The Secret People

by John Wyndham

  She thought again. What did cats eat? Of course, fish. This time enormous discussion was provoked. According to Garm’s subsequent explanation, a question of precedence had arisen. Was it legitimate to feed the symbol of Bast upon the symbols of Hamhit? This embraced the practical question of which goddess had the more powerful means of advertising her displeasure – for one of them must be displeased, since either cat or fish must die. The puzzle was at length solved by the suggestion that there were many fish to be had, but only one cat. Hamhit might not grudge (or not miss) a few.

  They had brought them. Unpleasant monstrosities caught in the subterranean rivers, and unlike any Margaret had ever seen. White and eyeless, born of a million generations blind in the darkness. One eel-like creature among them found particular favour with Bast.

  Reassured by the cat’s appetite, she could now turn to her own food. She had grown used to the monotonous diet, and was able to eat the mess of chopped fungi with much the same indifference as she would have taken bread at home. Garm sat down near her, dipped a stone cup into a bowl of spirit and sipped from it. The bowl was there for his particular benefit. Margaret had tried the stuff once only; she classified it several stages below that inferior vodka which is made from bread. Garm evidently enjoyed it; he took several sips before settling down to resume ‘yesterday’s’ broken conversation. His particular interest at the moment centred on the treatment of animals. Though his experience of them was limited to a few cats, dogs, rats and other small creatures which had somehow found their ways below, he knew of others from pictures and carvings.

  Preliminary misunderstandings had been lessened by now. Margaret had succeeded in dispelling the idea that a cow consisted of a bovine head mounted upon a female human torso. The old man found this revolutionary, but not incredible; he had already been troubled by the difference between a live dog and the classical figure of Anubis.

  ‘You do not worship animals?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ Margaret said. ‘At least, not in our country,’ she amended.

  ‘And the gods are not angry?’

  ‘I don’t think so. You see, ours are different gods.’

  Garm considered the point. The idea of gods unassociated with animals was difficult, but he managed it.

  ‘Then, since you are not afraid of the gods and the animals must eat much food, why do you not kill all those animals you do not wish to eat?’

  ‘We make them work for us.’

  ‘But you talked of special metal creatures you had made to work for you – far stronger than men or animals.’

  ‘Yes, but for some things it is cheaper to employ animals than machines.’

  Garm looked wonderingly at Bast.

  ‘And what do cats do for you?’

  ‘They catch mice.’

  ‘What are mice?’

  Margaret groaned privately and started to explain. That was always the trouble with these conversations. There were so few points of contact that everything was continually being interrupted by the most trivial explanations. Moreover, she was tired of the status of animals, and wanted to change the subject. But that was not Garm’s way; he got his teeth into a topic, and worried at it. Soon he succeeded in finding out, to his great satisfaction, that there was a class of animals, known as pets, which did no work, and, furthermore, that a society for protecting the rights of animals was upheld chiefly by the supporters of these parasites. He seemed to regard this as the beginning of a return to grace.

  ‘It shows,’ he said, ‘that they are beginning again to worship animals.’

  ‘It doesn’t – it shows sublimation,’ Margaret objected.

  Sublimation took some explaining, but he got it at last. Instead of resenting the idea, he welcomed it, and plunged forthwith into a number of incomprehensible statements about the relationship of religion with sublimation, from which he emerged with the idea of increasing animal worship somehow strengthened.

  ‘They keep animals, pets, you call them, for no obvious reason. That means that they must find something in the animals which they cannot find elsewhere. That is the divine spirit. Knowing of this divine spirit, they band together into a noble society to preach it, so that others may recognize it.’

  ‘No. You don’t understand. There’s nothing divine about it – in fact, they say that animals have no souls.’

  Garm looked momentarily shocked by the heresy.

  ‘But they live.’

  ‘Of course, but our people say that only human beings have souls.’

  ‘Why?’

  Margaret was forced to admit that she did not know why. Garm became triumphant.

  ‘It means that your people are beginning to regain faith. Soon they will admit that animals have souls. In their hearts they must know it already. If they did not, is it likely they would spend so much time and wealth upon animals?’

  ‘Quite likely,’ Margaret thought.

  ‘No, you do not understand. I mean, if they thought animals to be soulless, they would obviously spend for the good of men whom they know to have souls. It would be waste to do otherwise.

  ‘You say your world is in difficulties. It is not surprising, for you have spurned the gods. But now that their servants are once more being recognized, the gods will smile again upon you.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Margaret.

  The idea of world redemption through the RSPCA was novel, even if it inspired little faith.

  Garm, with the status of animals settled to his satisfaction, became approachable on other subjects. She inquired for news.

  ‘Have there been any more breaks?’

  ‘No,’ he told her. No more breaks, but two airshafts had had to be stopped when the water came trickling in.

  So the New Sea was still rising. Margaret wondered how long the great pipes at Qabés would continue to pour out their millions of gallons. There had been no bad break for some little time, but it was an ever-present possibility. The weight of water was slowly and relentlessly finding out the weak spots, and driving through. So far they had beaten it by blocking the passages, but one by one the air inlets were being covered. How many of those hundreds of small fissures, which were the caves’ natural ventilating system, could they spare before the air would thicken unbreathably? Each time that she heard that there was one less, it seemed to her that the caves became a little more stuffy. It looked like being a question which would deal the final blow, suffocation, or drowning?

