The Book Of Ian Watson, page 25
“So the aliens must have done it,” Tate groaned.
“We … are the only hope. Us little groups. We’re the only hope, of regaining … what we could have been.” This was too complex a thought. It shrieked its wrongness.
Donald picked up the torch and stared along the railway tracks, trying to guide his own thoughts along their straight line. But the tracks disappeared into the darkness of the tunnel. From dimness into utter blackness.
He spoke with an effort.
“I found an old boo-book.” He stuttered over the word. “About whales—you know, whales in the sea. The book had lots of lovely pictures in it, so I could look through it without being hurt. And because whales spell harmony with nature, I could r-r-read some of the words. It said that whales sing. They can sing all around the world. From sea to sea. People used to know that. But we were kill-kill … we were culling them.” This word soared jubilantly, like a single bugle call attempting to reverse a chaotic rout. It would be so easy and rewarding to follow the bugle, back into line. But he persisted. “Did the whales learn how to sing to us, from all around the world, inside our heads? Not aliens at all—but the whales in our own oceans?”
He quit thinking for a while, till the screech in his head subsided. But he had passed his idea on.
“If the secret’s in the seas—in all the deep seas,” asked Tate, “how can we ever prove it?”
“S-s-somebody must go down to the sea,” Donald forced himself to say. “Somebody must persuade the good fisher folk to sail out. Far out. Somebody must try—no, not to talk to the whales—but to sing to them. To make music at them. Our music, not theirs.” He fingered the flute at his hip. “We’ve played their songs for too long.”
Tate laughed dismissively.
“One man, playing solo flute out at sea?”
“It might prove something,” said Alice. “Anything’s worth trying. Will you go, Don?”
Donald nodded.
They all embraced, in farewell, for it would be increasingly dangerous to meet and exchange impure thoughts as the weeks rolled on towards Midwinter. Above all, they must survive. They agreed to meet in the New Year, when Donald could report back—if he survived.
Then they climbed up the rusty metal staircase, out of the booming tomb into the fading light. The sun had just set, and the twilit ruins—overgrown though they were—were harsh on the ear. But the tree-clad hills beckoned vibrantly and lovingly.
Donald pulled his flute out of its sheath, and set it across his lips. As soon as he began to blow the long song of the evening hills, weight and pain lifted from him. His steps lightened. Though it would be dark long before he arrived home, the journey would seem timeless. He copied the pure tones in his head, and each tone that he blew seemed to be sustained indefinitely. He inserted whistle-stops—harmonics. He pranced along.
By the time he arrived in Harmony, he was almost too enchanted—too saturated with the vibrations of the universe—to remember for what jangling reason he had gone to the ruined city in the first place.
When he climbed between the sheets with Polly, bursting with this pent-up joy, she rejected his embraces, though.
Of course. It was long past the time for sexual embraces of any loving sort. His head beat like a demon drum.
“Sleep,” urged Polly. “Sleep.” She crooned a kind of lullaby, from deep inside her brain.
Donald wept. And ached to weep.
Little Hope and Charity both ran round the blanket screen that divided the house in half at night and began to batter little fists against Donald’s bare chest.
“The sea,” he mumbled to himself. “The sea.”
Taking up his flute, he blew the lullaby along with Polly till the children went back to bed, comforted. And by then he half believed in the lullaby himself.
There was work to do, to prepare for Winter. Whenever, gritting his teeth, Donald thought of his promise to walk down to the sea—a hundred and fifty miles distant—it was far sweeter to put off going and perform some tuneful task instead.
Yet the villagers of Harmony were beginning to whisper among themselves about the impending Festival of Culling; and whenever they did so, they glanced in his direction.
He played his flute enchantingly to them, but it seemed to make no difference, as though the songs they heard in their heads and the songs that he played were subtly different, exposing him as a false player who should be cast out of the orchestra of their lives. (He was a very good flautist, in these days when few amateurs dared play a note for fear of it being so much less than the song in all their heads.)
Horseplay began to spread from the younger children to the older children, from the adolescents to the young adults; and frequently Donald was the butt of it, for no very obvious reason.
Finally, after the first snow had fallen, he set off secretly one morning with a pack on his back and the flute at his side.
The decision caused a foul cacophony in his head, but he walked on, thinking resolutely of other things: such as the black lacework artistry of bare trees, or the adagio of the rolling hills, or the grace-notes of pockets of snow counterpointing the fleecy backs of sheep. He played to these.
This was a long, hard journey, but he played for his supper in the villages along the route, passing himself off as a holy fool. The children were all playing the Culling Game by now more vigorously, with sharp sticks and string nooses as well as with voice and finger. They dogged Donald’s heels, teasing and jeering. Yet the theme was still merely being stated; the climax was a few weeks off. Donald received bread and meat and shelter, and his playing must not have seemed too much out of tune, since his food was neither poisoned nor was his bed riven with a knife.
Along the route, too, he made contact with a few other malcontents—by a sort of mutual recognition. He spent two days resting up in the isolated hut belonging to one old bearded dissident called Michael.
