Quicksand (38 page)

-- Thus Urchin.

 

 

-- After a century of satiation the rulers' tastes grow jaded. It is
sometimes not enough for them to share the same erotic ministrations
as are supplied to the plebs; these fail to arouse desire. There must
be other stimulation. There must be young children. There must be corpses.
There must be dramatic preludes. For example, a harmless-looking girl
must appear to be so overcome by lust for her master that she fights
her way through his bodyguards barehanded and hurls herself upon him
reeking of sweat and blood to make frantic love while her victims moan
their lives out on the floor behind.

 

 

-- But in the abandon of orgy a joygirl might forget her instructions;
carried away by the frenzy of slaughter she might turn her terrible
skills on the master himself. To insure against this, orders must be
implanted hypnotically deep in her mind, so that with a single word the
master can stop whatever she is doing and compel her to wait passively
for his next command.

 

 

-- This can be done. There is little enough left on the ravaged planet
Earth except people, of whom there are so many that there is no room for
animals, and the desire for meat has been conditioned out of them not
through humanitarian reasons but purely because the few surviving cattle
and sheep are reserved to the rulers and the plebs have been taught to
vomit at the sight of their butchered carcasses. In short, what there
is of any desirable thing belongs to the rulers and no one else.

 

 

-- Among the things they do have are certain machines that focus upon
the brain and degrade the personality so that it conceives only the
simple thoughts of a moron; it can no longer plot to wreak vengeance
against the rulers. Such machines look not unlike the X-ray equipment
of a twentieth-century hospital.

 

 

-- This should have been done to Urchin before she was delivered to
her owner (owner! And I thought: "the freest person I have ever met
. . .") and would have been done but for a whim on his part. Occasionally
he liked to preserve the intelligence of his joygirls so that their
conversation might not be hopelessly drab. Having once escaped so narrowly
from a permanent idiot twilight in the mind, she had resolved she would
rather die than suffer that fate later on.

 

 

-- In a little while he learned to be afraid of her, for she was cleverer
than he was himself. While he was not so stupid as to exterminate his more
intelligent inferiors out of hand, he liked to keep them at a distance,
confining their opportunities to tasks that would furnish their master
with fresh stimulation. He would not have geniuses continually within
arm's reach. And he would equally not allow this superlative joygirl to
go back among the plebs where they might benefit from her talents. He
was too jealous.

 

 

-- In the nick of time . . .

 

 

-- There was an infinite universe around the rulers, but the boring
prospect of struggling outwards to the stars no faster than laggard
light had deterred them from searching there for relief from their
ennui. Besides, if they embarked on a fruitless journey of exploration
and stayed away until they were sure they could find nothing of interest,
they would most probably return to discover that their compeers had
stolen their luxuries during their absence.

 

 

-- But a certain inventor conceived a device alleged to be capable of
reversing the flow of time, and a test subject was required to verify his
claim. Intrigued, Urchin's owner offered her. She was ideal on two main
counts. First, she was exceptionally intelligent and would be well able
to observe her surroundings and leave reports, time-capsule-fashion,
filling in the blanks of history. Second, since theory did not rule
out the chance of history being changed by her intrusion, and since the
greatest change would be wrought by the birth of a child who should not
have been born, the emissary would have to be sterile.

 

 

-- Additionally, she was willing to go. She knew that if she stayed her
master would condemn her mind to be blotted out.

 

 

-- Nonetheless, as an extra precaution, they employed the hypnosis
to which she had already been made fantastically susceptible to equip
her with yet more weapons than she already possessed, and two sorts of
armour. Since in the era where they expected her to arrive the common
tongue had altered radically, they gave her a knowledge of it that might
pass for a native's. Also they trained her like an escapologist in the
subject of evading restraints: locks, bars, shackles, anything. She had
put that technique to use, chiefly in order to satisfy herself that she
had an escape route if she wanted one, as soon as she could after arriving
at Chent. She really had filched something from Madge Phelps -- not
the hair-brush she had been accused of coveting, but some hair-clips,
with which she unscrewed the plate covering the keyhole and later picked
the lock.

 

 

-- By contrast the first kind of armour she was given failed her
the instant she encountered Faberdown and realised from his language
and clothing that something had gone wrong. It was a carefully faked
background enabling her to establish herself in the time she had been
sent to if she was questioned by the Lord of West Mountain's police. By
contrast with the planet-wide hell she had left behind, she had looked
forward to the Age of Confusion as paradisal, despite its local wars and
primitive superstition. Stranded, she despaired and hoped by turns. When
she was locked up in Chent she took it for granted that she had come
to another world like her own where the majority of the population
were crowded into giant barracks like cattle and only the chosen few
could claim to enjoy their lives, with one extra restriction still more
terrible: they were deprived of the comfort of making love.

