“Bad,” he said, “it’s ruination. And worse to come, I reckon.” He shook his head. “Aye, worse to come,” he repeated, with gloomy satisfaction.
“Why?” I inquired.
“It’s a judgment,” he told me. “And they deserve it. No morals, no principles. Look at young Ted Norbat—gets a bit of a fine for hiding a litter of ten and eating all but two before he was found out. Enough to bring his father up out of his grave. Why, if he’d done a thing like that—not that he ever would, mind you—but if he had, d’you know what he’d have got?” I shook my head. “It’d have been a public shaming on a Sunday, a week of penances, and a tenth of all he had,” he told me, forcibly.
“But God is not mocked. Bringing Tribulation down on us, again, they are, a season like this is the start; I’m glad I’m an old man and not likely to see the fall of it. But it’s coming, you mark my words.
“Government regulations made by a lot of sniveling, weak-hearted, weak-witted babblers in the East. That’s what the trouble is. When my father was a young man a woman who bore a child that wasn’t in the image was whipped for it. If she bore three out of the image she was uncertified, outlawed, and sold. It made them careful about their Purity and their prayers. My father reckoned there was a lot less trouble with Mutants on account of it, and when there were any, they were burnt, like other Deviations.”
“Burnt!” I exclaimed.
He looked at me. “Isn’t that the way to cleanse Deviations?” he demanded fiercely.
“But a Mutant isn’t responsible for—” I began.
“ ‘Isn’t responsible,’ ” sneered the old man. “Is a tiger-cat responsible for being a tiger-cat? But you kill it. You can’t afford to have it around loose Repentances says to keep pure the stock of the Lord by fire, but that’s not good enough for the bloody government now,
“Give me the old days when a man was allowed to do his duty and keep the place clean. Heading right for another dose of Tribulation we are now.” He went on muttering, looking like an ancient, and wrathful, prophet of doom.
I asked Uncle Axel whether there were a lot of people who really felt the way old Jacob talked. He scratched his cheek thoughtfully.
“Quite a few of the old ones. They still feel it’s a personal responsibility—like it used to be before there were Inspectors. Some of the middle-aged are that way, too, but most of them are willing enough to leave it as it is. They’re not so set on the forms as their fathers were. They don’t reckon it matters much what way it’s done so long as the Mutants don’t breed and things go along all right—but give them a run of years with instability as high as it is this year, and I’d not say for certain they’d take it quietly.”
“Why should the deviation-rate suddenly get high some years?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “I don’t know. Something to do with the weather, they say. Get a bad winter with gales from the southwest, and up goes the deviation-rate—not the next season, but the one after that. Something comes over from the Badlands, they say. Nobody knows what, but it looks as though they’re right. The old men look on it as a warning, just a reminder of Tribulation sent to keep us on the right path and they make the most of it. Next year’s going to be a bad one, too. People will listen to them more then. They’ll have a sharp eye for scapegoats.” He concluded by giving me a long, thoughtful look.
I had taken the hint and passed it on to the others. Sure enough the season had been almost as tribulated as the one before, and there was a tendency to look for scapegoats. Public feeling toward concealments was noticeably less tolerant than it had been the previous summer, and it increased the anxiety we should in any case have felt over our discovery of Petra.
For a week after the river incident we listened with extra care for any hint of suspicion about it. We found none, however. Evidently it had been accepted that both Rosalind and I, in different directions, had happened to hear cries for help which must, in any case, have been faint at the distance. We were able to relax again, but not for long. Only about a month went by before we had a new source of misgiving.
Anne announced that she was going to marry.
CHAPTER TEN
There was a shade of defiance in Anne, even when she told us.
At first we did not take it very seriously. We found it difficult to believe, and we did not want to believe, that she was serious. For one thing, the man was Alan Ervin, the same Alan I had fought on the bank of the stream, and who had informed on Sophie. Anne’s parents ran a good farm, not a great deal smaller than Waknuk itself; Alan was the blacksmith’s son, his prospects were those of becoming the blacksmith himself in his turn. He had the physique for it, he was tall and healthy, but that was about as far as he went. Quite certainly Anne’s parents would be more ambitious for her than that; so we scarcely expected anything to come of it.
We were wrong. Somehow she brought her parents round to the idea, and the engagement was formally recognized. At that point we became alarmed. Abruptly, we were forced to consider some of the implications, and, young though we were, we could see enough of them to make us anxious. It was Michael who put it to Anne, first
“You can’t, Anne. For your own sake you mustn’t,” he told her. “It’d be like tying yourself for life to a cripple. Do think, Anne, do really think what it is going to mean.”
She came back to him angrily. “I’m not a fool. Of course I’ve thought. I’ve thought more than you have. I’m a woman—I’ve a right to marry and have children. There are three of you and five of us. Are you saying that two of us must never marry? Never have any lives or homes of our own? If not, then two of us have got to marry Norms. I’m in love with Alan, and I intend to marry him. You ought to be grateful. It’ll help to simplify things for the rest of you,”
“That doesn’t follow,” Michael argued. “We can’t be the only ones. There must be others like us—beyond our range, somewhere. If we wait a little . . .”
