Perelandra (10 page)

‘I see,’ said the Lady presently. ‘The wave you plunge into may be very swift and great. You may need all your force to swim into it. You mean, He might send me a good like that?’

‘Yes – or like a wave so swift and great that all your force was too little.’

‘It often happens that way in swimming,’ said the Lady. ‘Is not that part of the delight?’

‘But are you happy without the King? Do you not want the King?’

‘Want him?’ she said. ‘How could there be anything I did not want?’

There was something in her replies that began to repel Ransom. ‘You can’t want him very much if you are happy without him,’ he said: and was immediately surprised at the sulkiness of his own voice.

‘Why?’ said the Lady. ‘And why, O Piebald, are you making little hills and valleys in your forehead and why do you give a little lift of your shoulders? Are these the signs of something in your world?’

‘They mean nothing,’ said Ransom hastily. It was a small lie; but there it would not do. It tore him as he uttered it, like a vomit. It became of infinite importance. The silver meadow and the golden sky seemed to fling it back at him. As if stunned by some measureless anger in the very air he stammered an emendation: ‘They mean nothing I could explain to you.’ The Lady was looking at him with a new and more judicial expression. Perhaps in the presence of the first mother’s son she had ever seen, she was already dimly forecasting the problems that might arise when she had children of her own.

‘We have talked enough now,’ she said at last. At first he thought she was going to turn away and leave him. Then, when she did not move, he bowed and drew back a step or two. She still said nothing and seemed to have forgotten about him. He turned and retraced his way through the deep vegetation until they were out of sight of each other. The audience was at an end.

As soon as the Lady was out of sight Ransom’s first impulse was to run his hands through his hair, to expel the breath from his lungs in a long whistle, to light a cigarette, to put his hands in his pockets, and in general, to go through all that ritual of relaxation which a man performs on finding himself alone after a rather trying interview. But he had no cigarettes and no pockets: nor indeed did he feel himself alone. That sense of being in Someone’s Presence which had descended on him with such unbearable pressure during the very first moments of his conversation with the Lady did not disappear when he had left her. It was, if anything, increased. Her society had been, in some degree, a protection against it, and her absence left him not to solitude but to a more formidable kind of privacy. At first it was almost intolerable; as he put it to us, in telling the story, ‘There seemed no room.’ But later on, he discovered that it was intolerable only at certain moments – at just those moments in fact (symbolised by his impulse to smoke and to put his hands in his pockets) when a man asserts his independence and feels that now at last he’s on his own. When you felt like that, then the very air seemed too crowded to breathe; a complete fulness seemed to be excluding you from a place which, nevertheless, you were unable to
leave. But when you gave in to the thing, gave yourself up to it, there was no burden to be borne. It became not a load but a medium, a sort of splendour as of eatable, drinkable, breathable gold, which fed and carried you and not only poured into you but out from you as well. Taken the wrong way, it suffocated; taken the right way, it made terrestrial life seem, by comparison, a vacuum. At first, of course, the wrong moments occurred pretty often. But like a man who has a wound that hurts him in certain positions and who gradually learns to avoid those positions, Ransom learned not to make that inner gesture. His day became better and better as the hours passed.

During the course of the day he explored the island pretty thoroughly. The sea was still calm and it would have been possible in many directions to have reached neighbouring islands by a mere jump. He was placed, however, at the edge of this temporary archipelago, and from one shore he found himself looking out on the open sea. They were lying, or else very slowly drifting, in the neighbourhood of the huge green column which he had seen a few moments after his arrival in Perelandra. He had an excellent view of this object at about a mile’s distance. It was clearly a mountainous island. The column turned out to be really a cluster of columns – that is, of crags much higher than they were broad, rather like exaggerated dolomites, but smoother: so much smoother in fact that it might be truer to describe them as pillars from the Giant’s Causeway magnified to the height of mountains. This huge upright mass did not, however, rise directly from the sea. The island had a base of rough country, but with smoother land at the coast, and a hint of valleys with vegetation in
them between the ridges, and even of steeper and narrower valleys which ran some way up between the central crags. It was certainly land, real fixed land with its roots in the solid surface of the planet. He could dimly make out the texture of true rock from where he sat. Some of it was inhabitable land. He felt a great desire to explore it. It looked as if a landing would present no difficulties, and even the great mountain itself might turn out to be climbable.

