A Treasury of Great Science Fiction 1

by Anthony Boucher (ed)

  “They got them, all three of them,” he said to the Inspector, and gave a look of disgust at me.

  The Inspector got up promptly, and they went out together. I stared at the closed door. The misery of self-reproach struck me so that I shook all over. I could hear myself whimpering as the tears rolled down my cheeks. I tried to stop it, but I couldn’t. My hurt back was forgotten. The anguish my father’s news had caused me was far more painful than that. My chest was so tight with it that it was choking me.

  Presently the door opened again. I kept my face to the wall. Steps crossed the room. A hand rested on my shoulder. The Inspector’s voice said:

  “It wasn’t that, old man. You had nothing to do with it. A patrol picked them up, quite by chance, twenty miles away.”

  A couple of days later I said to Uncle Axel, “I’m going to run away.”

  He paused in his work, and gazed thoughtfully at his saw.

  “I’d not do that,” he advised. “It doesn’t usually work very well. Besides,” he added after a pause, “where would you run to?”

  “That’s what I wanted to ask you,” I explained.

  He shook his head. “Whatever district you’re in they want to see your normalcy certificate,” he told me. “Then they know who you are and where you’re from.”

  “Not in the Fringes,” I suggested.

  He stared at me. “Man alive, you’d not want to go to the Fringes. Why they’ve got nothing there, not even enough food. Most of them are half-starving, that’s why they make the raids. No, you’d spend all the time there just trying to keep alive, and lucky if you did.”

  “But there must be some other places,” I said.

  “Only if you can find a ship that’ll take you, and even then . . .” He shook his head again. “In my experience,” he told me, “if you run away from a thing just because you don’t like it, you don’t like what you find either. Now, running to a thing, that’s a different matter, but what would you want to run to? Take it from me, it’s a lot better here than it is most places. No, I’m against it, Davie. In a few years’ time when you’re a man and can look after yourself it may be different. I reckon it’d be better to stick it out till then, anyway; much better than have them just catch you and bring you back.” There was something in that. I was beginning to learn the meaning of the word “humiliation,” and did not want any more of it at present. But from what he said the question of where to go would not be easily solved even then. It looked as if it would be advisable to learn what one could of the world outside Labrador, in preparation. I asked him what it was like. “Godless,” he told me. “Very godless indeed.”

  It was the sort of uninformative answer my father would have given. I was disappointed to have it from Uncle Axel, and told him so. He grinned.

  “All right, Davie, boy, that’s fair enough. So long as you’ll not chatter, I’ll tell you something about it.”

  “You mean it’s secret?” I asked, puzzled.

  “Not quite that,” he said. “But when people are used to believing a thing is such-and-such a way, and the preachers want them to believe that that’s the way it is, you get no thanks for upsetting their ideas. Sailors soon found that out in Rigo, so mostly they only talk about it now to other sailors. If the rest of the people want to think it’s nearly all Badlands outside, they let them; it doesn’t alter the way it really is, but it does make for peace and quiet.”

  “My book says it’s all Badlands, or bad Fringes country,” I told him.

  “There are other books that don’t but you’ll not see them about much, not even in Rigo, let alone in the backwoods here,” he said. “And, mind you it doesn’t do to believe everything every sailor says, either. Often you’re not sure whether any couple of them are talking about the same place or not, even when they think they are. But when you’ve seen some of it, you begin to understand that the world’s a much queerer place than it looks from Waknuk. So you’ll keep it to yourself?”

  I assured him I would.

  “All right. Well, it’s this way . . .” he began.

  To reach the rest of the world (my Uncle Axel explained) you start by sailing downriver from Rigo until you get to the sea. They say that it’s no good sailing on straight ahead, to the east, that is, because either the sea goes on for ever, or else it comes to an end suddenly, and you sail over the edge. Nobody knows for sure.

  If you make to the northeast they say there is a great land where the plants aren’t very deviational, and animals and people don’t look deviational, but the women are very tall and strong. They rule the country entirely, and do all the work. They keep their men in cages until they are about twenty-four years old, and then eat them. They also eat shipwrecked sailors. But as no one ever seems to have met anyone who has actually been there and escaped, it’s difficult to see how all that can be known. Still there it is—no one has ever come back denying it, either.

  The only way I know is south—I’ve been south three times. To get there you keep the coast to starboard as you leave the river. After a couple of hundred miles or so you come to the Straits of Newf. As the Straits widen out you keep the coast of Newf to port and call in at Lark for fresh water—and provisions, too, if the Newf people will let you have any. After that you bear southeast a while and then south, and pick up the mainland coast again to starboard. When you reach it you find it is Badlands—or at least very bad Fringes. There’s plenty growing there, but sailing close inshore you can see that nearly all of it is deviational. There are animals, too, and most of them look as if it’d be difficult to classify them as Offenses against any known kinds.

  A day or two’s sail further on there’s plenty of Badlands coastline, with no doubt about it. Soon you’re following round a big bay, and you get to where there are no gaps, it’s all Badlands.

