Untitled, page 5
Despite all the machinery employed on the land, there was still plenty of work for humans, work often too dangerous for machines. Our work on the pylons was too precarious and difficult for any machine yet invented. The pylons stood along the line of the ridge where the trees I could remember had once grown. We were engaged in stringing a vast metal net between them, from six feet above ground to forty feet above. And as I climbed and clipped and riveted, I cursed the Farmer who sat in his office in the distant city, shuffling his papers and never seeing the sullen ground over which he ruled. At that time, I did not know enough to curse the system that had supplied the man.
Directly below me, the earth was broken and eroded. The infertile subsoil showed through. This was what had happened since shelter and binding provided by the trees were gone. The trees had been cut down to get rid of birds, which were currently being destroyed because of their ability to spread crop disease. Now we were building tree-substitutes; they would act as windbreaks, as the trees had done, and stop the wind from blowing away the soil and exposing more subsoil. Nobody admitted that this showed some sort of basic failure in the system.
As the man below me unrolled the steel mesh and I secured it, we gradually worked higher up the pylon. The nearest city came into view, its serried roofs visible through the mist. It squatted on a giant platform, raised on legs high above the surrounding land where the poisons in the country air could less easily reach its inhabitants.
A pang of homesickness ran through me, although I knew how overcrowded it was in the dark alleys of the metropolis.
Something else I could see from my vantage point. Breasting the road only a short way off lay the ruins of one of the old towns made obsolete when the grid-road system was established. Much of it had been cleared away to provide more arable land; but much remained.
Two years earlier, I had been engaged on that job of clearance myself. A landsman was made to work, at anything during the term of his rustication. There in those ruins I had found a secret cache of books, and smuggled some back to the village. They lay hidden under a loose board under my bunk.
I resolved now to visit the ruins and see what else I could find. I hungered to do something forbidden.
We worked through the day, with a break at noon to drink turnip soup from a flying canteen. At dispersal time, when the hooters blew, it was easy for me to drive across to the broken township, since I was the only member of that work detail from our village. None of the work-overseers cared a rap what happened to us after they had given out our work stamps.
I kept under the line of the ridge, out of sight of the things that squarked to each other as they patrolled the road. The ruins were dark, silted up, promising. My tractor bumped over a great pile of rabble in front of them. With a swing of the wheel, I twisted between two houses and under the awning of what had been a shop. I was immediately out of sight of prying eyes.
The time factor was important; they would expect me to check in in the village within a certain time after the hooter, or else I’d be for no supper and the cells. For all that, I sat where I was for a moment, taking in the feel of the kind of place my ancestors - whoever those faceless optimists had been-lived in.
The shop window before which I had stopped was shattered. Through it lay darkness, darkness and mouldering things. The houses were only remains of houses, husks, their core eaten by the elements. Rubble had been bulldozed against them from behind, as high as the upper windows. It could not have been more desolate. The desolation was emphasized by the glimpse of bare tillage and struggling plant life visible between the buildings. Yet I saw here the ghost of a more human order of life, when the mass unit had not been the only standard. Here was the corpse of a world where the individual had had some status.
Clamping down my face-plate, I climbed out of the tractor. Moving fast now, I made my way between the buildings. This had been some sort of central part of the city; I recognized the building from which I had taken the books, without knowing what sort of building it was. In the books themselves I had found possible labels for it: bookstore, library, museum, reading-room; but which it was, or what the differences between the terms implied, I did not know.
The place was more in ruin than ever. The demolishers had broken down all the front of it before the operation was suspended; I climbed in through a back way, into a murky room. My heart beat very fast, my nerves stammered.
Something moved across the window through which I had scrambled.’ I turned. Two men jumped in and grasped me savagely by the arms. Before I could struggle, a dirty hand clamped over my face-piece and my head was jerked backwards.
They saw the yellow star on the breast of my suit.
“He’s only a landsman!” one said.
They let me stand up straight though they still held me tightly.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“We ask the questions here. Get moving, lander. The boss would like to meet you.” One of them produced a knife. Taking hold of my suit, he dug the knife into it, and jagged a cut in it about three inches long. I grabbed it in horror, pursing the lips of the gash so that the pure air did not pour out. This was standard procedure for dealing with anyone who looked like making trouble; with a cut in your suit to nurse, you are too busy to do anything else.
The shock threw me straight into an hallucination.
The men took me out of the ruined building to another I had not noticed before. It was miraculously preserved. Inside, it was furnished in the style of an earlier and more luxurious age, with curtains made of natural fabric hanging everywhere, and big dark musical instruments in a corner, and plants not used for eating, real woods, and strange pieces of furniture to sprawl on.
