one tract of woodland to another.
I tried to get
through to the others to tell them I'd attend to it, but I couldn't make
contact even with Rosalind. A blotting like that is hard to describe: something
like being unable to make oneself heard against a loud noise, but also
something like trying to see through a fog. To make it worse, it gave no
picture or hint of the cause: it was — this attempt to explain one sense in
terms of others is bound to be misleading, but one might say it was something
like a wordless yell of protest. Just a reflex emotion, no thought, or control:
I doubted even if she knew she was doing it at all. It was instinctive.... All
I could tell was that it was a distress signal, and coming from some distance
away....
I ran from the
forge where I was working, and got the gun — the one that always hung just
inside the house door, ready charged and primed for an emergency. In a couple
of minutes I had one of the horses saddled-up, and was away on it. One thing as
definite about the call as its quality was its direction. Once I was out on the
green lane I thumped my heels and was off at a gallop towards the West Woods.
If Petra had
only let up on that overpowering distress-pattern of hers for just a few
minutes — long enough for the rest of us to get in touch with one another — the
consequences would have been quite different — indeed, there might have been no
consequences at all. But she did not. She kept it up, like a screen, and there
was nothing one could do but make for the source of it as quickly as possible.
Some of the
going wasn't good. I took a tumble at one point, and lost more time catching
the horse again. Once in the woods the ground was harder, for the track was
kept clear and fairly well used to save a considerable circuit. I held on along
it until I realized I had overshot. The undergrowth was too thick to allow of a
direct line, so I had to turn back and hunt for another track in the right
direction. There was no trouble about the direction itself; not for a moment
did
The animal was
a reddish-brown, dappled with both yellow and darker brown spots. Its huge
pad-like feet were covered with mops of fur, matted with blood now on the forepaws,
and showing long, curved claws. Fur hung from the tail, too, in a way that made
it look like a huge plume. The face was round, with eyes like yellow glass. The
ears were wide set and drooping, the nose almost retroussé.
Two large incisors projected downwards over the lower jaw, and it was using
these, as well as the claws, to tear at the pony.
I started to unsling the gun from my back. The movement caught its
attention. It turned its head and crouched motionless, glaring at me, with the
blood glistening on the lower half of its face. Its tail rose, and waved gently
from side to side. I cocked the gun and was in the act of raising it when an
arrow took the creature in the throat. It leapt, writhing into the air and
landed on all fours, facing me still, with its yellow eyes glaring. My horse
took fright and reared, and my gun exploded into the air, but before the
creature could spring two more arrows took it, one in the hindquarters, the other in the head. It stood stock-still for a moment,
and then rolled over.
Rosalind rode
into the glade from my right, her bow still in her hand. Michael appeared from
the other side, a fresh arrow already on his string, and his eyes fixed on the
creature, making sure about it. Even though we were so close to one another, we
were close to
'Where is she?'
Rosalind asked in words.
We looked round
and then spotted the small figure twelve feet up a young tree. She was sitting
in a fork and clinging round the trunk with both arms. Rosalind rode under the
tree and told her it was safe to come down.
'We must stop
this,' I said to Rosalind. 'She'll be bringing all the others here.'
Michael, assured that the creature was really
dead, joined us. He looked at
'She's no idea
she's doing it. It's not intelligent; she's sort of howling with fright inside.
It'd be better for her to howl outwardly. Let's start by getting her where she
can't see her pony.'
We moved off a
little, round a screen of bushes. Michael spoke to her quietly, trying to
encourage her. She did not seem to understand, and there was no weakening of
her distress-pattern.
'Perhaps if we
were all to try the same thought-pattern on her simultaneously,' I suggested. 'Soothing-sympathizing-relaxing. Ready?'
We tried, for a
full fifteen seconds. There was just a momentary check in
'No good,' said
Rosalind, and let up.
The three of us
regarded her helplessly. The pattern was a little changed; the incisiveness of
alarm had receded, but the bewilderment and distress were still overwhelming.
She began to cry. Rosalind put an arm round her and held her close to her.
'Let her have
it out. It'll relax the tension,' said Michael.
While we were
waiting for her to calm down, the thing that I had been afraid of happened.
Rachel came riding out of the trees; a moment later a
boy rode in from the other side. I'd never seen him until now, but I knew he
must be Mark.
We had never
met as a group before. It was one of the things that we had known would be
unsafe. It was almost certain that the other two girls would be somewhere on
the way, too, to complete a gathering that we had decided must never happen.
Hurriedly, we
explained in words what had occurred. We urged them to get away and disperse as
soon as possible so that they would not be seen together, Michael, too.
Rosalind and I would stay with
The three of
them appreciated the situation without argument. A moment later they left us,
riding off in different directions.
We went on
trying to comfort and soothe
Some ten
minutes later the two girls, Sally and Katherine, came pushing their way
through the bushes. They, too, were on horseback, and with their bows strung.
We had hoped that one of the others might have met them and turned them back,
but clearly they had approached by a different route.
They came
closer, staring incredulously at
He reined in,
and sat looking at us.
'What's going
on here?' he demanded, with suspicion in his tone.
He was a
stranger to me, and I did not care for the look of him. I asked what one
usually asked of strangers. Impatiently he pulled out his identity tag, with
the current year's punch-mark on it. It was established that we were neither of
us outlaws.
'What's all
this?' he repeated.
The temptation
was to tell him to mind his own damned business, but I thought it more tactful
in the circumstances to be placatory. I explained that my sister's pony had
been attacked, and that we had answered her calls for help. He wasn't willing
to take that at its face value. He looked at me steadily, and then turned to
regard Sally and Katherine.
'Maybe. But what brought you two here in such a
hurry?' he asked them.
'Naturally we
came when we heard the child calling,' Sally told him.
'I was right
behind you, and I heard no calling,' he said.
Sally and
Katherine looked at one another. Sally shrugged.
'We did,' she
told him shortly.
It seemed about
time I took a hand.
'I'd have
thought everyone for miles around would have heard it,' I said. 'The pony was
screaming, too, poor little brute.'
I led him round
the clump of bushes and showed him the savaged pony and the dead creature. He
looked surprised, as if he'd not expected that evidence, but he wasn't
altogether appeased. He demanded to see Rosalind's and
'What's this
all about?' I asked in my turn.
'You didn't
know that the Fringes have got spies out?' he said.
'I didn't,' I
told him. 'Anyway, do we look like Fringes people?'
He ignored the
question. 'Well, they have. There's an instruction to watch for them. There's
trouble working up, and the clearer you keep of the woods, the less likely you
are to meet it before we all do.'
He still was
not satisfied. He turned to look at the pony again, then at Sally.
'I'd say it's
near half an hour since that pony did any screaming. How did you two manage to
come straight to this spot?'
Sally's eyes
widened a little.
'Well, this was
the direction it came from, and then when we got nearer we heard the little
girl screaming,' she said simply.
'And very good
it was of you to follow it up,' I put in. 'You would
have saved her life by doing it if we hadn't happened to be a little nearer.
It's all over now, and luckily she wasn't hurt. But she's had a nasty fright
and I'd better get her home. Thank you both for wanting to help.'
They took that
up all right. They congratulated us on
'Who is he?'
Rosalind asked, uneasily.
I could tell
her that the name on his tag had been Jerome Skinner, but no more. He was a
stranger to me, and our names had not seemed to mean much to him. I would have
asked Sally but for the barrier that
Rosalind, still
with her right arm round
They put
'Thank goodness
for that. She's gone to sleep at last,' came from one of the others.
'Who was that
man Skinner?' Rosalind and I inquired anxiously and simultaneously.
Sally answered:
'He's fairly new here. My father knows him. He has a farm bordering on the
woods near where you were. It was just bad luck his seeing us, and of course he
wondered why we were making for the trees at a gallop.'
'He seemed very
suspicious. Why?' asked Rosalind. 'Does he know anything about thought-shapes?
I didn't think any of them did.'
'He can't make
them, or receive them himself — I tried him hard,' Sally told her.
Michael's
distinctive pattern came in, inquiring what it was all about. We explained. He
commented:
'Some of them
do have an idea that something of the kind may be possible — but only very
roughly of the kind — a sort of emotional transfer of mental impressions. They
call it telepathy — at least, those who believe in it do. Most of them are
pretty doubtful whether it exists at all.'
'Do they think
it's deviational, those who do believe it exists, I
mean?' I asked.
'It's difficult
to say. I don't know that the question has ever been straightly put. But
academically, there's the point that since God is able to read men's minds, the
true image ought to be able to do so, too. It might be argued that it is a
power that men have temporarily lost as a punishment, part of Tribulation — but
I'd not like to risk myself on that argument in front of a tribunal.'
'This man had
the air of smelling a rat,' Rosalind told him. 'Has anybody else been
inquisitive?'
They all gave her a 'No' to
that.
'Good,' she
replied. 'But we must be careful this doesn't happen again. David will have to
explain to
Their assents
came in, then presently the rest of them withdrew,
leaving Rosalind and me to discuss how I could best tackle
I woke early
the next morning, and the first thing I was aware of was
I tried to make
contact with her, and, though she did not understand, there was a perceptible
check and a trace of puzzlement for some seconds. I got out of bed, and went
along to her room. She was glad to have company; the distress-pattern faded a
lot as we chatted. Before I left I promised to take her fishing that afternoon.
It is not at
all easy to explain in words how one can make intelligible thought-shapes. All
of us had first found out for ourselves; a very crude fumbling to begin with,
but then more skilful when we had discovered one another and begun to learn by
practice. With
'Let's play a
game,' I suggested. 'You shut your eyes. Keep them shut tight, and pretend
you're looking down a deep, deep well. There's nothing but dark to see. Right?'
'Yes,' she
said, eyelids tightly clenched.
'Good. Now,
don't think of anything at all except how dark it is and how far, far away the
bottom is. Just think of that, but look at the dark. Understand that?'
'Yes,' she said
again.
'Now, watch,' I
told her.
I thought a
rabbit for her, and made it twitch its nose. She chuckled. Well, that was one
good thing: at least, it made sure that she could receive. I abolished
the rabbit, and thought a puppy, then some chickens, and then a horse and cart.
After a minute or two she opened her eyes, and looked bewildered.
"Where are
they?' she asked, looking round.
'They aren't
anywhere. They were just think-things,' I told her. 'That's the game. Now I'll
shut my eyes, too. We'll both look down the well and think of nothing but how
dark it is. Then it's your turn to think a picture at the bottom of the well,
so that I can see it.'
I played my
part conscientiously and opened my mind to its most sensitive. That was a
mistake. There was a flash and a glare and a general impression that I had been
struck by a thunderbolt. I staggered in a mental daze, with no idea what her
picture had been. The others came in, protesting bitterly. I explained what was
going on.
'Well, for
heaven's sake be careful, and don't let her do it
again. I damned near put an axe through my foot,' came aggrievedly from
Michael.
'I've
scalded my hand with the kettle,' from Katherine.
'Lull her.
Soothe her down somehow,' advised Rosalind.
'She isn't unsoothed. She's perfectly tranquil. That seems to be just
the way it is with her,' I told them.
'Maybe, but
it's a way it can't stay,' Michael answered. 'She must cut it down.'
'I know — I'm
doing my best. Perhaps you've got some ideas on how to tackle it?' I suggested.
'Well, next
time warn us before she tries,' Rosalind told me.
I pulled myself
together and turned my attention to
'You're too
rough,' I said. 'This time make a little think-picture; a really little
one ever so far away, in soft pretty colours. Do it slowly and gently, as if
you were making it out of cobwebs.'
'Here it
comes!' I warned the others, and waited, wishing it were the kind of thing one
could take cover from.
It was not much
worse than a minor explosion this time. It was dazzling, but I did manage to
catch the shape of it.
'A
fish!' I said. 'A fish with a droopy tail.'
'Undoubtedly a
fish,' came from Michael. 'You're doing fine. All you want to do now is to cut
her down to about one per cent of the power in that last one before she burns
our brains out.'
'Now you
show me,' demanded
The following
afternoon we had another session. It was a rather violent and exhausting
business, but there was progress. Petra was beginning to grasp the idea of
forming thought-shapes — in a childish way, as was only to be expected — but
frequently recognizable in spite of distortions. The main trouble still was to
keep the strength down: when she became excited one was almost stunned by the
impact. The rest complained that they could get no work done while we were at
it: it was like trying to ignore sudden hammer-bangs inside one's head. Towards
the end of the lesson I told
'Now I'm going
to tell Rosalind to give you a think-picture. Just shut your eyes, like before.'
'Where's
Rosalind?' she asked, looking round. 'She's not here, but that doesn't matter
with think-pictures. Now, look at the dark and think of nothing.'
'And you
others,' I added mentally for the benefit of the rest, 'just lay off, will you?
Keep it all clear for Rosalind, and don't interrupt. Go ahead, Rosalind, strong
and clear.' We sat silent and receptive.
Rosalind made a
pond with reeds round it. She put in several ducks, friendly, humorous-looking
ducks of various colours. They swam a kind of ballet, except for one chunky,
earnestly-trying duck who was always a little late and a little wrong.
In the fourth
lesson she learnt the trick of clearing one's mind without closing one's eyes,
which was quite a step. By the end of the week we were really getting on. Her
thought-shapes were still crude and unstable, but they would improve with
practice; her reception of simple forms was good, though as yet she could catch
little of our projections to one another.
'Too difficult
to see all at once and too quick,' she said. 'But I
can tell whether it's you, or Rosalind, or Michael, or Sally doing it, but
going so fast it gets muddled. The other ones are much more muddled,
though.'
'What
other ones — Katherine and Mark?'
I asked her.
'Oh,
no. I can tell them.
It's the other other
ones. The long-way-away ones,' she said, impatiently.
I decided to
take it calmly.
'I don't think
I know them. Who are they?'
'I don't know,'
she said, 'Can't you hear them? They're over there, but a long, long way.' She
pointed to the south-west.
I thought that
over for a few moments.
'Are they there
now?' I asked.
'Yes, but not
much,' she said.
I tried my best
to detect anything, and failed.
'Suppose you
try to copy for me what you're getting from them?' I suggested.
She tried.
There was something there, and with a quality in it which none of us had. It
was not comprehensible and it was very blurred — possibly, I thought, because
In spite of
'This,' Michael
said, 'is going to be very interesting indeed — provided she doesn't break us
all up before she gets control of it.'
At supper, some
ten days after the loss of
'You been
careless,
There are
plenty of ways of being careless, but only one he'd ask me about with the
manner he was using.
'I don't think
so,' I told him.
'One of the
others, maybe?' he suggested.
Again, I did
not think so.
'H'm,' he grunted. 'Then why, would you say, has Joe Darley been asking questions about you? Any
idea?'
I had no idea
why, and told him so. He shook his head.
'I don't like
it, boy.'
'Just
me — or the others, as well?'
I asked.
'You
— and Rosalind Morton.'
'Oh,' I said,
uneasily. 'Still, if it's only Joe Darley... Could it
be he's heard a rumour about us, and is out to do a bit of scandal-raising?'
'Might be,'
Uncle Axel agreed, but reservedly. 'On the other hand, Joe is a fellow that the
inspector has used before now when he wants a few inquiries made on the quiet.
I don't like it.'
I did not care
for it either. But he had not approached either of us directly, and I did not
see where else he was going to get any incriminating information. There was, I
pointed out, nothing he could pin on us that brought us within any category of
the Scheduled Deviations.
Uncle Axel
shook his head. 'Those lists are inclusive, not exclusive,' he said. 'You can't
schedule all the million things that may happen — only the more frequent
ones. There have to be test cases for new ones when they crop up. It's part of
the inspector's job to keep watch and call an inquiry if the information he
gets seems to warrant it.'
'We've thought
about what might happen,' I told him. 'If there should be any questions they'll
not be sure what they're looking for. All we'll have to do is act bewildered,
just as a norm would be. If Joe or anybody has anything it can't be more than
suspicion, no solid evidence.'
He did not seem
reassured.
'There's
Rachel,' he suggested. 'She was pretty much knocked by her sister's suicide. Do
you think she—?'
'No,' I said
confidently. 'Quite apart from the fact that she couldn't do it without
involving herself, we should have known if she were hiding anything.'
'Well, then,
there's young
I stared at
him.
'How did you
know about
He nodded in a
satisfied way. 'So she is. I reckoned so.'
'How did you
find out?' I repeated anxiously, wondering who else might have had a similar
idea. 'Did she tell you?'
'Oh, no, I kind
of came across it.' He paused, then he added:
'Indirectly it
came from Anne. I told you it was a bad thing to let her marry that fellow.
There's a type of woman who isn't content until she's made herself some man's
slave and doormat — put herself completely in his
power. That's the kind she was.'
