Earthworks (14 page)

“There is no future for our generations,” said March Jordill. “Below a certain living level, there is nothing for the individual but today. The power to speculate and plan ahead were hard won; the human race grasped that power only for a brief while before letting it slip away. When you don’t think about tomorrow, you see no contradiction in raising a large family to starve and cause you to starve. The poor have inherited the world and beat it about the head with their stringy untiring reproductive organ.” March Jordill, the Ragman, was my master, and Hammer’s.

We forced our way back to his place, through the rogues and Unspeakables. Some streets were being widened, to provide a better thoroughfare for the population. Some were being narrowed, to provide extra rooms for the population.

March Jordill’s was a gaunt house, containing offices of tiny companies — the Megapole Sickness Fund, United Milk Water Stiffener Company, Preghast Associates, Human Water Development Finance, Breeze Fumigation Company, Parallax Birth-Death Bidders, Unclepox — where the directors and secretaries slept, dreaming of their luck, under the desks, come nightfall — with the March Jordill Rags Co. on the top floor, its sagging roof pointing towards the still unpopulated stars. That top floor was the first home I had known.

Hammer had been sold into apprenticeship to Jordill; I had been given to him from the orphanage. We knew we were in luck. March Jordill was mad. To work for a sane man was disaster in the grinding survival conditions of the city. And we were lucky that the Human Water Development Finance lay so near. We saved our water, precious and golden, never letting a drop go astray, leaking it into containers, to get the pittance per gallon it would fetch in the offices below us. A week’s leak made us millionaires compared with many of the other young ruffians we knew along the street.

My master was found on the roof, where he liked to go when there was no business in the musty rooms below, lolling and talking to the broken-nosed widow woman Lamb who performed many tasks for him, from the most casual to the most awful and intimate, perhaps in the hope that he would marry her and raise her above her official Unspeakable status.

As we went round to him, Jordill gripped us and looked us up and down. Half his face, the lower half, was all but empty. Into the upper half were crowded all the hair left to him, the furrows that marked his brow, his eyebrows, his deep eyes in their tuckers of flesh, his blunt brief nose with its tip upturned rudely towards the world. In the lower half, set above the blank spade of his chin, lay the neat divide of his mouth. That mouth, almost lipless, opened and shut like a sort of fly-trapping plant when he spoke.

“So you boys have escaped the combined stewpots of the city’s rascals, and are back to me again — with a handsome profit, I hope?” he said.

Hammer had not the same respect for our master that I held. He struggled out of his grip and stood back.

“We got what you told us,” he said.

“I expected no less of you, boy. Hand it over, then.”

“I’ve got it, Master,” I said. From under the tunic that covered my ribs, I pulled the little ornament that the people of the Shuttered Quarter had given me in exchange for the rags we had taken them. I would have given it to the master, but he snatched it from me and held it aloft, laughing from his pale mouth, so that his chin and head tipped different ways. He threw it to the widow woman Lamb, who caught it neatly and held it between her eyes and the sky, making a ticking noise with her tongue as she did so.

“One of them!” she said.

“Worth a bit when melted down, worth more when sold to the Manskin Believers!”

“There aren’t none of them left!” exclaimed old Lamb, shocked by the mention of this outlaw creed. “They was all routed out by the police and sent for landsmen long ago, back before Jack died.”

“I know better — as usual I know better,” March Jordill said, splitting his face with another laugh. “Nothing is ever eradicated, Lambkin, no shred of clothing, no weed, no sin, no hope. The Manskins are cleverer now, and do their snatching in more devious ways, but their belief has died no more than they, and once we contact them with this nice idol of their faith, they’ll pay handsomely.”

“Master March, it’s illegal, and I fear for you — ”

They went into one of their arguments that I did not attempt to follow. Hammer slipped away, scowling because I would not join him. But I stood long hours not understanding a tenth of what March Jordill said in order to grasp a little, and now that I was growing older I understood more. Now I gathered from his conversation that this ornament we had carried back for him from the Shuttered Quarter was in fact an image of a forbidden cult, of which there were many in the teeming byways near us.

This idol of the Manskin cult was a bare ugly thing with two male faces, one on its head, one on its chest. Its feet stood apart, its buttocks were braced, it clenched its fists against its metal shoulders. Although I did not like it, I did not dare laugh at it.

“Don’t understand it all, at all,” old Lamb said, making the wry face that usually went with her shaken head, “in my young days there wasn’t all this trouble, everyone believing something different.”

“Ah, you’re wrong there,” March Jordill said with relish, for he loved to emphasize other people’s wrongness. “Everyone has begun to believe the same again, now that human self-consciousness is sinking back into mass consciousness. We’re witnessing the belief in only one thing, though it comes superficially disguised in many forms — the belief in the animal darkness from which we rose so comparatively short a time ago.

Over-population has not only brought a collapse of economic organization, which is and always was dependent on agricultural organization, but a collapse in mental organization. We’re all animists again. This compulsively vile little idol — ”

“It’s all very well you talking, but I don’t see why people shouldn’t have as many children as they want. It’s the only right that hasn’t been taken away from them, heaven knows.” Old Lamb always grew heated on this subject, having borne fifteen children herself. “I know what’s to blame! It isn’t nobody’s fault here, it’s the fault of these African states you hear about. They don’t help anybody, they just go on fighting each other and don’t bother about us in the poorer nations. People say to me, Why should they bother about us? but I say, we’re human same as them, aren’t we? Why shouldn’t a white man be as good as a black man, I say. I tell ’em! I’m used to speaking out straight, ah, and in language as anyone can understand, not this high-flown stuff you gets out of them old books. I used to speak out straight to Jack and all. I never stood any nonsense from any man — ”

“You must have stood a good deal to have been so prodigal of progeny,” Jordill observed. “But don’t you see the emergence of the African nations is the consequence of our downfall, not its cause. Alas, the demise of the historic sense! In one part of the world after another, man has outrun his natural resources, simply because he will not curb his natural tendencies at the same time as he curbs his natural enemies. The Middle East, the East, became impoverished and worn out, then Europe, then America and the Usser. So the nations withered and collapsed, until now there remains no power but the African states. The topsoil there — in many regions — is still rich enough to support a pugnacious and aware set of nations. That situation won’t last, of course. Unless something radical happens pretty fast, we shall then see the end of mankind. But look at the rabble flocking down in the street! You think they care?”

