by Brian Aldiss
They began to move, going downhill with the two slave women leading. Yattmur glanced back to see the three tummy-bellies staring mournfully at them from their cave. She raised her hand, beckoning and calling to them. Slowly they stood up and began to jostle forward, almost tripping over one another in their efforts to stay close together.
‘Come on!’ she called encouragingly. ‘You fellows come with us and we’ll look after you.’
‘They’ve been trouble enough to us,’ Gren said. Stooping, he collected a handful of stones and flung them.
One tummy-belly was hit in the groin, one on the shoulder, before they broke and fled back into the cave, crying aloud that nobody loved them.
‘You are too cruel, Gren. We should not leave them at the mercy of the sharp-furs.’
‘I tell you I’ve had enough of those creatures. We are better on our own.’ He patted her shoulder, but she remained unconvinced.
As they moved down Big Slope, the cries of the tummy-bellies died behind them. Nor would their voices ever reach Gren and Yattmur again.
chapter twenty-five
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They descended the ragged flank of Big Slope and the shadows of the valley rose up to meet them. A moment came when they waded in dark up to their ankles; then it rose rapidly, swallowing them, as the sun was hidden by a range of hills ahead.
The pool of darkness in which they now moved, and in which they were to travel for some while, was not total. Though at present no cloud banks overhead reflected the light of the sun, the frequent lightning traced out their path for them.
Where the rivulets of Big Slope gathered into a fair-sized stream, the way became precipitous, for the water had carved a gully for itself, and they were forced to follow along its higher bank, going in single file along a steep cliff edge. The need for care slowed them. They descended laboriously round boulders, many of them clearly dislodged by the recent earth tremors. Apart from the sound of their footsteps, the only noise to compete with the stream was the regular groaning of the carrying man.
Soon a roaring somewhere ahead told them of a waterfall. Peering into the gloom, they saw a light. It was burning on what, as far as they could discern, was the lip of the cliff. The procession halted, bunching protectively together.
‘What is it?’ Gren asked. ‘What sort of creature lives in this miserable pit?’
Nobody answered.
Sodal Ye grunted something to the talking woman, who in turn grunted at her mute companion. The mute companion began to vanish where she stood, rigid in an attitude of attention.
Yattmur clasped Gren’s arm. It was the first time he had seen this disappearing act. Shadows all about them made it the more uncanny, as a ragged incline showed through her body. For a while her tattoo lines hung seemingly unsupported in the gloom. He strained his eyes to see. She had gone, was as intangible as the resonance of falling water.
They held their tableau until she returned.
Wordlessly the woman made a few gestures, which the other woman interpreted into grunts for the sodal’s benefit. Slapping his tail round his porter’s calves to get him moving again, the sodal said, ‘It’s safe. One or two of the sharp-furs are there, possibly guarding a bridge, but they’ll go away.’
‘How do you know?’ Gren demanded.
‘It will help if we make a noise,’ said Sodal Ye, ignoring Gren’s question. Immediately he let out a deep baying call that startled Yattmur and Gren out of their wits and set the baby wailing.
As they moved forward, the light flickered and went over the lip of the cliff. Arriving at the point when it had been, they could look down a steep slope. Lightning revealed six or eight of the snouted creatures bouncing and leaping into the ravine, one of them carrying a crude torch. Ever and again they looked back over their shoulders, barking invective.
‘How did you know they’d go away?’ Gren asked.
‘Don’t talk so much. We must go carefully here.’
They had come to a sort of bridge: one cliff of the gully had fallen forward in a solid slab, causing the stream to tunnel beneath it before splashing down into the nearby ravine; the slab rested against the opposite cliff, forming an arch over the flood. Because the way looked so broken and uncertain, its hazards increased in the twilight, the party moved hesitantly. Yet they had hardly stepped on to the crumbling bridge when a host of tiny beings clattered up startlingly from beneath their feet.
The air flaked into black flying fragments.
Savage with startlement, Gren struck out, punching at small bodies as they rocketed past him. Then they had lifted. Looking up, he saw a host of creatures circling and dipping over their heads.
‘Only bats,’ said Sodal Ye casually. ‘Move on. You human creatures have a poor turn of speed.’
They moved. Again the lightning flashed, bleaching the world into a momentary still life. In the ruts at their feet, and just below them, and over the bridge side, reaching down to the tumbling waters, glistened such spiders’ webs as Gren and Yattmur had never seen before, like a multitude of beards growing into the river.
She exclaimed about them, and the sodal said loftily, ‘You don’t realize the facts behind the curious sight you see here. How could you, being mere landlivers? – Intelligence has always come from the seas. We sodals are the only keepers of the world’s wisdom.’
‘You certainly didn’t concentrate on modesty,’ Gren said, as he helped Yattmur on to the farther side.
‘The bats and the spiders were inhabitants of the old cool world, many eons ago,’ said the sodal, ‘but the growth of the vegetable kingdom forced them to adopt new ways of life or perish. So they gradually moved away from the fiercest competition into the dark, to which the bats at least were predisposed. And in so doing the two species formed an alliance.’
