The Chrysalids

6

In the evening, when I grew calmer, I found that Rosalind was trying to talk to me. Some of the others were anxiously asking what was the matter, too. I told them about Sophie. It wasn’t a secret any more now. I could feel that they were shocked. I tried to explain that a person with a deviation — a small deviation, at any rate — wasn’t the monstrosity we had been told. It did not really make any difference — not to Sophie, at any rate.

They received that very doubtfully indeed. The things we had all been taught were against their acceptance — though they knew well enough that what I was telling them must be true to me. You can’t lie when you talk with your thoughts. They wrestled with the novel idea that a Deviation might not be disgusting and evil — not very successfully. In the circumstances they could not give me much consolation, and I was not sorry when one by one they dropped out and I knew that they had fallen asleep.

I was tired out myself, but sleep was a long time coming. I lay there, picturing Sophie and her parents plodding their way southward towards the dubious safety of the Fringes, and hoping desperately that they would be far enough off now for my betrayal not to hurt them.

And then, when sleep did come, it was full of dreams. Faces and people moved restlessly through it, scenes, too. Once more there was the one where we all stood round in the yard while my father disposed of an Offence which was Sophie, and I woke up from that hearing my own voice shouting to him to stop. I was frightened to go to sleep again, but I did, and that time it was quite different. I dreamed again of the great city by the sea, with its houses and streets, and the things that flew in the sky. It was years since I had dreamed about that, but it still looked just the same, and in some quite obscure way it soothed me.

My mother looked in in the morning, but she was detached and disapproving. Mary was the one who took charge, and she decreed that there was to be no getting up that day. I was to lie on my front, and not wriggle about, so that my back would heal more quickly. I took the instruction meekly, for it was certainly more comfortable to do as she said. So I lay there and considered what preparations I should have to make for running away, once I was about again and the stiffness had worn off. It would, I decided, be much better to have a horse, and I spent most of the morning concocting a plan for stealing one and riding away to the Fringes.

The inspector looked in in the afternoon, bringing with him a bag of buttery sweets. For a moment I thought of trying to get something out of him — casually, of course — about the real nature of the Fringes: after all, as an expert on Deviation he might be expected to know more about them than anyone else. On second thoughts, however, I decided it might be unwise.

He was sympathetic and kindly enough, but he was on a mission. He put his questions in a friendly way. Munching one of the sweets himself, he asked me:

‘How long have you known that Wender child — what is her name, by the way?’

I told him, there was no harm in that now.

‘How long have you known that Sophie deviates?’

I didn’t see that telling the truth could make things much worse.

‘Quite a long time,’ I admitted.

‘And how long would that be?’

‘About six months, I think,’ I told him.

He raised his eyebrows, and then looked serious.

‘That’s bad, you know,’ he said, ‘It’s what we call abetting a concealment. You must have known that was wrong, didn’t you?’

I dropped my gaze. I wriggled uncomfortably under his straight look, and then stopped because it made my back twinge.

‘It sort of didn’t seem like the things they say in church,’ I tried to explain.’ Besides, they were awfully little toes.’

The inspector took another sweet and pushed the bag back to me.

’”… and each foot shall have five toes,”’ he quoted. ‘You remember that?’

‘Yes,’ I admitted, unhappily.

‘Well, every part of the definition is as important as any other; and if a child doesn’t come within it, then it isn’t human, and that means it doesn’t have a soul. It is not in the image of God, it is an imitation, and in the imitations there is always some mistake. Only God produces perfection, so although deviations may look like us in many ways, they cannot be really human. They are something quite different.’

I thought that over.

‘But Sophie isn’t really different — not in any other way,’ I told him.

‘You’ll find it easier to understand when you are older, but you do know the definition, and you must have realized Sophie deviated. Why didn’t you tell your father, or me, about her?’

I explained about my dream of my father treating Sophie as he did one of the farm Offences. The inspector looked at me thoughtfully for some seconds, then he nodded:

‘I see,’ he said. ‘But Blasphemies are not treated the same way as Offences.’

‘What happens to them?’ I asked.