Michael was a shepherd, an occupation which kept him from having to mix with other people too often. Even so, he lived in fear of his life during the coming Culling. For once long ago he had been a scientist of some kind, and even though he ached to think wrong thoughts, think them he still did.
Michael claimed to belong to a vague organization which he called ‘the Network.’ The Network were positive that people of the previous age were responsible for the songs. According to them, the songs were a weapon of war or of mass control, run by some sentient computer which had run amuck, independent of its builders.
“But it can’t be a human weapon,” argued Donald. “Humans could never have built anything that listens to people’s thoughts, and sorts out which are good and bad, and rewards or punishes.”
“Couldn’t we just? Thought is an electromagnetic field. If you have a machine that’s big enough and sensitive enough, able to carry out billions of operations per second, and if you use the Earth’s magnetic field as its listening dish—”
“I can’t believe in such a thing.”
“It’s a damn sight easier to believe in than telepathic whales—when there were never any telepathic whales before! If the whales feared us so much, and had the power, why didn’t they just make us all kill each other?”
“Maybe it was against their ethics—their sense of harmony? So they just made us wreck our technology. And culled us down to size. Now they’re trying to guide us, to live naturally. So they think! If only I can show them what they’ve really done to us—”
“But they must know that already.”
“If I can plead … I’ll promise that we’ll never harm them again.”
“Do this to a fellow, and you’d never dare let him get up again.”
“We can be partners, now that we’ve learnt our lesson. Them in the sea, us on land.”
“Lord, it hurts my head to think about it! Look, Don, this is a human machine: a machine for spying on our thoughts and correcting them. It’s a social engineering super-computer that ran amuck. I think the Chinese or the Russians built it. But it clobbered them too, or else they’d be here today running the show.”
Donald shook his head. His skull was a bell, his brain was the clapper of the bell.
“There was a mutant whale born,” he said firmly. “A changed super-whale. That was because of all the poisons we poured into the seas. And through it, every singing whale joins in. It’ll have had mutant children too, by now—dozens of them.”
“You’re forgetting the channel capacity of this thing, Don. It has to be a machine. And the machine doesn’t want us to find it. It doesn’t even want us to think about finding it. But there’s a way. The Network’s working on a way. Will you let me try to hypnotise you?”
“Hypnotise me?”
“Well, we can’t build another machine to jam the first machine—that’s for sure. We don’t know how to, any longer. But if we use our own minds as a weapon … If we can learn to act on command, without thinking of what we’re doing … If we can hypnotise all our children, even if it takes a hundred years, when the command’s given we’ll go and get that machine!”
“So long as you can swim down to the bottom of the sea!”
Donald left Michael’s hut, sick at the stupid notions of the Network. Probably it was ninety per cent talk, indulged in by a dozen people at most. Or else Michael wouldn’t have told the secret. What sort of plan was it, anyway? People already acted on command. People were already hypnotised by the songs, like snakes dancing to a flute.
Besides, he didn’t believe in the machine any more than he believed in the aliens, or in Mother Earth giving voice.
It had to be something natural, and mighty, that had somehow changed. Mutated.
He played himself away from the shepherd’s hut, and continued on his journey.
It snowed; and he struggled through. It thawed; and he waded through. It froze; and he slid through. Not unexpectedly he heard no more hint of a Network. Indeed, as he came nearer to the coast he encountered hardly any malcontents at all—then none whatever. The people in this part of the land seemed more simple-minded, as though they had reverted—or been plunged—far deeper into the human past, when a more elementary kind of language made it impossible even to conceive certain thoughts.
Finally he arrived in sight of the sea, whipped to a froth by gales.
The good fisher folk had all beached their boats long since. Donald walked from shingle cottage to shingle cottage, playing his flute, and the folk came out to mutter and prod him a little and caper round him like performing bears. They prodded him as though they were weighing up a sacrifice, which had just delivered itself voluntarily to them to ensure that shoals of fish filled their nets next Spring.
Still, they behaved quite respectfully and even indulgently towards him after the initial prodding and prancing. The victim should be honoured—till the moment of the sacrifice arrived. They pressed fish upon him: salted fish, dried fish, fish stew. No doubt they saw him as some sort of mythic figure.
Also, in this part of the country music was no longer a human art at all. No sea chanties were sung; no bagpipes wailed; no tin whistles blew. The competition in their heads was much too daunting. The most that the fisher folk produced by way of music was a monotonous, murmuring hum that rose and fell like the waves. They hummed in the way that other people chew tobacco. The fisher folk were a people of few and simple words, and much inner music; but Donald could almost hear, by sympathetic vibration, the exact drift of their thoughts. Perhaps this prodigy that he was, this willing victim, ought to be culled out at sea rather than on the shore, to make full use of his magic? Donald played upon this sentiment.
The Herring family gave him shelter, and the best bed. From the grunted conversation which punctuated their humming, Donald gathered that they had lost a son at sea quite recently and so, alas, felt little personal urge to cull themselves. As the Midwinter Festival loomed, there was a hollow in their lives. But now they adopted Donald, to fill this hollow up. They took him to their bosom on behalf of the whole fishing village. So now they hummed to their gutting knives, as they sharpened them, and to their bludgeons as they hefted them. Donald watched, praying—to he knew not what—that the weather would improve.