He went on discoursing with the smoothness of a preacher even while his porter, aided by the tattooed women, heaved and strained and groaned to pull him up a broken bank on to firm ground. The voice poured forth with assurance, as thick and velvety as the night itself.
‘The spider needs warmth for her eggs to hatch, or more warmth than she can get here. So she lays them, sews them into a bag, and the bat obligingly carries them up to Big Slope or one of these other peaks that catch the sun. When they hatch, he obligingly brings the progeny back again. Nor does he work for nothing.
‘The grown spiders weave two webs, one an ordinary one, the other half in and half out of the water, so that the lower part of it forms a net below the surface. They catch fish or small living things in it and then hoist them out into the air for the bats to eat. Any number of similar strange things go on here of which you land-dwellers would have no knowledge.’
They were now travelling along an escarpment that sloped down into a plain. Emerging as they were from under the bulk of a mountain, they slowly gained a better view of the terrain round about. From the tissue of shadows soared an occasional crimson cone of a hill lofty enough to bathe its cap in sunlight. Gathering cloud threw a glow over the land that changed minute by minute. Landmarks were thus by turns revealed and hidden as though by drifting curtains. Gradually the clouds blanketed the sun itself, so that they had to travel with additional caution through a thicker obscurity.
Over to the left appeared a wavering light. If it was the one they had seen by the ravine, then the sharp-furs kept pace with them. The sight reminded Gren of his earlier question.
‘How does this woman of yours vanish, Sodal?’ he asked.
‘We have a long way yet to go before reaching the Bountiful Basin,’ declared the sodal. ‘Perhaps it will therefore amuse me to answer your question fully, since you seem a mite more interesting than most of your kind.
‘The history of the lands through which we travel can never be pieced together, for the beings that lived here have vanished leaving no records but their unwanted bones. Yet there are legends. My race of the catchy-carry-kind are great travellers; we have travelle
d widely and through many generations; and we have collected these legends.
‘So we learned that the Lands of Perpetual Twilight, for all their apparent emptiness, have offered shelter to many creatures. Always these creatures are going the same way.
‘Always they come from the bright green lands over which the sun burns. Always they are heading either for extinction or for the lands of Night Eternal – and often the two mean the same thing.
‘Each wave of creatures may stay here for several generations. But always it is forced farther and farther from the sun by its successors.
‘Once there flourished here a race we know as the Pack People because they hunted in packs – as the sharp-furs will do in a crisis, but with far more organization. Like the sharp-furs, the Pack People were sharp of teeth and brought forth living young, but they moved always on all-fours.
‘The Pack People were mammal but non-human. Such distinctions are vague to me, for Distinguishing is not one of my subjects, but your kind once knew the Pack People as wolves, I believe.
‘After the Pack People came a hardy race of some kind of human, who brought with them four-footed creatures which supplied them with food and clothing, and with which they mated.’
‘Can that be possible?’ Gren asked.
‘I only repeat to you the old legends. Possibilities are no concern of mine. Anyhow, these people were called Shipperds. They drove out the Packers and were in turn superseded by the Howlers, the species that legend says grew from the matings between the Shipperds and their creatures. Some Howlers still survive, but they were mainly killed in the next invasion, when the Heavers appeared. The Heavers were nomadic – I’ve run into a few of them, but they’re savage brutes. Next came another off-shoot of humanity, the Arablers, a race with some small gift for cultivating crops, and no other abilities.
‘The Arablers were quickly overrun by the sharp-furs, or Bamboons, to give them their proper name.
‘The sharp-furs have lived in this region in greater or lesser strength for ages. Indeed, the myths say they wrested the gift of cooking from the Arablers, the gift of sledge transport from the Heavers, the gift of fire from the Packers, and the gift of speech from the Shipperds, and so on. How true that is, I don’t know. The fact remains that the sharp-furs have overrun the land.
‘They are capricious and untrustworthy. Sometimes they will obey me, sometimes not. Fortunately they are afraid of the powers of my species.
‘I should not be surprised if you tree-dwelling humans – Sandwichers, did I hear the belly men call you? – aren’t the forerunners of the next wave of invaders. Not that you’d be aware of it if you were…’
Much of this monologue was lost on Gren and Yattmur, particularly as they had to concentrate on their progress across a stony valley.
‘And who are these people you have as slaves here?’ Gren asked, indicating the carrying man and the women.
‘As I should have thought you might have gathered, these are specimens of Arablers. They would all have died out but for our protection.
‘The Arablers, you see, are devolving. I may possibly explain what I mean by that some other time. They have devolved furthest. They will turn into vegetables if sterility does not obliterate the race first. Long ago they lost even the art of speech. Although I say lost, this was in fact an achievement, for they could only survive at all by renouncing everything that stood between them and vegetative level.
‘This sort of change is not surprising under present conditions on this world, but with it went a more unusual transformation. The Arablers lost the notion of passing time; after all, there is no longer anything to remind us daily or seasonally of time: so the Arablers in their decline forgot it entirely. For them there was simply the individual life span. It was – it is, the only time span they are capable of recognizing: the period-of-being.
‘So they have developed a co-extensive life, living where they need along that span.’
Yattmur and Gren looked blankly through the gloom at each other.
