The Chrysalids

17

It needs a lot of resolution to lie perfectly still while you feel more and more sticky strands falling with a feathery, tickling touch across your face and hands: and still more when you begin to feel that those which landed first press on your skin like fine cords, and tug gently at it.

I caught Michael wondering with some alarm if this was not a trick, and whether he might not have been better off if he had tried to run for it. Before I could reply the Sealand woman came in reassuring us again, telling us to keep calm and have patience. Rosalind emphasized that to Petra.

‘Has it got you, too?’ I asked her.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The wind from the machine blew it right into the cave — Petra, darling, you heard what she said. You must try to keep still.’

The throbbing and the whirring which had dominated everything grew less as the machine slowed down. Presently it stopped. The succeeding silence was shocking. There were a few half-muffled calls and smothered sounds, but little more. I understood the reasons for that. Strands had fallen across my own mouth. I could not have opened it to call out if I wanted to.

The waiting seemed interminable. My skin crawled under the touch of the stuff, and the pull of it was becoming painful.

The Sealand woman inquired: ‘Michael? – Keep counting to guide me to you.’

Michael started counting, in figure shapes. They were steady until the one and the two of his twelve wavered and dissolved into a pattern of relief and thankfulness. In the silence that had now fallen I could hear him say in words: ‘They’re in that cave there, that one.’

There was a creak from the ladder, a gritting of its poles against the ledge, and presently a slight hissing noise. A dampness fell on my face and hands, and the skin began to lose its puckered feeling. I tried to open my eyes again; they resisted, but gave slowly. There was a sticky feeling about the lids as I raised them.

Close in front of me, standing on the upper rungs of the ladder, and leaning inwards, was a figure entirely hidden in a shiny white suit. There were still filaments leisurely adrift in the air, but when they fell on the headpiece or shoulders of the white suit they did not stick. They slithered off and wafted gently on their downward way. I could see nothing of the suit’s wearer but a pair of eyes looked at me through small, transparent windows. In a white-gloved hand was a metal bottle, with a fine spray hissing from it. ‘Turn over,’ came the woman’s thought. I turned, and she played the spray up and down the front of my clothes. Then she climbed the last two or three rungs, stepped over me where I lay and made her way towards Rosalind and Petra at the back of the cave, spraying as she went. Michael’s head and shoulders appeared above the sill. He, too, was bedewed with spray, and the few vagrant strands that settled him lay glistening for a moment before they dissolved. I sat up and looked past him.

The white machine rested in the middle of the clearing. The device on top of it had ceased to revolve, and now that it was observable, seemed to be a sort of conical spiral, built up in a number of spaced sections from some almost transparent material. There were glazed windows in the side of the fish-shaped body, and a door stood open.

The clearing itself looked as if a fantastic number of spiders had spun there with all their might and main. The place was festooned with threads, which appeared more white than glossy now: it took a moment or two of feeling something was wrong with them before one perceived that they failed to move in the breeze as webs would. And not only they, but everything was motionless, petrified.

The forms of a number of men, and horses, too, were scattered among the shacks. They were as unmoving as the rest.

A sudden sharp cracking came from the right. I looked over there, just in time to see a young tree break off a foot from the ground, and fall. Then another movement caught the corner of my eye — a bush slowly leaning over. Its roots came out of the ground as I watched. Another bush moved. A shack crumpled in on itself and collapsed, and another. It was uncanny and alarming….

Back in the cave there was a sigh of relief from Rosalind. I got up and went to her, with Michael following. Petra announced in a subdued, somewhat expostulatory, tone:

‘That was very horrid.’

Her eyes dwelt reprovingly and curiously on the white-suited figure. The woman made a few final, all-encompassing passes with her spray, then pulled off her gloves and lifted back her hood. She regarded us: we frankly stared at her.

Her eyes were large, with irises more brown than green, and fringed with long, deep-gold lashes. Her nose was straight, but her nostrils curved with the perfection of a sculpture. Her mouth was, perhaps, a little wide; the chin beneath it was rounded, but not soft. Her hair was just a little darker than Rosalind’s, and, astonishingly in a woman, it was short. Cut off nearly level with her jaw.

But more than anything it was the lightness of her face that made us stare. It was not pallor, it was simply fairness, like new cream, and with cheeks that might have been dusted with pink petals. There was scarcely a line in its smoothness, it seemed all new and perfect, as if neither wind nor rain had ever touched her. We found it hard to believe that any real, living person could look like that, so untouched, so unflawed.

For she was no girl in a first tender blossoming, unmistakably she was a woman — thirty, perhaps; one could not tell. She was sure of herself, with a serenity of confidence which made Rosalind’s self-reliance seem almost bravado.

