The Green Book

by Jill Paton Walsh

  “Come and slide on this stone, Mary. We’re just ready to eat.”

  “I’m not sliding on that one,” Mary said. “It pushed me off.”

  “Oh, rubbish, Mary! Come on!”

  “It did, it did!” said Mary, coming back all the same when she saw the picnic. “I climbed up it and it shrugged itself and made me fall off.”

  Jason looked at it with interest, biting a biscuit. “Its shape looks different from before,” he said. So Pattie stared at it too. And while they were all looking, a crack appeared in the stone. It just tore open a little way, and there was an inside like a piece of wet gray velvet.

  “I don’t like it here!” wailed Mary. “Let’s go home!” The stone tore some more. Tore, and moved; not that it moved on the ground, but it moved inside, like a person in a sleeping bag shifting arms or legs.

  “Let’s go now!” said Pattie.

  They left the picnic just where it was, and began to go, scrambling up the sloping side of Boulder Valley, toward the path to Shine. But, as they went, all the stones in the valley were moving. They were heaving, and shuddering, and tearing open. A very big one lay close to the path home, and as they got near, they saw it had opened right down the middle, and a draggled silver-gray wing, with dark purple blotches on it, lay like a tablecloth across the path.

  “We’ll be all right,” said Pattie very bravely, “if we just run. When I say ‘now.’ Now!”

  And they ran. They ran around the edge of the spread wing, and reached the top of the slope, and stopped for breath, and looked back. All over the bowl of the valley the stones were tearing, and crumpling, and showing soft, furry wings. On the farther side of the valley, one giant moth had got all the way out, and was half fluttering, half crawling on the ground, fanning its wings in the sun. They were losing the damp look and turning a bright dusty silver marked with crimson. Very near them, just below where they stood, the moth whose wing had lain in their way was fighting his body free of the crumbling stone. He was thick gray, and furry, but he had front arms, and a round head like a person, and he was actually looking at them, with dark red, vacant, lidless eyes. He made Pattie feel very frightened and sick, and she screamed and took Mary’s hand and ran and ran away.

  They all ran, screaming and crying into the grownups’ meeting, and some of the men took guns, and all the people ran back up the hill toward Boulder Valley. But Pattie sat and thought. Now that she wasn’t looking at them any more, she wasn’t sick at the moth people, even when she remembered she had climbed all over them. She went and asked Jason’s mother, who was trying to calm the babies down: “What do moths eat? Will they eat us?”

  “Heavens, no,” said Jason’s mother. “Moths on Earth ate nectar from flowers, I think. Not meat!”

  So Pattie went to the cupboard in her hut, and fetched a pan of the lovely tree candy, and started out after the others to Boulder Valley. And as she got to the edge of the village, the moth people began to fly overhead. Their huge beating wings made a wind that stroked Pattie’s face and flattened her hair back from her forehead just like wind at home. All those years closed inside the spaceship, and the time on the new planet, had made Pattie forget the air could move, the air could touch you, as the quiet air of the new place never did. But the eight-foot span of dozens of pairs of wings made the air into wind. Over Pattie’s upturned face a great flock of them came, wheeling and turning in the air over Shine, and over the green-turning-gold of the colony’s precious wheat field, fluttering down and around, as though they were looking.

  One of the huge things alighted just in front of Pattie. It had a round head, halfway between a person’s head and a wrinkled walnut; it had trembling antennae, which bent and quivered toward her. It had six legs to stand on, and its body was furry, silver-furry. It folded its wings together above its body, and stood. Pattie closed her eyes, took three steps forward, and put the pan of candy on the ground, and then took three steps back and opened her eyes.

  The moth felt forward toward the candy, and then began to eat it, unrolling a long black tongue and twisting it around the pan. Then it sort of dipped to her, as if bowing, and spread its lovely wings, and flew so close over Pattie’s head she ducked. And then she looked up and saw all the grownups coming back in a group, and watching her being brave and kind.