'You're not —
you don't mean she told Alan about herself?' I protested.
'She did,' he
nodded. 'She did more than that. She told him about all of you.'
I stared at him
incredulously.
'You can't be
sure of that, Uncle Axel!'
'I am,
'But even if he
did, how did you know he knew?' I asked, with
rising anxiety.
He said,
reminiscently:
'A while ago
there used to be a dive down on the waterfront in Rigo. It was run by a fellow
called Grouth, and very profitably, too. He had a
staff of three girls and two men, and they did as he said — just as he said. If
he'd liked to tell what he knew one of the men would have been strung up for
mutiny on the high seas, and two of the girls for murder. I don't know what the
others had done, but he had the lot of them cold. It was as neat a set-up for
blackmail as you could find. If the men got any tips he had them. He saw to it
that the girls were nice to the sailors who used the place, and whatever they
got out of the sailors he had, too. I used to see the way he treated them, and the expression on his face when he watched them;
kind of gloating because he'd got them, and he knew it, and they knew it. He'd
only got to frown, and they danced.' Uncle Axel paused reflectively. 'You'd
never think you'd come across just that expression on a man's face again in
Waknuk church, of all places, would you? It made me feel a bit queer when I
did. But there it was. It was on his face while he studied first Rosalind, then
Rachel, then you, then young
'You could have
been mistaken — just an expression...' I said.
'Not that
expression. Oh, no, I knew that expression, it jerked me right back to the dive
in Rigo. Besides, if I wasn't right, how do I come to know about
'What did you
do?'
'I came home
and thought a bit about Grouth, and what a
comfortable life he'd been able to lead, and about one or two other things.
Then I put a new string on my bow.'
'So it was
you!' I exclaimed.
'It was the
only thing to do,
'There
certainly was a risk — and it nearly didn't come off,' I said, and told him
about the letter that Anne had left for the inspector.
He shook his
head. 'I hadn't reckoned she'd go as far as that, poor girl,' he said. 'All the
same, it had to be done — and quickly. Alan wasn't a fool. He'd see to it that
he was covered. Before he actually began on you he'd have had a written
deposition somewhere to be opened in the event of his death, and he'd see that
you knew about it, too. It'd have been a pretty nasty situation for all of
you.'
The more I
considered it, the more I realized how nasty it could have been.
'You took a big
risk for us yourself, Uncle Axel,' I told him.
He shrugged.
'Very little
risk for me against a great deal for you,' he said.
Presently we
came back to the matter in hand.
'But these
inquiries can't have anything to do with Alan. That was weeks ago,' I pointed
out.
'What's more,
it's not the kind of information Alan'd share with
anyone if he wanted to cash in on it,' agreed Uncle Axel. 'There's one thing,'
he went on, 'they can't know much, or they'd have called an inquiry already,
and they'll have to be pretty damn sure of themselves before they do call one.
The inspector isn't going to put himself in a weak spot with
your father if he can help it — nor with Angus Morton either, for the
matter of that. But that still doesn't get us any nearer to knowing what
started it.'
I was pressed
back again into thinking it must have something to do with the affair of
'Jerome
Skinner,' he repeated, not very hopefully. 'Very well, I'll see if I can find
out anything about him.'
We all
conferred that night, but inconclusively. Michael put it:
'Well, if you
and Rosalind are quite satisfied that there's been nothing to start suspicion
in your district, then I don't see that it can be traceable to anybody but that
man in the forest.' He used a thought-shape rather than bothering to spell out
'Jerome Skinner' in letter-forms. 'If he is the source, then he must
have put his suspicions before the inspector in this district who will have
handed it on as a routine report to the inspector in yours. That'll mean that
several people are wondering about it already, and there'll be questions going
on here about Sally and Katherine. The devil of it is that everybody's more
suspicious than usual because of these rumours of large-scale trouble from the
Fringes. I'll see if I can find out anything tomorrow, and let you know.'
'But what's the
best thing for us to do?' Rosalind put in.
'Nothing at the
moment,' Michael advised. 'If we are right about the source, then you are in
two groups; Sally and Katherine in one, you, David, and Petra in the other; and
the other three of us aren't involved at all. Don't do anything unusual, or you
may cause them to pounce, on suspicion. If it does come to an inquiry we ought
to be able to bluff it out by acting simple, as we decided. But
'That makes her
the key-point. They must not get hold of her. It's possible that there's
no suspicion attached to her — but she was there, so she's liable to be
suspected. If there's any sign of interest in her it'll be better to cut your
losses and get her away — if they do start on her they'll have it out of her
somehow.
'Very likely
it'll all blow over, but just in case it does get sticky, David will have to be
responsible. It'll be your job, David, to see that she isn't taken for
questioning — at any cost. If you have to kill someone to prevent it, then you
must. They'd not think twice about killing us if they had the excuse. Don't
forget, if they move at all, they'll be doing it to exterminate us — by the
slow method, if not by the fast.
'If the worst
comes to the worst, and you can't save
Their
agreements came in.
When I thought
of little
'Very well,'
Michael went on. 'Just to be on the safe side, then, it might be best if the
four of you and
He went on
explaining in more detail.
It is difficult
to see what other course we could have taken. An overt move by any of us would
at once have brought trouble on the rest. Our misfortune lay in our receiving
the information regarding the inquiries when we did, and not two or three days
earlier. . . .
The discussion, and Michael's advice, made
the threat of discovery seem both more real and more imminent than it had been
when I talked to Uncle Axel earlier in the evening. Somehow it brought it home
to me that one day we should find ourselves faced by the real thing — the alarm
which wasn't simply going to work up and blow over, leaving us much as before.
Michael, I knew, had been increasingly anxious during the last year or so, as
if he had a feeling that time was running out, and now I caught some of that
sensation, too. I even went as far as making some preparations before I went to
bed that night — at least, I put a bow and a couple of dozen arrows handy, and
found a sack into which I put several loaves and a cheese. And I decided that
next day I would make up a pack of spare clothes and boots and other things
that would be useful, and hide it in some dry, convenient place outside. Then
we should need some clothing for
I was still
listing the desirable equipment in my mind when I fell asleep. . . .
No more than
three hours or so can have passed before I was wakened by the click of my
latch. There was no moon, but there was starlight enough to show a small, white
night-gowned figure by the door.
'David,' she
said. 'Rosalind —'
But she did not
need to tell me. Rosalind had already broken in, urgently.
'David,' she
was telling me, 'we must get away at once — just as soon as you can. They've
taken Sally and Katherine —'
Michael crowded
in on her.
'Hurry up, both
of you, while there's time. It was a deliberate surprise. If they do know much
about us, they'll have tried to time it to send a party for you, too — before
you could I be warned. They were at Sally's and Katherine's almost
simultaneously just over ten minutes ago. Get moving, quick!'
'Meet you below
the mill. Hurry,' Rosalind added.
I told
'Get dressed as
fast as you can. Overalls. And be very quiet.'
Very likely she
had not understood the thought-shapes in detail, but she had caught their
urgency. She simply nodded, and slipped back into the dark passage.
I pulled on my
clothes, and rolled the bed blankets into a bundle. I groped about in the
shadows till I found the bow and arrows and the bag of food, and made for the
door.
'Don't put on
your shoes yet,' I whispered. 'Carry them, and come tiptoe, like a cat.'
Outside in the
yard I put down the bundle and the sack while we both got our shoes on.
'Horses,'
whispered
Horses it was. Several sets of hoofs and, faintly, the tinkle of bits.
There was no
time to find the saddle and bridle for
Quietly we
slipped out of the yard by the far end and started down the path to the
river-bank while the hoof-beats on the upper track drew close to the house.
'Are you away?'
I asked Rosalind, and let her know what was happening with us.
'I was away ten
minutes ago. I had everything ready,' she told me reprovingly. 'We've all been
trying our damnedest to reach you. It was lucky
'Gently,
darling. Much more
gently,' protested Rosalind. 'We'll tell you all about it soon.' She paused a
moment to get over the blinding effect.
'Sally—?
Katherine—?' she inquired.
They responded
together.
'We're being
taken to the Inspector's. We're all innocent and bewildered. Is that best?'
Michael and
Rosalind agreed that it was.
'We think,'
Sally went on, 'that we ought to shut our minds to
you. It will make it easier for us to act as normals
if we really don't know what is happening. So don't try to reach us, any of
you.'
'Very well —
but we shall be open for you,' Rosalind agreed. She diverted her thoughts to
me. 'Come along, David. There are lights up at the farm now.'
'It's all
right. We're coming,' I told her. 'It's going to take them some time in the
dark to find which way we went, anyhow.'
'They'll know
by the stable-warmth that you can't have got far yet,' she pointed out.
I looked back.
Up by the house I could see a light in a window, and a lantern swinging in
someone's hand. The sound of a man's voice calling came to us faintly. We had
reached the river-bank now, and it was safe to urge
We trotted
again, and a few moments later I noticed a movement under the trees of the
track. I turned the mare that way, and found Rosalind waiting for us — and not
only Rosalind, but her father's pair of great-horses. The massive creatures
towered above us, both saddled with large pannier baskets. Rosalind was
standing in one of the baskets, her bow, strung and ready to hand, laid across it.
I rode up close
beneath her while she leaned out to see what I had brought.
'Hand me the
blankets,' she directed, reaching down. 'What's in the sack?'
I told her.
'Do you mean to
say that's all you've brought?' she said disapprovingly.
'There was some
hurry,' I pointed out.
She arranged
the blankets to pad the saddle-board between the panniers. I hoisted
'We'd better
keep together,' Rosalind directed. 'I've left room for you in the other
pannier. You can shoot left-handed from there.' She flipped over a kind of
miniature rope-ladder so that it hung down the great-horse's left shoulder.
I slid off
We trotted
awhile, and then left the track for a stream. Where that was joined by another
we branched off up the lesser. We left that and picked our way across boggy ground
to another stream. We held on along the bed of that for perhaps half a mile or
more and then turned off on to another stretch of uneven, marshy ground which
soon became firmer until presently the hoofs were clinking among stones. We
slowed still more while the horses picked a winding way amid rocks. I realized
that Rosalind had put in some careful planning to hide our tracks. I must have
projected the thought unwittingly, for she came in, somewhat coldly:
'It's a pity you
didn't do a little more thinking and a little less sleeping.'
'I made a
start,' I protested. 'I was going to get everything fixed up today. It didn't
seem all that urgent.'
'And
so when I tried to consult you about it, there you were, swinishly asleep. My mother and I spent two solid hours
packing up these panniers and getting the saddles slung up ready for an
emergency, while all you did was go on sleeping.'
'Your
mother?' I asked,
startled. 'Does she know?'
'She's sort of
half-known, guessed something, for some time now. I don't know how much she's
guessed — she never spoke about it at all. I think she felt that as long as she
didn't have to admit it in words it might be all right. When I told her this
evening that I thought it very likely I'd have to go, she cried — but she
wasn't really surprised; she didn't try to argue, or dissuade me. I had a sort
of feeling that she'd already resolved at the back of her mind that she'd have
to help me one day, when the time came, and she did.'
I thought that
over. I could not imagine my own mother doing such a thing for
We went on by
the erratic route that Rosalind had picked to hide the trail. There were more
stony places and more streams until finally we urged the horses up a steep bank
and into the woods. Before long, we encountered a track-way running south-west.
We did not care to risk the spoor of the great-horses there, and so kept along
parallel with it until the sky began to show grey. Then we turned deeper into
the woods until we found a glade which offered grass for the horses. There we
hobbled them and let them graze.
After we had
made a meal of bread and cheese Rosalind said:
'Since
you slept so well earlier on, you'd better take first watch.'
She and
I sat with my
strung bow across my knees, and half a dozen arrows stuck handy in the ground
beside me. There was nothing to be heard but the birds, occasionally a small
animal moving, and the steady munchings of the
great-horses. The sun rose into the thinner branches and began to give more
warmth. Every now and then I got up and prowled silently round the fringe of
the glade, with an arrow ready nocked on the string.
I found nothing, but it helped to keep me awake. After a couple of hours of it
Michael came through:
'Where are you
now?' he inquired.
I explained as
well as I could.
'Where are you
heading?' he wanted to know.
'South-west,' I
told him. 'We thought we'd move by night and lie-up by day.'
He approved of
that, but:
'The devil of
it is that with this Fringes scare there'll be a lot of patrols about. I don't
know that Rosalind was wise to take those great-horses - if they're seen at
all, word will go round like wildfire, even a hoof-mark will be enough.'
'Ordinary horses
have the speed of them for short bursts,' I acknowledged, 'but they can't touch
them for stamina.'
'You may need
that. Frankly, David, you're going to need your wits, too. There's hell to pay
over this. They must have found out much more about you than we ever guessed,
though they aren't on to Mark or Rachel or me yet. But it's got them very
worried indeed. They're going to send posses after you. My idea is to volunteer
for one of them right away. I'm going to plant a report of your having been
seen making south-east. When that peters out, we'll have Mark start up another
to take them north-west.
'If anyone does
see you, stop him getting away with the news, at all costs. But don't shoot.
There's an order going out not to use guns except when necessary, and as
signals — all gunshots to be investigated.'
'That's all
right. We haven't a gun,' I told him.
'So
much the better. You
can't be tempted to use one — but they think you have.'
I had
deliberately decided against taking a gun, partly on account of the noise, but
mostly because they are slow to reload, heavy to carry, and useless if you run
out of powder. Arrows haven't the range, but they are silent, and you can get a
dozen and more of them off while a man is recharging a gun.
Mark came in:
'I heard that.
I'll have a north-west rumour ready for when it's needed.'
'Good. But
don't loose it till I tell you. Rosalind's asleep now, I suppose? Tell her to
get into touch with me when she wakes, will you?'
I said I would,
and everybody laid off projecting for a while. I went
on keeping my watch for another couple of hours, and then woke Rosalind for her
turn.
Perhaps I was
sleeping lightly, or it may have been just coincidence that I woke up to catch
an anguished thought from Rosalind.
'I've killed
him, Michael. He's quite dead . . .' Then she slid off
into a panicky, chaotic thought-shape.
Michael came
in, steady and reassuring.
'Don't be
scared, Rosalind. You had to do it. This is a war, between our kind and theirs.
We didn't start it — we've just as much right to exist as they have. You
mustn't be frightened, Rosalind, dear: you had to do it.'
'What's
happened?' I asked, sitting up.
They ignored
me, or were too much occupied to notice.
I looked round
the glade.
'Hide him
Rosalind. Try to find a hollow, and pile leaves over him.'
A
pause. Then Rosalind,
her panic conquered now, but with deep distress, agreeing.
I got up,
picked up my bow, and walked across the glade in the direction I knew she must
be. When I reached the edge of the trees it occurred to me that I was leaving
Presently Rosalind
appeared among the bushes. She was walking slowly, cleaning an arrow on a
handful of leaves as she came.
'What
happened?' I repeated.
But she seemed
to have lost control over her thought-shapes again,
they were muddled and distorted by her emotions. When she got nearer she used
words instead:
'It was a man.
He had found the trail of the horses. I saw him following them. Michael said .
. . Oh, I didn't want to do it, David, but what else could I do . . . ?'
Her eyes were
full of tears. I put my arms round her, and let her cry on my shoulder. There
was little I could do to comfort her. Nothing, but assure her, as Michael had,
that what she had done had been absolutely necessary.
After a little
time we walked slowly back. She sat down beside the still-sleeping
'What about his
horse, Rosalind? Did that get away?'
She shook her
head.
'I don't know.
I suppose he must have had one, but he was following our tracks on foot when I
saw him.'
I thought it
better to retrace our course and find out whether he had left a horse tethered
anywhere along it. I went back half a mile, but found no horse, nor was there
any trace of recent hoof-marks other than those of the great-horses. When I got
back,
The day wore
on. Nothing more came to us from Michael or the rest. In spite of what had
happened it seemed better to stay where we were than to move by daylight with
the risk of being seen. So we waited.
Then, in the
afternoon, something did come, suddenly.
It was not a
thought-shape; it had no real form; it was sheer distress, like a cry of agony.
Then there was
a jumble of pain and shame, overridden with hopeless desolation, and, among it,
characteristic glimpses of forms that we knew without doubt were Katherine's.
Rosalind put her hand on mine and held it tightly. We endured, while the
sharpness dimmed, and the pressure ebbed away.
Presently came Sally, brokenly, in waves of love and sympathy to
Katherine, then, in anguish, to the rest of us.
'They've broken
Katherine. They've broken her. . . Oh, Katherine, dear . . . you mustn't blame
her, any of you. Please, please don't blame her. They're torturing her. It
might have been any of us. She's all clouded now. She can't hear us . . . Oh,
Katherine, darling . . .' Her thoughts dissolved into
shapeless distress.
