Inverted World (28 page)

“We have nurses,” he said. “In the … where I come from.”

She looked at him with new interest. “Where’s that?”

“A city. In the south.”

“What’s it called?”

“Earth. Although most of the time we just call it the city.”

Elizabeth smiled uncertainly, not sure she had heard correctly. “Tell me about it.”

He shook his head. The horses had finished drinking, and were nuzzling each other.

“I think I’d better be on my way,” he said.

He walked quickly towards his equipment, scooped it up, and stuffed it hurriedly in the saddle-bags. Elizabeth watched curiously. When he had finished he took the rein, turned the horse round and led her up the bank. At the fringe of the trees he looked back.

“I’m sorry. You must think me very rude. It’s just… you’re not like the others.”

“The others?”

“The people round here.”

“Is that so bad?”

“No.” He looked around the river-side as if seeking some further excuse to stay with her. Abruptly, he seemed to change his mind about leaving. He tethered the horse to the nearest tree. “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“I wonder … do you think I could draw you?”

“Draw me?”

“Yes … just a sketch. I’m not very good, I haven’t been doing it very long. While I’m up here I spend a lot of time drawing what I see.”

“Was that what you were doing when I met you?”

“No. That was just a map. I mean proper drawings.”

“O.K. Do you want me to pose for you?”

He fumbled in his saddle-bag, then brought out a wad of paper of assorted sizes. He flicked through them nervously, and she saw that there were line-drawings on them.

“Just stand there,” he said. “No … by your horse.”

He sat down on the edge of the bank, balancing the papers on his knees.

She watched him, still disconcerted by this sudden development, and felt a growing self-consciousness that was generally alien to her personality. He stared over the paper at her.

She stood by the horse, her arm running underneath its neck so that she could pat the other side, and the horse responded by pressing its nose against her.

“You’re standing wrong,” he said. “Turn towards me more.”

The self-consciousness grew, and she realized she was standing in an unnatural, awkward position.

He worked away, slipping through one sheet of paper after the next, and she began to relax more. She decided to pay no attention to him, and petted the horse again. After a while he asked her to sit in the saddle, but she was growing tired.

“Can I see what you’ve done?”

“I never show this to anyone.”

“Please, Helward. I’ve never been drawn before.”

He sifted through the papers, and selected two or three. “I don’t know what you’ll think.”

She took them from him.

“God, am I as skinny as that?” she said, without thinking.

He tried to take them away from her. “Give them back.”

She turned away from him, and flicked through the others. It was possible to see that they were of her, but his sense of proportion was…

unusual. Both she and the horse were drawn too tall and thin. The effect was not unpleasing, but rather weird.

“Please … I’d like them back.”

She gave them to him, and he put them at the bottom of the pile.

Abruptly he turned his back on her, and walked towards his horse.

“Have I offended you?” she said.

“It’s O.K. I knew I shouldn’t have shown them to you.”

“I think they’re excellent. It’s just … it’s a bit of a shock to see yourself through someone else’s eyes. I told you I had never been drawn.”

“You’re difficult to draw.”

“Could I see some of your others?”

“You wouldn’t be interested.”

“Look, I’m not just trying to smooth your ruffled feathers. I really am interested.”

“O.K.”

He gave her the whole pile, and continued on his way towards his horse.

While she sat down again and began to go through the drawings, she was aware of him in the background pretending to adjust the horse’s harness, but in fact trying to anticipate her response.

There were a variety of subjects. There were several of his horse: grazing, standing, throwing its head back. These were amazingly naturalistic; with a few lines he had caught the very essence of the animal, proud yet docile, tamed yet still its own master. Curiously, the proportions were exactly right. There were several drawings of a man… self-portraits, or the man she had seen him with earlier? He was drawn in his cloak, without his cloak, standing by a horse, using the video camera she had seen earlier.

Again, the proportions were almost exactly right.

There were a few sketches of scenery: trees, a river, a curious structure being dragged by ropes, a distant range of hills. He wasn’t as adept with views; sometimes his proportions were good, at other times there was a disturbing distortion that she could not quite identify. Something wrong with the perspective? She couldn’t tell, not having a sufficient artistic vocabulary.

At the bottom of the pile she found the drawings he had made of her. The first few were not very good, clearly his first attempts. The three he had shown her were by far the best, but there was still this elongation of her and the horse that puzzled her.

“Well?” he said.

“I—” She couldn’t find the right words. “I think they’re good. Very unusual. You’ve got an excellent eye.”

“You’re a difficult subject.”

“I particularly like this one.” She searched through the pile, found one of the horse with its mane flying wild. “It’s so lifelike.”

He grinned then. “That’s my own favourite.”

She glanced again through the drawings. There was something about them she hadn’t understood … there, in one of the drawings of the man. High in the background, a weird, fourpointed shape. There was one in each of the sketches he had done of her.

“What’s this?” she said, pointing to it.

“The sun.”

She frowned a little, but decided not to pursue it. She felt she had done enough damage to his artistic ego for the moment.

She selected what she thought was the best of the three.

“Could I have this one?”

“I thought you didn’t like it.”

“I do. I think it’s marvellous.”

He looked at her carefully, as if trying to divine whether she was being truthful, then took the pile from her again.

“Would you like this one too?”

He handed her the one of the horse.

“I couldn’t. Not that one.”

“I’d like you to have it,” he said. “You’re the first person to have seen it.”

“I—thank you.”

He placed the papers carefully into the saddle-bag, and buckled the cover.

“Did you say your name was Elizabeth?”

“I prefer to be called Liz.”

He nodded gravely. “Goodbye, Liz.”

“Are you going?”