She took us in, and then fixed her attention upon Petra. She smiled at her, with just a glimpse of perfect, white teeth.

There was an immensely complex pattern which compounded pleasure, satisfaction, achievement, relief, approval, and, most surprisingly to me, a touch of something very like awe. The intermixture was subtle beyond Petra’s grasp, but enough of it reached her to give her an unwonted, wide-eyed seriousness for some seconds as she looked up into the woman’s eyes; as if she knew in some way, without understanding how or why, that this was one of the cardinal moments of her life.

Then, after a few moments, her expression relaxed; she smiled and chuckled. Evidently something was passing between them, but it was of a quality, or on a level, that did not reach me at all. I caught Rosalind’s eye, but she simply shook her head and watched.

The Sealand woman bent down and picked Petra up. They looked closely into one another’s faces. Petra raised her hand and tentatively touched the woman’s face, as if to assure herself that it was real. The Sealand woman laughed, kissed her and put her down again. She shook her head slowly, as if she were not quite believing.

‘It was worth while,’ she said in words, but words so curiously pronounced that I scarcely understood them at first. ‘Yes. Certainly, it was worth while!’

She slipped into thought-forms, much easier to follow than her words.

‘It was not simple to get permission to come. Such an immense distance: more than twice as far as any of us has been before. So costly to send the ship: they could scarcely believe it would be worth it. But it will be…’ She looked at Petra again, wonderingly. ‘At her age, and untrained — yet she can throw a thought half-way round the world!’ She shook her head once more, as if still unable to believe it entirely. Then she turned to me.

‘She has still a great deal to learn, but we will give her the best teachers, and then, one day, she will be teaching them.’

She sat down on Sophie’s bed of twigs and skins. Against the thrown-back white hood, her beautiful head looked as though it were framed by a halo. She studied each of us thoughtfully in turn, and seemed satisfied. She nodded.

‘With one another’s help, you have managed to get quite a long way, too; but you’ll find that there is a lot more we can teach you.’ She took hold of Petra’s hand. ‘Well, as you’ve no possessions to collect, and there’s nothing to delay us, we might as well start now.’

It was as much a statement as a question, and she checked herself in the act of rising, to look at him inquiringly.

‘There is still Rachel,’ he explained.

The Sealand woman considered.

‘I’m not sure — Wait a minute,’ she told him.

She was suddenly in communication with someone on board the machine outside, at a speed and on a level where I could make almost nothing of it. Presently she shook her head regretfully.

‘I was afraid of that,’ she said. ‘I am sorry, but we cannot include her.’

‘It wouldn’t take long. It isn’t far — not for your flying machine,’ Michael insisted.

Again she shook her head.

‘I am sorry,’ she said again. ‘Of course we would if we could, but it is a technical matter. You see, the journey was longer than we expected. There were some dreadful parts that we dare not cross, even at great height: we had to go far round them. Also, because of what was happening here, we had to come faster than we had intended.’ She paused, seeming to wonder whether she were attempting an explanation beyond the understanding of such primitives as we. ‘The machine,’ she told us, ‘uses fuel. The more weight it has to carry, and the faster it travels, the more of this fuel it uses, and now we have only just enough of it left to get us back, if we go carefully. If we were to go to Waknuk and make another landing and take-off there, and try to carry four of you, as well as Petra, we should use up all our fuel before we could reach home. That would mean that we should fall into the sea, and drown. Three of you from here we can just manage with safety; four, and the extra landing, we can’t.’

There was a pause while we appreciated the situation. She had made it clear enough, and she sat back, a motionless figure in her gleaming white suit, her knees drawn up and her hands clasped round them, waiting sympathetically and patiently for us to accept the facts.

In the pause one became aware of the uncanniness of the silence all about us. There was not a sound to be heard now.

Not a movement. Even the leaves on the trees were unable to rustle. A sudden shock of realization jerked a question from Rosalind:

‘They’re not – they’re not all – dead? I didn’t understand. I thought…’

‘Yes,’ the Sealand woman told her simply. ‘They’re all dead. The plastic threads contract as they dry. A man who struggles and entangles himself soon becomes unconscious. It is more merciful than your arrows and spears.’

Rosalind shivered. Perhaps I did, too. There was an unnerving quality about it — something quite different from the fatal issue of a man-to-man fight, or from the casualty roll of an ordinary battle. We were puzzled, too, by the Sealand woman, for there was no callousness in her mind, nor any great concern either: just a slight distaste, as if for an unavoidable, but unexceptional, necessity. She perceived our confusion, and shook her head reprovingly.