Then there was
Michael, unsteadily at first, but hardening into as rigid a form as I had ever
received:
'It is
war. Some day I'll kill them for what they've done to Katherine.'
After that
there was nothing for an hour or more. We did our rather unconvincing best to
soothe and reassure
Then there was
Sally again; dully, miserably, forcing herself to it:
'Katherine has
admitted it; confessed. I have confirmed it. They would have forced me to it,
too, in the end. I —' she hesitated, wavering. 'I couldn't face it. Not the hot
irons; not for nothing, when she had told them. I couldn't. . . Forgive me, all of you . . . forgive us both . . .'She broke off
again.
Michael came in
unsteadily, anxiously, too.
'Sally, dear,
of course we're not blaming you — either of you. We understand. But we must
know what you've told them. How much do they know?'
'About
thought-shapes — and David and Rosalind. They were nearly sure about them, but they wanted it
confirmed.'
'
'Yes... Oh, oh,
oh...!'There was an unshaped surge of remorse. 'We had to — poor little
'Anyone
else?'
'No. We've told
them that there isn't anyone else. I think they believe it. They are still
asking questions. Trying to understand more about it.
They want to know how we make thought-shapes, and what the range is. I'm
telling them lies. Not more than five miles, I'm saying, and pretending it's
not at all easy to understand thought-shapes even that far away. . . .
Katherine's barely conscious. She can't send to you. But they keep on asking us
both questions, on and on.... If you could see what they've
done to her. . . . Oh, Katherine, darling.... Her feet, Michael — oh,
her poor, poor feet. . . .'
Sally's
patterns clouded in anguish, and then faded away.
Nobody else
came in. I think we were all too deeply hurt and shocked. Words have to be
chosen, and then interpreted; but thought-shapes you feel, inside you. . . .
The sun was low
and we were beginning to pack up when Michael made contact again.
'Listen to me,'
he told us. 'They're taking this very seriously indeed. They're badly alarmed
over us. Usually if a Deviation gets clear of a district they let him go.
Nobody can settle anywhere without proofs of identity, or a very thorough
examination by the local inspector, so he's pretty well bound to end up in the
Fringes, anyway. But what's got them so agitated about us is that nothing
shows. We've been living among them for nearly twenty years and they didn't
suspect it. We could pass for normal anywhere. So a proclamation has been
posted describing the three of you and officially classifying you as deviants.
That means that you are non-human and therefore not entitled to any of the
rights or protections of human society. Anyone who assists you in any way is
committing a criminal act; and anyone concealing knowledge of your whereabouts
is also liable to punishment.
'In effect, it
makes you outlaws. Anyone may shoot you on sight without penalty. There is a
small reward if your deaths are reported and confirmed; but there is a very
much larger reward for you if you are taken alive.'
There was a
pause while we took that in.
'I don't
understand,' said Rosalind. 'If we were to promise to go away
and stay away–?'
'They're afraid
of us. They want to capture you and learn more about us — that's why there's
the large reward. It isn't just a question of the true image — though that's
the way they're making it appear. What they've seen is that we could be a real
danger to them. Imagine if there were a lot more of us than there are, able to
think together and plan and co-ordinate without all their machinery of words
and messages: we could outwit them all the time. They find that a very
unpleasant thought; so we are to be stamped out before there can be any more of
us. They see it as a matter of survival — and they may be right, you know.'
'Are they going
to kill Sally and Katherine?'
That was an
incautious question which slipped from Rosalind. We waited for a response from
either of the two girls. There was none. We could not tell what that meant;
they might simply have closed their minds again, or be sleeping from exhaustion, or perhaps dead already. . . . Michael thought
not.
'There's little
reason for that when they have them safely in their hands: it would very likely
raise a lot of ill-feeling. To declare a new-born baby as non-human on physical
defects is one thing: but this is a lot more delicate. It isn't going to be
easy for people who have known them for years to accept the non-human verdict
at all. If they were to be killed, it would make a lot of people feel uneasy
and uncertain about the authorities — much the same way as a retrospective law does.'
'But we
can be killed quite safely?' Rosalind commented, with some bitterness.
'You aren't
already captives, and you aren't among people who know you. To strangers you
are just non-humans on the run.'
There was not
much one could say to that. Michael asked:
'Which way are
you travelling tonight?'
'Still
south-west,' I told him. 'We had thought of trying to find some place to stop
in Wild Country, but now that any hunter is licensed to shoot us, we shall have
to go on into the Fringes, I think.'
'That'd be
best. If you can find a place to hide-up there for a bit we'll see if we can't
fake your deaths. I'll try to think of some way. Tomorrow I shall be with a
search-party that's going south-east. I'll let you know what it's doing.
Meanwhile, if you run into anyone, make sure that you shoot first.'
On that we
broke off. Rosalind finished packing up, and we arranged the gear to make the
panniers more comfortable than they had been the previous night. Then we
climbed up, I on the left again,
She did not, it
emerged from her snuffles, want to go to the Fringes, her mind was sorely
troubled by thoughts of Old Maggie, and Hairy Jack and his family, and the
other ominous nursery-threat characters said to lurk in those regions.
It would have
been easier to pacify her had we not ourselves suffered from quite a residue of
childhood apprehensions, or had we been able to advance some real idea of the
region to set against its morbid reputation. As it was, we, like most people,
knew too little of it to be convincing, and had to go on suffering her distress
again. Admittedly it was less intense than it had been on former occasions, and
experience did now enable us to put up more of a barrier against it;
nevertheless, the effect was wearing. Fully half an hour passed before Rosalind
succeeded in soothing away the obliterating hullabaloo. When she had, the
others came in anxiously; Michael inquiring, with irritation:
'What was it
this time?'
We explained.
Michael dropped
his irritability, and turned his attention to
But at about
this stage
'Who is the
other one?' she inquired.
'What other
one? What do you mean?' he asked her.
'The somebody else who's making think-pictures all mixed up
with yours,' she told him.
There was a
pause. I opened right out, but could not detect any thought-shapes at all.
Then:
'I get
nothing,' came from Michael, and Mark and Rachel, too. 'It must be —'
There was an
impetuous strong sign from
I glanced over
at the other pannier. Rosalind had one arm round
'What is it?'
Rosalind asked her.
'Somebody
asking questions.
She's a long way, a very long, long way away, I think. She says she's had my
afraid-thoughts before. She wants to know who I am, and where I am. Shall I
tell her?'
There was a
moment's caution. Then Michael inquiring with a touch of
excitement whether we approved. We did.
'All right,
'I shall have
to be very loud. She's such a long way away,'
It was as well
she did. If she had let it rip while our minds were wide open she'd have
blistered them. I closed mine and tried to concentrate my attention on the way
ahead of us. It helped, but it was by no means a thorough defence.
The shapes were simple, as one would expect of
There was the
equivalent of 'Phew' from Michael when it let up; closely followed by the
repeated equivalent of 'Shut up!' from
'Where is she?'
inquired Michael.
'Over there,'
'For goodness
sake —'
'She's pointing
south-west,' I explained.
'Did you ask
her the name of the place, darling?' Rosalind inquired.
'Yes, but it
didn't mean anything, except that there were two parts of it and a lot of
water,'
Rosalind
suggested:
'Tell her to
spell it out in letter-shapes.'
'But I can't
read letters,'
'Oh, dear,
that's awkward,' Rosalind admitted. 'But at least we can send. I'll give you
the letter-shapes one by one, and you can think them on to her. How about that?'
'Good,' said
Rosalind. 'Look out, everybody! Here we go again.'
She pictured an
'L'.
'She
understands, but she doesn't know where
She says she'll
try to find out. She wants to send us her letter-shapes, but I said it's no
good.'
'But it is,
darling. You get them from her, then you show them to
us — only gently, so that we can read them.'
Presently we
got the first one. It was 'Z.' We were disappointed.
'What on
earth's that?' everyone inquired at once.
'She's got it
back to front. It must be "S,"' Michael decided.
'It's not
"S," it's "Z,"'
'Never mind
them. Just go on,' Rosalind told her.
The rest of the
word built up.
'Well, the
others are proper letters,' Michael admitted.' Sea-land — it must be —'
'Not "S"; it's "Z,"'
repeated
'But, darling,
"Z" doesn't mean anything. Now, Sealand
obviously means a land in the sea.'
'If that
helps,' I said doubtfully. 'According to my Uncle Axel there's a lot more sea
than anyone would think possible.'
At that point
everything was blotted out by
'All right,'
Michael told her, pacifically, 'but ask her if there
is a lot of sea.'
'Yes. There are
two parts of it, with lots of sea all round. From where she is you can see the
sun shining on it for miles and miles and it's all
blue—'
'In the middle
of the night?' said Michael. 'She's crazy.'
'But it isn't
night where she is. She showed me.'
I was jolted to
recognize the picture from the childhood dreams that I had almost forgotten. I
broke in, repeating it more clearly than
'Yes — like
that,'
'There's
something very queer about this, altogether, 'Michael put in. 'David, how on
earth did you know—?'
I cut him
short.
'Let
So again we did
our best to put up a barrier between ourselves and the apparently one-sided
exchange that
We made slow
progress through the forest. We were anxious not to leave traces on the rides
and tracks, so that the going was poor. As well as keeping our bows ready for
use we had to be alert enough not to have them swept out of our hands, and to
crouch low beneath overhanging branches. The risk of meeting men was not great,
but there was the chance of encountering some hunting beast. Luckily, when we
did hear one it was invariably in a hurry to get away. Possible the bulk of the
great-horses was discouraging: if so, it was, at least, one advantage we could
set against the distinctive spoor behind us.
The summer
nights are not long in those parts. We kept on plodding until there were signs
of dawn and then found another glade to rest in. There would have been too much
risk in unsaddling; the heavy pack-saddles and panniers would have had to be
hoisted off by a pulley on a branch, and that would deprive us of any chance of
a quick getaway. We simply had to hobble the horses, as on the previous day.
While we ate
our food I talked to
Just after
sunrise Michael came through in some agitation.
'They've picked
up your trail, David. That man Rosalind shot: his dog found him, and they came
across the great-horse tracks. Our lot is turning back to the south-west to
join in the hunt. You'd better push on. Where are you now?'
All I could
tell him was that we had calculated we must be within a few miles of Wild
Country by this time.
'Then get
moving,' he told me. 'The longer you delay the more time they'll have to get a
party ahead to cut you off.'
It sounded good
advice. I woke Rosalind, and explained. Ten minutes later we were on our way
again, with
The way wound
somewhat with the lie of the land, but its general direction was right. We
followed it for fully ten miles without trouble of any kind, but then, as we
rounded a corner, we came face to face with a horseman trotting towards us
barely fifty yards ahead.
The man cannot have had a moment's doubt who we were, for even as he saw us he dropped his reins and
snatched his bow from his shoulder. Before he had a shaft on the string we had
loosed at him.
The motion of
the great-horse was unfamiliar, and we both shot wide. He did better. His arrow
passed between us, skinning our horse's head. Again I missed, but Rosalind's
second shot took his horse in the chest. It reared,
almost unseating him, then turned and started to bolt away ahead of us. I sent
another arrow after it, and took it in the buttock. It leapt sideways, catapulting
the man into the bushes, and then sped off down the track as hard as it could
go.
We passed the
thrown man without checking. He cringed aside as the huge hoofs clumped by
within a couple of feet of his head. At the next turn we looked back to see him
sitting up, feeling his bruises. The least satisfactory part of the incident
was that there was now a wounded, riderless horse
spreading an alarm ahead of us.
A couple of
miles further on the stretch of forest came to an abrupt end, and we found
ourselves looking across a narrow, cultivated valley. There was about a mile
and a half of open country before the trees began again on the far side. Most
of the land was pasture, with sheep and cattle behind rail and post fences. One
of the few arable fields was immediately to our left. The young crop there
looked as if it might be oats, but it deviated to an extent which would have
caused it to be burnt long ago at home.
The sight of it
encouraged us, for it could only mean that we had reached almost to Wild
Country where stock could not be kept pure.
The track led
at a gentle slope down to a farm which was little better than a cluster of huts
and sheds. In the open space among them which served for a yard we could see
four or five women and a couple of men gathered round a horse. They were
examining it, and we had little doubt what horse it was. Evidently it had only
just arrived, and they were still arguing about it. We decided to go on, rather
than give them time to arm and come in search of us.
So absorbed
were they in their inspection of the horse that we had covered half the
distance from the trees before any of them noticed us. Then one glanced up, and
the rest, too, turned to stare. They can never have seen a great-horse before,
and the sight of two bearing down upon them at a canter with a thunderous
rumble of horse-beats struck them momentarily rigid with astonishment. It was
the horse in their midst that broke up the tableau; it reared, whinnied, and
made off, scattering them.
There was no
need to shoot. The whole group scuttled for the shelter of various doorways,
and we pounded through their yard unmolested.
The track bore
off to the left, but Rosalind held the great-horse on a straight line ahead,
towards the next stretch of forest. The rails flew aside like twigs, and we
kept going at a lumbering canter across the fields, leaving a trail of broken
fences behind us.
At the edge of
the trees, I looked back. The people at the farm had emerged from shelter and stood
gesticulating and staring after us.
Three or four
miles farther on we came out into more open country, but not like any region we
had seen before. It was dotted with bushes, and brakes, and thickets. Most of
the grass was coarse and large-leafed: in some places it was monstrous, growing
into giant tufts where the sharp-edged blades stood eight or ten feet high.
We wound our
way among them, keeping generally south-west, for another couple of hours. Then
we pushed into a copse of queer but fair-sized trees. It offered a good
hiding-place, and inside were several open spaces where there grew a more
ordinary kind of grass which looked as if it might make suitable fodder. We
decided to rest awhile there and sleep.
I hobbled the
horses while Rosalind unrolled the blankets, and presently we were eating
hungrily. It was pleasantly peaceful until
Rosalind
screwed up her eyes, and put a hand to her head.
'For heaven's
sake, child!' she protested.
'Sorry. I
forgot,' said
She sat with
her head a little on one side for a minute, then she
told us:
'She wants to
talk to one of you. She says will you all try to hear her while she thinks her
loudest.'
'All right,' we
agreed, 'but you keep quiet, or you'll blind us.'
I tried my very
hardest, straining sensitivity to its utmost, but there was nothing — or as
near nothing as the shimmer of a heat-haze.
We relaxed
again.
'No good,' I
said, 'you'll have to tell her we can't reach her,
We did our best
to damp out the exchange that followed, then
The urgent
emphasis was on importance — the importance not of us, but of
There was quite
a lot more that was less clear, muddled up with it, but that main point was
quite unmistakable.
'Did you get
it?' I asked of the others, when it had finished.
They had.
Michael responded: 'This is very confusing. There is no doubt that Petra's
power of projection is remarkable compared with ours, anyway — but what she
seemed to me to be putting across was that she was particularly surprised to
find it among primitive people, did you notice that? It looked almost as if she
were meaning us.'
'She was,'
confirmed Rosalind. 'Not a shadow of doubt about it.'
'There must be
some misunderstanding,' I put in. 'Probably Petra somehow gave her the
impression we were Fringes people. As for— 'I was suddenly
blotted out for a moment by
Rosalind
refused to argue about that.
'Let's wait and
find out,' she suggested. 'Just now all I want is sleep.'
I felt the same
way, and since
I awoke with
'Michael,' she
explained.
I cleared my
mind for him.
'They've picked
up your trail again. A small farm on the edge of Wild
Country. You galloped through it. Remember?'
I did. He went
on:
'There's a
party converging there now. They'll start to follow your tracks as soon as it's
light. Better get moving soon. I don't know how it is in front of you, but
there may be some men cutting across from the west to head you off. If there
are, my bet is that they'll keep in smallish groups for the night. They can't
risk a cordon of single sentries because there are known to be Fringes people
scouting around. So, with luck, you should be able to sneak through.'
'All right,' I
agreed wearily. Then a question I had meant to ask before occurred to me.
'What's happened to Sally and Katherine?'
'I don't know.
No answer. The range is getting rather long now. Does any one know?'
Rachel came in,
made faint by the distance.
'Katherine was
unconscious. There's been nothing understandable since then. Mark and I are
afraid —' She faded, in a foggy reluctance to continue.
'Go on,'
Michael told her.
'Well,
Katherine's been unconscious so long we're wondering if she's — dead.'
'And
Sally—?'
This time there
was even more reluctance.
'We think —
we're afraid something queer must have happened to her mind.... There've been
just one or two little jumbles from her. Very weak, not sensible at all, so
we're afraid . . .' She faded away, in great
unhappiness.