 

 

-- Having discovered that those about her were irrational, she began to
apply her mind fiercely to unravelling the mystery of what had happened
to her. Here there is and has been from the start a half-truth, but now
the halfness is not due to deception, only to the foggy mind which will
not wrestle the ideas into a pattern. She said tonight that originally
she did believe what she once told me, that she had been displaced
sideways to another branch of time because even the intrusion of a single
individual might so affect the course of her remembered history that
her departure failed to take place, an impossible paradox. But later,
having learned much she did not know before, about the working of cars,
about the time-scale of the history she found in books, she changed
her mind and did not tell me for fear of hurting me. She thinks now
-- or thought this evening -- there is only one history after all:
no branching river delta, simply a crooked road. They hurled her back
along it not for the planned five hundred years, but for something
more like ten thousand, to an age when there is still coal, and oil,
and unmined ore, being prodigally squandered before our civiisation is
ruined by its extravagance and collapses so completely that wandering
savages out of Central Asia have to learn the art of writing over again
from degenerates notching strips of wood with rusty knives. She thought
the great empire which fell in the dawn of time and left a few scattered
relics for her own people to find might correspond to Rome; discovering
that this did not fit, she deduced that it was before Rome's rise that
her history branched off. But ultimately she came to the conclusion that
the great forgotten civilisation must be ours.

 

 

-- She's right, though, about history resisting change. The other layer
of her armour worked too well, and hid her inmost mind from me against her
will, until tonight. It consisted in a vision of a future so infinitely
desirable that even if through persistence, or torture, or sheer chance
the people of the past came to believe she was a visitor out of time,
they would be afraid to act otherwise than as history would later record
for fear of preventing the creation of Llanraw. Almost, they made it
more real to her than the truth; so too have sometimes seemed my visions
of disaster.

 

 

-- They were very clever, the bastards who sent her forth. Even in the
instant when she finally broke free, they dug her a pit into which,
freely, she fell. For I could not bear the comfort she offered me in
the last words I shall ever hear from her, though "they" had left her
nothing else to give.

 

 

-- I railed crazily at the mess that I am stranded in for the sake of
the lie called Llanraw: a penniless fugitive in a foreign land. And she
said piteously, "But, Paul, in your world I think a girl can earn much
money if she is good at making love . . ."

 

 

 

 

The wind was driving the waves like wild animals in stampede. They were
washing around Paul's ankles. The shock of their chill brought uppermost
in his mind a momentary flash of the person he had once known by his
own name, as a capsized boat may be briefly righted by the caprice of
the gale.

 

 

Shuddering, he turned as though to head towards the town. He stared at
its dotted lights, the only symbol perceptible which might define his
familiar world.

 

 

But instead of taking even one pace towards it, he simply stood where
he was, feeling the salt water leach away the doubts and suspicions and
uncertainties he had rediscovered a few heartbeats ago. He had thought to
arrive at truth when he confronted the incongruities in Urchin's former
story; be could not bear to think himself doubly deceived. There was no
going back for any reason, even disbelief.
He
could not return to an
earlier time.

 

 

Resolutely he set his back to Louze again and began to unbutton his shirt.

 

 

-- I know what I know. I know that because you do as you do, you there
on shore behind those yellow cheerful lights, one day your children's
children's children will be made barren to amuse a tyrant. I know that
they will sweat away a weary drab hopeless existence in barracks bigger
than a modern city, scrawny with hunger and disease because what little
there is goes always to "them." I could warn you, I could change the
doom written in those stars up there . . .

 

 

-- And I won't.

 

 

He let the shirt blow away and kicked off his shoes.

 

 

-- Count what you took from me, you sons of devils. Count carefully.
All chance of happiness when you wished on me pushful parents ("my son's
a good boy he's going to be a doctor!"), a marriage ("what makes you so
sure it's your child I want to get rid of?"), children ("standing bloody
joke in every medical school in Britain!"), the career I'd laboured for
("General Medical Council"), and, latest, most hurtful, beloved stranger
Urchin.

 

 

He looked dully at his watch. Thirty minutes gone. In the hotel-room,
still and white as wax. He took the watch off and hurled it into the sea.

 

 

Then, stripped, he waded after it, his limbs numb so that they would
not have obeyed his instructions to swim even if he had remembered the
desire to, until the wind lifted the sea above his head and he walked
on steadily towards lost Llanraw, with a single thought ringing around
his skull so loudly he was sure all the people in the world must hear
him before that and every other thought ceased.

 

 

-- So I don't care, damn you! I don't care!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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JOHN BRUNNER
She appeared in our world naked, defenseless,
unable to say a word anyone could understand.
Her origin was at first simply a puzzle, then a
scientific enigma, and finally a series of terrifying
surmises that her most fascinated investigator was
afraid to probe.
But probe he must, for somehow he know that this
strange girl was a key to the kind of information
science had sought for centuries. But the more he
uncovered from the depths of her mind, the
deeper became the quicksand into which his own
was sinking.
John Brunner, Hugo-winning author, presents in
QUICKSAND one of his most unusual and
thought-provoking science fiction novels.
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By John Brunner:
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