Out Of The Silent Planet (12 page)

'No,' said Whin. 'I have been thinking. All this has come from not obeying the eldil. He said you
were to go to Oyarsa. You ought to have been already on the road. You must go now.'

'But that will leave the bent hmana here. They may do more harm.'

'They will not set on the hrossa. You have said they are afraid. It is more likely that we will
come upon them. Never fear - they will not see us or hear us. We will take them to Oyarsa. But
you must go now, as the eldil said.'

'Your people will think I have run away because I am afraid to look in their faces after
Hyoi's death.'

'It is not a question of thinking but of what an eldil says. This is cubs' talk. Now listen,
and I will teach you the way.

The hross explained to him that five days' journey to the south the handramit joined another
handramit; and three days up this other handramil to west and north was Meldilorn and the seat
of Oyarsa. But there was a shorter way, a mountain road, across the corner of the harandra
between the two canyons, which would bring him down to Meldilorn on the second day. He must
go into the wood before them and through it till he came to the mountain wall of the handramit;
and he must work south along the roots of the mountains till he came to a road cut up between
them. Up this he must go, and somewhere beyond the tops of the mountains he would come to the
tower of Augray. Augray would help him. He could cut weed for his food before he left the
forest and came into the rock country. Whin realized that Ransom might meet the other two hmana
as soon as he entered the wood.

'If they catch you,' he said, then it will be as you say, they will come no farther into our land.
But it is better to be taken on your way to Oyarsa than to stay here. And once you are on the way
to him, I do not think he will let the bent ones stop you.'

Ransom was by no means convinced that this was the best plan either for himself or for the
hrossa. But the stupor of humiliation in which he had lain ever since Hyoi fell forbade him
to criticize. He was anxious only to do whatever they wanted him to do, to trouble them as
little as was now possible, and above all to get away. It was impossible to find out how
Whin felt; and Ransom sternly repressed an insistent, whining impulse to renewed protestations
and regrets, self-accusations that might elicit some word of pardon. Hyoi with his last breath
had called him hnakra-slayer; that was forgiveness generous enough and with that he must be
content. As soon as he had mastered the details of his route he bade farewell to Whin and
advanced alone towards the forest.

UNTIL HE reached the wood Ransom found it difficult to think of anything except the
possibility of another rifle bullet from Weston or Devine. He thought that they probably
still wanted him alive rather than dead, and this, combined with the knowledge that a
hross was watching him, enabled him to proceed with at least external composure. Even when
he had entered the forest he felt himself in considerable danger. The long branchless
stems made cover, only if you were very far away from the enemy; and the enemy in this
case might be very close. He became aware of a strong impulse to shout out to Weston and
Devine and give himself up; it rationalized itself in the form that this would remove
them from the district, as they would probably take him off to the sorns and leave the
hrossa unmolested. But Ransom knew a little psychology and had heard of the hunted man's
irrational instinct to give himself up - indeed, he had felt it himself in dreams. It was
some such trick, he thought, that his nerves were now playing him. In any case he was
determined henceforward to obey the hrossa or eldila. His efforts to rely on his own
judgement in Malacandra had so far ended tragically enough. He made a strong resolution,
defying in advance all changes of mood, that he would faithfully carry out the journey to
Meldilorn if it could be done.