There was a
pause before Michael started with hard, harsh shapes.
'You understand
what that means, David? They are scared of us. Ready to break us down in
the attempt to find out more about us — once they can catch us. You mustn't let
them get hold of Rosalind or
I looked at
Rosalind lying asleep beside me, the red of the sunset glistening on her hair,
and I thought of the anguish we had felt from Katherine. The possibility of her
and
'Yes,' I told
him, and the others. 'Yes — I understand.'
I felt their
sympathy and encouragement for a while, then there was
nothing.
'Why did he say
you must kill Rosalind and me?'
I pulled myself
together.
'That was only
if they catch us,' I told her, trying to make it sound as if it were the
sensible and usual course in such circumstances. She considered the prospect
judicially, then:
'Why?' she
asked.
'Well,' I
tried, 'you see we're different from them because they can't make
thought-shapes, and when people are different, ordinary people are afraid of
them—'
'Why should
they be afraid of us? We aren't hurting them,' she broke in.
'I'm not sure
that I know why,' I told her. 'But they are. It's a feel-thing not a
think-thing. And the more stupid they are, the more like everyone else they
think everyone ought to be. And once they get afraid they become cruel and want
to hurt people who are different—'
'Why?' inquired
'They just do.
And they'd hurt us very much if they could catch us.'
'I don't see
why,'
'It's the way
things work. It's complicated and rather nasty,' I told her. 'You'll understand
better when you're older. But the thing is, we don't
want you and Rosalind to be hurt. You remember when you spilt the boiling water
on your foot? Well, it'd be much worse than that. Being dead's
a lot better — it's sort of like being so much asleep that they can't get at
you to hurt you at all.'
I looked down
at Rosalind, at the gentle rise and fall of her breasts as she slept. There was
a vagrant wisp of hair on her cheek; I brushed it away gently and kissed her
without waking her.
Presently
'David, when
you kill me and Rosalind—'
I put my arm
round her. 'Hush, darling. It isn't going to happen, because we aren't going to
let them catch us. Now, let's wake her up, but we won't tell her about this.
She might be worried, so we'll just keep it to ourselves for a secret, shall
we?'
'All right,'
She tugged
gently at Rosalind's hair.
We decided to
eat again, and then push on when it was a little darker so that there would be
stars to steer by.
'Sealand must be a funny place. Everybody there can make
think-pictures — well, nearly everybody — and nobody wants
to hurt anybody for doing it.'
'Oh, you've
been chatting while we were asleep, have you?' remarked Rosalind. 'I must say
that makes it a lot more comfortable for us.'
'They aren't
all of them very good at it, though — most of them are more like you and
David,' she told us kindly. 'But she's much better at it than most of
them, and she's got two babies and she thinks they will be good at it, only
they're too little yet. But she doesn't think they'll be as good at it as me.
She says I can make stronger think-pictures than anybody at all,' she concluded
complacently.
'That doesn't
surprise me one bit,' Rosalind told her. 'What you want to learn next is to
make good think-pictures instead of just noisy ones,' she added deflatingly.
'Oh you must,
must you?' said Rosalind. 'Why? My impression of think-pictures up to now is
that chiefly they bring trouble.'
'Not in Sealand.'
We pondered
that. I recalled Uncle Axel's tales about places beyond the Black Coasts where
the Deviations thought that they were the true image, and anything else
was a mutant.
'She
says,'
'I can't say I
feel very sorry for them at present,'! remarked.
'Well, she says we ought to because they have to live very dull, stupid lives
compared with think-picture people,'
We let her
prattle on. It was difficult to make sense of a lot of the things she said, and
possibly she had not got them right, anyway, but the one thing that did stand
out clearly was that these Sealanders, whoever and
wherever they were, thought no small beans of themselves. It began to seem more
than likely that Rosalind had been right when she had taken 'primitive' to
refer to ordinary
In clear
starlight we set out again, still winding our way between clumps and thickets
in a south-westerly direction. Out of respect for Michael's warning we were travelling as quietly as we could, with our eyes and ears
alert for any sign of interception. For some miles there was nothing to be
heard but the steady, cushioned clumping of the great-horses' hoofs, slight
creaking from the girths and panniers, and, occasionally, some small animal
scuttling out of our way.
After three
hours or more we began to perceive uncertainly a line of deeper darkness ahead,
and presently the edge of more forest solidified to loom up like a black wall.
It was not
possible in the shadow to tell how dense it was. The best course seemed to be
to hold straight on until we came to it, and then, if it turned out to be not
easily penetrable, to work along the edge until we could find a suitable place
to make an entrance.
We started to
do that, and had come within a hundred yards of it when without any warning a
gun went off to the rear, and shot whistled past us.
Both horses
were startled, and plunged. I was all but flung out of my pannier. The rearing
horses pulled away and the lead rope parted with a snap. The other horse bolted
straight towards the forest, then thought better of it and swerved to the left.
Ours pelted after it. There was nothing to be done but wedge oneself in the
pannier and hang on as we tore along in a rain of clods and stones flung up by
hoofs of the lead horse.
Somewhere
behind us a gun fired again, and we speeded up still more....
For a while or
more we hurtled on in a ponderous, earth-shaking gallop. Then there was a flash
ahead and half-left. At the sound of the shot our horse sprang sideways in
mid-stride, swerved right, and raced for the forest. We crouched still lower in
the baskets as we crashed among the trees.
By luck alone
we made the entry at a point where the bigger trunks were well separated, but,
for all that, it was a nightmare ride, with branches slapping and dragging at
the panniers. The great-horse simply ploughed ahead, avoiding the larger trees,
thrusting through the rest, smashing its way by sheer weight while branches and
saplings cracked and snapped at the onslaught.
Inevitably the
horse slowed down, but its panic determination to get away from the guns abated
very little. I had to brace with arms and legs and whole body to avoid being
battered to pieces in the pannier, scarcely daring to raise my head even for a
quick look, lest a branch should knock it off.
I could not
tell whether there was any pursuit, but it seemed improbable. Not only was it
darker under the trees, but a horse of ordinary size would most likely have disembowelled itself in any attempt to follow over the
snapped-off stems standing up like stakes behind us.
The horse began
to grow calmer; the pace and violence eased, and it started to pick its way
instead of crashing through. Presently the trees on our left grew thinner.
Rosalind, leaning out of her pannier, caught up the reins again and urged the
creature that way. We came out obliquely upon a narrow open space where we
could see the stars overhead again. Whether it was an artificial track, or a natural opening was impossible to tell in the
poor light. We paused a moment, wondering whether to risk it, then decided that
the easier going would offset the disadvantages of easier pursuit, and turned
southward along it. A crackling of branches to one side brought both of us
facing round, with bows ready, but it was only the other great-horse.
It came
trotting out of the shadows with a whinny of pleasure, and fell into place
behind us as though the rope still held it.
The country was
more broken now. The trail wound, taking us round outcrops of rock, slanting
down the sides of gullies to cross small streams. Sometimes there were fairly
open stretches, at others the trees met overhead. Our progress was inevitably
slow.
We must by now,
we reckoned, be truly in the Fringes. Whether or not the pursuit would risk
following any farther we could not tell. When we tried to consult Michael there
was no response, so we guessed he was asleep. It was perplexing to know whether
the time had not come when we ought to get rid of the tell-tale great-horses —
perhaps drive them on along the track while we made off in a different
direction on foot. The decision was difficult to make without more information.
It would be foolish to get rid of the creatures unless we were sure that the
pursuit would risk coming right into Fringes country after us; but, if it did,
it would gain on us quickly by making a great deal faster time in daylight than
we were making now. Moreover, we were tired, and the prospect of starting to
travel on foot was far from attractive. Once more we tried, and failed, to make
contact with Michael. A moment later the choice was taken away from us.
We were at one
of the stretches where the trees met above us, making a dark tunnel through
which the horse chose its way slowly and carefully. Suddenly something dropped
full on me, crushing me down in the pannier. I had no warning, no chance to use
the bow. There was the weight jolting the breath out of me, then a shower of
sparks in my head, and that was the end of it.
I came back slowly, lingering for what
seemed a long time only half-aware.
Rosalind was
calling me; the real Rosalind, the one who dwelt inside, and showed herself too
seldom. The other, the practical, capable one, was her own
convincing creation, not herself. I had seen her begin to build it when she was
a sensitive, fearful, yet determined child. She became aware by instinct,
perhaps sooner than the rest of us, that she was in a
hostile world, and deliberately equipped herself to face it. The armour had grown slowly, plate by plate. I had seen her
find her weapons and become skilled with them, watched her construct a
character so thoroughly and wear it so constantly that for spells she almost
deceived herself.
I loved the
girl one could see. I loved her tall slim shape, the poise of her neck, her
small, pointed breasts, her long, slim legs: and the way she moved, and the
sureness of her hands, and her lips when she smiled. I loved the bronze-gold
hair that felt like heavy silk in one's hand, her satin-skinned shoulders, her velvet cheeks: and the warmth of her body, and the scent
of her breath.
All these were
easy to love — too easy: anyone must love them.
They needed her
defences: the crust of independence and indifference:
the air of practical, decisive reliability; the unroused
interest, the aloof manner. The qualities were not intended to endear, and at
times they could hurt; but one who had seen the how and why of them could
admire them, if only as a triumph of art over nature.
But now it was
the under-Rosalind calling gently, forlornly, all armour
thrown aside, the heart naked.
And again there
are no words.
Words exist
that can, used by a poet, achieve a dim monochrome of the body's love, but
beyond that they fail clumsily.
My love flowed
out to her, hers back to me. Mine stroked and soothed. Hers caressed. The
distance — and the difference — between us dwindled and vanished. We could
meet, mingle, and blend. Neither one of us existed any more; for a time there
was a single being that was both. There was escape from the solitary cell; a
brief symbiosis, sharing all the world....
No one else
knew the hidden Rosalind. Even Michael and the rest caught only glimpses of
her. They did not know at what cost the overt Rosalind had been wrought. None
of them knew my dear, tender Rosalind longing for escape, gentleness, and love;
grown afraid now of what she had built for her own protection; yet more afraid
still, of facing life without it.
Duration is
nothing. Perhaps it was only for an instant we were together again. The
importance of a point is in its existence; it has no dimensions.
Then we were
apart, and I was becoming aware of mundane things: a dim grey sky; considerable
discomfort; and, presently, Michael, anxiously inquiring what had happened to
me. With an effort I raked my wits together.
'I don't know —
something hit me,' I told him, 'but I think I'm all right now — except that my
head aches, and I'm damned uncomfortable.'
It was only as
I replied that I perceived why I was so uncomfortable — that I was still in the
pannier, but sort of folded into it, and the pannier itself was still in
motion.
Michael did not
find that very informative. He applied to Rosalind.
'They jumped
down on us from overhanging branches. Four or five of them.
One landed right on top of David,' she explained.
'They?' asked
Michael.
'Fringes
people,' she told him.
I was relieved.
It had occurred to me that we might have been outflanked by the others. I was
on the point of asking what was happening now when Michael inquired:
'Was it you
they fired at last night?'
I admitted that
we had been fired at, but there might have been other firing for all I knew.
'No. Only one
lot,' he told us with disappointment. 'I hoped they'd made a mistake and were
on a false trail. We've all been called together. They think it's too risky to
come farther into the Fringes in small groups. We're supposed to be assembled
to move off in four hours or so from now. Round about a hundred they reckon.
They've decided that if we do meet any Fringes people and give them a good
hiding it'll save trouble later on, anyway. You'd better get rid of those
great-horses — you'll never cover your trail while you have them.'
'A bit late for
that advice,' Rosalind told him. 'I'm in a pannier on the first horse with my
thumbs tied together, and David's in a pannier on the second.'
'Where's
'Oh, she's all
right. She's in the other pannier of this horse, fraternizing with the man in
charge.'
'What happened,
exactly?' Michael demanded.
'Well, first
they dropped on us, and then a lot more came out of the trees and steadied up
the horses. They made us get down and lifted David down. Then when they'd
talked and argued for a bit, they decided to get rid of us. So they loaded us
into the panniers again, like this, and put a man on each horse and sent us on
— the same way we'd been going.'
'Farther into
the Fringes, that is?'
'Yes.'
'Well, at least
that's the best direction,' Michael commented. 'What's the attitude?
Threatening?'
'Oh,
no. They're just
being careful we don't run off. They seemed to have some idea who we were, but
weren't quite sure what to do with us. They argued a bit over that, but they
were much more interested in the great-horses really, I think. The man on this
horse seems to be quite harmless. He's talking to
'Can you find
out what they're intending to do with you?'
'I did ask, but
I don't think he knows. He's just been told to take us somewhere.'
'Well —'
Michael seemed at a loss for once. 'Well, I suppose all we can do is wait and
see — but it'll do no harm to let him know we'll be coming after you.'
He left it at
that for the moment.
I struggled and
wriggled round. With some difficulty I managed to get on to my feet and stand
up in the swaying basket. The man in the other pannier looked round at me quite
amiably.
'Whoa, there!'
he said to the great-horse, and reined in. He unslung
a leather bottle from his shoulder, and swung it across to me on the strap. I
uncorked it, drank gratefully, and swung it back to him. We went on.
I was able to
see our surroundings now. It was broken country, no longer thick forest, though
well-wooded, and even a first look at it assured me that my father had been
right about normality being mocked in these parts. I could scarcely identify a
single tree with certainty. There were familiar trunks supporting the wrong
shape of tree: familiar types of branches growing out of the wrong kind of
bark, and bearing the wrong kind of leaves. For a while our view to the left
was cut off by a fantastically-woven fence of immense bramble trunks with
spines as big as shovels. In another place a stretch of ground looked like a
dried-out river-bed full of large boulders, but the boulders turned out to be
globular fungi set as close together as they could grow. There were trees with
trunks too soft to stand upright, so that they looped over and grew along the ground.
Here and there were patches of miniature trees, shrunk and gnarled, and looking
centuries old.
I glanced
surreptitiously again at the man in the other pannier. There didn't seem to be
anything wrong with him except that he looked very dirty, as were his ragged
clothes and crumpled hat. He caught my eye on him.
'Never been in
the Fringes before, boy?' he asked.
'No,' I told
him. 'Is it all like this?'
He grinned, and
shook his head.
'None of it's
like any other part. That's why the Fringes is the Fringes;
pretty near nothing grows true to stock here, yet.'
'Yet—?' I repeated.
'Sure. It'll
settle down, though, in time. Wild Country was Fringes once, but it's steadier
now; likely the parts you come from were Wild Country once, but they've settled
down more. God's little game of patience I reckon it is, but He certainly takes
His time over it.'
'God?' I said doubtfully. 'They've always
taught us that it's the Devil that rules in the Fringes.'
He shook his
head.
'That's what
they tell you over there. 'Tisn't
so, boy. It's your parts where the old Devil's hanging on and looking
after his own. Arrogant, they are. The true image, and all that.... Want to be
like the Old People. Tribulation hasn't taught 'em a
thing....
'The Old People
thought they were the tops, too. Had ideals, they did; knew just how the world ought to be run. All they had to do
was get it fixed up comfortable, and keep it that way; then everybody'd
be fine, on account of their ideas being a lot more civilized than God's.'
He shook his
head.
'Didn't
work out, boy. Couldn't work out. They weren't God's last word like they
thought: God doesn't have any last word. If He did He'd be dead. But He isn't
dead; and He changes and grows, like everything else that's alive. So when they
were doing their best to get everything fixed and tidy on some kind of eternal
lines they'd thought up for themselves, He sent along Tribulation to bust it up
and remind 'em that life is change.
'He saw it
wasn't going to come out the way things lay, so He shuffled the pack to see if
it wouldn't give a better break next time.'
He paused to
consider that a moment, and went on:
'Maybe He
didn't shuffle quite enough. The same sequences seem to have got kind of stuck
together some places. Parts where you come from, for
instance. There they are, still on the same lines, still reckoning
they're the last word, still trying their damnedest to stay as they are and fix
up just the same state of affairs that brought Tribulation last time. One day
He's going to get pretty tired of the way they can't learn a lesson, and start
showing them another trick or two.'
'Oh,' I said,
vaguely but safely. It was odd, I felt, how many people seemed to have
positive, if conflicting, information upon God's views.
The man did not
seem altogether satisfied that he had got his point home. He waved his hand at
the deviational landscape about us, and I suddenly noticed his own
irregularity: the right hand lacked the first three fingers.
'Some day,' he
proclaimed, 'something is going to steady down out of all this. It'll be new,
and new kinds of plants mean new creatures. Tribulation was a shake-up to give
us a new start.'
'But where they
can make the stock breed true, they destroy Deviations,' I pointed out.
