Perelandra (3 page)

The door was slammed (for the second time that night) and after a moment’s groping Ransom had found and lit a candle. I glanced quickly round and could see no one but ourselves. The most noticeable thing in the room was the big white object. I recognised the shape well enough this time. It was a large coffin-shaped casket, open. On the floor beside it lay its lid, and it was doubtless this that I had tripped over. Both were made of the same white material, like ice, but more cloudy and less shining.

‘By Jove, I’m glad to see you,’ said Ransom, advancing and shaking hands with me. ‘I’d hoped to be able to meet you at the station, but everything has had to be arranged in such a hurry and I found at the last moment that I’d got to go up to Cambridge. I never intended to leave you to make
that
journey alone.’ Then, seeing, I suppose, that I was still staring at him rather stupidly, he added, ‘I say – you’re
all right
, aren’t you? You got through the barrage without any damage?’

‘The barrage? – I don’t understand.’

‘I was thinking you would have met some difficulties in getting here.’

‘Oh,
that!’
said I. ‘You mean it wasn’t just my nerves? There really was something in the way?’

‘Yes. They didn’t want you to get here. I was afraid some thing of the sort might happen but there was no time to do anything about it. I was pretty sure you’d get through somehow.’

‘By
they
you mean the others – our own
eldila?’

‘Of course. They’ve got wind of what’s on hand …’

I interrupted him. ‘To tell you the truth, Ransom,’ I said, ‘I’m getting more worried every day about the whole business. It came into my head as I was on my way here –’

‘Oh, they’ll put all sorts of things into your head if you let them,’ said Ransom lightly. ‘The best plan is to take no notice, and keep straight on. Don’t try to answer them. They like drawing you into an interminable argument.’

‘But, look here,’ said I. ‘This isn’t child’s play. Are you quite certain that this Dark Lord, this depraved Oyarsa of Tellus, really exists? Do you know for certain either that there are two sides, or which side is ours?’

He fixed me suddenly with one of his mild, but strangely formidable, glances.

‘You are in
real
doubt about either, are you?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said I, after a pause, and felt rather ashamed.

‘That’s all right, then,’ said Ransom cheerfully. ‘Now let’s get some supper and I’ll explain as we go along.’

‘What’s that coffin affair?’ I asked as we moved into the kitchen.

‘That is what I’m to travel in.’

‘Ransom!’ I exclaimed. ‘He – it – the
eldil
– is not going to take you back to Malacandra?’

‘Don’t!’ said he. ‘Oh, Lewis, you don’t understand. Take me back to Malacandra? If only he would! I’d give
anything I possess … just to look down one of those gorges again and see the blue, blue water winding in and out among the woods. Or to be up on top – to see a
sorn
go gliding along the slopes. Or to be back there of an evening when Jupiter was rising, too bright to look at, and all the asteroids like a Milky Way, with each star in it as bright as Venus looks from Earth! And the smells! It is hardly ever out of my mind. You’d expect it to be worse at night when Malacandra is up and I can actually see it. But it isn’t then that I get the real twinge. It’s on hot summer days – looking up at the deep blue and thinking that
in there,
millions of miles deep where I can never, never get back to it, there’s a place I know, and flowers at that very moment growing over Meldilorn, and friends of mine, going about their business, who would welcome me back. No. No such luck. It’s not Malacandra I’m being sent to. It’s Perelandra.’

‘That’s what we call Venus, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you say you’re being sent.’

‘Yes. If you remember, before I left Malacandra the Oyarsa hinted to me that my going there at all might be the beginning of a whole new phase in the life of the Solar System – the Field of Arbol. It might mean, he said, that the isolation of our world, the siege, was beginning to draw to an end.’

‘Yes. I remember.’

‘Well, it really does look as if something of the sort were afoot. For one thing, the two sides, as you call them, have begun to appear much more clearly, much less mixed, here on Earth, in our own human affairs – to show in something a little more like their true colours.’

‘I see that all right.’

‘The other thing is this. The black archon – our own bent Oyarsa – is meditating some sort of attack on Perelandra.’