“Why should I wait? It might be for years, or for always. I’ve got Alan, and you want me to waste years waiting for someone who may never come, or whom I may hate if he does. You want me to give up Alan, and risk being cheated of everything. Well, I didn’t ask to be the way we are; but I’ve as much right to get what I can out of life as anyone else. “It’s you who haven’t thought, Michael—or any of you. I know what I intend to do; the rest of you don’t know what you intend to do because you’re none of you in love—except David and Rosalind—and so you’ve none of you faced it.”
That was partially true as far as it went; but if we had not faced all the problems before they arose, we were well aware of those that were constantly with us, and of those the main one was the need of dissembling, of leading all the time a suffocating half-life with our families. One of the things we looked forward to most was relief some day from that burden, and though we’d few positive ideas how it could be achieved, we could all realize that marriage to a Norm would become intolerable in a very short while. It could not be anything but a sham of a marriage when the two were separated by something wider than a different language, which had always been hidden by the one from the other. It would be misery, perpetual lack of confidence, and insecurity; there’d be the prospect of a lifetime’s guarding against slips—and we knew well enough already that occasional slips were inevitable.
Anne had seen this just as well as the rest of us, but now she pretended to ignore it. She began to defy her differences by refusing to respond to us, though whether she shut her mind off altogether, or continued to listen without taking part we could not tell. We suspected the former as being more in character, but, being unsure, we were not even able to discuss among ourselves what course, if any, we ought to take. Possibly there was no active course. I myself could think of none. Rosalind, too, was at a loss.
Rosalind had grown into a tall, slim young woman, now. She was handsome, with a face one could not help watching, she was attractive, too, in the way she moved and carried herself. Several of the younger men had felt the attractio
n, and gravitated toward her. She was civil to them, but no more. She would not be entangled with any of them, very likely it was for that reason that she was more shocked than any of us by what Anne proposed to do.
We used to meet, discreetly and not dangerously often. No one but the others, I think, ever suspected anything between us. We had to make love in a snatched, unhappy way when we did meet, wondering miserably whether there would ever be a time when we should not have to hide ourselves. And somehow the business of Anne made us more wretched still. Marriage to a Norm, even the kindest and best of them was unthinkable for both of us.
The only other person I could turn to for advice was Uncle Axel. He knew, as did everyone else, about the forthcoming marriage, but it was news to him that Anne was one of us, and he received it lugubriously. After he had turned it over in his mind, he shook his head.
“No. It won’t do, Davie. You’re right there, I’ve been seeing these last five or six years how it wouldn’t do, but I’ve just been hoping that maybe it’d never come to it. I reckon you’re all up against a wall, or you’d not be telling me now?”
I nodded. “She wouldn’t listen to us,” I told him. “Now she’s gone further. She won’t respond at all. She says that’s over. She never wanted to be different from Normals, now she wants to be as like them as she can. I never knew before that anybody could not want anybody else quite like that. She’s so fierce and blind about it that she simply doesn’t care what may happen later. I don’t see what we can do.”
“You don’t think that perhaps she can make herself live like a Norm—cut out the other altogether? It’d be too difficult?” Uncle Axel asked.
“We’ve thought about that, of course,” I told him. “She can refuse to respond. She’s doing that now, like somebody refusing to talk. But to go on with it—it’d be like taking a vow of silence for the rest of her life. I mean, she can’t just make herself forget, and become a Norm. We can’t believe that’s possible. Michael told her it’d be like pretending to have only one arm because the person one wants to marry has only one arm. It wouldn’t be any good—and you couldn’t keep it up, either.”
Uncle Axel pondered for a bit.
“You’re convinced she’s crazy about this Alan, quite beyond reason, I mean?” he asked.
“She’s not like herself at all. She doesn’t think properly any more,” I told him. “Before she stopped responding her thought-shapes were all queer with it.”
Uncle Axel shook his head disapprovingly again. “Women like to think they’re in love when they want to marry; they feel it’s a justification which helps their self-respect,” he observed. “No harm in that; most of them are going to need all the illusions they can keep up, anyway. But a woman who is in love is a different proposition. She lives in a world where all the old perspectives have altered. She is blinkered, single-purposed, undependable in other matters. She will sacrifice anything, including herself, to one loyalty. For her, that is quite logical; for everyone else it looks not quite sane; socially it is dangerous. And when there is also a feeling of guilt to be overcome, and maybe, expiated, it is quite certainly dangerous for someone.” He broke off, and reflected in silence awhile. Then he added, “It is too dangerous, Davie. Remorse . . . abnegation . . . self-sacrifice . . . the desire for purification . . . all pressing upon her. The sense of burden, the need for help, for someone to share the burden . . . Sooner or later, I’m afraid, Davie. Sooner or later. . .”
I thought so, too.
“But what can we do?” I repeated, miserably.
He turned steady, serious eyes on me.