He evaded that. He went on:

‘You know, it’s really my duty to include your name in my report. However, as your father has already taken action, I may be able to leave it out. All the same, it is a very serious matter. The Devil sends Deviations among us to weaken us and tempt us away from Purity. Sometimes he is clever enough to make a nearly-perfect imitation, so we have always to be on the look-out for the mistake he has made, however small, and when we see one it must be reported at once. You’ll remember that in future, won’t you?’

I avoided his eye. The inspector was the inspector, and an important person; all the same I could not believe that the Devil sent Sophie. I found it hard to see how the very small toe on each foot could make much difference either.

‘Sophie’s my friend,’ I said. ‘My best friend.’

The inspector kept on looking at me, then he shook his head and sighed.

‘Loyalty is a great virtue, but there is such a thing as misplaced loyalty. One day you will understand the importance of a greater loyalty. The Purity of the Race—’ He broke off as the door opened. My father came in.

‘They got them — all three of them,’ he said to the inspector, and gave a look of disgust at me.

The inspector got up promptly, and they went out together. I stared at the closed door. The misery of self-reproach struck me so that I shook all over. I could hear myself whimpering as the tears rolled down my cheeks. I tried to stop it, but I couldn’t. My hurt back was forgotten. The anguish my father’s news had caused me was far more painful than that. My chest was so tight with it that it was choking me.

Presently the door opened again. I kept my face to the wall. Steps crossed the room. A hand rested on my shoulder. The inspector’s voice said:

‘It wasn’t that, old man. You had nothing to do with it. A patrol picked them up, quite by chance, twenty miles away.’

A couple of days later I said to Uncle Axel:

‘I’m going to run away.’

He paused in his work, and gazed thoughtfully at his saw.

‘I’d not do that,’ he advised. ‘It doesn’t usually work very well. Besides,’ he added after a pause, ‘where would you run to?’

‘That’s what I wanted to ask you,’ I explained.

He shook his head. ‘Whatever district you’re in they want to see your Normalcy Certificate,’ he told me. ‘Then they know who you are and where you’re from.’

‘Not in the Fringes,’ I suggested.

He stared at me. ‘Man alive, you’d not want to go to the Fringes. Why, they’ve got nothing there — not even enough food. Most of them are half starving, that’s why they make the raids. No, you’d spend all the time there just trying to keep alive, and lucky if you did.’

‘But there must be some other places,’ I said. ‘Only if you can find a ship that’ll take you — and even then—’ He shook his head again. ‘In my experience,’ he told me, ‘if you run away from a thing just because you don’t like it, you don’t like what you find either. Now, running to a thing, that’s a different matter, but what would you want to run to? Take it from me, it’s a lot better here than it is most places. No, I’m against it, Davie. In a few years’ time when you’re a man and can look after yourself it may be different. I reckon it’d be better to stick it out till then, anyway; much better than have them just catch you and bring you back.’

There was something in that. I was beginning to learn the meaning of the word ‘humiliation’, and did not want any more of it at present. But from what he said the question of where to go would not be easily solved even then. It looked as if it would be advisable to learn what one could of the world outside Labrador, in preparation. I asked him what it was like. ‘Godless,’ he told me. ‘Very godless indeed.’ It was the sort of uninformative answer my father would have given. I was disappointed to have it from Uncle Axel, and told him so. He grinned.

‘All right, Davie boy, that’s fair enough. So long as you’ll not chatter, I’ll tell you something about it.’

‘You mean it’s secret?’ I asked, puzzled.

‘Not quite that,’ he said. ‘But when people are used to believing a thing is such-and-such a way, and the preachers want them to believe that that’s the way it is; it’s trouble you get, not thanks, for upsetting their ideas. Sailors soon found that out in Rigo, so mostly they only talk about it now to other sailors. If the rest of the people want to think it’s nearly all Badlands outside, they let them; it doesn’t alter the way it really is, but it does make for peace and quiet.’

‘My book says it’s all Badlands, or bad Fringes country,’ I told him.