This resolution seemed to him all the more certainly right because he had the deepest
misgivings about that journey. He understood that the harandra, which he had to cross, was
the home of the sorns. In fact he was walking of his own free will into the very trap
that he had been trying to avoid ever since his arrival on Malacandra. (Here the first
change of mood tried to raise its head. He thrust it down.) And even if he got through
the sorns and reached Meldilorn, who or what might Oyarsa be? Oyarsa, Whin had ominously
observed, did not share the hrossa's objection to shedding the blood of a hnau. And again,
Oyarsa ruled sorns as well as hrossa and pfifltriggi. Perhaps he was simply the arch-sorn.
And now came the second change of mood. Those old terrestrial fears of some alien, cold,
intelligence, superhuman in power, sub-human in cruelty, which had utterly faded from his
mind among the hrossa, rose clamouring for readmission. But he strode on. He was going to
Meldilorn. It was not possible, he told himself that the hrossa should obey any evil or
monstrous creature; and they had told him - or had they? he was not quite sure - that
Oyarsa was not a sorn. Was Oyarsa a god? - perhaps that very idol to whom the sorns wanted
to sacrifice him. But the hrossa, though they said strange things about him, clearly denied
that he was a god. There was one God, according to them, Maleldil the Young; nor was it
possible to imagine Hyoi or Hnohra worshipping a bloodstained idol. Unless, of course, the
hrossa were after all under the thumb of the sorns, superior to their masters in all the
qualities that human beings value, but intellectually inferior to them and dependent on them.
It would be a strange but not an inconceivable world; heroism and poetry at the bottom, cold
scientific intellect above it, and overtopping all, some dark superstition which scientific
intellect, helpless against the revenge of the emotional depths it had ignored, had neither
will nor power to remove. A mumbo-jumbo... but Ransom pulled himself up. He knew too much
now to talk that way. He and all his class would have called the eldila a superstition if
they had been merely described to them, but now he had heard the voice himself No, Oyarsa
was a real person if he was a person at all.

He had now been walking for about an hour, and it was nearly midday. No difficulty about his
direction had yet occurred; he had merely to keep going uphill and he was certarn of coming
out of the forest to the mountain wall sooner or later. Meanwhile he felt remarkably well,
though greatly chastened in mind. The silent, purple half light of the woods spread all
around him as it had spread on the first day he spent in Malacandra, but everything else was
changed. He looked back on that time as on a nightmare, on his own mood at that time as a
sort of sickness. Then all had been whimpering, unanalysed, self-nourishing, self-consuming
dismay. Now, in the clear light of an accepted duty, he felt fear indeed, but with it a
sober sense of confidence in himself and in the world, and even an element of pleasure. It
was the difference between a landsman in a sinking ship and a horseman on a bolting horse:
either may be killed, but the horseman is an agent as well as a patient.

About an hour after noon he suddenly came out of the wood into bright sunshine. He was only
twenty yards from the almost perpendicular bases of the mountain spires, too close to them
to see their tops. A sort of valley ran up in the re-entrant between two of them at the place
where he had emerged: an unclimbable valley consisting of a single concave sweep of stone,
which in its lower parts ascended steeply as the roof of a house and farther up seemed almost
vertical. At the top it even looked as if it hung over a bit, like a tidal wave of stone at
the very moment of breaking; but this, he thought, might be an illusion. He wondered what
the hrossa's idea of a road might be.

He began to work his way southward along the narrow, broken ground between wood and mountain.
Great spurs of the mountains had to be crossed every few moments, and even in that lightweight
world it was intensely tiring. After about half an hour he came to a stream. Here he went a
few paces into the forest, cut himself an ample supply of the ground weed, and sat down beside
the water's edge for lunch. When he had finished he filled his pockets with what he had not
eaten and proceeded.

He began soon to be anxious about his road, for if he could make the top at all he could
do it only by daylight and the middle of the afternoon was approaching. But his fears were
unnecessary. When it came it was unmistakable. An open way through the wood appeared on the
left - he must be somewhere behind the hross village now - and on the right he saw the road,
a single ledge, or in places, a trench, cut sidewise and upwards across the sweep of such a
valley as he had seen before. It took his breath away - the insanely steep, hideously narrow
stair-case without steps, leading up and up from where he stood to where it was an almost
invisible thread on the pale green surface of the rock. But there was no time to stand and look
at it. He was a poor judge of heights, but he had no doubt that the top of the road was removed
from him by a more than Alpine distance. It would take him at least till sundown to reach it.
Instantly he began the ascent.