  When sailors first saw those parts they were pretty scared. They felt they were leaving all Purity behind, and sailing further and further away from God, where he’d not be able to help them. Everybody knows that if you walk on Badlands you die, and they’d none of them expected ever to see them so closely with their own eyes.

  And a shocking sight it must have been at first, to see how the things which are against God’s laws of nature flourish there just as if they had a right to. You can see giant, distorted heads of corn growing higher than small trees; big saprophytes growing on rocks, with their roots trailing out on the wind like bunches of hair, fathoms long; in some places there are fungus colonies that you’d take at first sight for big white boulders; you can see succulents like barrels, but as big as small houses, and with spines ten feet long. There are plants which grow on the cliff tops and send thick, green cables down a hundred feet and more into the sea; and you wonder whether it’s a land plant that’s got to the salt water, or a sea plant that’s somehow climbed ashore. There are hundreds of kinds of queer things, and scarcely a normal one among them—it’s a kind of jungle of Deviations, going on for miles and miles. There don’t seem to be many animals, but occasionally you catch sight of one, though you’d never be able to name it. There are a fair number of birds, though, seabirds mostly; and once or twice people have seen big things flying in the distance, too far away to make out anything except that the motion didn’t look right for birds. It’s a weird, evil land, and many a man who sees it suddenly understands what might happen here if it weren’t for the Purity Laws and the Inspectors.

  It’s bad, but it isn’t the worst.

  Further south still you begin to find patches where only coarse plants grow, and poorly at that, and soon you begin to come to stretches of coast, and land behind it, twenty, thirty, forty miles long, maybe, where nothing grows, nothing at all.

  The whole seaboard is empty—black and harsh and empty. The land behind looks like a huge desert of charcoal. Where there are cliffs they are sharp-edged, with nothing to soften them. There are no fish in the sea there, no weed either, not even slime, and when a ship has sailed there the barnacles and the fouling on her bottom dr
op off and leave her hull clean. You don’t see any birds. Nothing moves at all, except the waves breaking on the black beaches.

  It is a frightful place. Masters order their ships well out for fear of it, and very relieved the sailors are to keep clear of it.

  And yet it can’t always have been like that because there was one ship whose captain was foolhardy enough to sail close inshore. Her crew were able to make out great stone ruins. They all agreed that they were far too regular to be natural, and they thought they might be the remains of one of the Old People’s cities. But nobody knows any more about them. Most of the men in that ship wasted away and died, and the rest were never the same afterward. No other ship has risked going close in.

  For hundreds of miles the coast goes on being Badlands with stretches of the dead, black land, so far, in fact, that the first navigators gave up and turned back saying that they thought it must go on like that to the ends of the earth.

  The preachers and the church people were pleased to hear it, for it was very much what they had been teaching, and for a time it made people lose interest in exploring.

  But later on curiosity revived, and better-found ships sailed south again. A ship called the Venture, which had long been given up for lost, came sailing home to Rigo. She was battered and under-manned, her canvas was patched, her mizzen jury-rigged, and her condition foul, but she triumphantly claimed the honor of being the first to reach the lands beyond the Black Coasts. She brought back a number of objects including gold and silver and copper ornaments, and a cargo of spices to prove it. Strict churchgoers refused to touch the spices for fear they might be tainted, but other people preferred to believe that they were the kinds of spices referred to in the Bible. Whatever they were, they are profitable enough now for ships to sail south in search of them.

  The lands down there aren’t civilized. Mostly they don’t have any sense of sin there so they don’t stop Deviations; and where they do have a sense of sin, they’ve got it mixed up. A lot of them aren’t ashamed of Mutants; it doesn’t seem to worry them when children turn out wrong, provided they’re right enough to live and to learn to look after themselves.

  You’ll find islands where the people are all thickset, and others where they’re thin; there are even said to be some islands where both the men and women would be passed as true images if it weren’t that some strange deviation has turned them all completely black—though even that’s easier to believe than the one about a race of Deviations that has dwindled to two feet high, grown fur and a tail, and taken to living in trees.

  All the same, it’s queerer there than you’d ever credit. Pretty nearly anything seems possible once you’ve seen it.

  That seems blasphemous at first, but after a bit you start asking yourself, well, what real evidence have we got about the true image? You find that the Bible doesn’t say anything to contradict the Old People being like us, but, on the other hand it doesn’t give any definition of Man, either. No, the definition comes from Nicholson’s Repentances and he admits that he was writing some generations after Tribulation came. You find yourself wondering whether he knew he was in the true image, or whether he only thought he was . . .

  Uncle Axel had a lot more to say about southern parts than I can remember, and it was all very interesting in its way, but it didn’t tell me what I wanted to know. At last I asked him point-blank.

  “Uncle Axel, are there any cities there?”

  “Cities?” he repeated. “Well, here and there you’ll find a town, of a kind. As big as Kentak, maybe, but built differently.”

  “No,” I told him. “I mean big places.” I described the city in my dream, but without telling him it was a dream.

  He looked at me oddly. “No, I never heard of any place like that,” he told me.