“Well, I don’t know about that, but I used to say to Jack before he got himself trampled to death in that riot, ‘Jack,’ I said, ‘you may be bigger than me, but that’s a fact you haven’t got half so much sense as me, worshipping these strange religions, if you’d call them that.’ He became an Abstainer for a brief period, right when it wasn’t fashionable, as certain people seem to think it is now — you know, didn’t want to lie with me or anything like that. O’ course, being a man, he couldn’t keep that up for long.”

“Even in its happiest historical period, the intellect was never a very certain ruler of the body...”

So their talk would flow on, while I stood there slackmouthed, listening. I was not only puzzled by what March Jordill said, but by the way he said it, for in these conversations it was as if he worked himself into the part of a seer, and spoke in an ornate (what I learnt through reading to know as a literary) manner; the more he adopted this fashion, the less likely old Lamb was to understand him; and so I came to realize that he was talking mainly for his own benefit. It was only much later, when I was a convict and had the leisure of thought permitted to a landsman, that it struck me that in this my master was no different from old Lamb herself, or from countless others I met. Even the old books I found: had their authors gone to their great trouble in order to communicate with other people or to commune with themselves? Thus I arrived at a picture of my world, where all were so assailed by others that in defence they turned in towards their own selves. Once I believed that this was the only piece of knowledge I possessed not owned by March Jordill. Now I do not even know if it is knowledge.

My master ended this strange conversation when the old widow burst into belated tears to recall the death of her husband in the riots. Jordill rose, turned his back on her weeping, placed the Mariskin idol on the parapet that ran round the roof, and looked down at the mobs in the street below. Then he chanted at them, words I had heard from him before so often that I had them memorized, though he changed them or rearranged them at will.

“Gaze at each other, people!

You should not have stopped your looking

People of people, like unwatched topiary

You grow unlikely shapes

Out of the bulworks of you birthworks

From the multitudinous bums

Of your gods, no eye regards you —

Look to yourselves, Earth’s peoples, Earthworks!

Look, look hard, and take a knife,

Carve yourself a conscience!”

The words went to the winds, and before they were done, a knocking from below summoned us. He slipped the idol into one of his voluminous patch pockets, lay a hand commandingly on my shoulder, and we climbed below, to meet a customer with whom my master went into a long haggle.

Our room was full of the clutter of our trade — not only old clothes of every description, but any other objects that my master had acquired with the idea of getting a good price for later. There were things here from the past for which the present, I thought, could have no use. They gave me a strange feeling about the past; I had a picture of lonely people doing and wanting strange things that were irrelevant to the real and important matters of life. From the books this impression came with particular strength. There were many books, for nobody wanted them in a city where nobody could read, books piled into old boxes or heaped in one corner to make a sort of table at which old Lamb worked a sewing-machine. Because my master was mad, he would read these books, aloud sometimes, much to Hammer’s disgust, for he did not at all understand the principle of reading. I understood, and March Jordill encouraged me.

“Cutting off, boy, cutting off,” he said to me, his eyes staring over their little rough embankments of flesh. “That’s been the way of man all along, and it’s been the wrong way. Somewhere, something fatal went wrong with the pattern — but we won’t go into that. What I’m telling you is that we only got where we are by cutting ourselves off from the world about us. Do you know the biggest advance ever made by our hairless tribe?”

“Discovering the wheel?” That was something I’d read about, and even as I piped the question the notion was in my head that somewhere in the maze of the city that wheel might still be found, vast and aged and wormy-wooden, if one looked diligently enough: the Original Wheel, as momentous as the Original Sin.

“No, not that, boy. Nor the discovery of fire. Far more vital was the discovery that food could be cooked in the fire, because by so doing those little scrawny men unknowingly cut themselves off from a great deal of disease. There are living things in raw flesh, you see, worms that transfer themselves into your belly and live there when you eat them. They are killed when meat is cooked. That way, a great and perpetual drain on the tribe’s health — mental as well as physical health, since the two cannot but go together — was wiped out. And the tribe that first took to cooking was the only sort of animal with that advantage. Because they ate better, they lived better in every way, and that was how man got the edge on all the other animals.”

“We don’t eat very well now, master. I’m hungry as anything.”

“We don’t live very well now! That’s what’s wrong with the world. We may have killed off all the dangerous animals, but we have eaten and copulated ourselves out of our inheritance, see... But what was I saying?”

If you did not give him his cue, he became very angry, and would strike us, which was why Hammer didn’t care much for him. “You were saying someone cut themselves, master.”

“No, I wasn’t. I was saying how people cut themselves off, and I was giving you an instance.” He screwed his eyes up and looked with his head held sideways at a pile of trouser legs. “People progressed by cutting themselves off from the natural world. But now they’s taken it a stage further, When the soil grew so foul, they moved the cities on to raised platforms to cut themselves off from it, but that cut them off from their own past as well. That’s why everything’s gone to pot. We’re cut off from the wisdom of the ages.”