He did not see the Lady again that day. Early next morning, after he had amused himself by swimming for a little and eaten his first meal, he was again seated on the shore looking out towards the Fixed Land. Suddenly he heard her voice behind him and looked round. She had come forth from the woods with some beasts, as usual, following her. Her words had been words of greeting, but she showed no disposition to talk. She came and stood on the edge of the floating island beside him and looked with him towards the Fixed Land.

‘I will go there,’ she said at last.

‘May I go with you?’ asked Ransom.

‘If you will,’ said the Lady. ‘But you see it is the Fixed Land.’

‘That is why I wish to tread on it,’ said Ransom. ‘In my world all the lands are fixed, and it would give me pleasure to walk in such a land again.’

She gave a sudden exclamation of surprise and stared at him.

‘Where, then, do you live in your world?’ she asked.

‘On the lands.’

‘But you said they are all fixed.’

‘Yes. We live on the fixed lands.’

For the first time since they had met, something not quite unlike an expression of horror or disgust passed over her face.

‘But what do you do during the nights?’

‘During the nights?’ said Ransom in bewilderment. ‘Why, we sleep, of course.’

‘But where?’

‘Where we live. On the land.’

She remained in deep thought so long that Ransom feared she was never going to speak again. When she did, her voice was hushed and once more tranquil, though the note of joy had not yet returned to it.

‘He has never bidden you not to,’ she said, less as a question than as a statement.

‘No,’ said Ransom.

‘There can, then, be different laws in different worlds.’

‘Is there a law in your world not to sleep in a Fixed Land?’

‘Yes,’ said the Lady. ‘He does not wish us to dwell there. We may land on them and walk on them, for the world is ours. But to stay there to sleep and awake there …’ she ended with a shudder.

‘You couldn’t have that law in our world,’ said Ransom. ‘There
are
no floating lands with us.’

‘How many of you are there?’ asked the Lady suddenly.

Ransom found that he didn’t know the population of the Earth, but contrived to give her some idea of many millions. He had expected her to be astonished, but it appeared that numbers did not interest her. ‘How do you all find room on your Fixed Land?’ she asked.

‘There is not one fixed land, but many,’ he answered. ‘And they are big: almost as big as the sea.’

‘How do you endure it?’ she burst out. ‘Almost half your world empty and dead. Loads and loads of land, all tied down. Does not the very thought of it crush you?’

‘Not at all,’ said Ransom. ‘The very thought of a world which was all sea like yours would make my people unhappy and afraid.’

‘Where will this end?’ said the Lady, speaking more to herself than to him. ‘I have grown so old in these last few hours that all my life before seems only like the stem of a tree, and now I am like the branches shooting out in every direction. They are getting so wide apart that I can hardly bear it. First to have learned that I walk from good to good with my own feet … that was a stretch enough. But now it seems that good is not the same in all worlds; that Maleldil has forbidden in one what He allows in another.’

‘Perhaps my world is wrong about this,’ said Ransom rather feebly, for he was dismayed at what he had done.

‘It is not so,’ said she. ‘Maleldil Himself has told me now. And it could not be so, if your world has no floating lands. But He is not telling me why He has forbidden it to us.’

‘There’s probably some good reason,’ began Ransom, when he was interrupted by her sudden laughter.

‘Oh, Piebald, Piebald,’ she said, still laughing. ‘How often the people of your race speak!’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Ransom, a little put out.

‘What are you sorry for?’

‘I am sorry if you think I talk too much.’

‘Too much? How can I tell what would be too much for you to talk?’

‘In our world when they say a man talks much they mean they wish him to be silent.’

‘If that is what they mean, why do they not say it?’

‘What made you laugh?’ asked Ransom, finding her question too hard.