At last, on Midwinter Day, the sea calmed, sostenuto. It lay flat. The breeze from the south was only the gentlest of murmurs.
After the Festival lunch, Donald put his flute across his lips and led the Herring family down to the beach, to their boat, playing the Song of Culling. By now this was the only dominant joyful theme running through everyone’s mind, yearning upwards in a long crescendo towards the evening’s climax.
The Herrings pushed the boat out and scrambled on board. Donald stood playing in the bow as the Saucy Sue sailed far out, through the day into dusk.
Presently the stars shone down like ice crystals. The night was clear. No land was in sight. Donald played and played: an angrily plaintive summoning serenade. It was the first time he had played anything that was really of his own. The Herrings stared at him calmly, in the starlight, realizing that he was setting himself apart from them. Gently, the black sea began to swell.
And something swelled beneath the swell of water: something that was giant and ancient, something mountainous that displaced the sea.
A single absurdly small eye regarded Donald from somewhere in the flank of the mountain: an eye that was in the process of devolving back into that fortress of flesh, which saw far more clearly by means of sound.
Quivering with joy, the Herring family turned their knives and clubs towards Donald.
Donald projected his thoughts so fiercely at the mountain of flesh wallowing alongside that he felt that his eyes would pop out. Through the caterwauling in his brain, he cried out silently:
‘You. Do you—? Do you do this to us? To our world?
‘We were once the lords of creation. And perhaps that was the whole trouble. But surely we didn’t deserve all this? To become mere harps played by hidden hands?
‘At least show me that it is you!At least give me a sign! Let me die, knowing!’
The Saucy Sue drifted ever closer to the mountain as the Herring family advanced slowly on Donald, humming like beehives.
Donald made a great leap from the gunwale, out on to the flank of the mountain. A moment later, by what feat of scrabbling and scrambling he never knew, he lay sprawled on top of the beast. His head gonged with his rebellion. The Herrings stood slack-jawed and dumbfounded, staring stupidly across a growing chasm of black water as the beast now moved away from the boat. Waves sloshed Donald’s ankles. Soon the Saucy Sue vanished into the night; Donald was alone with the stars and the sea and the beast, and the grinding discords in his head.
The beast picked up speed but it did not submerge. Gradually the raucous riot in Donald’s brain was replaced by sweeter, haunting tones: long whistling harmonies and soft low cries, echoing and overlapping.
Presently he made out several other moving humps in the water. Three. Five. Seven. A small flotilla converged and proceeded together. Shivering convulsively, his hands locked to the beast’s back like suckers, Donald scanned the stars. The Plough pointed their course: towards land.
Eventually the land loomed blackly—but little flickers of light burned here and there: bonfires along the beaches.
Donald could hardly think of anything but of the love songs of mournful delight coursing through his mind. These salved the pains of exposure.
The flotilla rushed towards the shore. Were the beasts going to cull themselves too, upon the rocks, upon the pebbles? In that case, all was lost. They too were slaves of the music that ruled the human race.
But the beasts knew the shelves and shallows of the unseen sea floor far better than any human being. When it seemed that they surely had no other choice than to dash themselves aground, the flotilla stopped.
The nine beasts floated lazily, watching with their little eyes. People were dancing on the beach, round a bonfire where several bodies burned, still recognizable as bodies as they sprawled in the flames.
Then in unison all of the beasts—including Donald’s own mount—submerged, casting him adrift in the cold water. Like great worms turning, back to the deeps they were gone.
With arms and legs of ice, Donald somehow struck out towards the beach where the bonfire beckoned with its heat.
Somehow he waded ashore.
A band of fisher folk—the very same folk he had sailed away from earlier in the day—turned to greet him, holding nooses and clubs and bloody knives. Ecstasy sang in their heads, and his.
As they walked towards him with the tools of the Culling held out, a thin Moon rose up over the sea horizon; and they all paused.
For no longer was it Midwinter Day. It was the first minute of the New Year.
The song in their heads changed key. It announced a new theme: the celebration of the cleansed world.
Promptly the good fisher folk slung their ropes over their shoulders and tucked their long knives back into their belts. Instead of butchering Donald-from-the-Deep, they raised a hearty cheer.
Donald staggered to the bonfire and collapsed by it, beneath the burning bodies, to dry off and warm his bones.
Although his clothes and his limbs dried presently, his face did not dry. Though the song of New Year moonlight enchanted him and the fisher folk, his eyes still wept upon the sand tears that were as salty as the ocean.
In her neat home a hundred and fifty miles away, Polly woke up at this moment. She began to hope for Donald’s return, and then to long for it. He would come; she could almost hear his footsteps, and his flute.
Beyond the blanket-screen little Hope and Charity both lay dead, to Polly’s surprise as much as theirs. As soon as Donald came back, a new little one could be conceived. Once again love-making would sing like a harp string.