'They try to;
they think they do,' he agreed. 'They're pig-headedly determined to keep the
Old People's standards — but do they? Can they? How do they know that
their crops and their fruit and their vegetables are just the same? Aren't
there disputes? And doesn't it nearly always turn out that the breed with the
higher yield is accepted in the end? Aren't cattle cross-bred to get hardiness,
or milk-yield, or meat? Sure, they can wipe out the obvious deviations, but are
you sure that the Old people would recognize any of the present breeds at all?
I'm not, by any means. You can't stop it, you see. You can be obstructive and
destructive, and you can slow it all up and distort it for your own ends, but
somehow it keeps on happening. Just look at these horses.'
'They're government
approved,' I told him.
'Sure. That's
just what I mean,' he said.
'But if it
keeps on anyway, I don't see why there had to be Tribulation,' I objected.
'For other
forms it keeps on keeping on,' he said, 'but not for man, not for kinds like
the Old People and your people, if they can help it. They stamp on any change:
they close the way and keep the type fixed because they've got the arrogance to
think themselves perfect. As they reckon it, they, and only they, are in the
true image; very well, then it follows that if the image is true, they
themselves must be God: and, being God, they reckon themselves entitled to
decree, "thus far, and no farther." That is their great sin: they try
to strangle the life out of Life.'
There was an
air about the last few sentences, rather out of keeping with the rest, which
caused me to suspect I had encountered some kind of creed once more. I decided
to shift the conversation on to a more practical plane by inquiring why we had
been taken prisoner.
He did not seem
very sure about that, except to assure me that it was always done when any
stranger was found entering Fringes territory.
I thought that
over, and then got into touch with Michael again.
'What do you
suggest we tell them?' I asked. 'I imagine there'll be an examination. When
they find we're physically normal we shall have to give some reason for being
on the run.'
'Best to tell
them the truth, only minimize it. Play it right down the way Katherine and
Sally did. Just let them know enough to account for it,' he suggested.
'Very well,' I
agreed. 'Do you understand that,
'The Sealand people are coming to help. They're not so far away
as they were, now,' she told us confidently.
Michael
received that with scepticism. 'All very nice — if
they can. But don't mention them.'
'All right,'
We discussed
whether we would tell our two guards about the intended pursuit, and decided it
would do no harm.
The man in the
other pannier showed no surprise at the news.
'Good. That'll
suit us,' he said. But he explained no further, and we plodded steadily on.
Rosalind
explained what she could of our present situation, and that we did not seem to
be in immediate danger. The other advised:
'Be cautious.
Agree to whatever they say, and play for time. Be emphatic about the danger you
are in from your own people. It is difficult to advise you without knowing the
tribe. Some deviational tribes detest the appearance of normality. It can't do
any harm to exaggerate how different you are inside from your own
people. The really important matter is the little girl. Keep her safe at all
costs. We have never before known such a power of projection in one so young.
What is her name?'
Rosalind spelt
it out in letter-forms. Then she asked:
'But who are
you? What is this Sealand?'
'We are the New
People — your kind of people. The people who can
think-together. We're the people who are going to build a new kind of
world — different from the Old People's world, and from the savages'.'
'The
kind of people that God intended, perhaps?' I inquired, with a feeling of being on
familiar ground again.
'I don't know
about that. Who does? But we do know that we can make a better world than the
Old People did. They were only ingenious half-humans, little better than
savages; all living shut off from one another, with only clumsy words to link
them. Often they were shut off still more by different languages, and different
beliefs. Some of them could think individually, but they had to remain
individuals. Emotions they could sometimes share, but they could not think
collectively. When their conditions were primitive they could get along all
right, as the animals can; but the more complex they made their world, the less
capable they were of dealing with it. They had no means of consensus. They
learnt to co-operate constructively in small units; but only destructively in
large units. They aspired greedily, and then refused to face the
responsibilities they had created. They created vast problems, and then buried
their heads in the sands of idle faith. There was, you see, no real
communication, no understanding between them. They could, at their best, be
near-sublime animals, but not more.
'They could
never have succeeded. If they had not brought down Tribulation which all but
destroyed them; then they would have bred with the carelessness of animals
until they had reduced themselves to poverty and misery, and ultimately to starvation
and barbarism. One way or another they were foredoomed because they were an
inadequate species.'
It occurred to
me again that these Sealanders had no little opinion
of themselves. To one brought up as I had been this irreverence for the Old
People was difficult to take. While I was still wrestling with it Rosalind
asked:
'But
you? Where do you
come from?'
'Our ancestors
had the good fortune to live on an island — or, rather, two islands — somewhat
secluded. They did not escape Tribulation and its effects even there, though it
was less violent there than in most places, but they were cut off from the rest
of the world, and sank back almost to barbarism. Then, somehow, the strain of
people who could think-together began. In time, those who were able to do it
best found others who could do it a little, and taught them to develop it. It
was natural for the people who could share thoughts to tend to marry one
another, so that the strain was strengthened.
'Later on, they
started to discover thought-shape makers in other places, too. That was when
they began to understand how fortunate they had been; they found that even in
places where physical deviations don't count for much people who have
think-together are usually persecuted.
'For a long
time nothing could be done to help the same kind of people in other places —
though some tried to sail to Zealand in canoes, and sometimes they got there —
but later, when we had machines again, we were able to fetch some of them to
safety. Now we try to do that whenever we make contact — but we have never
before made contact at anything like this distance. It is still a strain for me
to reach you. It will get easier, but I shall have to stop now. Look after the
little girl. She is unique and tremendously important. Protect her at all
costs.'
The
thought-patterns faded away, leaving nothing for a moment. Then
'That's me,'
she proclaimed, with satisfaction and totally unnecessary vigour.
We rocked, and
recovered.
'Beware, odious
smug child. We haven't met Hairy Jack yet,' Rosalind told her, with subduing
effect. 'Michael,' she added,' did all that reach you, too?'
'Yes,' Michael
responded with a touch of reserve. 'Condescending, I thought. Sounded as if she were lecturing to children. Still coming from a devil of a long way away, too. I don't
see how they can come fast enough to be any help at all. We shall be starting
after you in a few minutes now.'
The
great-horses clumped steadily on. The landscape continued to be disturbing and
alarming to one brought up in respect for the propriety of forms. Certainly,
few things were as fantastic as the growths that Uncle Axel had told of in the
south; on the other hand, practically nothing was comfortably familiar, or even
orthodox. There was so much confusion that it did not seem to matter any more
whether a particular tree was an aberrate or just a miscegenate, but it was a relief to get away from trees and
out into open country for a bit — though even there the bushes weren't homogeneal or identifiable, and the grass was pretty queer,
too.
We stopped only
once for food and drink, and for no more than half an hour before we were on
our way again. Two hours or so later, after several more stretches of
woodlands, we reached a medium-sized river. On our side the level ground
descended in a sharp, steep bank to the water; on the other stood a line of
low, reddish cliffs.
We turned
downstream, keeping to the top of the bank. A quarter of a mile along, at a
place marked by a grossly deviational tree shaped like a huge wooden pear, and
with all its branches growing in one big tuft at the top, a runnel cut well
back into the bank and made a way for the horses to get down. We forded the
river obliquely, making for a gap in the opposite cliffs When
we reached it, it turned out to be little more than a cleft, so narrow in some
places that the panniers scraped both walls, and we could scarcely squeeze
through. There was quite a hundred yards of it before the way widened and began
to slope up to normal ground level.
Where the sides
diminished to mere banks seven or eight men stood with bows in their hands.
They gaped incredulously at the great-horses, and looked half-inclined to run.
Abreast of them, we stopped.
The man in the
other pannier jerked his head at me.
'Down you get,
boy,' he told me.
There was
nothing immediately alarming about the group. One of the hands which held a bow
had six fingers; one man displayed a head like a polished brown egg, without a
hair on it, or on his face; another had immensely large feet and hands; but
whatever was wrong with the rest was hidden under their rags.
Rosalind and I
shared a feeling of relief at not being confronted with the kinds of
grotesquerie we had half expected.
A well-used
path led downwards through woods for a few hundred yards, and then gave on to a
clearing. To the right ran a wall of the reddish cliffs again, not more than
forty feet high. They appeared to be the reverse side of the ridge which
retained the river, and the whole face was pocked by numerous holes, with
ladders, roughly made of branches, leading to the higher openings.
The level
ground in front was littered with crude huts and tents. One or two small
cooking fires smoked among them. A few tattered men and a rather larger number
of slatternly-looking women moved around with no great activity.
We wound our way
among hovels and refuse-heaps until we reached the largest of the tents. It
appeared to be an old rick-cover — the loot,
presumably, of some raid — fastened over a framework of lashed poles. A figure
seated on a stool just inside the entrance looked up as we approached. The
sight of his face jolted me with panic for a moment — it was so like my
father's. Then I recognized him — the same 'spider-man' I had seen as a captive
at Waknuk, seven or eight years before.
The two men who
had brought us pushed us forward, in front of him. He looked the three of us
over. His eyes travelled up and down Rosalind's slim
straight figure in a way I did not care for — nor she, either. Then he studied
me more carefully, and nodded to himself, as if satisfied over something.
'Remember me?'
he asked.
'Yes,' I told
him.
He shifted his
gaze from my face. He let it stray over the conglomeration of hutches and
shacks, and then back again to me.
'Not much like
Waknuk,' he said.
'Not much,' I
agreed.
He paused quite
lengthily, in contemplation. Then:
'Know who I
am?' he inquired.
'I think so. I
think I found out,' I told him.
He raised an
eyebrow, questioningly.
'My father had
an elder brother,' I said. 'He was thought to be normal until he was about
three or four years old. Then his certificate was revoked, and he was sent
away.'
He nodded
slowly.
'But not quite
right,' he said. 'His mother loved him. His nurse was fond of him, too. So when
they came to take him away he was already missing — but they'd hush that up, of
course. They'd hush the whole thing up: pretend it never happened.' He paused
again, reflectively. Presently he added:
'The
eldest son. The heir. Waknuk should be mine. It would be — except for this.'
He stretched out his long arm, and regarded it for a moment. Then he dropped it
and looked at me again.
'Do you know
what the length of a man's arm should be?'
'No,' I
admitted.
'Nor do I. But somebody in Rigo does, some
expert on the true image. So, no Waknuk — and I must live like a savage among
savages. Are you the eldest son?'
'The only son,'
I told him. 'There was a younger one, but—'
'No
certificate, eh?'
I nodded.
'So you, too,
have lost Waknuk!'
That aspect of
things had never troubled me. I do not think I had ever had any real
expectation of inheriting Waknuk. There had always been the sense of insecurity
— the expectation, almost the certainty, that one day I should be discovered. I
had lived too long with that expectation to feel the resentment that embittered
him. Now that it was resolved, I was glad to be safely away, and I told him so.
It did not please him. He looked at me thoughtfully.
'You've not the
guts to fight for what's yours by right?' he suggested.
'If it's yours
by right, it can't be mine by right,' I pointed out. 'But my meaning was that
I've had more than enough of living in hiding.'
'We all live in
hiding here,' he said.
'Maybe,' I told
him. 'But you can be your own selves. You don't have to live a
pretence. You don't have to watch yourselves every moment, and think
twice whenever you open your mouths.'
He nodded
slowly.
'We heard about
you. We have our ways,' he said. 'What I don't understand is why they are after
you in such strength.'
'We think,' I
explained, 'that we worry them more than the usual deviants because they've no
way of identifying us. I fancy they must be suspecting that there are a lot
more of us that they haven't discovered, and they want to get hold of us to
make us tell.'
'An even more
than usually good reason for not being caught,' he said.
I was aware
that Michael had come in and that Rosalind was answering him, but I could not
attend to two conversations at once, so I left that to her.
'So they are
coming right into the Fringes after you? How many of them?' he asked.
'I'm not sure,'
I said, considering how to play our hand to the best advantage.
'From what I've
heard, you should have ways of finding out,' he said.
I wondered how
much he did know about us, and whether he knew about Michael, too — but that
seemed unlikely. With his eyes a little narrowed, he went on:
'It'll be better
not to fool with us, boy. It's you they're after, and you've brought trouble
this way with you. Why should we care what happens to you? Quite
easy to put one of you where they'd find you.'
'More than a
hundred men,' she said.
He turned a
thoughtful eye on her for a moment.
'So there is
one of you with them — I rather thought there might be,' he observed, and
nodded again. 'A hundred men is a great many to send
after just you three. Too many... I see...' He turned
back to me. 'There will have been rumours lately about trouble working up in
the Fringes?'
'Yes,' I
admitted.
He grinned.
'So it comes in
handy. For the first time they decide that they will take the initiative, and
invade us — and pick you up, too, of course. They'll be following your trail,
naturally. How far have they got?'
I consulted
Michael, and learnt that the main body had still some miles to go before they
would join the party that had fired on us and bolted the great-horses. The difficulty
then was to find a way of conveying the position intelligibly to the man in
front of me. He appreciated that, and did not seem greatly perturbed.
'Is your father
with them?' he asked.
That was a
question which I had been careful not to put to Michael before. I did not put
it now. I simply paused for a moment, and then told him ' No.' Out of the
corner of my eye I noticed
'A pity,' said
the spidery man. 'It's quite a time now I've been hoping that one day I'd meet
your father on equal terms. From what I've heard I should have thought he'd be
there. Maybe he's not such a valiant champion of the true image as they say.'
He went on looking at me with a steady, penetrating gaze. I could feel Rosalind's
sympathy and understanding why I had not put the question to Michael, like a
hand-clasp.
Then, quite
suddenly, the man dismissed me from his attention and turned to consider
Rosalind. She looked back at him. She stood with her straight, confident air,
eyeing him levelly and coldly for long seconds. Then, suddenly, to my
astonishment, she broke. Her eyes dropped. She flushed. He smiled slightly....
But he was
wrong. It was not surrender to the stronger character, the conqueror. It was
loathing, a horror which broke her defences from
within. I had a glimpse of him from her mind, hideously exaggerated. The fears
she hid so well burst up and she was terrified; not as a woman weakened by a
man, but as a child in terror of a monstrosity.
I jumped full
at the man, overturning the stool and sending him sprawling. The two men behind
us leapt after me, but I got in at least one good blow before they could drag
me off.
The spider-man
sat up, and rubbed his jaw. He grinned at me, but not with any amusement.
'Does you
credit,' he conceded, 'but not much more.' He got up on his gangling legs. 'Not
seen much of the women around here, have you, boy? Take a look at 'em as you go. Maybe you'll understand a bit more. Besides,
this one can have children. I've had a fancy for some children a long time now
— even if they do happen to take after their father a bit.' He grinned briefly
again, and then frowned at me. 'Better take it the way it is, boy. Be a sensible
fellow. I don't give second chances.'
He looked from
me to the men who were holding me.
'Chuck him
out,' he told them. 'And if he doesn't seem to understand that that means stay
out, shoot him.'
The two of them
jerked me round and marched me off. At the edge of the clearing one of them
helped me along a path with his boot.
'Keep on
going,' he said.
I got up and
turned round, but one of them had an arrow trained on me. He gave a shake of
his head to urge me on. So I did what I was told, kept on going — for a few
yards, until the trees hid me; then I doubled back under cover.
Just
what they were expecting.
But they didn't shoot me; they just beat me up and slung me back among the
undergrowth. I remember flying through the air, but I don't remember landing....
I was being dragged along. There were
hands under my shoulders. Small branches were whipping back and slapping me in
the face.
'Sh—!' whispered a voice behind me.
'Give me a
minute. I'll be all right,' I whispered back.
The dragging stopped.
I lay pulling myself together for a moment, and then rolled over. A woman, a
young woman, was sitting back on her heels, looking at me.
The sun was low
now, and it was dim under the trees. I could not see her well. There was dark
hair hanging down on each side of a sunburnt face,
and the glint of dark eyes regarding me earnestly. The bodice of her dress was
ragged, a nondescript tawny colour, with stains on
it. There were no sleeves, but what struck me most was that it bore no cross. I
had never before been face to face with a woman who wore no protective cross
stitched to her dress. It looked queer, almost indecent. We faced one another
for some seconds.
'You don't know
me, David,' she said sadly.
Until then I
had not. It was the way she said 'David' that suddenly told me.
'Sophie!' I
said, 'Oh, Sophie...!'
She smiled.
'Dear David,'
she said. 'Have they hurt you badly, David?'
I tried moving
my arms and legs. They were stiff and they ached in several places, so did my
body and my head. I felt some blood caked on my left cheek, but there seemed to
be nothing broken. I started to get up, but she stretched out a hand and put it
on my arm.
'No,
not yet. Wait a
little, till it's dark.' She went on looking at me. 'I
saw them bring you in. You and the little girl, and the other
girl — who is she, David?'