  After that, we put a big pan of tree candy on the ground outside Shine, as a friendship present to the moth people, and we went and stood, to be scarecrows, scare-moths, around the edges of the field of wheat. For the moth people kept flying, filling the air with the silky sound of wings, and all circling around Shine, as though they were full of curiosity about it. Of course, by and by, some of them fluttered down, as if they were going to settle on the nodding heads of wheat, and then the Guide fired his gun. Just into the air, just to frighten them. They all fluttered up again, and beat around and around. When that had happened three times, they seemed to understand we didn’t want them landing on the wheat, and they kept away. There were a lot of them eating the candy we had given them. Pattie thought it was unkind to fire guns to frighten them, but the Guide told her the wheat was so brittle that anything would break and crush it down, and we couldn’t afford to risk it.

  “Ah, why bother?” growled Arthur. “We’ve got eyes. We can all see what is happening to the wheat.”

  Pattie picked a stem of wheat to look at it closely. Within the folded leaf, the grains were swelling and hardening. She peeled the leaf off, and saw the close-packed grains within. They had edges. She pulled them off the stalk and tumbled them on the palm of her hand. Little shining green glass hexagons, like beads. The wrong shape. Hard and faceted like glass. Pattie looked up from the beads in her hand across the field. It was just turning from pale green-gold to yellow like the crust on bread. It was ripening as it ought to, but it was too shiny, too transparent. Pattie felt frightened. The wheat field was more frightening than the moths.

  When it got dark that day, the people of Shine went home to bed, and a watch was set for the first time since the land survey came home. But the moth people didn’t sleep, they flew. The soft pulse of their wings beat around Shine all night, and brushed across the glassy walls of the huts. Father said they were drawn by the lights of the fires and the jellyfish lamps. Their shadows flitted across, blanking out the warm glow that showed from neighboring houses, passing and repassing, blundering into the house walls and making them shake. After a while, people put out the lamps, and damped down the fires, and the moth people were quieter. Malcolm came visiting Father that evening. They talked in the darkness. Malcolm was excited.

  “Those very slow biorhythms that showed up on the scanner,” he said. “I thought they must have been some kind of mistake, some kind of malfunction in the computer. But I’ll bet now they weren’t—they were the sleep rhythms of these moths in the chrysalis stage!”

  “Do you think they are any danger to us, Malcolm?” asked Father.

  “That I can’t say,” said Malcolm. “Maybe not. They aren’t likely to be a competing form of life. They don’t seem hostile, do they?”

  “Just curious,” said Father. “Think—supposing they have consciousness of some kind—they go to sleep on an empty planet, and wake up to find us!”

  “What I’d like to know is what they eat at the grub stage,” said Malcolm.

  “Do they have to have a grub stage?” asked Father.

  “Well, who knows?” said Malcolm. “Who knows anything here? We must watch them closely, that’s all.”

  The moth people were with us for three days. We tried to talk to them, but it didn’t work. The grownups tried very hard. They made lots of funny noises, through a loud-hailer. They tried sign language. The moth people sometimes flew around, and sometimes settled, and looked at us, but they didn’t seem to understand. We might have thought they were stupid if it hadn’t been for them joining in the hopscotch. We were all playing hopscotch—the children, that is—down on the lake shore, and a moth person came and made a lot of little fl
ights and landings, alongside us, as though he were jumping, too. So we laughed, and began to play ring-around-a-rosy, and the moth people came and fluttered round us in a ring outside our ring. So then we played Lambeth Walk, all making a long line, and stamping along the beach, and they made a line too, and came with us. We were very happy, and we laughed a lot. Some of the grownups came down and watched. Then the moth people began a game of their own, flying in corkscrews, winding around and around each other. We jumped into the air, and twisted as we fell, as though we were trying their game, and we laughed and rolled around on the beach. Sarah ran into the water, and swam, to see if they would share that too, but they didn’t seem to like to go near the water. So in the end we were all just dancing. Arthur brought out his squeeze-box, and played creaky music, and children and grownups and moth people all danced around, and we were singing “In and out the dusty bluebells…you shall be my master!” Pattie was even brave enough to go and tap one of the moth people, and sing “Pitter patter pitter patter on your shoulder!” to it. It didn’t really have a shoulder, so she dibbled her fingers where its head joined its body, and it swept its wings up and down and up again at her.