‘But is he at large like that in the Solar System? Can he get there?’

‘That’s just the point. He can’t get there in his own person, in his own photosome or whatever we should call it. As you know, he was driven back within these bounds centuries before any human life existed on our planet. If he ventured to show himself outside the Moon’s orbit he’d be driven back again by main force. That would be a different kind of war. You or I could contribute no more to it than a flea could contribute to the defence of Moscow. No. He must be attempting Perelandra in some different way.’

‘And where do you come in?’

‘Well – simply I’ve been ordered there.’

‘By the – by Oyarsa, you mean?’

‘No. The order comes from much higher up. They all do, you know, in the long run.’

‘And what have you got to do when you get there?’

‘I haven’t been told.’

‘You are just part of the Oyarsa’s
entourage?’

‘Oh no. He isn’t going to be there. He is to transport me to Venus – to deliver me there. After that, as far as I know, I shall be alone.’

‘But, look here, Ransom – I mean …’ my voice trailed away.

‘I know!’ said he with one of his singularly disarming smiles. ‘You are feeling the absurdity of it. Dr Elwin Ransom setting out single-handed to combat powers and
principalities. You may even be wondering if I’ve got megalomania.’

‘I didn’t mean that quite,’ said I.

‘Oh, but I think you did. At any rate that is what I have been feeling myself ever since the thing was sprung on me. But when you come to think of it, is it odder than what all of us have to do every day? When the Bible used that very expression about fighting with principalities and powers and depraved hypersomatic beings at great heights (our translation is very misleading at that point, by the way) it meant that quite ordinary people were to do the fighting.’

‘Oh, I dare say,’ said I. ‘But that’s rather different. That refers to a moral conflict.’

Ransom threw back his head and laughed. ‘Oh, Lewis, Lewis,’ he said, ‘you are inimitable, simply inimitable!’

‘Say what you like, Ransom, there
is
a difference.’

‘Yes. There is. But not a difference that makes it megalomania to think that any of us might have to fight either way. I’ll tell you how I look at it. Haven’t you noticed how in our own little war here on earth, there are different phases, and while any one phase is going on people get into the habit of thinking and behaving as if it was going to be permanent? But really the thing is changing under your hands all the time, and neither your assets nor your dangers this year are the same as the year before. Now your idea that ordinary people will never have to meet the Dark
Eldila
in any form except a psychological or moral form – as temptations or the like – is simply an idea that held good for a certain phase of the cosmic war: the phase of the great siege, the phase which gave to our planet its name of Thulcandra, the
silent
planet. But supposing that phase is passing? In the next phase it may be anyone’s job to meet them … well, in some quite different mode.’

‘I see.’

‘Don’t imagine I’ve been selected to go to Perelandra because I’m anyone in particular. One never can see, or not till long afterwards, why
any
one was selected for
any
job. And when one does, it is usually some reason that leaves no room for vanity. Certainly, it is never for what the man himself would have regarded as his chief qualifications. I rather fancy I am being sent because those two blackguards who kidnapped me and took me to Malacandra, did something which they never intended: namely, gave a human being a chance to learn that language.’

‘What language do you mean?’

‘Hressa-Hlab
, of course. The language I learned in Malacandra.’

‘But surely you don’t imagine they will speak the same language on Venus?’

‘Didn’t I tell you about that?’ said Ransom, leaning forward. We were now at table and had nearly finished our cold meat and beer and tea. ‘I’m surprised I didn’t, for I found out two or three months ago, and scientifically it is one of the most interesting things about the whole affair. It appears we were quite mistaken in thinking
Hressa-Hlab
the peculiar speech of Mars. It is really what may be called Old Solar,
Hlab-Eribol-ef-Cordi.’

‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘I mean that there was originally a common speech for all rational creatures inhabiting the planets of our system: those that were ever inhabited, I mean – what the
eldila
call the Low Worlds. Most of them, of course, have never been inhabited and never will be. At least not what we’d call inhabited. That original speech was lost on Thulcandra, our own world, when our whole tragedy took place. No human language now known in the world is descended from it.’