That brought me
fully round, with a jolt. Frantically I sought for Rosalind and
'Thank goodness
for that. We've been worried stiff about you. Take it easy. They're all right,
both of them tired out and exhausted; they're asleep.'
'Is Rosalind—?'
'She's all
right, I tell you. What's been happening to you?'
I told him. The
whole exchange only took a few seconds, but long enough for Sophie to be
regarding me curiously.
'Who is she,
David?' she repeated.
I explained
that Rosalind was my cousin. She watched me as I spoke, and then nodded slowly.
'He
wants her, doesn't he?' she asked.
'That's what he
said,' I admitted, grimly.
'She could give
him babies?' she persisted.
'What are you
trying to do to me?' I asked her.
'So you're in
love with her?' she went on.
A
word again.... When
the minds have learnt to mingle, when no thought is wholly one's own, and each
has taken too much of the other ever to be entirely himself alone; when one has
reached the beginning of seeing with a single eye, loving with a single heart,
enjoying with a single joy; when there can be moments of identity and nothing
is separate save bodies that long for one another. . . . When there is that,
where is the word? There is only the inadequacy of the word that exists.
'We love one
another,' I said.
Sophie nodded.
She picked up a few twigs, and watched her brown fingers break them. She said:
'He's gone away
— where the fighting is. She's safe just now.'
'She's asleep,'
I told her. 'They're both asleep.'
Her eyes came
back to mine, puzzled.
'How do you
know?'
I told her
briefly, as simply as I could. She went on breaking twigs as she listened. Then
she nodded.
'I remember. My
mother said there was something... something about the way you sometimes seemed
to understand her before she spoke. Was that it?'
'I think so. I
think your mother had a little of it, without knowing she had it,' I said.
'It must be a
very wonderful thing to have,' she said, half wistfully. 'Like more eyes,
inside you.'
'Something
like,' I admitted. 'It's difficult to explain. But it isn't all wonderful. It
can hurt a lot sometimes.'
'To be any kind
of deviant is to be hurt — always,' she said. She continued to sit back on her
heels, looking at her hands in her lap, seeing nothing.
'If she were to
give him children, he wouldn't want me any more,' she said at last.
There was still
enough light to catch a glistening on her cheeks.
'Sophie dear,'
I said. 'Are you in love with him — with this spider-man?'
'Oh, don't call
him that — please — we can't any of us help being what we are. His name's
Gordon. He's kind to me, David. He's fond of me. You've got to have as little
as I have to know how much that means. You've never known loneliness. You can't
understand the awful emptiness that's waiting all round us here. I'd have given
him babies gladly, if I could.... I — oh, why do they do that to us? Why didn't
they kill me? It would have been kinder than this . . .'
She sat without
a sound. The tears squeezed out from under the closed lids and ran down her
face. I took her hand between my own.
I remembered
watching. The man with his arm linked in the woman's, the small figure on top
of the pack-horse waving back to me as they disappeared into the trees. Myself
desolate, a kiss still damp on my cheek, a lock tied with a yellow ribbon in my
hand. I looked at her now, and my heart ached.
'Sophie,' I
said. 'Sophie, darling. It's not going to happen. Do
you understand? It won't happen. Rosalind will never let it happen. I know
that.'
She opened her
eyes again, and looked at me through the brimming tears.
'You can't know
a thing like that about another person. You're just trying to—'
'I'm not,
Sophie. I do know. You and I could only know very little about one
another. But with Rosalind it is different: it's part
of what thinking-together means.'
She regarded me
doubtfully.
'Is that really
true? I don't understand—'
'How should
you? But it is true. I could feel what she was feeling about the spi— about that man.'
She went on
looking at me, a trifle uneasily.
'You can't see
what I think?' she inquired, with a touch of anxiety.
'No more than
you can tell what I think,' I assured her. 'It isn't a kind of spying. It's
more as if you could just talk all your thoughts, if you liked — and not talk
them if you wanted them private.'
It was more
difficult trying to explain it to her than it had been to Uncle Axel, but I
kept on struggling to simplify it into words until I suddenly became aware that
the light had gone, and I was talking to a figure I could scarcely see. I broke
off.
'Is it dark
enough now?'
'Yes. It'll be
safe if we go carefully,' she told me. 'Can you walk all right? It isn't far.'
I got up, well
aware of stiffness and bruises, but not of anything worse. She seemed able to
see better in the gloom than I could, and took my hand, to lead the way. We
kept to the trees, but I could see fires twinkling on my left, and realized
that we were skirting the encampment. We kept on round it until we reached the
low cliff that closed the north-west side, and then along the base of that, in
the shadow, for fifty yards or so. There she stopped, and laid my hand on one
of the rough ladders I had seen against the rock face.
'Follow me,'
she whispered, and suddenly whisked upwards.
I climbed more
cautiously until I reached the top of the ladder where it rested against a rock
ledge. Her arm reached out and helped me in.
'Sit down,' she
told me.
The lighter
patch through which I had come disappeared. She moved about, looking for
something. Presently there were sparks as she used a flint and steel. She blew
up the sparks until she was able to light a pair of candles. They were short, fat,
burnt with smoky flames, and smelt abominably, but they enabled me to see the
surroundings.
The place was a
cave about fifteen feet deep and nine wide, cut out of the sandy rock. The
entrance was covered by a skin curtain hooked across it. In one corner of the
inner end there was a flaw in the roof from which water dripped steadily at
about a drop a second. It fell into a wooden bucket; the overflow of the bucket
trickled down a groove for the full length of the cave, and out of the
entrance. In the other inner corner was a mattress of small branches, with
skins and a tattered blanket on it. There were a few bowls and utensils. A
blackened fire-hollow near the entrance, empty now, showed an ingenious
draught-hole drilled to the outer air. The handles of a few knives and other
tools protruded from niches in the walls. A spear, a bow, a leather quiver with
a dozen arrows in it, lay close to the brushwood mattress. There was nothing
much else.
I thought of
the kitchen of the Wenders' cottage. The clean, bright room that had seemed so friendly because it had
no texts on the walls. The candles flickered, sent greasy smoke up to
the roof, and stank.
Sophie dipped a
bowl into the bucket, rummaged a fairly clean bit of rag out of a niche, and
brought it across to me. She washed the blood off my face and out of my hair,
and examined the cause.
'Just
a cut. Not deep,' she
said, reassuringly.
I washed my
hands in the bowl. She tipped the water into the runnel, rinsed the bowl and
put it away.
'You're hungry,
David?' she said.
'Very,' I told
her. I had had nothing to eat all day except during our one brief stop.
'Stay here. I
won't be long,' she instructed, and slipped out under the skin curtain.
I sat looking
at the shadows that danced on the rock walls, listening to the plop-plop-plop
of the drips. And very likely, I told myself, this is luxury, in the Fringes.
'You've got to have as little as I have . . .' Sophie had said, though it had
not been material things that she meant. To escape the forlornness and the
squalor I sought Michael's company.
'Where are you?
What's been happening?' I asked him.
'We've
leaguered for the night,' he told me. 'Too dangerous to go on
in the dark.' He tried to give me a picture of the place as he had seen
it just before sunset, but it might have been a dozen spots along our route.
'It's been slow going all day — tiring, too. They know their woods, these
Fringes people. We've been expecting a real ambush somewhere on the way, but
it's been sniping and harassing all the time. We've lost three killed, but had
seven wounded — only two of them seriously.'
'But you're
still coming on?'
'Yes. The
feeling is that now we do have quite a force here for once, it's a chance to
give the Fringes something that will keep them quiet for some time to come. Besides,
you three are badly wanted. There's a rumour that there are a couple of dozen,
perhaps more, of us scattered about Waknuk and surrounding districts, and you
have to be brought back to identify them.' He paused a moment there, then he went on in a worried, unhappy mood.
'In point of
fact, David, I'm afraid — very much afraid — there is only one.'
'One?'
'Rachel managed to reach me, right at her
limit, very faintly. She says something has happened to Mark.'
'They've caught
him?'
'No. She thinks
not. He'd have let her know if it were that. He's simply stopped. Not a thing
from him in over twenty-four hours now.'
'An
accident perhaps?
Remember Walter Brent — that boy who was killed by a tree? He just stopped like
that.'
'It might be.
Rachel just doesn't know. She's frightened; it leaves her all alone now. She
was right at her limit, and I was almost. Another two or three miles, and we'll
be out of touch.'
'It's queer I
didn't hear at least your side of this,' I told him.
'Probably while
you were knocked out,' he suggested.
'Well, when
'Yes, of
course. I'd forgotten that,' he agreed. 'It will help her a bit.'
A few moments
later a hand came under the curtain, pushing a wooden bowl into the cave-mouth.
Sophie scrambled in after it, and gave it to me. She trimmed up the disgusting
candles and then squatted down on the skin of some unidentifiable animal while
I helped myself with a wooden spoon. An odd dish; it appeared to consist of
several kinds of shoots, diced meat, and crumbled hard-bread, but the result
was not at all bad, and very welcome. I enjoyed it, almost to the last when I
was suddenly smitten in a way that sent a whole spoonful cascading down my
shirt.
I got in a
response at once.
Presently
'Is she safe
now? What was all that thunder and lightning about?' Michael inquired.
'We thought
David was dead. We thought they'd killed him.'
Now I began to
catch Rosalind's thoughts, firming into comprehensible shapes out of a sort of
swirl. I was humbled, bowled over, happy, and distressed all at the same time.
I could not think much more clearly in response, for all I tried. It was
Michael who put an end to that.
'This is
scarcely decent for third parties,' he observed. 'When you two can disentangle
yourselves there are other things to be discussed.' He paused. 'Now,' he
continued,' what is the position?'
We sorted it
out. Rosalind and
'Very well,'
said Michael. 'You say this spider-man seems to be in some sort of authority,
and that he has come forward towards the fighting. You've no idea whether he
intends to join in the fighting himself, or whether he is simply making
tactical dispositions? You see, if it is the latter he
may come back at any time.'
'I've no idea,'
I told him.
Rosalind came
in abruptly, as near to hysteria as I had known her.
'I'm frightened
of him. He's a different kind. Not like us. Not the same sort at all. It would
be outrageous — like an animal. I couldn't, ever ... If he tries to take me I
shall kill myself. . . .'
Michael threw
himself on that like a pail of ice-water.
'You won't do
anything so damned silly. You'll kill the spider-man, if necessary.' With an
air of having settled that point conclusively he turned his attention
elsewhere. At his full range he directed a question to
'You still
think you can reach us?'
The reply came
still from a long distance, but clearly and without effort now. It was a calmly
confident 'Yes'.
'When?' Michael asked.
There was a
pause before the reply, as if for consultation, then:
'In not more
than sixteen hours from now,' she told him, just as confidently. Michael's scepticism diminished. For the first time he allowed
himself to admit the possibility of her help.
'Then it is a
question of ensuring that you three are kept safe for that long,' he told us,
meditatively.
'Wait a minute.
Just hold on a bit,' I told them.
I looked up at
Sophie. The smoky candles gave enough light to show that she was watching my
face intently, a little uneasily.
'You were
"talking" to that girl?' she said.
'And
my sister. They're
awake now,' I told her. 'They are in the tent, and being guarded by an albino.
It seems odd.'
'Odd?' she
inquired.
'Well, one
would have thought a woman in charge of them...'
'This is the
Fringes,' she reminded me with bitterness.
'It — oh, I
see,' I said awkwardly. 'Well, the point is this: do you think there is any way
they can be got out of there before he comes back? It seems to me that now is
the time. Once he does come back . . .' I shrugged, keeping my eyes on hers.
She turned her
head away and contemplated the candles for some moments. Then she nodded.
'Yes. That
would be best for all of us — all of us, except him . . .' she added, half
sadly. 'Yes, I think it can be done.'
'Straight
away?'
She nodded
again. I picked up the spear that lay by the couch, and weighed it in my hand.
It was somewhat light, but well balanced. She looked at it, and shook her head.
'You must stay
here, David,' she told me.
'But—' I began.
'No. If you
were to be seen there would be an alarm. No one will take any notice of me
going to his tent, even if they do see me.'
There was sense
in that. I laid the spear down, though with reluctance.
'But can you—?'
'Yes,' she said
decisively.
She got up and
went to one of the niches. From it she pulled out a knife. The broad blade was
clean and bright. It looked as if it might once have been part of the kitchen
furnishings of a raided farm. She slipped it into the belt of her skirt,
leaving only the dark handle protruding. Then she turned and looked at me for a
long moment.
'David—' she
began, tentatively.
'What?' I
asked.
She changed her
mind. In a different tone she said:
'Will you tell
them no noise? Whatever happens, no sounds at all? Tell them to follow me, and
have dark pieces of cloth ready to wrap round themselves. Will you be able to
make all that clear to them?'
'Yes,' I told
her. 'But I wish you'd let me—'
She shook her
head and cut me short.
'No, David.
It'd only increase the risk. You don't know the place.'
She pinched out
the candles, and unhooked the curtain. For a moment I saw her silhouetted
against the paler darkness of the entrance, then she
was gone.
I gave her
instructions to Rosalind, and we impressed on
I could not sit
still for long like that. I went to the entrance and put my head out into the
night. There were a few cooking fires glowing among the shacks; people moving
about, too, for the glows blinked occasionally as figures crossed in front of
them. There was a murmur of voices, a slight, composite stir of small
movements, a night-bird calling harshly a little distance away, the cry of an
animal still farther off. Nothing more.
We were all
waiting. A small shapeless surge of excitement escaped for a moment from
Then
from Rosalind a reassuring 'it's-all-right' shape, but with a curious secondary
quality of shock to it.
It seemed wiser not to distract their attention now by asking the reason for
that.
I listened.
There was no alarm; no change in the conglomerate murmur. It seemed a long time
until I heard the crunch of grit underfoot, directly below me. The poles of the
ladder scraped faintly on the rock edge as the weight came on them. I moved
back into the cave out of the way. Rosalind was asking silently, a little
doubtfully:
'Is this right?
Are you there, David?'
'Yes. Come
along up,' I told them.
One figure
appeared dimly outlined in the opening. Then another, smaller
form, then a third. The opening was blotted out. Presently the candles
were alight again.
Rosalind, and
The two girls studied one another,
curiously and warily. Sophie's eyes travelled over
Rosalind, in her russet woollen dress with its brown
cross appliqué, and rested for a moment on her leather shoes. She looked down
at her own soft moccasins, then at her short, tattered skirt. In the course of
her self-inspection she discovered new stains that had not been on her bodice
half an hour before. Without any embarrassment she pulled it off and began to
soak them out in the cold water. To Rosalind she said:
'You must get
rid of that cross. Hers, as well,' she added, glancing at
Rosalind took
it, doubtfully. She looked at it, and then down at the cross which had been
displayed on every dress she had ever worn. Sophie watched her.
'I used to wear
one,' she said. 'It didn't help me, either.'
Rosalind looked
at me, still a little doubtfully. I nodded.
'They don't
much like insistence on the true image in these parts. Very likely it's
dangerous.' I glanced at Sophie.
'It is,' she
said. 'It's not only an identification; it's a
challenge.'
Rosalind lifted
the knife and began, half reluctantly, to pick at the stitches.
I said to
Sophie: 'What now? Oughtn't we to try to get as far away as we can before it's light?'
Sophie, still dabbling her bodice, shook her head.
'No. They may
find him any time. When they do, there'll be a search. They'll think that you
killed him, and then all three of you took to the woods. They'll never think of
looking for you here, why should they? But they'll rake the whole neighbourhood for you.'
'You mean we
stay here?' I asked her. She nodded.
'For
two, perhaps three, days.
Then, when they've called off the search, I'll see you clear.'
Rosalind looked
up from her unpicking thoughtfully.
'Why are you
doing all this for us?' she asked.
I explained to
her about Sophie and the spider-man far more quickly than it could have been
put into words. It did not seem to satisfy her entirely. She and Sophie went on
regarding one another steadily in the flickering light.
Sophie dropped
the bodice into the water with a plop. She stood up slowly. She bent towards
Rosalind, locks of dark hair dangling down on her naked breasts, her eyes
narrowed.
'Damn you,' she
said viciously. 'Leave me alone, damn you.'
Rosalind became
taut, ready for any movement. I shifted so that I could jump between them if
necessary. The tableau held for long seconds. Sophie, uncared for, half naked
in her ragged skirt, dangerously poised; Rosalind, in her brown dress with the
unpicked left arm of the cross hanging forward, with her bronze hair shining in
the candlelight, her fine features upturned, with eyes alert. The crisis
passed, and the tension lost pitch. The violence died out of Sophie's eyes, but
she did not move. Her mouth twisted a little and she trembled. Harsh and
bitter:
'Damn you!' she
said again. 'Go on, laugh at me, God damn your lovely
face. Laugh at me because I do want him, me!' She gave a queer,
choked laugh herself. 'And what's the use? Oh, God, what's the use? If he
weren't in love with you, what good would I be to him — like this?'