Such a journey would have been impossible on earth; the first quarter of an hour would have
reduced a man of Ransom's build and age to exhaustion. Here he was at first delighted with
the ease of his movement, and then staggered by the gradient and length of the climb which,
even under Malacandrian conditions, soon bowed his back and gave him an aching chest and
trembling knees. But this was not the worst. He heard already a singing in his ears, and
noticed that despite his labour there was no sweat on his forehead. The cold, increasing at
every step, seemed to sap his vitality worse than any heat could have done. Already his lips
were cracked; his breath, as he panted, showed like a cloud; his fingers were numb. He was
cutting his way up into a silent arctic world, and had already passed from an English to a
Lapland winter. It frightened him, and he decided that he must rest here or not at all; a
hundred paces more and if he sat down he would sit for ever. He squatted on the road for a
few minutes, slapping his body with his arms. The landscape was terrifying. Already the
handramit which had made his world for so many weeks was only a thin purple cleft sunk amidst
the boundless level desolation of the harandra which now, on the farther side, showed clearly
between and above the mountain peaks. But long before he was rested he knew that he must
go on or die.

The world grew stranger. Among the hrossa he had almost lost the feeling of being on a strange
planet; here it returned upon him with desolating force. It was no longer 'the world',
scarcely even a world': it was a planet, a star, a waste place in the universe, milions of
miles from the world of men. It was impossible to recall what he had felt about Hyoi, or Whin,
or the eldila, or Oyarsa. It seemed fantastic to have thought he had duties to such hobgoblins -
if they were not hallucinations - met in the wilds of space. He had nothing to do with them:
he was a man. Why had Weston and Devine left him alone like this?

But all the time the old resolution, taken when he could still think, was driving him up the
road. Often he forgot where he was going, and why. The movement became a mechanical rhythm
from weariness to stillness, from stillness to unbearable cold, from cold to motion again.
He noticed that the handramit - now an insignificant part of the landscape - was full of a
sort of haze. He had never seen a fog while he was living there. Perhaps that was what the air
of the handramit looked like from above; certainly it was different air from this. There was
something more wrong with his lungs and heart than even the cold and the exertion accounted for.
And though there was no snow, there was an extraordinary brightness. The light was increasing,
sharpening and growing whiter and the sky was a much darker blue than he had ever seen on
Malacandra. indeed, it was darker than blue; it was almost black, and the jagged spines of
rock standing against it were like his mental picture of a lunar landscape. Some stars were
visible.

Suddenly he realized the meaning of these phenomena. There was very little air above him: he
was near the end of it. The Malacandrian atmosphere lay chiefly in the handramits; the real
surface of the planet was naked or thinly clad. The stabbing sunlight and the black sky above
him were that 'heaven' out of which he had dropped into the Malacandrian world, already showing
through the last thin veil of air. If the top were more than a hundred feet away, it would be
where no man could breathe at all. He wondered whether the hrossa had different lungs and had
sent him by a road that meant death for man.

But even while he thought of this he took note that those jagged peaks blazing
in sunlight against an almost black sky were level with him. He was no longer ascending. The
road ran on before him in a kind of shallow ravine bounded on his left by the tops of the
highest rock pinnacles and on his right by a smooth ascending swell of stone that ran up to
the true harandra. And where he was he could still breathe, though gasping, dizzy and in pain.
The blaze in his eyes was worse. The sun. was setting. The hrossa must have foreseen this;
they conld not live, any more than he, on the harandra by night. Still staggering forward,
he looked about him for any sign of Augray's tower, whatever Augray might be.

Doubtless he exaggerated the time during which he thus wandered and watched the shadows from
the rocks lengthening towards him. It cannot really have been long before he saw a light ahead -
a light which showed how dark the surrounding landscape had become. He tried to run but his
body would not respond. Stumbling in haste and weakness, he made for the light; thought he had
reached it and found that it was far farther off than he had supposed; almost despaired; staggered
on again, and came at last to what seemed a cavern mouth. The light within was an unsteady
one and a delicious wave of warmth smote on his face. It was firelight. He came into the mouth
of the cave and then, unsteadily, round the fire and into the interior, and stood still blinking
in the light. When at last he could see, he discerned a smooth chamber of green rock, very lofty.
There were two things in it. One of them, dancing on the wall and roof, was the huge, angular
shadow of a sorn: the other, crouched beneath it, was the sorn himself.