‘There are other books that don’t, but you’ll not see them about much — not even in Rigo, let alone in the backwoods here,’ he said. ‘And, mind you, it doesn’t do to believe everything every sailor says either — and you’re often not sure whether any couple of them are talking about the same place or not, even when they think they are. But when you’ve seen some of it, you begin to understand that the world’s a much queerer place than it looks from Waknuk. So you’ll keep it to yourself?’

I assured him I would.

‘All right. Well, it’s this way—’ he began.

To reach the rest of the world (my Uncle Axel explained) you start by sailing down river from Rigo until you get to the sea. They say that it’s no good sailing on straight ahead, to the east, that is, because either the sea goes on for ever, or else it comes to an end suddenly, and you sail over the edge. Nobody knows for sure.

If you make north and keep along the coast, and still keep along when it turns west and then south, you reach the other side of Labrador. Or, if you keep straight on northwards, you come to colder parts where there are a great many islands with not much living on them except birds and sea-creatures.

To the north-east they say there is a great land where the plants aren’t very deviational, and the animals and people don’t look deviational, but the women are very tall and strong. They rule the country entirely, and do all the work. They keep their men in cages until they are about twenty-four years old, and then eat them. They also eat shipwrecked sailors. But as no one ever seems to have met anyone who has actually been there and escaped, it’s difficult to see how that can be known. Still, there it is — no one has ever come back denying it either.

The only way I know is south — I’ve been south three times. To get there you keep the coast to starboard as you leave the river. After a couple of hundred miles or so you come to the Straits of Newf. As the Straits widen out you keep the coast of Newf to port and call in at Lark for fresh water — and provisions, too, if the Newf people will let you have any. After that you bear south-east awhile and then south, and pick up the mainland coast again to starboard. When you reach it you find it is Badlands — or at least very bad Fringes. There’s plenty growing there, but sailing close inshore you can see that nearly all of it is deviational. There are animals, too, and most of them look as if it’d be difficult to classify them as Offences against any known kinds.

A day or two’s sail farther on there’s plenty of Badlands coastline, with no doubt about it. Soon you’re following round a big bay, and you get to where there are no gaps: it’s all Badlands.

When sailors first saw those parts they were pretty scared. They felt they were leaving all Purity behind, and sailing farther and farther away from God, where He’d not be able to help them. Everybody knows that if you walk on Badlands you die, and they’d none of them expected ever to see them so close with their own eyes. But what worried them most — and worried the people they talked to when they got back — was to see how the things which are against God’s laws of nature flourish there, just as if they had a right to.

And a shocking sight it must have been at first, too. You can see giant, distorted heads of corn growing higher than small trees; big saprophytes growing on rocks, with their roots trailing out on the wind like bunches of hair, fathoms long; in some places there are fungus colonies that you’d take at first sight for big white boulders; you can see succulents like barrels, but as big as small houses, and with spines ten feet long. There are plants which grow on the cliff-tops and send thick, green cables down a hundred feet and more into the sea; and you wonder whether it’s a land plant that’s got to the salt water, or a sea plant that’s somehow climbed ashore. There are hundreds of kinds of queer things, and scarcely a normal one among them — it’s a kind of jungle of Deviations, going on for miles and miles. There don’t seem to be many animals, but occasionally you catch sight of one, though you’d never be able to name it. There are a fair number of birds, though, sea-birds mostly; and once or twice people have seen big things flying in the distance, too far away to make out anything except that the motion didn’t look right for birds. It’s a weird, evil land; and many a man who sees it suddenly understands what might happen here if it weren’t for the Purity Laws and the inspectors.

It’s bad — but it isn’t the worst.

Farther south still, you begin to find patches where only coarse plants grow, and poorly at that, and soon you come to stretches of coast, and land behind it, twenty, thirty, forty miles long, maybe, where nothing grows — nothing at all.

The whole seaboard is empty — black and harsh and empty. The land behind looks like a huge desert of charcoal. Where there are cliffs they are sharp-edged, with nothing to soften them. There are no fish in the sea there, no weed either, not even slime, and when a ship has sailed there the barnacles and the fouling on her bottom drop off, and leave her hull clean. You don’t see any birds. Nothing moves at all, except the waves breaking on the black beaches.