She clenched
her hands to her face and stood for a moment, shaking all over, then she turned and flung herself on the brushwood bed.
We stared into
the shadowy corner. One moccasin had fallen off. I could see the brown, grubby
sole of her foot, and the line of six toes. I turned to Rosalind. Her eyes met
mine, contrite and appalled. Instinctively she made to get up. I shook my head,
and hesitantly she sank back.
The only sounds
in the cave were the hopeless, abandoned sobbing, and plop-plop-plop of the
drips.
'Don't,' she
said. 'Please don't.'
There was a
startled catch in the sobbing. A pause, then a brown arm reached out round
I awoke
reluctantly, stiff and cold from lying on the hard rock floor. Almost
immediately there was Michael:
'Did you mean
to sleep all day?'
I looked up and
saw a chink of daylight beneath the skin curtain.
'What's the
time?' I asked him.
'About eight,
I'd guess. It's been light for three hours, and we've fought a battle already.'
'What
happened?' I inquired.
'We got wind of
an ambush, so we sent an outflanking party. It clashed with the reserve force
that was waiting to follow up the ambush. Apparently they thought it was our
main body; anyway, the result was a rout, at a cost of two or three wounded to
us.'
'So now you're
coming on?'
'Yes. I suppose
they'll rally somewhere, but they've melted away now. No opposition at all.'
That was by no
means as one could have wished. I explained our position, and that we certainly
could not hope to emerge from the cave in daylight, unseen. On the other hand,
if we stayed, and the place were to be captured, it
would undoubtedly be searched, and we should be found.
'What about
'You can
count on us.'
'Your estimated
time is the same? You've not been delayed?' Michael asked.
'Just the same,'
she assured us. 'Approximately eight and a half hours from now.' Then the
slightly huffy note dropped, a tinge almost of awe coloured
her thoughts.
'This is a
dreadful country indeed. We have seen
Michael came
in, asking:
'David, what
about Rachel?'
I remembered
his anxiety the previous night.
'
'We want to
know if she has heard anything of Mark since she talked to Michael.'
'No,' she said.
'She hasn't heard anything. She's very miserable, I think. She wants to know if
Michael is all right.'
'Tell her he's
quite all right — we all are. Tell her we love her, we're terribly sorry she's
all alone, but she must be brave — and careful. She must try not to let anyone
see she's worried.'
'She
understands. She says she'll try.'
'Did she tell
you that?' I asked.
'We'd better
not say anything about it,' I decided. 'It's not our business. A person's
behind-thinks aren't really meant for other people, so we must just pretend not
to have noticed them.'
'All right,'
I hoped it was
all right. When I thought it over I wasn't at all sure that I cared much for
this business of detecting 'behind-thinks.' It left one a trifle uneasy, and
retrospective...
Sophie woke up
a few minutes later. She seemed calm, competent again, as though the last
night's storm had blown itself out. She sent us to the back of the cave and
unhooked the curtain to let the daylight in. Presently she had a fire going in
the hollow. The greater part of the smoke from it went out of the entrance; the
rest did at least have the compensation that it helped to obscure the interior
of the cave from any outside observation. She ladled measures from two or three
bags into an iron pot, added some water, and put the pot on the fire.
'Watch it,' she
instructed Rosalind, and then disappeared down the outside ladder.
Some twenty
minutes later her head reappeared. She threw a couple of discs of hard bread
over the sill and climbed in after them. She went to the pot, stirred it, and
sniffed at the contents.
'No trouble?' I
asked her.
'Not about
that,' she said. 'They found him. They think you did it. There was a search —
of a sort — early this morning. It wasn't as much of a search as it would have
been with more men. But now they've got other things to worry about. The men
who went to the fighting are coming back in twos and threes. What happened, do
you know?'
I told of the
ambush that had failed, and the resulting disappearance of resistance.
'How far have
they come now?' she wanted to know.
I inquired of
Michael.
'We're just
clear of forest for the first time, and into rough country,' he told me.
I handed it on
to Sophie. She nodded. 'Three hours, or a bit less, perhaps, to the
river-bank,' she said.
She ladled the
species of porridge out of the pot into bowls. It tasted better than it looked.
The bread was less palatable. She broke a disc of it with a stone, and it had
to be dipped in water before one could eat it.
'Michael, is my
father there?'
It took him off
guard. I caught his 'yes' forming before he could suppress it.
I looked at
Suspicion
insulated one curiously little against the shock of knowledge. I could recall
my father's voice, doctrinaire, relentless. I knew the expression his face
would be wearing, as if I had seen him when he spoke.
'A baby — a
baby which . . . would grow to breed, and breeding, spread pollution until all
around us there would be mutants and abominations. That has happened in places
where the will and faith were weak, but here it shall never happen.'
And then my
Aunt Harriet:
'I shall pray
God to send charity into this hideous world....'
Poor Aunt
Harriet, with her prayers as futile as her hopes. . . .
A world in
which a man could come upon such a hunt himself! What kind of a man?
Rosalind rested
her hand on my arm. Sophie looked up. When she saw my face her expression
changed.
'What is it?'
she asked.
Rosalind told
her. Her eyes widened with horror. She looked from me to
'Purity . . .'
I said. 'The will of the Lord. Honour
thy father . . . Am I supposed to forgive him! Or to try to
kill him?'
The answer
startled me. I was not aware that I had sent out the thought at large.
'Let him be,' came the severe, clear pattern from the Sealand
woman. 'Your work is to survive. Neither his kind, nor his kind of thinking
will survive long. They are the crown of creation, they are ambition fulfilled
— they have nowhere more to go. But life is change, that
is how it differs from the rocks, change is its very nature. Who, then, were
the recent lords of creation, that they should expect
to remain unchanged?
'The living
form defies evolution at its peril; if it does not adapt, it will be broken.
The idea of completed man is the supreme vanity: the finished image is a
sacrilegious myth.
'The Old People
brought down Tribulation, and were broken into fragments by it. Your father and
his kind are a part of those fragments. They have become history without being
aware of it. They are determined still that there is a final form to defend:
soon they will attain the stability they strive for, in the only form it is
granted — a place among the fossils. . . .'
Her patterns
became less harsh and decisive. A kindlier shaping softened them, but, for all
that, she seemed to be in a mood which required an oracular style of
presentation, for she went on:
'There is
comfort in a mother's breast, but there has to be a weaning. The attainment of
independence, the severing of ties, is, at best, a bleak process for both
sides; but it is necessary, even though each may grudge it and hold it against
the other. The cord has been cut at the other end already; it will only be a
futile entanglement if you do not cut it at your end, too.
'Whether
harsh intolerance and bitter rectitude are the armour
worn over fear and disappointment, or whether they are the festival-dress of
the sadist, they cover an enemy of the life-force. The difference in kind can be bridged
only by self-sacrifice: his self-sacrifice, for yours would bridge
nothing. So, there is the severance. We have a new world to conquer: they have
only a lost cause to lose.'
She ceased,
leaving me somewhat bemused. Rosalind, too, looked as if she were still
catching up on it.
Sophie regarded
us curiously. She said:
'You give an
outsider an uncomfortable feeling. Is it something I could know?'
'Well—' I
began, and paused, wondering how to put it.
'She said we're
not to bother about my father because he doesn't understand — I think,'
observed
'She . . .?'
Sophie inquired.
I remembered
that she knew nothing of the Sealand people.
'Oh, a friend
of
Sophie was
sitting close to the entrance, the rest of us farther back, out of sight from
the ground. Presently she looked out and down.
'There are
quite a lot of the men back now — most of them I should think. Some of them are
collected round Gordon's tent, most of the others are
drifting that way. He must be back, too.'
She went on
regarding the scene while she finished the contents of her bowl. Then she put
it down beside her.
'I'll see what
I can find out,' she said, and disappeared down the ladder.
She was gone
fully an hour. I risked a quick look-out once or twice, and could see the
spider-man in front of his tent. He seemed to be dividing his men up into
parties and instructing them by drawing diagrams in the bare earth.
'What's
happening?' I asked Sophie as she returned. 'What's the plan?'
She hesitated,
looking doubtful.
'For goodness
sake,' I told her, 'we want your people to win, don't we? But we don't
want Michael to get hurt, if it can be helped.'
'We're going to
ambush them this side of the river,' she said.
'Let them get
across?'
'There's
nowhere to make a stand on the other side,' she explained.
I suggested to
Michael that he should hang back at the riverside, or, if he could not do that,
he might fall off during the crossing and get carried away downstream. He said
he'd bear the proposal in mind, but try to think of a less uncomfortable means
of delay.
A few minutes
later a voice called Sophie's name from below. She whispered:
'Keep back.
It's him,' and sped across and down the ladder.
After that
nothing happened for more than an hour, when the Sealand
woman came through again:
'Reply to me,
please. We need a sharper reading on you now. Just keep on sending numbers.'
'Enough,' the Sealand woman told her. 'Wait a moment.' Presently she
added: ' Better than we hoped. We can cut that estimate by an hour.'
Another half
hour went by. I sneaked a few quick glimpses outside. The encampment looked all
but deserted now. There was no one to be seen among the shacks but a few older
women.
'In sight of
the river,' Michael reported.
Fifteen to
twenty minutes passed. Then Michael again:
'They've muffed
it, the fools. We've spotted a couple of them moving on the top of the cliffs.
Not that it makes a lot of difference, anyway — that cleft's much too obvious a
trap. Council of war now.'
The council was
evidently brief. In less than ten minutes he was through again:
'Plan. We retreat to cover immediately opposite
the cleft. There, at a gap in the cover, we leave half a dozen men occasionally
passing and repassing in view to give the impression
of more, and light fires to suggest that we are held
up. Rest of the force is splitting to make detours and two crossings, one
upstream and one down. We then pincer-in behind the cleft.
Better inform, if you can.'
The encampment
was no great distance behind the river cliffs. It looked likely that we might
be caught within the pincers. With so few about now,
and only women, as far as I could see, we should very likely be able to get
safely across the place and into the trees. ... Or would that carry us into the
path of one of the pincer forces? I looked out again, prospecting, and the
first thing I noticed was that a dozen of the women now carried bows and were
sticking arrows in the ground to be handy. I changed my mind about a sprint
across the encampment.
Inform, Michael
had said. And a good idea, too. But
how? Even if I should risk leaving Rosalind and
I very much
wished Sophie would return: and went on wishing that for an hour or so.
'We're across
the river downstream from you. No opposition,' Michael told us.
We went on
waiting.
Suddenly a gun
went off somewhere in the woods, on the left. Three or four more shots followed, then silence, then another two.
A few minutes
later a crowd of ragged men with quite a number of women among them came
pouring out of the woods, leaving the scene of their intended ambush and making
towards the firing. They were a woebegone, miserable lot, a few of them visibly
deviants, but most of them looking simply the wrecks of normal human beings. I
could not see more than three or four guns in all. The rest had bows, and a
number had short spears scabbarded at their backs as
well. The spider-man stood out among them, taller than the rest, and close
beside him I could see Sophie, with a bow in her hand. Whatever degree of
organization there may have been had clearly disintegrated.
'What's
happening?' I asked Michael. 'Was that your lot shooting?'
'No. That was
the other party. They're trying to draw the Fringes men across their way so
that we can come in from the opposite side and take them in the rear.'
'They're
succeeding,' I told him.
The sound of
more firing came from the same direction as before. A clamour
and shouting broke out. A few spent arrows dropped into the left-hand end of
the clearing. Some men came running back out of the
trees.
Suddenly there
was a strong, clear question:
'You're still
safe?'
We were all
three lying on the floor in the front part of the cave now. We had a view of
what was going on, and there was little enough chance of anyone noticing our
heads, or bothering about us if he did. The way things were going was plain
even to
'Steady, child,
steady! We're coming,' admonished the Sealand woman.
More arrows
fell into the left-hand end of the clearing, and more ragged figures appeared
in rapid retreat. They ran back, dodging as they came, and took cover among the
tents and hovels. Still more followed, with arrows spitting out of the woods
after them. The Fringes men crouched behind their bits of cover, bobbing up now
and then to take quick shots at figures scarcely visible between the trees.
Unexpectedly a
shower of arrows flew in from the other end of the clearing. The tattered men
and women discovered themselves to be between two fires, and started to panic.
Most of them jumped to their feet and ran for the shelter of the caves. I got
ready to push the ladder away if any of them should try to climb into ours.
Half a dozen
horsemen appeared, riding out of the trees on the right. I noticed the
spider-man. He was standing by his tent, bow in hand, watching the riders.
Sophie, beside him, was tugging at his ragged jacket, urging him to run towards
the caves. He brushed her back with his long right arm, never taking his eyes
from the emerging horsemen. His right hand went back to the string, and held
the bow half-drawn. His eyes kept on searching among the horsemen.
Suddenly he
stiffened. His bow came up like a flash, bent to its full. He loosed. The shaft
took my father in the left of his chest. He jerked, and fell back on
The spider-man
threw down his bow, and turned. With a scoop of his long arms he snatched up
Sophie, and began to run. His spindly legs had not made more than three
prodigious strides when a couple of arrows took him simultaneously in the back
and side, and he fell.
Sophie
struggled to her feet and ran on by herself. An arrow pierced right through her
upper arm, but she held on, with it lodged there. Then another took her in the
back of the neck. She dropped in mid-stride, and her body slid along in the
dust....
'What's that?'
she asked. 'What's that queer noise?'
The
Sealand woman came in, calm, confidence-inspiring.
'Don't be
frightened. We're coming. It's all right. Stay just where you are.'
I could hear
the voice now. A strange drumming sound, gradually swelling.
One could not place it; it seemed to be filling everywhere, emanating from
nowhere.
More men were
coming out of the woods into the clearing, most of them on horseback. Many of
them I recognized, men I had known all my life, all joined together now to hunt
us down. Most of the Fringes people had bolted into the caves, and were
shooting a little more effectively from their cover.
Suddenly one of
the horsemen shouted and pointed upwards.
I looked up,
too. The sky was no longer clear. Something like a
bank of mist, but shot with quick iridescent flashes, hung over us. Above it,
as if through a veil, I could make out one of the strange, fish-shaped craft
that I had dreamt of in my childhood, hanging in the sky. The mist made it
indistinct in detail, but what I could see of it was just as I remembered: a
white, glistening body with something half-invisible whizzing round above it.
It was growing bigger and louder as it dropped towards us.
As I looked
down again I saw a few glistening threads, like cobwebs, drifting past the
mouth of the cave. Then more and more of them, giving sudden gleams as they
twisted in the air and caught the light.
The shooting
fell off. All over the clearing the invaders lowered their bows and guns and
stared upwards. They goggled incredulously, then those
on the left jumped to their feet with shouts of alarm, and turned to run. Over
on the right the horses pranced with fright, whinnied, and began to bolt in all
directions. In a few seconds the whole place was in chaos. Fleeing men cannoned
into one another, panic-stricken horses trampled through the flimsy shacks, and
tripped on the guy-ropes of tents flinging their riders headlong.
I sought for
Michael.
'Here!' I told
him. 'This way. Come along over here.'
'Coming,' he
told me.
I spotted him
then, just getting to his feet beside a prone horse that was kicking out
violently. He looked up towards our cave, found us, and waved a hand. He turned
to glance up at the machine in the sky. It was still sinking gently down,
perhaps a couple of hundred feet above us now. Underneath it the queer mist
eddied in a great swirl.
'Coming,'
repeated Michael.
He turned
towards us and started. Then he paused and picked at something on his arm. His
hand stayed there.
'Queer,' he
told us. 'Like a cobweb, but sticky. I can't get my hand . . .'His thought
suddenly became panicky. 'It's stuck. I can't move it!'
The Sealand woman came in, coolly advising:
'Don't
struggle. You'll exhaust yourself. Lie down if you can. Keep calm. Don't move.
Just wait. Keep still, on the ground, so that it can't get round you.'
I saw Michael
obey the instruction, though his thoughts were by no means confident. Suddenly
I realized that all over the clearing men were clawing at themselves, trying to
get the stuff off, but where their hands touched it they stuck. They were
struggling with it like flies in treacle, and all the time more strands were
floating down on them. Most of them fought with it for a few seconds and then
tried to run for shelter of the trees. They'd take about three steps before
their feet stuck together, and they pitched on to the ground. The threads
already lying there trapped them further. More threads fell lightly down on them
as they struggled and thrashed about until presently they could struggle no
more. The horses were no better off. I saw one back into a small bush. When it
moved forward it tore the bush out by the roots. The bush swung round and
touched the other hind leg. The legs became inseparable. The horse fell over
and lay kicking — for a while.