  The configuration of the caves puzzled her more than a little. One ‘day’ she had managed to evade her guards, and had made her way back to the cavern where she and Mark had landed. She had stood at the top of the ramp and looked down on the Sun Bird still lying where Mark had moored her – how long ago? But the water no longer rushed through the cavern. The break had been blocked. Only a current so slight as scarcely to trouble the surface flowed across from the tunnel down which they had swept, to an opening on the opposite side. The cavern lake was now so smooth that reflection rivalled original.

  Gazing down on the hull of the maimed Sun Bird, Margaret was tempted. It would be so easy just to run down the ramp, to jump aboard and cast off. Surely it would be better to drift away into that other tunnel and take one’s chance than to continue this existence among the pygmies. Probably she would fail, but what did that mean? Just to die a little earlier, to perish in the attempt rather than to wait here and drown. And she might have the luck to get free – to save this subterranean place and its people – and Mark. She imagined herself fighting officials, working night and day, pulling strings until at last the Qabés pumps should cease to turn. An expedition would be sent down to free Mark and the other inhabitants of the prison system.

  For a long time she looked, but though her fancy soared, her body did not move. She was afraid, but that was not the whole cause of her hesitation – she was no more afraid to go than to stay. Another feeling held her back. A sensation that she might help here, that someone – Mark? – might need her, and she would have deserted. It
would be all but impossible for her to escape alone, and by trying she might in some way wreck the chances of others. It was not very clear; but it was very compelling. With a sigh, she had turned away from the sight of the Sun Bird, and gone back to search for her distracted guards.

  There had, she knew, been other breaks since the one which had engulfed Mark and herself, and yet there was the Sun Bird floating at practically the same level as before. It was puzzling. She decided to ask Garm about it, without revealing her reasons. At that time they had talked with difficulty, but as far as she could understand he had replied:

  ‘The caves are on many levels. Often they are like a series of deep holes connected by passages. Only in those where the floors of the caverns to be connected are of even, or almost even depth, do the passages enter and leave at ground level. Often it has been more convenient to cut an entrance part way up a wall, and make a ledge sloping to the ground. Thus the actual tunnelling can be made shorter. Sometimes there have been fissures, and at others formations of harder rock to be avoided. There is no regularity. Therefore, it follows that although some of the breaks have sent water pouring down to the lowest levels, others have entered these well-like caves, and we have been able to stop them before they could reach the side passages and overflow. It is lucky that there are less of us than there were, for already all the lowest caverns are flooded deeply.’

  With this she had to be satisfied, though it left much unexplained. Why, for instance, was there a slight current through the Sun Bird’s cave? Was it making its way to the pygmies’ lower levels? If so, why hadn’t they stopped it? The only other possibility seemed to be that the water was flowing beyond the pygmy system, that the incoming water had joined the course of a subterranean river already flowing through the cave. In the end she had sighed and given it up – one had to give up so many problems in this incomprehensible place.

  It was a relief to know that there had been no more breaks lately. Each time she had heard of one her heart raced painfully, until she was sure that the prison caves had not been threatened. At first she had been angry with herself for her own anxiety – it rose, involuntary and unwanted. She had not yet forgiven Mark for the slaughter of the pygmies. It had been the sudden intrusion of violence which had shocked her even more than the violence itself. For a long time she had been unable to picture Mark without seeing those pathetically childlike bodies sprawling before him. Had she been able to reach the Sun Bird again before her first wrathful resentment had cooled, there would have been no hesitation to deter her.

  Familiarity with the idea had now damped down the sense of shock. Insensibly she had begun to adopt something of the pygmy attitude. The thing had happened. Lives had been lost; it was unfortunate, but it could not be helped. There was no demanding the blood of the slayer, no suggestion that he might have behaved differently. The pygmies seemed to attach less importance than did her own people to the act of dying. Or did they? Wasn’t it rather that her people attached an exaggerated importance to the more sensational and spectacular forms of death? At home, more indignation and publicity was expended upon one murder (justified or not) than upon a hundred fatal road accidents. But death was just as final. Obviously then, it was the manner which counted, not the act; if it were not so, there would be no difference between hanging by the law and hanging by private individuals, whereas everybody knows that the law may do many things which the private individual may not. Yes, it was the manner which stirred people’s emotions. If you were to shoot a man because he was a public danger, everybody would be enraged, but if you killed an excellent citizen through negligent driving, nobody minded very much. It was all very confusing … Anyhow, the emergent fact was that the pygmies did not draw these nice distinctions; they seemed to put all deceases under the heading of death from misadventure. Death, after all, was as natural as birth; all that had been done was to accelerate its advance. Everyone was condemned to death by being born, you couldn’t change that.