‘It is not pleasant to kill any creature,’ she agreed, ‘but to pretend that one can live without doing so is self-deception. There has to be meat in the dish, there have to be vegetables forbidden to flower, seeds forbidden to germinate; even the cycles of microbes must be sacrificed for us to continue our cycles. It is neither shameful nor shocking that it should be so: it is simply a part of the great revolving wheel of natural economy. And just as we have to keep ourselves alive in these ways, so, too, we have to preserve our species against other species that wish to destroy it — or else fail in our trust.

‘The unhappy Fringes people were condemned through no act of their own to a life of squalor and misery — there could be no future for them. As for those who condemned them — well, that, too, is the way of it. There have been lords of life before, you know. Did you ever hear of the great lizards? When the time came for them to be superseded they had to pass away.

‘Sometime there will come a day when we ourselves shall have to give place to a new thing. Very certainly we shall struggle against the inevitable just as these remnants of the Old People do. We shall try with all our strength to grind it back into the earth from which it is emerging, for treachery to one’s own species must always seem a crime. We shall force it to prove itself, and when it does, we shall go; as, by the same process, these are going.

‘In loyalty to their kind they cannot tolerate our rise; in loyalty to our kind, we cannot tolerate their obstruction.

‘If the process shocks you, it is because you have not been able to stand off and, knowing what you are, see what a difference in kind must mean. Your minds are confused by your ties and your upbringing: you are still half-thinking of them as the same kind as yourselves. That is why you are shocked. And that is why they have you at a disadvantage, for they are not confused. They are alert, corporately aware of danger to their species. They can see quite well that if it is to survive they have not only to preserve it from deterioration, but they must protect it from the even more serious threat of the superior variant.

‘For ours is a superior variant, and we are only just beginning. We are able to think-together and understand one another as they never could; we are beginning to understand how to assemble and apply the composite team-mind to a problem — and where may that not take us one day? We are not shut away into individual cages from which we can reach out only with inadequate words. Understanding one another, we do not need laws which treat living forms as though they were as indistinguishable as bricks; we could never commit the enormity of imagining that we could mint ourselves into equality and identity, like stamped coins; we do not mechanistically attempt to hammer ourselves into geometrical patterns of society, or policy; we are not dogmatists teaching God how He should have ordered the world.

‘The essential quality of life is living; the essential quality of living is change; change is evolution: and we are part of it.

‘The static, the enemy of change, is the enemy of life, and therefore our implacable enemy. If you still feel shocked, or doubtful, just consider some of the things that these people, who have taught you to think of them as your fellows, have done. I know little about your lives, but the pattern scarcely varies wherever a pocket of the older species is trying to preserve itself. And consider, too, what they intended to do to you, and why…’

As before, I found her rhetorical style somewhat overwhelming, but in general I was able to follow her line of thought. I did not have the power of detachment that could allow me to think of myself as another species - nor am I sure that I have it yet. In my thinking we were still no more than unhappy minor variants; but I could look back and consider why we had been forced to flee….

I glanced at Petra. She was sitting pretty much bored with all this apologia, watching the Sealand woman’s beautiful face with a kind of wistful wonder. A series of memories cut off what my eyes were seeing — my Aunt Harriet’s face in the water, her hair gently waving in the current; poor Anne, a limp figure hanging from a beam; Sally, wringing her hands in anguish for Katherine, and in terror for herself; Sophie, degraded to a savage, sliding in the dust, with an arrow in her neck….

Any of those might have been a picture of Petra’s future…. I shifted over beside her, and put an arm round her. During all the Sealand woman’s disquisition Michael had been gazing out of the entrance, running his eyes almost covetously over the machine that waited in the clearing. He went on studying it for a minute or two after she had stopped, then he sighed, and turned away. For a few moments he contemplated the rock floor between his feet. Presently he looked up.

‘Petra,’ he asked. ‘Do you think you could reach Rachel for me?’

Petra put out the inquiry, in her forceful way. ‘Yes. She’s there. She wants to know what’s happening,’ she told him.

‘Say first that whatever she may hear, we’re all alive and quite all right.’

‘Yes,’ said Petra presently. ‘She understands that.’ ‘Now I want you to tell her this,’ Michael went on carefully. ‘She is to go on being brave — and very careful — and in a little time, three or four days, perhaps, I shall come and fetch her away. Will you tell her that?’

Petra made the relay energetically, but quite faithfully, and then sat waiting for the response. A small frown gradually appeared.

‘Oh dear,’ she said, with a touch of disgust. ‘She’s gone all muddled up and crying again. She does seem to cry an awful lot, that girl, doesn’t she? I don’t see why. Her behind-thinks aren’t miserable at all this time: it’s sort of happy-crying. Isn’t that silly?’