‘I laughed, Piebald, because you were wondering, as I was, about this law which Maleldil has made for one world and not for another. And you had nothing to say about it and yet made the nothing up into words.’

‘I
had
something to say, though,’ said Ransom almost under his breath. ‘At least,’ he added in a louder voice, ‘this forbidding is no hardship in such a world as yours.’

‘That also is a strange thing to say,’ replied the Lady. ‘Who thought of its being hard? The beasts would not think it hard if I told them to walk on their heads. It would become their delight to walk on their heads. I am His beast, and all His biddings are joys. It is not that which makes me thoughtful. But it was coming into my mind to wonder whether there are two kinds of bidding.’

‘Some of our wise men have said …’ began Ransom, when she interrupted him.

‘Let us wait and ask the King,’ she said. ‘For I think, Piebald, you do not know much more about this than I do.’

‘Yes, the King, by all means,’ said Ransom. ‘If only we can find him.’ Then, quite involuntarily, he added in English, ‘By Jove! What was that?’ She also had exclaimed. Some thing like a shooting star seemed to have streaked across the sky, far away on their left, and some seconds later an indeterminate noise reached their ears.

‘What was that?’ he asked again, this time in Old Solar.

‘Something has fallen out of Deep Heaven,’ said the Lady. Her face showed wonder and curiosity: but on Earth we so rarely see these emotions without some admixture of defensive fear that her expression seemed strange to him.

‘I think you’re right,’ said he. ‘Hullo! What’s this?’ The calm sea had swelled and all the weeds at the edge of their island were in movement. A single wave passed under their island and all was still again.

‘Something has certainly fallen into the sea,’ said the Lady. Then she resumed the conversation as if nothing had happened.

‘It was to look for the King that I had resolved to go over today to the Fixed Land. He is on none of these islands here, for I have searched them all. But if we climbed high up on the Fixed Land and looked about, then we should see a long way. We could see if there are any other islands near us.’

‘Let us do this,’ said Ransom. ‘If we can swim so far.’

‘We shall ride,’ said the Lady. Then she knelt down on the shore – and such grace was in all her movements that it was a wonder to see her kneel – and gave three low calls all on the same note. At first no result was visible. But soon Ransom saw broken water coming rapidly towards them. A moment later and the sea beside the island was a mass of the large silver fishes: spouting, curling their bodies, pressing upon one another to get nearer, and the nearest ones nosing the land. They had not only the colour but the smoothness of silver. The biggest were about nine feet long and all were thick-set and powerful-looking. They were very unlike any terrestrial species, for the base of the head was noticeably
wider than the foremost part of the trunk. But then the trunk itself grew thicker again towards the tail. Without this tailward bulge they would have looked like giant tadpoles. As it was, they suggested rather pot-bellied and narrow-chested old men with very big heads. The Lady seemed to take a long time in selecting two of them. But the moment she had done so the others all fell back for a few yards and the two successful candidates wheeled round and lay still with their tails to the shore, gently moving their fins. ‘Now, Piebald, like this,’ she said, and seated herself astride the narrow part of the right-hand fish. Ransom followed her example. The great head in front of him served instead of shoulders so that there was no danger of sliding off. He watched his hostess. She gave her fish a slight kick with her heels. He did the same to his. A moment later they were gliding out to sea at about six miles an hour. The air over the water was cooler and the breeze lifted his hair. In a world where he had as yet only swum and walked, the fish’s progress gave the impression of quite an exhilarating speed. He glanced back and saw the feathery and billowy mass of the islands receding and the sky growing larger and more emphatically golden. Ahead, the fantastically shaped and coloured mountain dominated his whole field of vision. He noticed with interest that the whole school of rejected fish were still with them – some following, but the majority gambolling in wide extended wings to left and right.

‘Do they always follow like this?’ he asked.

‘Do the beasts not follow in your world?’ she replied. ‘We cannot ride more than two. It would be hard if those we did not choose were not even allowed to follow.’

‘Was that why you took so long to choose the two fish, Lady?’ he asked.