  At last, when it got dark, we brought out pans of tree candy and gave it to them, and went indoors to our evening meals. Father said it was amazing the moth people didn’t talk, and Pattie told him she thought they did—she could just hear them making squeaking noises to each other, very high and faint. Father and Joe decided it was very high frequency sound that only young ears could pick up.

  Chapter 6

  After the lovely romp that evening, we expected them to come the next morning. But they didn’t, and they weren’t flying around above us as they had been every day since they hatched out. So in the afternoon we went to look for them. They were all gathered in Boulder Valley—Boulder Valley all smooth and stoneless now. They were settled on the round slopes of the valley, row upon row of them, all round the curving valley sides, wings folded above their heads, and all facing the circular flat valley floor, looking toward the view of the lake and the distant mountain. And on the valley floor a small group of them were slowly moving, and opening and closing their wings.

  Anybody would have known how special it was. It felt very hushed, and intense, and though we could not hear the performers, we could tell that the rest of the moths were listening—listening in that way that made words huge and grand, as the people of Shine had listened to Father reading from the Grimm storybook. The whole lot of us gathered now, standing on the valley rim, outside the assembly of moth people, watching and staring, drawn into the circle by the feeling, but shut out hopelessly from understanding. There seemed to be a play going on—speeches, and then slow solemn dances, little bursts of flight, little ringing movements, and amazing, spectacular movements of dozens of wings.

  “A drama,” said the Guide, bemused.

  “A mystery play,” said Father. And we settled to watch, sitting on the rough hillside, and staring.

  It seemed to Pattie that it all went on a very long time. She didn’t want to leave, go home, play instead. But it made her feel terribly lonely, not to understand at all. At last, when the afternoon was halfway over, the players, the dancers on the stage, suddenly rose in flight, in a great spiraling column of wings that mounted and mounted, blazing red and silver in the sun, and the moth audience began to join in, rushing forward down the hillside onto the stage, and then mounting in flight with the others, so that the column of wheeling wings soared higher and higher and seemed to reach a vanishing point in the bright sky. Like a great kite with a long, long tail, flying upward. And when the leaders had finally flown high enough to draw the very last followers off the ground, the column leveled out, and flew away across the lake, toward the mountain.

  Behind them in Boulder Valley they left silence. For though their drama had been soundless, and the great rapt fluttering crowd of them had made no noise, the living hush of their play and the dead silence of the empty valley were quite different.

  Somewhere over the lake, the cloud of moths broke line and flew onward in a random scattering. Malcolm, watching them through the only pair of field glasses, said, “They’re in pairs now. That must have been a mating dance!”

  We all stood for a little while, feeling lost and disappointed, just as it had felt when suddenly there were missing pages in the Grimm story. And we all went home and ate, though it wasn’t really hunger that was making us feel empty.

  The moth people were gone all the rest of that day, and all night. We missed their shadows flitting between the huts, their scudding shadows cast across the fireshine and lampshine between neighbors. And the next day, too, they were gone. The grownups found themselves things to do, but everyone was restless, and the children suddenly found their games boring with no moth friends to join in.

  And then toward evening they began to come back. Or some of them did. Fewer than half as many. They came straggling, flying low over the still water, and as though they were sick or exhausted, or heavily laden. We could see that they were struggling, that their bodies were swollen and heavy, and some of them could not keep aloft, but touched the water, first just with wing tips, and then, as they struggled and failed to fly higher, with wet wings they stuck to the lake surface, trapped and helpless.