  As time went on the picture of the slain pygmies began to have less significance. They were no longer the shocking evidence of an unsuspected streak of brutality in Mark’s nature … At least, the idea of a streak of brutality was no longer shocking. In fact, there were things in favour of a streak (a narrow streak, of course) of brutality …

  Garm broke in upon an interesting line of thought. The baffling time sense which the pygmies had evolved came into play as though an alarm clock had gone off in his mind.

  ‘We must go now,’ he interrupted.

  Margaret had long ceased to be surprised by this bump of temporality. She rose, and crossed to Bast, gathering her up as she loosed the cord. Garm gulped down the dregs of his cupful of spirit, and led the way to the outer passage.

  2

  The worship of Bast centred in one of the larger caverns. Immense labour had gone to make this place a fit dwelling for a goddess. The usual pygmy custom of smoothing only the most dangerous corners and cutting away the more obtrusive projections could not give a sufficiently polished effect for a divine sanctuary. The inconveniences of rough adaptation might be good enough for themselves, but they were inadequate for a goddess. In pursuance of the axiom that good housing is more necessary for a bodiless spirit than for one’s own flesh and blood, they had done their best. They had smoothed the rock walls almost to regularity before covering them with carvings in low relief. Broad bands of pictorial representation, alternating with narrower bands of purely conventional pattern, now encircled the whole hall from floor almost to roof.

  Margaret suspected that the broader bands contained a history, but, if so, it must have been designed for the edification of greatly gifted readers. Frequently the stiffness and angularity of the figures made them no more informative than the geometrical patterns above and below. Isolated groups in which battles – between slingers and stone-throwers – were taking place could be identified as could certain processions which might consist either of victors or vanquished; but the interdependence, if any, of these events was elusive.

  Nor was Garm able to give any suggestions. The incidents, whatever they might be, were long forgotten, and the links between them entirely invisible. To him, and to all his race, the carvings were merely decoration. The knowledge of history had followed history itself into nullity. He knew only that they must have been made by his own people, since every figure was of pygmy cast. To this Margaret’s observation added that the eyes were set full face in profiles, after the Egyptian manner, and that the few colours used were applied sparingly, though with skilful effect. The main result of her inspection was to confirm her opinion that the race was now in an advanced stage of degeneracy.

  At the far end of the cave stood a huge statue of the goddess Bast, a concrete testimony of alien influence. The ponderous figure sat upon a throne. Straight-backed and dominant, she stared down the cave; great fists, set square upon the knees, held, one a sistrum, and the other, a shield. Further, to enhance its majesty, the sixty-foot sculpture had been mounted upon a dais of stone ten feet high. From the centre of the front panel a narrow flight of steps projected, leading up to an altar set between the gigantic feet.

  Margaret never failed to be a little awed. Perhaps in the open, staring across Egyptian sands between the two immensities of desert and sky, the figure would have been unimpressive, but here, where confinement exaggerated, it all but overwhelmed. Only the face relieved its severity.

  The sculptor, having flanked his work with twenty-foot images of cats, had been content that the goddess herself should show her humanity. Had he chosen to crown her with such a head as her two attendants wore, the effect would have been fearsome – as it was, he had given her a face in which wise benignity and peace went far to mitigate the sense of impotence which her size induced. To look up at it was to feel partially reassured. Its graven smoothness showed no trace of pygmy features. Margaret liked to think of it as the work of some captive more fortunate than herself, fortunate in that his faith had transcended his captivity. Ther
e were angles from which one could read into the stone face and the wide, calm eyes, compassion and, perhaps, a wistfulness as though something of the artist’s exiled longing had survived in the stone.

  As they entered, the crowd parted, leaving a straight, clear path between them and the steps. Garm fell back, allowing Margaret to take the lead. She paused for a moment, gazing up at the towering figure of Bast, then, keeping her eyes fixed upon the statue’s face, she started forward with a slow dignity.

  This was always the most trying part of the ceremony. The fact that she was, to pygmy eyes, clad in a robe of honour entirely failed to give her self-confidence. In her mind her grimy suit became even more grimy than in reality. At such a moment she longed for a skirt. There was grace and rhythm about a garment which hung; one could move in it. In breeches one seemed either strutting or striding; dignity was very hardly attained.

  Pygmy heads to right and left bowed as she passed, offering homage not to her, but to the cat in her arms. Bast, with the detached superiority of cats, remained indifferent. She continued to purr loudly and contentedly.

  The cave was more crowded than usual. Moreover, Margaret had the feeling that the crowd was expectant, not excited nor anxious, yet in a state where its members were stirred by one thought at the same time. This, in the stagnation of the caves, was sufficiently rare to be remarkable. She had known such simultaneity of emotion only a few times since her capture; on each occasion it had been traceable to the common danger from the water. But this time the reason did not serve; Garm had denied that there were any more breaks. Something else, of which she knew nothing, must be afoot. She was irritated by the sense that she was being kept out of things. Garm had let her down; after all, there was little enough to occupy one’s interest in this place. A censorship would be intolerable …

  At the head of the steps she halted, and set the cat down on the altar block. Her further duties as acolyte included only the fastening of the cord and a perfunctory bow of homage. Then she retired, leaving the stage to Garm.