“How much are you justified in doing? One of you is set on a course to endanger the lives of all eight. Not altogether wittingly, perhaps, but none the less seriously, for all that. Even if she does intend to be loyal to you, she is deliberately risking you all for her own ends—just a few words in her sleep would be enough. Does she have a moral right to create a constant threat hanging over seven heads just because she wants to live with this man?”
I hesitated. “Well, if you put it like that—” I began.
“I do put it like that. Has she that right?”
“We’ve done our best to dissuade her,” I evaded, inadequately.
“Listen,” said Uncle Axel. “I knew a man once who was one of a party who were adrift in a boat after their ship had burnt. They’d not much food and very little water. One of them drank sea water and went mad. He tried to wreck the boat so that they’d all drown together. He was a menace to all of them. In the end they had to throw him overboard, with the result that the other three had just enough food and water to last until they reached land. If they hadn’t done it he’d have died anyway, and the rest of them, too, most likely-”
I shook my head. “No,” I said decisively, “we couldn’t do that.”
He went on looking at me steadily.
“This isn’t a nice cozy world for anyone, especially not for anyone that’s different,” he said. “Maybe you’re not the kind to survive in it, after all.”
“It isn’t just that,” I told him. “If it were Alan you were talking about, if it would help to throw him overboard, we’d do it, but it wouldn’t help. She’d understand why, and it’d only make things worse. But it’s Anne you’re meaning, and we can’t do it—not because she’s a girl, it’d be the same with any of us; we just couldn’t do it. We’re all too close together. It’s difficult to explain. . .” I broke off, trying to think of a way of showing him what we meant to one another. There didn’t seem to be any clear way of putting it, into words, I could only tell him, not very effectively.
“It wouldn’t be just murder, Uncle Axel. It’d be something worse, as well; like violating part of ourselves. We couldn’t do it.”
‘The alternative is the sword over your heads,” he said.
“I know,” I agreed unhappily. “But that isn’t the way. A sword inside us would be worse.”
I could not even discuss that solution with the others for fear that Anne might catch our thoughts; but I knew with certainty what their verdict on it would be. I knew that Uncle Axel had proposed the only practical solution; and I knew, too, its impossibility meant recognizing that nothing could be done.
Anne now transmitted nothing whatever, we caught no trace of her, but whether she had the strength of will not to receive we were still uncertain. From Deborah, her sister, we learned that she would listen only to words, and was doing her best to pretend to herself that she was a Norm in every way, but that could not give us enough confidence for us to exchange our thoughts with freedom.
And in the following weeks Anne kept it up, so that one could almost believe that she had succeeded in renouncing her difference and becoming a Norm. Her wedding-day passed with nothing amiss, and she and Alan moved into the house which her father gave them on the edge of his own land. Here and there one encountered hints that she might have been unwise to marry beneath her, but otherwise there was little comment.
During the next few months we heard scarcely anything of her. She discouraged visits from her sister as though she was anxious to cut even that last link with us. We could only hope that she was being more successful and happier than we had feared.
One of the consequences, as far as Rosalind and I were concerned, was a more searching consideration of our own troubles. Quite when it was that we had known we were going to marry one another, neither of us was able to remember. It was one of those things that seem ordained, in such proper accord with the law of nature and our own desires, that we felt we had always known it. The prospect colored our thoughts even before we acknowledged it to ourselves. To me, it had never been thinkable that anything else should happen, for when two people have grown up thinking-together as closely as we had, and when they are drawn even closer together by the knowledge of hostility all around them they can feel the need of one another even before they know they are in love.
But when they do know they are in love they suddenly know, too, that there are
ways in which they differ not at all from Norms, that some of the same obstacles must be overcome.
The feud between our families which had first come into the open over the matter of the greathorses had now been established for almost a decade. My father and half-uncle Angus, Rosalind’s father, had settled down to a regular guerrilla. In their efforts to score points each kept a hawk-like watch upon the other’s land for the least Deviation or Offense, and both had been known for some time now to reward the informer who would bring news of irregularities in the other’s territory.
It was perfectly clear to us that neither side would be anything but dead set against a union of the families.
For both of us the situation was bound to grow more difficult. Already Rosalind’s mother had attempted some matchmaking; and I had seen my mother measuring one or two girls with a calculating, though so far unsatisfied eye.
We were sure that, at present, neither side had an idea of anything between us. There was only acrid communication between the Strorms and the Mortons, and the only place they could be found beneath the same roof was church. Rosalind and I met infrequently and very discreetly.
We discussed and explored lengthily for some pacific way out of the dilemma, but even when half a year had passed since Anne’s marriage we were no nearer reaching it
As for the rest of our group, we found that in that six months the first alarm had lost its edge. That is not to say that we were easy in our minds: we had never been that since we discovered ourselves, but once the crisis over Anne had passed we got used to living with a slightly increased degree of threat.
Then, one Sunday at dusk, Alan was found dead in the field-path that led to his home, with an arrow through his neck,
We had the news first from Deborah, and we listened anxiously as she tried to make contact with her sister. She used all the concentration she could manage, but it was useless. Anne’s mind remained as firmly closed against us as it had been for the last eight months. Even in distress she transmitted nothing.
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