  “Further on, perhaps. Further than you went?” I suggested.

  He shook his head. “You can’t go further on. The sea gets full of weed. Masses of weed with stems like cables. A ship can’t make her way through it, and it’s trouble enough to get clear of it once you get in it at all.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You’re quite sure there’s no city?”

  “Sure,” he said. “We’d have heard of it by this time if there was.”

  I was disappointed. It sounded as if running away to the South, even if I could find a ship to take me, would be little better than running away to the Fringes. For a time I had hoped, but now I had to go back to the idea that the city I dreamt of must be one of the Old People’s cities after all.

  Uncle Axel went on talking about the doubts of the true image that his voyages had given him. He labored it rather a lot, and after a while he broke off to ask me directly:

  “You understand, don’t you Davie, why I’ve been telling you all this?”

  I was not sure that I did. Moreover, I was reluctant to admit the flaw in the tidy, familiar orthodoxy I had been taught I recalled a phrase which I had heard a number of times.

  “You lost your faith?” I inquired.

  Uncle Axel snorted, and pulled a face.

  “Preacher-words!” he said, and thought for a moment. “I’m telling you,” he went on, “that a lot of people saying that a thing is so doesn’t prove it is so. I’m telling you that nobody, nobody really knows what is the true image. They all think they know—just as we think we know, but, for all we can prove, the Old People themselves may not have been the true image.” He turned, and looked long and steadily at me again.

  “So,” he said, “how am I, and how is anyone to be sure that this ‘difference’ that you and Rosalind have does not make you something nearer to the true image than other people are? Perhaps the Old People were the image; very well then, one of the things they say about them is that they could talk to one another over long distances. Now we can’t do that, but you and Rosalind can. Just think that over, Davie. You two may be nearer to the image than we are.”

  I hesitated for perhaps a minute, and then took a decision.

  “It isn’t just Rosalind and me, Uncle Axel,” I told him. “There are others, too.”

  He was startled. He stared at me.

  “Others?” he repeated. “Who are they? How many?”

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t know who they are—not names, I mean. Names don’t have any thinking-shapes, so we’ve never bothered. You just know who’s thinking, like you know who’s talking. I only found out who Rosalind was by accident.”

  He went on looking at me seriously, uneasily.

  “How many of you?” he repeated.

  “Eight,” I told him. “There were nine, but one of them stopped about a month ago. That’s what I wanted to ask you,

  Uncle Axel, do you think somebody found out? He just stopped suddenly. We’ve been wondering if anybody knows . . . You see, if they found out about him . . .” I let him draw the inference himself.

  Presently he shook his head.

  “I don’t think so. We should be pretty sure to have heard of it. It looks to me more as if it’d be an accident of some kind, being quite sudden like that. You’d like me to try to find out?”

  “Yes, please. It’s made some of us afraid.”

  I told him what I could, which was very little. It was a relief to know that he would try to find out what had happened. Now that a month had gone by without a similar thing happening to any of the rest of us we were less anxious than we had been, but still far from easy.

  Before we parted he returned to his earlier advice to remember that no one could be certain of the true image.

  Later, I understood why he gave it. I realized, too, that he did not greatly care what was the true image. Whether he was wise or not in trying to forestall both the alarm and the sense of inferiority that he saw lying in wait for us when we should become better aware of ourselves and our difference, I cannot say. At any rate, I decided, for the moment, not to run away from home. The practical difficulties were clearly greater than they had seemed.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

/>   The arrival of my sister, Petra, came as a genuine surprise to me, and a conventional surprise to everyone else.

  There had been a slight, not quite attributable, sense of expectation about the house for the previous week or two, but it remained unmentioned and unacknowledged. For me, the feeling that I was being kept unaware of something afoot was unresolved until there came a night when a baby howled. It was penetrating, unmistakable, and certainly within the house, where there had been no baby the day before. But in the morning nobody referred to the sound in the night. No one, indeed, would dream of mentioning the matter openly until the Inspector should have called to issue his certificate that it was a human baby in the true image. Should it unhappily turn out to violate the image and thus be ineligible for a certificate, no mention would ever be made of it, and the whole regrettable incident would be deemed not to have occurred.

  As soon as it was light my father sent a stablehand off on a horse to summon the Inspector, and, pending his arrival, the whole household tried to dissemble its anxiety by pretending we were just starting another ordinary day.

  The pretense grew thinner as time went on, for the stable-hand, instead of bringing back the Inspector forthwith, as was to be expected when a man of my father’s position and influence was concerned, returned with a polite message that the Inspector would certainly do his best to find time to pay a call in the course of the day.

  It is very unwise for even a righteous man to quarrel with his local Inspector and call him names in public. The Inspector has too many ways of hitting back.

  My father became very angry, the more so since the conventions did not allow him to admit what he was angry about.

  Furthermore, he was well aware that the Inspector intended him to be angry. He spent the morning hanging around the house and yard, exploding with bad temper now and then over trivial matters, so that everyone crept about on tiptoe and worked very hard indeed, in order not to attract his attention.