Quicksand (27 page)

 

 

Paul stared at her. Abruptly his mind locked into focus on what she had
been telling him.

 

 

-- Christ, it's ridiculous. Shoemaker said there were traces of Finno-Ugrian
influence in the tape I gave him. And the shape of her eyes: an Asiatic
overlay on a European bone structure. And she's just described the reason
why runic is all spiky and straight while our kind of writing is curved.
How far has she elaborated this wild notion of hers?

 

 

"Why didn't you arrive where you expected to, Urchin? And where did you
expect to come to?"

 

 

"Town called" -- he missed the name, his ear not being attuned to
the sounds of her own language. "Market for meat, cloth, vegetables,
thirteen thousand people, ruled by Lord of West Mountain, about to
start war against Middle Land Plain." She recited that tonelessly,
as though recounting a dream of impossible happiness. "Instead, here
I am. I have thought a lot, being alone in my room. What I think is,
time is like . . . What is your name for the thing at the end of rivers?"

 

 

"Ah -- mouth?"

 

 

"No, no. When in flat land the water separates into many lines?"

 

 

"I get you. A delta." He sketched the forking shape of one on his pad
and showed it to her. She nodded vigorously.

 

 

"Delta! Start here" -- she pointed to the main body of the river on his
sketch -- "go here, or here, or here. Was Rome in your history, not in
mine. I start here" -- she indicated the extreme left-hand mouth of the
delta -- "and came to here" -- the first of the branches leading to the
right-hand mouth.

 

 

-- Good lord. You know, if one were to take this seriously, the "other
Paul Fidlers" would . . .

 

 

He looked at her in bewilderment. Since the initial breakthrough when
he had somehow got her to confess what she believed to be her identity
against the command of "they" who had forbidden her to admit it, the
induction of a hypnotic state had become less and less important to make
her talk. Now, one could hardly tell whether she had been ordered into
trance or not. Certainly the full vigour and vitality of her personality
was showing in her bright eyes, her tense voice.

 

 

"How did you make the . . . the journey, Urchin?"

 

 

"Literally, promise you, there are no words to say in this language.
In my language there are no words to say engine, rocket, spaceman,
which I see on television -- no word for television either. Is all
different. We learned different things to do, studied different problems."

 

 

-- A society that somehow diverged from ours, concentrating on time-travel
as its ultimate achievement while ours is in jet airplanes and sending
rockets to the moon. Did she have this moment in mind the night I first
met her, when she went around the cars staring and touching them as
though she had never seen anything of the kind before?

 

 

With a sudden burst of energy, he said, "Tell me about the world you
come from, Urchin."

 

 

She looked doubtful. "Listen, Paul, first I explain one thing. When first
I know what happened to me, how I got stuck and never can go back home, I
wanted to explain who I am and why I came here. But I was forbidden. What
you do with that clock and talking gently in low voice, was done to me
to stop me telling people where I was going about other later things."

 

 

-- She's got it all figured out, hasn't she? If somebody were to come
from the future to the past, it would make sense to impose hypnotic
commands against talking too freely, in case the people of the past
took her seriously, did something different from what history recorded,
and thus abolished the time she had started out from!

 

 

There was a kind of fascination in this, like reading a well-constructed
mystery novel for the sake of seeing how the author resolved all the
misleading clues he'd planted. Paul challenged her.

 

 

"Then how come you're taking so openly to me now?"

 

 

"Language had changed between the Age of -- you said Confusion, yes? --
Age of Confusion and my time. Command was to not answer anyone asking
in the old language, but you remembered what we say for 'hello' and this
was permitted."

 

 

She clasped his free hand suddenly in both of hers, and gazed into his
eyes. "Paul, I'm so glad to be able to say these things! It was . . . it
was full of pain to sit by myself and know I was the alonest person in
the world."

 

 

Paul disengaged his hand, trembling.

 

 

-- I could lean over and put my arm around her and . . .
Stop it. Stop it. It's simple transference, it's a fixation like Maurice
Dawkins's. Suppose it were Maurice looking at me with those bedroom
eyes. For heaven's sake.

 

 

"Tell me about your world. Go and sit down in your chair again, too."

 

 

Sighing, she complied.

 

 

"Tell me about . . ."

 

 

-- What's the least emotively charged thing I can ask her? Politics,
maybe. There's not likely to be much reason for arousing emotions over
something that's been irrelevant to our world since Ancient Rome.

 

 

"Tell me about the government. Who's in charge?"

 

 

Obediently she leaned back and let her hands dangle over the chair's arms.
"Is not like yours. Is very peacy . . . ah . . . peacish?"

 

 

"Peaceful."

 

 

"Peaceful, thank you. For two hundred eighty years is no wars, no mad
people, no criminal. Rulers are men who we . . . selected for being good
and kind. Must be father of family and all children speak In support of
them. If even one son, one daughter, aged sixty years at least, says no,
they are not chosen. Same way is in all places, because when there are
not wars people do not like to be afraid of anyone, and mostly of all
not the ones who tell them what to do."

 

 

"Didn't you say something about people living to be a hundred and fifty
years old?"

 

 

"Children born at the time I left are expected, yes."

 

 

-- A benevolent government, no crime, no insanity, this fantastic longevity
. . . Why couldn't I have been born into a world like that, instead of
this death-trap of H-bombs, road accidents, high taxes, and prisonlike
mental asylums?

 

 

For a few moments Paul let his imagination roam down paths of wishful
thinking. Then he realised with a shock that he had kept Urchin long
over the appointed time of her session, and there was a mound of work
awaiting him on the desk.