‘Do you mean these women can move forward or backward in time?’ Yattmur asked.
‘That wasn’t what I said: nor was it how the Arablers would express it. Their minds are not like mine nor even like yours, but when for instance we came to the bridge guarded by the sharp-fur with the torch, I got one of the women to move along her period-of-being to see if we crossed the bridge uneventfully.
‘She returned and reported that we did. We advanced and she was proved right, as usual.
‘Of course they only operate when danger threatens; this spanning process is primarily a form of defence. For instance, when Yattmur brought us food the first time, I made the spanning woman span ahead to see if it poisoned us. When she returned and reported us still alive, then I knew it was safe to eat.
‘And similarly when I first saw you with the sharp-furs and – what do you call them? – the belly-tummy men, I sent the spanning woman to see if you would attack us. So you see even a miserable race like the Arablers have their uses!’
They were forging slowly ahead through foothills, travelling through a deep green gloom nourished by sunshine reflected from cloud banks overhead. Ever and again they caught a glimpse of moving lights over on their left flank; the sharp-furs were still following them, and had added more torches to their original one.
As the sodal talked, Gren stared with new curiosity at the two Arabler women leading their party.
Because they were naked, he could see how little their sexual characteristics were developed. Their hair was scanty on the head, non-existent on the mons veneris. Their hips were narrow, their breasts flat and pendulous, although, as far as one could judge their age, they did not seem old.
They walked with neither enthusiasm nor hesitation, never glancing back. One of the women carried on her head the gourd that held the morel.
Through Gren ran a sort of awe to feel how different must be the understandings of these women from his own; what could their lives be like, how would their thoughts flow, when their period-of-being was not a consecutive but a concurrent vista?
He asked Sodal Ye, ‘Are these Arablers happy?’
The catchy-carry-kind laughed throatily.
‘I’ve never thought to ask them such a question.’
‘Ask them now.’
With an impatient flip of his tail the sodal said, ‘All you human and similar kinds are cursed with inquisitiveness. It’s a horrible trait that will get you nowhere. Why should I speak to them just to gratify your curiosity?
‘Besides, it needs absolute nullity of intelligence to be able to span; to fail to distinguish between past and present and future needs a great concentration of ignorance. The Arablers have no language at all; once introduce them to the idea of verbalization and their wings are clipped. If they talk, they can’t span. If they span, they can’t talk.
‘That’s why it is always necessary for me to have two women with me – women preferably, because they are even more ignorant than the men. One woman has been taught a few words so that I can give her commands; she communicates them by gesture to her friend, who can thus be made to span when danger threatens. It is all rather roughly devised, but it has saved me much trouble on my journeys.’
‘What about the poor fellow who carries you?’ Yattmur asked.
From Sodal Ye came a vibrating growl of contempt.
‘A lazy brute, nothing but a lazy brute! I’ve ridden him since he was a lad and he’s very near worn out already. Hup, you idle monster! Get along there, or we’ll never be home.’
Much more the sodal told them. To some of it Gren and Yattmur responded with concealed anger. To some of it they paid no heed. The sodal orated unceasingly, until his voice became merely another factor in the lightning-cluttered gloom.
They kept moving even when rain fell so heavily that it turned the plain about them to mud. The clouds swam in a green light; in their discomfort they felt that it was growing warmer. Still the rain fell. Because nowhere in the open
country afforded shelter, they kept doggedly trudging forward. It was as though they walked in the middle of a bowl of swirling soup.
By the time the rainstorm died, they had begun to climb again. Yattmur insisted on stopping for the baby’s sake. The sodal, who had enjoyed the rain, reluctantly agreed. Under a bank they managed with difficulty to start a poor smouldering grass fire. The baby was fed. They all ate sparingly.
‘We are nearly at Bountiful Basin,’ declared Sodal Ye. ‘From the tops of this next range of mountains you will see it, its sweet salt waters dark, but with one long bar of sunlight falling across it. Ah, it’ll be good to be back in the sea. It’s lucky for you landgoers that we are a dedicated race, or we’d never leave the water in exchange for your benighted medium. Well, prophecy is our burden and we must shoulder it cheerfully…’
He began shouting at the women to hurry and fetch more grass and roots for the fire. They had placed him on top of the bank. The unfortunate carrying man was down in the hollow, standing with his arms above his head almost on top of the fire, letting smoke swirl round him as he attempted to induce heat into his body.
Seeing that Sodal Ye’s attention was distracted, Gren hurried over to the man. He grasped his shoulder.
‘Can you understand what I am saying?’ he asked. ‘Do you speak in my tongue, friend?’
The fellow never raised his head. It hung down on to his chest as if his neck was broken, rolling slightly as the man muttered something unintelligible. When next lightning spread its palsy over the world, Gren glimpsed scars about the top of the man’s spinal chord. In a flash of understanding as swift as the lightning, Gren knew the man had been mutilated so that his head would not lift.
Dropping on to one knee, Gren peered upwards at that bowed countenance. He had a view of a twisted mouth and an eye like a gleaming coal.
‘How far can I trust this catchy-carry-kind, friend?’ he asked.