A fat man, such as you rarely see outside hospitals, sat at a table. He was eating ancient kinds of food, brightly coloured, with complicated instruments. When I entered, he pushed them aside. He stood up, and the man brought me over to him.
“You have anything of value?” he asked.
In my pocket, I had a picture of someone. It was someone I had loved, someone who depended on me; either I had let that person down or he or she - I knew not who it was - had let me down; but love was still predominant in the relationship, which continued strongly though it had been severed long ago. This picture was my own, my only, my valued symbol of this person.
I clutched the picture convulsively.
“I have nothing for you,” I said.
The fat man sneered. “You must have something, you fool. This is the Twentieth Century, not the Twenty-Second; everyone has possessions still.”
The men wrenched my hand out of my pocket. I held the picture clenched in my right fist. They bent my forearm over the edge of the table. One of them brought the side of his palm down with a savage chopping motion. Pain scissored up my arm and shoulder. I cried and the picture fell on to the floor.
The fat man picked it up and walked over to a large tank standing by the window. I ran after him. The tank was full of a liquid with a familiar smell. How often have I not smelt it, in dreams and waking! It was a reinforced chlorinated hydrocarbon called Oxbenzide. We used it diluted to one part in ten thousand of water to kill off the hardiest pests. The fat man tossed my picture into it.
I saw that adored face curl down through the liquid, disappearing, seeming almost to suffer in the tortuous path it took.
I plunged my hand into the liquid to save it.
The beloved picture was almost within my grasp when my arm began to dissolve. A lethal paralysis syphoned up my veins. In the liquid, nothing remained. Straining my mouth open in a sigh of shame and fear, I fell back, clutching my stump of arm. The dissolution was climbing towards my shoulder.
The evil hallucination burst, pitching me - still sobbing as if I would sob for ever - back into the real world.
I lay across a bundle of sacks in a dim-lit ruined room. A group of ragged men looked down at me. So I found myself for the first time in the company of the Travellers.
* * * *
CHAPTER FOUR
So I have managed to get to the Travellers, after working for two months - or not working, which was as bad - on this manuscript. Perhaps I should have started with them, since they are so important a part of my life; for although I was with them for a short time only, the strangeness of them had terrific force: there was room in their system for trust and charity. And that was so although they were the most hunted of men. More importantly, the Travellers represented some sort of initiative for the future in a continent full of dead ends.
No, I could not start with them. You need courage to write, and courage grows by one’s own example more than by the example of others. You need courage because writing is confessing, and my biggest confession of all must come in this section. I loved the Travellers, yet I betrayed Jess! Also, the feel of how writing was has come over me; I have performed a sort of resurrection of this ancient art form. Syntactical arrangements, semantic mechanisms, come to my aid, allow me to convey my thoughts to no one! Or perhaps after this war, the remnants of humanity will rediscover caves and, crawling into them, confine their language again to paper, so coming to learn to read again. (Of course in my heart I have that hope.)
But will they understand? Have I put in too little or too much? Should I have left out the winters in the city, and the idiocy of my arrest, the clearing of snow in the villages, the despair, the knowledge that life always grew worse? Should I have put in my hallucinations, so real at the time and now, after a lapse of years, so repugnant to me, should I fiddle to produce footnotes, aping some of the books I find?
No way of solving these problems exists any more. The conventions collapsed like old bridges. On the one side of the gulf is the mind, eternal and untouched - on the other, the body, running, jumping, bleeding. Better to copy the method of the thrillers I find among old book piles (converted by the passage of two hundred years into the subtlest of all signposts to those old days of plenty), and stick to the body. The mind can take care of itself, as it has had to from the very beginning ; it’s not as smart as body, but it can survive. And when I cannot resist it, I will pop up and be my own editor and commentator.
With this coaxing, imagine for yourself my feelings: I lay on the sacks looking at those ragged men. Nobody spoke, I could not speak, my brain numbed by the illusion that I had lost my arms. My breath rattled in my throat, changing tempo only when the leader of the Travellers came up to look to me.
The faces of all but him were the faces of men and women of that time: faces lean and dessicated by the effects of constant malnutrition and hardship, faces in which could be read the determination to wrest what little they could from life and the sort of intelligence which hunts under the name of cunning. The women, reduced almost to sexlessness by their rough garments, hardly looked gentler than the men. Though the room was dim, I saw their faces clearly; the door had been converted into a crude airlock to trap most of the drifting gasses from entering, and few of them wore landsuits.
The leader’s face was different from the others. It had acquired in its starved lines an asceticism that transcended hunger. He was instantly marked out, not only as a man who had suffered, for nobody present had escaped that, but as a man whose spirit had transmuted the suffering into something finer. Before setting eyes on him, I had never appreciated the difference between mere endurance and durability. Directly I saw him, although I had never seen such a face before, I knew I could expect mercy at his hands.