‘But what about the other two languages on Mars?’

‘I admit I don’t understand about them. One thing I do know, and I believe I could prove it on purely philological grounds. They are incomparably less ancient than
Hressa-Hlab
, specially
Surnibur
, the speech of the
sorns.
I believe it could be shown that
Surnibur
is, by Malacandrian standards, quite a modern development. I doubt if its birth can be put farther back than a date which would fall within our Cambrian Period.’

‘And you think you will find
Hressa-Hlab
, or Old Solar, spoken on Venus?’

‘Yes. I shall arrive knowing the language. It saves a lot of trouble – though, as a philologist, I find it rather disappointing.’

‘But you’ve no idea what you are to do, or what conditions you will find?’

‘No idea at all what I’m to do. There are jobs, you know where it is essential that one should
not
know too much beforehand … things one might have to say which one couldn’t say effectively if one had prepared them. As to conditions, well, I don’t know much. It will be warm: I’m to go naked. Our astronomers don’t know anything about the surface of Perelandra at all. The outer layer of her atmosphere is too thick. The main problem, apparently, is whether she revolves on her own axis or not, and at what speed. There are two schools of thought. There’s
a man called Schiaparelli who thinks she revolves once on herself in the same time it takes her to go once round Arbol – I mean, the Sun. The other people think she revolves on her own axis once in every twenty-three hours. That’s one of the things I shall find out.’

‘If Schiaparelli is right there’d be perpetual day on one side of her and perpetual night on the other?’

He nodded, musing. ‘It’d be a funny frontier,’ he said presently. ‘Just think of it. You’d come to a country of eternal twilight, getting colder and darker every mile you went. And then presently you wouldn’t be able to go farther because there’d be no more air. I wonder can you stand in the day, just on the right side of the frontier, and look
into
the night which you can never reach? And perhaps see a star or two – the only place you
could
see them, for of course in the Day-Lands they would never be visible … Of course if they have a scientific civilisation they may have diving-suits or things like submarines on wheels for going into the Night.’

His eyes sparkled, and even I, who had been mainly thinking of how I should miss him and wondering what chances there were of my ever seeing him again, felt a vicarious thrill of wonder and of longing to know. Presently he spoke again.

‘You haven’t yet asked me where
you
come in,’ he said.

‘Do you mean I’m to go too?’ said I, with a thrill of exactly the opposite kind.

‘Not at all. I mean you are to pack me up, and to stand by to unpack me when I return – if all goes well.’

‘Pack you? Oh, I’d forgotten about that coffin affair. Ransom, how on earth are you going to travel in that
thing? What’s the motive power? What about air – and food – and water? There’s only just room for you to lie in it.’

‘The Oyarsa of Malacandra himself will be the motive power. He will simply move it to Venus. Don’t ask me how. I have no idea what organs or instruments they use. But a creature who has kept a planet in its orbit for several billions of years will be able to manage a packing-case!’

‘But what will you eat? How will you breathe?’

‘He tells me I shall need to do neither. I shall be in some state of suspended animation, as far as I can make out. I can’t understand him when he tries to describe it. But that’s his affair.’

‘Do you feel quite happy about it?’ said I, for a sort of horror was beginning once more to creep over me.

‘If you mean, Does my reason accept the view that he will (accidents apart) deliver me safe on the surface of Perelandra? – the answer is Yes,’ said Ransom. ‘If you mean, Do my nerves and my imagination respond to this view? – I’m afraid the answer is No. One can believe in anaesthetics and yet feel in a panic when they actually put the mask over your face. I think I feel as a man who believes in the future life feels when he is taken out to face a firing party. Perhaps it’s good practice.’

‘And I’m to pack you into that accursed thing?’ said I.

‘Yes,’ said Ransom. ‘That’s the first step. We must get out into the garden as soon as the sun is up and point it so that there are no trees or buildings in the way. Across the cabbage bed will do. Then I get in – with a bandage across my eyes, for those walls won’t keep out all the sunlight once I’m beyond the air – and you screw me down. After that, I think you’ll just see it glide off.’