Earthworks (17 page)

At this, there was some derisive laughter, particularly from the fleet of foot. Undismayed the old sheep continued.

“ ‘Observe what follows if my theory is correct. If the horrid metal monsters cannot come down from the embankment, then they are not chasing us. In fact, my friends, their perceptions may be so alien they are not even aware of us as they clatter by.’

“This was so startlingly novel that everyone began bleating at once. As several sheep pointed out, were this hypothesis true, it would imply that the pasture and they themselves were not central to the scheme of things; which was an intolerable heresy and should be punished. The fleetest lamb contradicted this, saying that people should be free to think what they liked, provided they kept it to themselves. Where the hypothesis was dangerous was that belief in it would clearly mean nobody would bother to run very fast when the horrid metal monsters came, and in no time the flock would become decadent and unable to run at all.

“When they had all had their say, the wise old sheep spoke again.

“ ‘Fortunately, my theory can be tested empirically,’ she said. ‘In the morning, when the first horrid metal monster comes, we will not run away. We will lie by the embankment, and you will see that the horrid metal monster flashes by without being aware of us.’

“They greeted this proposal with bleats of horror: it was an insult to common sense. But as night fell, such was the enlightenment of the flock, it became apparent that the wise old sheep would have her way, and that in the morning they would co-operate in this dangerous experiment.

“When the wise old sheep perceived this, she began to have qualms. Supposing she were mistaken, and they were all killed by the horrid metal monsters?

“The rest of the flock fell asleep at last, and she decided she must go alone to the top of the embankment and study the enemy territory. If she saw anything to alarm her, she could then call off the experiment.

“To get to the top of the embankment was more difficult than she had expected. There was wire to be negotiated, a steep slope to be climbed, gorse bushes to be pushed through. The wise old sheep was unused to such exertions. As she gained the top of the embankment, she suffered a heart attack and died.

“The flock woke in the morning and soon observed the hindquarters of the wise old sheep on the top of the embankment. A council was held. It was generally agreed that to honour her memory they must undertake her experiment.

“So when the first horrid metal monster was heard approaching, every one of the sheep sat tight where she was. The horrid metal monster roared down the line, struck the body of the wise old sheep, plunged over the embankment, and killed all the sheep without exception.

This story baffled me. “What happened?” I asked the faceless man.

“The grass grew tall in the field again.”

I left him, or I let the road whirl him away. Now the buildings were moving past more rapidly. The effect was not as if I was running forward, for I was being dragged back with them, but at a slower rate than they.

The mania had me savagely again, and impelled me to speak to an old woman who stood with a stick to support her. Her eyes were closed, or it may be that she had lids with no pupils underneath, but in either case, she never looked at me in the time I was before her.

“I understand nothing,” I said. “I only know that there is suffering. Why do we suffer, old woman?”

“I will tell you a story,” she said. Though we were both whirling away, she spoke softly, so that I could hardly catch her crazy words.

“When the Devil was a child, he was kept well away from all knowledge of the bitter things of the world. Only the happy things were allowed into his presence. Sin, unhappiness, ugliness, illness, age, all were secret from him.

“One day, the Devil escaped from his nanny and climbed over the garden wall. He walked down the road, full of excitement, until he met an old man bent double with age. The Devil stopped and looked at him.

“ ‘Why do you stare at me?’ said the old man. ‘Anyone would think you had never seen an old man before.’

“The Devil saw that his eyes were dim, his mouth slack, his skin full of wrinkles.

“ ‘What has happened to you?’ he asked.

“ ‘This is what happens to everyone. It is an incurable disease called time.’

“ ‘But what have you done to deserve it?’

“ ‘Nothing. I have got drunk, I have lied occasionally, I have slept with pretty women, I have worked no more than I had to. But those are not bad things. The punishment is greater than the crime, young man.’

“ ‘When will you get better?’ asked the Devil.

“The old man laughed.

“There’s a funeral coming along the road behind me. Have a look! That’s the only way I’ll be cured.’

“The Devil waited where he was, and presently the funeral came up. He climbed into a tree by the roadside, and as the procession passed he looked down into the face of the corpse.

“Although the corpse was that of an old man, he did indeed look more peaceful and less tortured than the old man to whom the Devil had spoken. It seemed as if he was cured, as the old man had said. So the Devil followed the procession to a cemetery to see what would happen next.

“He was surprised to see the body put into a hole and buried. He stayed on the spot until everyone had gone, full of a strange sense of things being wrong. He was still sitting there when one of the servants found him and carried him lovingly home.

“Next day, the Devil escaped over the wall again. He wanted to see if the corpse was properly cured.

“Finding a shovel in the cemetery, he began to dig up the grave. Unfortunately, he had forgotten which was the fresh grave and dug up a lot of older ones. In each hole he found terrible things with very alarming faces full of worms. He decided then that anything was better than the cure called death.

“It was on that day the Devil became sick; on that day, too, he decided what he wanted to be when he grew up.”

I stared at the vile old woman with her closed eyes. Like all the inhabitants of this purgatory, she was beyond my understanding. “And what did the Devil become when he grew up?” I demanded.

She laughed at me. “Why, a townsman!” she said.

The road whirled me on, or else it was the mania in me that pursued me. I seemed to fall down it, and to fall at an increasing rate, so that the other beings there twisted past me like people falling down a cliff. It was confusing, but I felt that I was perhaps asking everyone the wrong questions, or else was making the wrong assumptions, and that this was aggravating my rate of fall.

A small girl was falling beside me, a gaunt child with bright copper locks but a face like parched vellum. I shouted to her above the noise: “How can we find if we are fit for the truth?”