  We could only help some, only those that fell into the water just near the edge; the grownups waded in and pulled them onto the shore. But many of them died, floating and sinking far out. Those we had saved dragged themselves, crawling, along the land toward Boulder Valley. The lucky ones who were still airborne flew there. Not more than a quarter of them made it, Peter reckoned. Pattie and Jason hoped more would come home the next day. We left the survivors resting in the rapid dusk.

  But the next morning when we went back, carrying tree candy, they were all dying. They had shed their wings, which lay stretched like colored cloths across the valley slopes; and they had laid eggs—lots of brown boulders, scattered like rocks on the hillsides. They would not eat our candy but lay curled up and quiet, looking very shrunken and ugly and small without their wings. Pattie cried for them bitterly.

  “How long will it be before more of them hatch out?” she asked Father when he tried to comfort her.

  “I don’t know, Pattie,” he said. “How can we tell? As Peter said, we don’t know anything here. But I think it will be a long time, a very long time.”

  “Why, Father?” asked Sarah.

  “Because the bodies, and the shed wings from the last generation of them, had rotted away to nothing when we got here, and only the boulders were left. And I’m almost sure the boulders were much bigger before they hatched than the new ones are. I think they must have quite a lot of growing to do while they are boulders. And I don’t suppose boulders grow fast. It might be years before they come again, and I’m afraid we shan’t be here to see it.”

  “You mean, because the wheat has gone wrong?” said Sarah.

  “Yes, Sarah, because of that,” he said, very sadly.

  It still looked lovely, though. While the moth people had taken Pattie’s mind right off it, the ripening had burnished the bronzed wheat to gold, and then to a crusty brownness, like baked bread. The day came for cutting it, using a whirring thing with knife blades on it that Father and Malcolm had made. Then everyone had to help, putting gloves on to keep from cutting their hands, and walking along the fallen swaths of wheat, picking it up, and piling it in witches’ hats to dry. The first day we were cutting it, Malcolm took an armful of the stalks and laid them on the ground and beat them till the husks fell off the grains. Then he shook the grains in a sieve, to get rid of the chaff, and got a pile of hexagonal yellow beads, shining like golden glass.

  People came down from working in the field and looked at it and shook their heads. They went inside their houses, and all the doors were shut, and the silence was like the silence left behind when the moth people flew away. In our hut, Father sat with his head in his hands, and the little blue bottle of las
t-resort pills in front of him.

  But Sarah said, “I’m going to try, I’m going to try, I’m going to try!” She stole a handful of the glass beads, and rubbed them between two stones, and they fell easily into a dry white powder that smelled good. She sent Pattie for a ladle of lake water, and mixed a dough, and rolled it out thin, and made a pancake, and cooked it on the fire. Then, when it looked done, she broke it into four pieces, and gave one to Pattie and one to Joe, and bit into one herself, leaving Father’s share in the pan.

  Oh, it tasted good! We ate it in three bites. Then Sarah took the last piece to Father.

  “No, Sarah, pet,” he said. “No. It can’t be eaten. It’s like ground glass—it will be like poison to us. It will kill us in terrible agony if we eat it…”

  “We have eaten it, all three, Father,” said Sarah.

  “It tastes good,” Pattie said.

  Father went very white. “Oh, my dears,” he said. Then he said, “Listen, if it begins to hurt you, I will give you these pills at once. But let’s sit together for a bit now.” We sat till Pattie fell asleep, leaning over against Father. She half woke when he carried her to bed. Dimly she saw that the Guide was there, and Malcolm, taking away the last quarter of the pan-baked bread, and Jason’s mother sitting beside Sarah. Pattie fell fast asleep the moment Father laid her down in her bunk. “Does your tummy hurt, Pattie?” he asked her, but she barely heard him ask, and she was too far asleep to tell him.