 

 

-- Almost, I could hope she doesn't abandon this fantasy too soon.
To wander off once a day into a vision of perfection: it would be like
a holiday. But I daren't take a real holiday.

 

 

He clenched his fists in something close to panic.

 

 

-- Because . . . who else would take her fantasy the way I do? Who else
would have the insight and compassion to understand how real it is to her,
who else would decline to say outright, "The woman's off her nut?"
Who but me, haunted by the versions of myself who took the wrong turning
down life's roadway and signalled their despair, as she puts it, Northwest
across time?

 

 

 

 

 

 

*32*

 

 

The depth, the detail, the consistency, grew and grew and grew.

 

 

-- The place is called what I first misheard as Lion Roar; as near
as I can transliterate it that would be Llanraw with a sort of Welsh
double L. An interesting dialect survival, presumably from the pre-Roman
linguistic substratum in our world, showing Celtic influence. It was a
minor miracle she recognised my bastard accent when I demanded of her,
" Tiriak-no?" It's not a K, it's more a click of the tongue, just as
in Llanraw the final sound is nasalised like the French
bon
.

 

 

"What does the name Llanraw mean?"

 

 

"Nobody is sure any longer, but there is an idea that it means 'rock in
a storm,' because it was stormy when the conquerors came to it by sea."

 

 

-- Rock in a storm! And isn't that what it's becoming to me, the one
steadfast thing I can turn to when the world threatens to sink me
without trace?

 

 

"You said the town you meant to come to when you left your home was
a market for cloth, vegetables and meat. But you won't touch meat,
will you?"

 

 

A shudder that racked her whole tiny body. "In my world, Paul, to kill
an animal for meat was a religious thing, long ago. That's why in the
Age of Confusion there was a special market, and great ceremonies when
the meat was sold. Seeing it openly in your shops made me want to --
to return my last food. What would you say?"

 

 

"Vomit."

 

 

"Yes."

 

 

"So you don't kill for food any longer."

 

 

"No. We keep . . . uh . . . pets? I thought that was right. But we let
animals go where they want to in the countryside, and if there are too
many we go and give them drugs so there are not so many young ones."

 

 

"What about the animals that are fierce and dangerous?"

 

 

"What kind of animals?"

 

 

"Well -- big animals that do eat meat, that kill other animals because
that's the diet they've always had."

 

 

"In Llanraw there are none. In far lands where there are few people,
we let them do as they wish."

 

 

"But there was a religious ceremony when animals were killed?"

 

 

"What you would call the butchers were . . ." A snap of the fingers.
"Men in charge of the religion!"

 

 

"Priests?"

 

 

"I think so. And afterwards they must go to a river and wash the blood
off and say they are sorry to the spirits of the animals."

 

 

-- Like Eskimos, that. The range of her vision is unbelievable!

 

 

"But this was long ago. It's wasting work to make meat for food, and
cruel too. More people eat food grown off one piece of ground than eat
animals which ate the food off it. Is this clear?"

 

 

"Yes, perfectly clear."

 

 

She stared wistfully out of the window. "Those same hills in my world,
they are planted with high beautiful trees and the fields with flowers
taller than you -- blue, red, white, yellow. When the wind blows you can
smell the flowers at the seashore, there in the west." She hesitated.
"It was hardest to say goodbye to the flowers, know I would not see
them again."

 

 

Paul gazed at her, awed by the courage it would take to cast oneself
adrift from everything familiar -- not simply parents and lovers, but
the very sounds, scents, colours of the customary world.

 

 

"And to go above the sea of flowers in the air, to see the wind making
them shiver! Once we drifted four whole days and nights before we had to
put out the . . . the heater? Oh, I did not explain! A big round hollow
thing with warmer air in it that is light and lifts up into the sky."

 

 

"A balloon. A hot-air balloon."

 

 

"Yes." She was almost overcome by the memory, that was plain. "In summer,
with little wind -- four days before we saw the sea and had to let the
balloon come down."

 

 

Paul shied away from asking who the other member of the "we" had been.

 

 

So, now, two sets of notes were being compiled: the slimmer for Alsop's
attention and eventual inclusion in the general hospital records,
giving only the baldest indication of progress -- "Patient today was
communicative under hypnosis and further success was achieved in enlarging
her vocabulary in significant areas" -- and the fatter, now numbering
hundreds of pages, documenting the strange and lovely world of Llanraw.

 

 

Under heading after heading he listed the explanations Urchin had given
him, becoming almost drunk on the visions the words implied.

 

 

"In Llanraw parents do not punish their children. If a child does wrong
the parents ask themselves what they have done to set a bad example.
A child is regarded as an independent and responsible individual from
the moment it learns to talk comprehensibly, and its education and life's
work are adapted to its intrinsic capabilities. Pushing a child into work
for which it is not fitted is regarded as cruel, and there appears to be
none of that craving for vicarious status which mars so many childhoods
in our world."

 

 

-- Mine too. Bright or not bright, they shouldn't have driven me, bribed
me, compelled me up the educational ladder.

 

 

"In Llanraw marriage consists in a vow taken before the assembled
community that the couple will accept the responsibility of bearing and
raising children and remain their best friends for as long as they live,
to whom they may always turn for help, and advice. Conception without
such previous public pledges is regarded as offensive to the unborn
child and the administration of an abortifacient is compulsory. Owing to
the seriousness with which parenthood is undertaken, there is no excess
population pressure, nor any social pressure on young people to marry
and bear children as frequently happens in our world, thus ensuring that
too many children are subconsciously resented by their parents."

 

 

-- And if something unpleasant happens to the child, like a nervous
breakdown from overwork, they never tire of reminding him how much he
owes them for fulfilling their parental duty towards their ungrateful
offspring.