When she smiled at me, she had no teeth, and I took her then for an old dwarf who had dyed her hair.

“There’s a tale about that,” she said. “All about a poor but proud young man who jumped from a hotel window seventeen storeys above the ground. As he was falling, he wondered if his whole life, and the life of almost everyone he knew, was not based upon illusory values. The ground whirled up — ”

“Stop! Stop! Don’t tell me how the story ends! That is my story! I shall die if you tell me any more. Now I can see that I still have the power to choose my own ending!”

Even as I spoke these words, I roused partly out of this strange bout of madness. The old hag whirled past me, and I realized that what I had taken for a street was nothing of the kind. These verticals, these ventilation cowls, these rails and windows — formed part of the
Trieste Star.
For I was done with Africa, and was sailing fast for home in my own vessel, with all my troubles behind.

Until now, I had not realized that my ship was armoured; I saw that the grey of the street was nothing more than the shielding that covered almost everything, rendering us impervious to anything but a nuclear attack. As I clung to the wheel — we drove through the grey waters at a tremendous pace — it was hard to see our course, so thoroughly were the windows shielded.

When the coast of England loomed up, bells sounded, and the crew began to cheer. I gave her a touch of additional speed; she responded like a woman; and we climbed up a steep launching ramp and ashore without difficulty. Until that minute, I had not realized that I captained an amphibious craft.

In no time, we arrived at the biggest city. It sat on top of its miles-wide platform, with starved land stretching all round it — I saw tiny withered things tending rows and rows of wilting plants before we launched ourselves up on to the platform. Moving more slowly now, I steered the ship down one of the streets.

All the ratings were leaning over the rail, cheering and waving, In my heart too surged an enormous relief that we were back home. But in the streets I saw things that I did not wish to see.

First I saw how the city was constructed. I saw how the serviceways that ran below the base platform had eliminated the need for all the distributive and supply and administrative vehicles that might once have crowded such a street; they were all automated, and ran below ground. All private vehicles, too, had long ago been eliminated in deference to an efficient public transport of bus and tube. As a result the traffic was negligible and the streets were narrow.

On either side of the streets ran the homes of the citizens, the plebs. They were more like barracks than flats. They spread all over the city, were the city, for the city had decentralized itself; divided into districts, no one district took precedence over another. All government and public offices were indistinguishable from the plebeian buildings in which the workers lived. It was only here and there that the brute form of a factory or distributive broke the drab uniformity.

One of the factories we passed, tall and black and windowless, was a soil manufactory, where synthetic micro-organisms were injected into the sand we brought home from Africa’s arid coast.

But the people, the people from whom I had sprung! Eagerly I turned to them, to realize for the first time how brutalized they had become. More and more the faculties of the city were being taken over by machines, and more and more the people were looking like machines. A starved body shows its joints and tendons and stanchions in a manner hardly distinguishable from an ordinary robot.

But robots do not break out with those awful skin diseases. Robots do not develop stomachs and legs distended by beri beri. They never have running sores or scurvy. Their spines do not curve, nor their knees buckle, with rickets. They are unable to walk with a hang-dog look. Their fabrics do not atrophy or their hearts break. I had forgotten, I had forgotten!

Many of these tragic people carried charms with which to ward off illness. Most of them had developed weird cults and religions. Among the more simple-minded, orgies formed a vital if occasional part of their lives; the shedding of seed was strongly linked with the vital fertility of the soil from which they were for ever cut off. Among the
élite
— for every ant hill has its aristocrats — was an austere cult that forbade sexual intercourse on the grounds that already the world groaned under too many people; “Let the Earth bring forth a decrease!” was its legend.

All this I saw: and I wept, so that I gave up the wheel, and another of the crew stood by my shoulder and took it. He steered a wilder course than I. He sailed us to city after city, not only in England; we moved up to Scotland, and then across to the lands of Scandinavia, down to Europe, across the wilds of Russia, over to China, over to America. City after city poured beneath our keel like cobbles under a fleet foot, and each city in its misery and lack of distinction could hardly be told from the next. In all of them the people, the endless people, starved and died and hoped and starved. It was as if that anxious jerking of the loins by which they begot duplicates of themselves was a part of a universal death agony.

“Enough!” I cried.

At once the cities vanished, and were replaced by the sea, the sea at night, a dark and gently breathing expanse of water, grumbling in its bed. Full of relief, I turned to the dark figure at the wheel. It was the
doppelgänger
, the Figure!

Our eyes met. It had eyes if not face — and yet it had face, for I saw for the first time that it was myself, a reflection of myself trapped as it might be in a pool of oil, imprisoned behind some terrible surface of guilt.

Its suffering — this I knew in that first glance when our gazes locked — was inseparable from mine, its damnation was mine, and as it was a lost spirit so was my spirit. Yet for this I felt no compassion, only hate. I leapt at the foul thing.

Even as I seized it by the throat, so it seized me, fighting back savagely. In those anguished seconds, it looked nothing like me. Its fangs gleamed in my face, and I wrestled so that it would not bite off my lips. Now I had a better grip, and tightened it, and tightened it, until I felt the seams of my robe rip. It fought back, clinging to me so that a bloody cloud settled before my eyes and would not shake away. Yet I kept that crazed grip on him, and gradually the light died from his eyes. I gave him a final shake, and we fell together into the pool of oily water.

His figure, his dread face, was below me. Slowly it slid down, away from the surface. One hand came up as the rest sank; its fingers touched my fingers, then it all was lost in the rippling dark of the sea.