A descending
strand wafted across the back of my own hand. I told Rosalind and
'Here they are,'
I looked up to
see the gleaming white fish-shape settling into the middle of the clearing. Its
descent swirled the floating filaments in a cloud about it and thrust a waft of
air outwards. I saw some of the strands in front of the cave-mouth hesitate,
undulate, and then come drifting inwards. Involuntarily I closed my eyes. There
was a light gossamer touch on my face. When I tried to open my eyes again I
found I could not.
It needs a lot of resolution to lie
perfectly still while you feel more and more sticky strands falling with a
feathery, tickling touch across your face and hands: and still more when you
begin to feel that those which landed first press on your skin like fine cords,
and tug gently at it.
I caught
Michael wondering with some alarm if this was not a trick, and whether he might
not have been better off if he had tried to run for it. Before I could reply
the Sealand woman came in reassuring us again,
telling us to keep calm and have patience. Rosalind emphasized that to
'Has it got
you, too?' I asked her.
'Yes,' she
said. 'The wind from the machine blew it right into the cave —
The throbbing
and the whirring which had dominated everything grew less as the machine slowed
down. Presently it stopped. The succeeding silence was shocking. There were a
few half-muffled calls and smothered sounds, but little more. I understood the
reasons for that. Strands had fallen across my own mouth. I could not have
opened it to call out if I wanted to.
The waiting
seemed interminable. My skin crawled under the touch of the stuff, and the pull
of it was becoming painful.
The Sealand woman inquired: 'Michael? – Keep counting to guide
me to you.'
Michael started
counting, in figure shapes. They were steady until the one and the two of his
twelve wavered and dissolved into a pattern of relief and thankfulness. In the
silence that had now fallen I could hear him say in words: 'They're in that
cave there, that one.'
There was a
creak from the ladder, a gritting of its poles against the ledge, and presently
a slight hissing noise. A dampness fell on my face and
hands, and the skin began to lose its puckered feeling. I tried to open my eyes
again; they resisted, but gave slowly. There was a sticky feeling about the
lids as I raised them.
Close in front
of me, standing on the upper rungs of the ladder, and leaning inwards, was a
figure entirely hidden in a shiny white suit. There were still filaments
leisurely adrift in the air, but when they fell on the headpiece or shoulders
of the white suit they did not stick. They slithered off and wafted gently on
their downward way. I could see nothing of the suit's wearer but a pair of eyes
looked at me through small, transparent windows. In a white-gloved hand was a
metal bottle, with a fine spray hissing from it. 'Turn over,' came the woman's
thought. I turned, and she played the spray up and down the front of my
clothes. Then she climbed the last two or three rungs, stepped over me where I
lay and made her way towards Rosalind and Petra at the back of the cave,
spraying as she went. Michael's head and shoulders appeared above the sill. He,
too, was bedewed with spray, and the few vagrant strands that settled him lay
glistening for a moment before they dissolved. I sat up and looked past him.
The white
machine rested in the middle of the clearing. The device on top of it had
ceased to revolve, and now that it was observable, seemed to be a sort of
conical spiral, built up in a number of spaced sections from some almost
transparent material. There were glazed windows in the side of the fish-shaped
body, and a door stood open.
The clearing
itself looked as if a fantastic number of spiders had spun there with all their
might and main. The place was festooned with threads, which appeared more white
than glossy now: it took a moment or two of feeling something was wrong with
them before one perceived that they failed to move in the breeze as webs would.
And not only they, but everything was motionless, petrified.
The forms of a
number of men, and horses, too, were scattered among the shacks. They were as
unmoving as the rest.
A sudden sharp
cracking came from the right. I looked over there, just in time to see a young
tree break off a foot from the ground, and fall. Then another movement caught
the corner of my eye — a bush slowly leaning over. Its roots came out of the
ground as I watched. Another bush moved. A shack crumpled in on itself and
collapsed, and another. ... It was uncanny and alarming. . . .
Back in the
cave there was a sigh of relief from Rosalind. I got up and went to her, with
Michael following.
'That was very
horrid.'
Her eyes dwelt
reprovingly and curiously on the white-suited figure. The woman made a few
final, all-encompassing passes with her spray, then pulled off her gloves and
lifted back her hood. She regarded us: we frankly stared at her.
Her eyes were
large, with irises more brown than green, and fringed with long, deep-gold
lashes. Her nose was straight, but her nostrils curved with the perfection of a
sculpture. Her mouth was, perhaps, a little wide; the chin beneath it was
rounded, but not soft. Her hair was just a little darker than Rosalind's, and,
astonishingly in a woman, it was short. Cut off nearly level with her jaw.
But more than
anything it was the lightness of her face that made us stare. It was not pallor, it was simply fairness, like new cream, and with
cheeks that might have been dusted with pink petals. There was scarcely a line
in its smoothness, it seemed all new and perfect, as
if neither wind nor rain had ever touched her. We found it hard to believe that
any real, living person could look like that, so untouched, so unflawed.
For she was no
girl in a first tender blossoming, unmistakably she was a woman — thirty,
perhaps; one could not tell. She was sure of herself, with a serenity of
confidence which made Rosalind's self-reliance seem almost bravado.
She took us in,
and then fixed her attention upon
There was an
immensely complex pattern which compounded pleasure, satisfaction, achievement,
relief, approval, and, most surprisingly to me, a touch of
something very like awe. The intermixture was subtle beyond
Then, after a
few moments, her expression relaxed; she smiled and chuckled. Evidently
something was passing between them, but it was of a quality, or on a level,
that did not reach me at all. I caught Rosalind's eye, but she simply shook her
head and watched.
The Sealand woman bent down and picked
'It was worth
while,' she said in words, but words so curiously pronounced that I scarcely
understood them at first. 'Yes. Certainly, it was worth while!'
She slipped
into thought-forms, much easier to follow than her words.
'It was not
simple to get permission to come. Such an immense distance: more than twice as
far as any of us has been before. So costly to send the ship: they could
scarcely believe it would be worth it. But it will be . . .' She looked at
'She has still
a great deal to learn, but we will give her the best teachers, and then, one
day, she will be teaching them.'
She sat down on
Sophie's bed of twigs and skins. Against the thrown-back white hood, her
beautiful head looked as though it were framed by a halo. She studied each of
us thoughtfully in turn, and seemed satisfied. She nodded.
'With one
another's help, you have managed to get quite a long way, too; but you'll find
that there is a lot more we can teach you.' She took hold of
It was as much
a statement as a question, and she checked herself in the act of rising, to
look at him inquiringly.
'There is still
Rachel,' he explained.
The Sealand woman considered.
'I'm not sure —
Wait a minute,' she told him.
She was
suddenly in communication with someone on board the machine outside, at a speed
and on a level where I could make almost nothing of it. Presently she shook her
head regretfully.
'I was afraid
of that,' she said. 'I am sorry, but we cannot include her.'
'It wouldn't
take long. It isn't far — not for your flying machine,' Michael insisted.
Again she shook
her head.
'I am sorry,'
she said again. 'Of course we would if we could, but it is a technical matter.
You see, the journey was longer than we expected. There were some dreadful
parts that we dare not cross, even at great height: we had to go far round
them. Also, because of what was happening here, we had to come faster than we
had intended.' She paused, seeming to wonder whether she were
attempting an explanation beyond the understanding of such primitives as we.
'The machine,' she told us, 'uses fuel. The more weight it has to carry, and
the faster it travels, the more of this fuel it uses, and now we have only just
enough of it left to get us back, if we go carefully. If we were to go to
Waknuk and make another landing and take-off there, and try to carry
four of you, as well as Petra, we should use up all our fuel before we could
reach home. That would mean that we should fall into the sea, and drown. Three
of you from here we can just manage with safety; four, and the extra landing, we
can't.'
There was a
pause while we appreciated the situation. She had made it clear enough, and she
sat back, a motionless figure in her gleaming white suit, her knees drawn up
and her hands clasped round them, waiting sympathetically and patiently for us
to accept the facts.
In the pause
one became aware of the uncanniness of the silence
all about us. There was not a sound to be heard now.
Not a movement.
Even the leaves on the trees were unable to rustle. A sudden shock of
realization jerked a question from Rosalind:
'They're not –
they're not all – dead? I didn't understand. I thought. . .'
'Yes,' the Sealand woman told her simply. 'They're all dead. The
plastic threads contract as they dry. A man who struggles and entangles himself
soon becomes unconscious. It is more merciful than your arrows and spears.'
Rosalind
shivered. Perhaps I did, too. There was an unnerving quality about it —
something quite different from the fatal issue of a man-to-man fight, or from
the casualty roll of an ordinary battle. We were puzzled, too, by the Sealand woman, for there was no
callousness in her mind, nor any great concern either: just a slight
distaste, as if for an unavoidable, but unexceptional, necessity. She perceived
our confusion, and shook her head reprovingly.
'It is not
pleasant to kill any creature,' she agreed, 'but to pretend that one can live
without doing so is self-deception. There has to be meat in the dish, there
have to be vegetables forbidden to flower, seeds forbidden to germinate; even
the cycles of microbes must be sacrificed for us to continue our cycles. It is
neither shameful nor shocking that it should be so: it is simply a part of the
great revolving wheel of natural economy. And just as we have to keep ourselves
alive in these ways, so, too, we have to preserve our species against other
species that wish to destroy it — or else fail in our trust.
'The unhappy
Fringes people were condemned through no act of their own to a life of squalor
and misery — there could be no future for them. As for those who condemned them
— well, that, too, is the way of it. There have been lords of life before, you
know. Did you ever hear of the great lizards? When the time came for them to be
superseded they had to pass away.
'Sometime there
will come a day when we ourselves shall have to give place to a new thing. Very
certainly we shall struggle against the inevitable just as these remnants of
the Old People do. We shall try with all our strength to grind it back into the
earth from which it is emerging, for treachery to one's own species must always
seem a crime. We shall force it to prove itself, and when it does,
we shall go; as, by the same process, these are going.
'In loyalty to
their kind they cannot tolerate our rise; in loyalty to our kind, we cannot
tolerate their obstruction.
'If the process
shocks you, it is because you have not been able to stand off and, knowing what
you are, see what a difference in kind must mean. Your minds are
confused by your ties and your upbringing: you are still half-thinking of them
as the same kind as yourselves. That is why you are shocked. And that is why
they have you at a disadvantage, for they are not confused. They are alert,
corporately aware of danger to their species. They can see quite well that if
it is to survive they have not only to preserve it from deterioration, but they
must protect it from the even more serious threat of the superior variant.
'For ours is
a superior variant, and we are only just beginning. We are able to
think-together and understand one another as they never could; we are beginning
to understand how to assemble and apply the composite team-mind to a problem —
and where may that not take us one day? We are not shut away into individual
cages from which we can reach out only with inadequate words. Understanding one
another, we do not need laws which treat living forms as though they were as
indistinguishable as bricks; we could never commit the enormity of imagining
that we could mint ourselves into equality and identity, like stamped coins; we
do not mechanistically attempt to hammer ourselves into geometrical patterns of
society, or policy; we are not dogmatists teaching God how He should have ordered
the world.
'The essential
quality of life is living; the essential quality of living is change; change is
evolution: and we are part of it.
'The static,
the enemy of change, is the enemy of life, and therefore our implacable enemy.
If you still feel shocked, or doubtful, just consider some of the things that
these people, who have taught you to think of them as your fellows, have done.
I know little about your lives, but the pattern scarcely varies wherever a
pocket of the older species is trying to preserve itself. And consider, too,
what they intended to do to you, and why...'
As before, I
found her rhetorical style somewhat overwhelming, but in general I was able to
follow her line of thought. I did not have the power of detachment that could
allow me to think of myself as another species - nor am I sure that I have it
yet. In my thinking we were still no more than unhappy minor variants; but I
could look back and consider why we had been forced to flee. . . .
I glanced at
Any of those
might have been a picture of
'
'Say first that
whatever she may hear, we're all alive and quite all right.'
'Yes,' said
'Oh dear,' she
said, with a touch of disgust. 'She's gone all muddled up and crying again. She
does seem to cry an awful lot, that girl, doesn't she? I don't see why. Her
behind-thinks aren't miserable at all this time: it's sort of happy-crying.
Isn't that silly?'
All of us
looked at Michael, without open comment.
'Well,' he
said, defensively, 'you two are proscribed as outlaws, so neither of you can
go.'
'But, Michael
—' Rosalind began.
'She's quite alone,'
said Michael. 'Would you leave David alone there, or would David leave you?'
There was no
answer to that.
'You said
"fetch her away,"' observed Rosalind.
'That's what I
meant. We could stay in Waknuk for a while, waiting for the day when we,
or perhaps our children, would be found out.... That's not good enough....
'Or we could
come to the Fringes.' He looked round the cave and out across the clearing with
distaste. 'That's not good enough either.
'Rachel
deserves just as well as any of the rest of us. All right, then; since the
machine can't take her, someone's got to bring her.'
The Sealand woman was leaning forward, watching him. There was
sympathy and admiration in her eyes, but she shook her head gently.
'It's a very
long way — and there's that awful, impassable country in between,' she reminded
him.
'I know that,'
he acknowledged. 'But the world is round, so there must be another way to get
there.'
'It would be
hard — and certainly dangerous,' she warned.
'No more
dangerous than to stay in Waknuk. Besides, how could we stay now, knowing that
there is a place for people like us, that there is somewhere to go.
'Knowing makes all the difference. Knowing that
we're not just pointless freaks — a few bewildered deviations hoping to save
their own skins. It's the difference between just trying to keep alive, and
having something to live for.'
The Sealand woman thought for a moment or two, then she raised her eyes to meet his again.
'When you do
reach us, Michael,' she told him, 'you can be very sure of your place with us.'
The door shut
with a thud. The machine started to vibrate and blow a great dusty wind across
the clearing. Through the windows we could see Michael bracing himself against
it, his clothes flapping. Even the deviational trees about the clearing were
stirring in their webby shrouds.
The floor
tilted beneath us. There was a slight lurch, then the
ground began to drop away as we climbed faster and faster into the evening sky.
Soon we steadied, pointed towards the south-west.
'It's awfully
wonderful,' she announced. 'I can see for simply miles and miles and miles. Oh,
Michael, you do look funny and tiny down there!'
The lone,
miniature figure in the clearing waved its arm.
'Just at
present,' Michael's thought came up to us, 'I seem to be feeling a bit funny
and tiny down here,
It was just as
I had seen it in my dreams. A brighter sun than Waknuk ever knew poured down
upon the wide blue bay where the lines of white-topped breakers crawled slowly
to the beach. Small boats, some with coloured sails,
and some with none, were making for the harbour
already dotted with craft. Clustered along the shore, and thinning as it stretched
back towards the hills, lay the city with its white
houses embedded among green parks and gardens. I could even make out the tiny
vehicles sliding along the wide, tree-bordered avenues. A little inland, beside
a square of green, a bright light was blinking from a tower and a fish-shaped
machine was floating to the ground.
It was so
familiar that I almost misgave. For a swift moment I
imagined that I should wake to find myself back in my bed in Waknuk. I took
hold of Rosalind's hand to reassure myself.
'It is
real, isn't it? You can see it, too?' I asked her.
'It's
beautiful, David. I never thought there could be anything so lovely. . . . And
there's something else, too, that you never told me about.'
'What?' I
asked.
'Listen! . . .
Can't you feel it? Open your mind more. . . .
I did as she
told me. I was aware of the engineer in our machine communicating with someone
below, but behind that, as a background to it, there was something new and
unknown to me. In terms of sound it could be not unlike the buzzing of a hive
of bees; in terms of light, a suffused glow.
'What is it?' I
said, puzzled.
'Can't you
guess, David? It's people. Lots and lots of our kind of
people.'
I realized she
must be right, and I listened to it for a bit — until
We were over
the land now, and looked down at the city coming up to meet us.
'I'm beginning
to believe it's real and true at last,' I told Rosalind. 'You were never with
me those other times.'
She turned her
head. The under-Rosalind was in her face, smiling, shiny-eyed. The armour was gone. She let me look beneath it. It was like a
flower opening....
'This time,
David —' she began.
Then she was
blotted out. We staggered, and put our hands to our heads. Even the floor under
our feet jerked a little.
Anguished
protests came from all directions.
'Oh, sorry,'
'This time,
darling, we'll forgive you,' Rosalind told her. 'It is.'
END OF THE
CHRYSALIDS