All of us looked at Michael, without open comment.

‘Well,’ he said, defensively, ‘you two are proscribed as outlaws, so neither of you can go.’

‘But, Michael—’ Rosalind began.

‘She’s quite alone,’ said Michael. ‘Would you leave David alone there, or would David leave you?’

There was no answer to that.

‘You said “fetch her away,”’ observed Rosalind.

‘That’s what I meant. We could stay in Waknuk for a while, waiting for the day when we, or perhaps our children, would be found out…. That’s not good enough….

‘Or we could come to the Fringes.’ He looked round the cave and out across the clearing with distaste. ‘That’s not good enough either.

‘Rachel deserves just as well as any of the rest of us. All right, then; since the machine can’t take her, someone’s got to bring her.’

The Sealand woman was leaning forward, watching him. There was sympathy and admiration in her eyes, but she shook her head gently.

‘It’s a very long way — and there’s that awful, impassable country in between,’ she reminded him.

‘I know that,’ he acknowledged. ‘But the world is round, so there must be another way to get there.’

‘It would be hard — and certainly dangerous,’ she warned.

‘No more dangerous than to stay in Waknuk. Besides, how could we stay now, knowing that there is a place for people like us, that there is somewhere to go.

‘Knowing makes all the difference. Knowing that we’re not just pointless freaks — a few bewildered deviations hoping to save their own skins. It’s the difference between just trying to keep alive, and having something to live for.’

The Sealand woman thought for a moment or two, then she raised her eyes to meet his again.

‘When you do reach us, Michael,’ she told him, ‘you can be very sure of your place with us.’

The door shut with a thud. The machine started to vibrate and blow a great dusty wind across the clearing. Through the windows we could see Michael bracing himself against it, his clothes flapping. Even the deviational trees about the clearing were stirring in their webby shrouds.

The floor tilted beneath us. There was a slight lurch, then the ground began to drop away as we climbed faster and faster into the evening sky. Soon we steadied, pointed towards the south-west.

Petra was excited, and a bit over strength.

‘It’s awfully wonderful,’ she announced. ‘I can see for simply miles and miles and miles. Oh, Michael, you do look funny and tiny down there!’

The lone, miniature figure in the clearing waved its arm.

‘Just at present,’ Michael’s thought came up to us, ‘I seem to be feeling a bit funny and tiny down here, Petra, dear. But it’ll pass. We’ll be coming after you.’

It was just as I had seen it in my dreams. A brighter sun than Waknuk ever knew poured down upon the wide blue bay where the lines of white-topped breakers crawled slowly to the beach. Small boats, some with coloured sails, and some with none, were making for the harbour already dotted with craft. Clustered along the shore, and thinning as it stretched back towards the hills, lay the city with its white houses embedded among green parks and gardens. I could even make out the tiny vehicles sliding along the wide, tree-bordered avenues. A little inland, beside a square of green, a bright light was blinking from a tower and a fish-shaped machine was floating to the ground.

It was so familiar that I almost misgave. For a swift moment I imagined that I should wake to find myself back in my bed in Waknuk. I took hold of Rosalind’s hand to reassure myself.

‘It is real, isn’t it? You can see it, too?’ I asked her.

‘It’s beautiful, David. I never thought there could be anything so lovely…. And there’s something else, too, that you never told me about.’

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Listen!… Can’t you feel it? Open your mind more…. Petra, darling, if you could stop bubbling over for a few minutes…’

I did as she told me. I was aware of the engineer in our machine communicating with someone below, but behind that, as a background to it, there was something new and unknown to me. In terms of sound it could be not unlike the buzzing of a hive of bees; in terms of light, a suffused glow.

‘What is it?’ I said, puzzled.

‘Can’t you guess, David? It’s people. Lots and lots of our kind of people.’

I realized she must be right, and I listened to it for a bit — until Petra’s excitement got the better of her, and I had to protect myself.

We were over the land now, and looked down at the city coming up to meet us.

‘I’m beginning to believe it’s real and true at last,’ I told Rosalind. ‘You were never with me those other times.’

She turned her head. The under-Rosalind was in her face, smiling, shiny-eyed. The armour was gone. She let me look beneath it. It was like a flower opening….

‘This time, David—’ she began.

Then she was blotted out. We staggered, and put our hands to our heads. Even the floor under our feet jerked a little.

Anguished protests came from all directions.

‘Oh, sorry,’ Petra apologized to the ship’s crew, and to the city in general, ‘but it is awfully exciting.’

‘This time, darling, we’ll forgive you,’ Rosalind told her. ‘It is.’