He came forward with some sort of an adhesive patch, and with it mended the gash his men had cut in my suit. All the while, he looked penetratingly at me.
“You are sick, friend,” he said. “You’ve been babbling! Unlatch your face-plate and let’s have a look at you. You’re a landsman, aren’t you?”
“I’ve got to get back to the village,” I said. “I’ll be late. You know what that means - either the cells or the Gas House!”
“You’d be better advised to stay with us,” he said.
One of the women said: “We can’t afford to let him go now we’ve got him, Jess. He might tell the guards on us. He’s a Traveller now.”
Jess! This was Jess! Throughout the prison villages, that was the name they spoke when they spoke of the Travellers. To landsmen it meant hope, to overseers fear. I knew his life was a legend and there was a reward on his head.
Jess said to me: “We were all landsmen once, convicts sentenced to work on the land, as you are. We have escaped. We broke free and now we obey no order but our own. Will you join us?”
“Where are you escaping to? There’s nowhere to go,” I said.
“That we will tell you in due time. First we must know if you will join us?”
I looked down at my hands. In fact it was not a question in which I had any freedom to answer as I would; that sort of question was gone from the world; I thought that for my throat’s sake there was only one answer I could give; now I knew where they met, I could not be trusted back in a village. “I will join you,” I said.
“His tractor will come in handy, any case,” one of the men remarked. “We can use that.”
“No,” Jess said. “They will soon track down a lost machine ; men take a deal more hunting, and are less important anyway. What’s your name, friend?”
“Knowle Noland.”
“You call me Jess - just that. We Travellers form a brotherhood and you’ll soon get to know us. What little we have, we share.”
“I’ve heard your name spoken.”
“Right, Knowle, go and start up your tractor. Set it going across the farm, so that it heads well away from here, and then jump out and come back to me.”
Stiffly, I clamped up my face-plate. They looked at me hungrily and in silence. I could feel their lack of trust. Without a word, I turned and walked out under the wet blankets that formed an airlock at the door. Outside, an early evening calm was falling over the ruined remains of the town. A pair of sentries were snuggled into the rubble; they watched me without speaking.
I picked my way past the place where they had captured me, which was only a few yards away. I came to my tractor, climbed in, started it. Slowly, I backed it from the awning and pointed its nose towards the miles of open field.
What life would be like among the Travellers, except that it would be unimaginably hard, I knew not. Life at the village was something I knew. If I drove back there fast, I might get no worse punishment than a week in the Gas House. The Gas House was the nickname for the factory - one stood outside every village - where the produce of the land went before it was carried away on autotrucks to the city. In the factory, the poisons on which the produce had been nourished, the phosphates, potassiums, magnesiums, and the insecticides and arsenicals with which it had been protected, were sluiced off under heavy sprays. Working those sprays, manipulating the foodstuffs, was not in itself a hard punishment. But every week in that poisonous atmosphere was a year off a man’s life. Robots were not allowed in there; they would seize up, and they were too expensive to risk.
Revving the engine, I looked back into the ruins. I saw half a dozen heads, half a dozen rifles. I was being covered. They would shoot if I tried to make a break for the village. Without further thought, I set the tractor in motion, jammed one of my cable tools down against the fuel pedal, and jumped. For a moment I stood there, watching the machine gather speed and head away over the open land, straight through a cabbage crop. Then I turned back to the ruins.
“You’re not so clever as I expected,” I told Jess. “The trail of that tractor will be easily visible to anyone who cares to investigate.”
“We’re moving out of here in an hour or two, when it’s dusk,” he said. “Now come with us and eat. You’re a Traveller now.”
The soup was vegetable water. The meat was that of a cow they had stolen from a cattle pen some miles away. The beast had been fed on stilbestrol to promote growth; its flesh was pulpy and obviously lacked key nutrients. Stilbestrol itself was known - and had been known for over a couple of centuries - as a carcinogen; but we had no option but to eat it. In the frantic drive to keep food production level with population increase, no pure food, as the ancients would have recognized it, was left on the planet, except perhaps in a few remote corners.
But if the food was bad, I found the company good.
These outcasts now accepted me easily enough as one of them (though I was careful not to let them know I could read print, since I soon discovered that every one of them, even Jess, was illiterate). So I found out something of the way of life of the Travellers.
I cannot say I became one of them. Nor was I with them for long. But that experience was vital, and some of the lessons of survival that I picked up then, with Jess and Garry and Haagman and the others, have been useful to me recently. And the touch of freedom I experienced - so novel was it that it frightened me at the time; but it has grown in me since.