He didn’t answer, but untethered the horse and swung into the saddle. He rode down the bank, splashed through the shallow water of the river, and spurred his horse on up the opposite bank. In a few seconds he was lost to sight in the trees beyond.

Back at the village Elizabeth found she had no appetite for more work.

She was still waiting for a consignment of proper medical supplies, and a doctor had been promised for more than a month. She had done what she could to see that the villagers were getting a balanced diet—but food supplies were limited—and she had been able to deal with the more obvious ailments such as sores, rashes, and so forth. Last week she had helped deliver a baby for one of the women, and it wasn’t until this that she had felt she was doing any good at all.

Now, with the strange encounter by the river still fresh in her mind, she decided to return to headquarters early.

She found Luiz before she left.

“If those men come back,” she said, “try to find out what it is they want. I’ll be back in the morning. If they come before I arrive, try to keep them here. Find out where they’re from.”

It was nearly seven miles to the headquarters, and it was evening when she arrived. The place was almost deserted: many of the field operatives stayed out for several nights on end. Tony Chappell was there, though, and he intercepted her as she headed for her room.

“Are you free this evening, Liz? I thought we might—”

“I’m very tired. I thought I’d have an early night.”

When she had first arrived, Elizabeth had felt the first stirrings of attraction towards Chappell, and made the mistake of showing them. There were only a few women at the station, and he had responded with great eagerness.

Since then he had hardly left her alone, and although she now found him very dull and self-centred she hadn’t yet discovered a polite way of cooling his unwelcome ardour.

He tried to persuade her to do whatever it was he wanted, but after a few minutes she managed to escape to her room.

She dumped her bag on the bed, undressed, and took a long shower.

Later, she went to find something to eat and, inevitably, Tony joined her.

During the meal, she remembered she’d been meaning to ask him something.

“Do you know any towns around here, called Earth?”

“Earth? Like the planet?”

“That’s what it sounded like. I might have misheard.”

“I don’t know any. Whereabouts?”

“Somewhere round here. Not far.”

He shook his head. “Urf? Or Mirth?” He laughed loudly, and dropped his fork. “Are you sure?”

“No … not really. I think I must have got it wrong.”

In his own inimitable way, Tony continued to make bad puns until once again she found an excuse to get away.

There was a large map of the region in one of the offices, but she couldn’t see anything that might be where Helward said he lived. He had described it as a city lying in the south, but there was no large settlement for nearly sixty miles.

She was genuinely exhausted, and returned to her room.

She undressed, and took the two sketches Helward had given her and taped them to the wall by the bed. The one he had drawn of her was so strange… .

She looked at it more closely. The paper it was drawn on was evidently quite old, for its edges were yellowed. Looking at the edges, she realized that the top and bottom were slightly burred where they had been torn, but the line was quite straight.

Experimentally, she ran the tip of her finger along it. The sensation was a quite regular vibration: the paper had been perforated… .

Careful not to damage the drawing, she separated the tape from the wall, and took the sketch down.

On the back she discovered that a column of numbers had been printed down one side. One or two of them were asterisked.

Printed in pale blue ink along the side were the words: IBM Multifold (TM).

She taped the sketch back on the wall … and stared at it uncomprehendingly for a long time.

In the morning Elizabeth put in another teleprinted request for a doctor, then set off for the village.

The daytime heat was flooding the village when she arrived, and already the listless mood of lethargy that had so infuriated her at first had set in.

She sought out Luiz, who was sitting in the shadow of the church with two other men.

“Well … have they been back?”

“Not today, Menina Khan.”

“When did they say they’d come again?”

He shrugged idly. “Sometime. Today, tomorrow.”

“Have you tried that—?”

She stopped, irritated with herself. She had meant to take the purported fertilizer to headquarters to have it analysed, and in her preoccupation had forgotten it.

“Let me know if they come.”

She went to see Maria and her new baby, but her mind was not fully on her work. Later she supervised a meal, which was served to all comers, then talked to Father dos Santos in the workshop. All this time she was aware that she had one ear cocked for any sounds of horses.

No longer trying to make any excuse for herself, she went down to the stable and saddled up the horse. She rode away from the village, towards the river.

She was trying not to dwell on her own thoughts, trying not to examine her own motives, but it was inevitable. The last twenty-four hours had been momentous in their own way. She had come out here to work in the field because of a feeling that her life at home was wasted, only to find a new kind of frustration here. In spite of intents and appearances, all the voluntary workers could offer was a sight of recovery to the impoverished people here.

It was too little, too late. A few government handouts of grain, or a few inoculations, or a repaired church were all right, and better than nothing.

But the root of the problem remained unsolved in practice: the central economy had failed. There was nothing on this land but what the people themselves could take.

The intrusion of Helward into her life was the first event of interest she had experienced since she arrived. She knew, as she rode the horse across the scrubland towards the trees, that her motives were mixed. Perhaps there was simple curiosity there, but it ran deeper.

The men on the station were obsessed with themselves and what they imagined their roles to be; they spoke in abstracts about group psychology, social readjustment, patterns of behaviour … and in her more cynical moods she found such an outlook simply pathetic. Apart from the unfortunate Tony Chappell, she had formed no kind of interest in any of the men, which was not as she had anticipated at all before she arrived.

Helward was different. She refrained from spelling it out to herself, but she knew why she was riding out to find him.

She found the place on the river-bank, and allowed her horse to drink.

Later, she tethered it in the shade, and sat down by the water to wait. Again she tried to blank out the turmoil of mental activity: thoughts, desires, questions. Concentrating hard on the physical environment, she lay back on the bank in the sunshine and closed her eyes. She listened to the sound of the water as it ran across the pebbles of the river-bed, the sound of the gentle wind in the trees, the humming of insects, the smell of dry undergrowth, hot soil, warmth.