It is a frightful place. Masters order their ships well out for fear of it; and very relieved the sailors are to keep clear.

And yet it can’t always have been like that because there was one ship whose captain was foolhardy enough to sail close inshore. Her crew were able to make out great stone ruins. They were all agreed that they were far too regular to be natural, and they thought they might be the remains of one of the Old People’s cities. But nobody knows any more about them. Most of the men in that ship wasted away and died, and the rest were never the same afterwards, so no other ship has risked keeping close in.

For hundreds of miles the coast goes on being Badlands with stretches of the dead, black lands; so far, in fact, that the first ships down there gave up and turned about because they thought they would never reach any place where they could water and provision. They came back saying that they thought it must go on like that to the ends of the earth.

The preachers and the church people were pleased to hear it, for that was very much what they had been teaching, and for a time it made people lose interest in exploring.

But later on curiosity revived, and better-found ships sailed south again. An observer on one of these, a man called Marther, wrote in a journal which he published, something like this:

The Black Coasts would appear to be an extreme form of Badlands. Since any close approach to them is likely to be fatal nothing can be said of them with certainty but that they are entirely barren, and in some regions are known to glow dimly on a dark night.

Such study as has been possible at a distance, however, does not confirm the view of the Right Wing Church Party that they are the result of unchecked deviation. There is no evidence whatever that they are a form of sore on the earth’s surface destined to spread to all impure regions. Indeed, the contrary appears more likely. This is to say that just as Wild Country becomes tractable, and Badlands country slowly gives way to habitable Fringes country, so, it would seem, are the Blacklands contracting within the Badlands. Observations at the necessary distance cannot be detailed, but such as have been made indicate consistently that living forms are in the process, although in the most profane shapes, of encroaching upon this fearsome desolation.

That was one of the parts of the journal that got Marther into a lot of trouble with orthodox people, for it implied that deviations, so far from being a curse, were performing, however slowly, a work of reclamation. Along with half a dozen more heresies it landed Marther in court, and started agitation for a ban on further exploration.

In the middle of all the fuss, however, a ship called the Venture which had long been given up for lost, came sailing home to Rigo. She was battered and undermanned, her canvas was patched, her mizzen jury-rigged, and her condition foul, but she triumphantly claimed the honour of being the first to reach the lands beyond the Black Coasts. She brought back a number of objects including gold and silver and copper ornaments, and a cargo of spices to prove it. The evidence had to be accepted, but there was a lot of trouble over the spices, for there was no means of telling whether they were deviational, or the product of a pure strain. Strict churchgoers refused to touch them for fear they might be tainted; other people preferred to believe that they were the kind of spices referred to in the Bible. Whatever they were, they are profitable enough now for ships to sail south in search of them.

The lands down there aren’t civilized. Mostly they don’t have any sense of sin so they don’t stop Deviations; and where they do have a sense of sin, they’ve got it mixed up. A lot of them aren’t ashamed of Mutants; it doesn’t seem to worry them when children turn out wrong, provided they’re right enough to live and to learn to look after themselves. Other places, though, you’ll find Deviations who think they are normal. There’s one tribe where both the men and women are hairless, and they think that hair is the devil’s mark; and there’s another where they all have white hair and pink eyes. In one place they don’t think you’re properly human unless you have webbed fingers and toes; in another, they don’t allow any woman who is not multi-breasted to have children.

You’ll find islands where the people are all thickset, and others where they’re thin; there are even said to be some islands where both the men and women would be passed as true images if it weren’t that some strange deviation has turned them all completely black — though even that’s easier to believe than the one about a race of Deviations that has dwindled to two feet high, grown fur and a tail, and taken to living in trees. All the same, it’s queerer there than you’d ever credit; pretty nearly anything seems possible once you’ve seen it.

It’s pretty dangerous in those parts, too. The fish and the other things in the sea are bigger and fiercer than they are here. And when you do go ashore you never know how the local Deviations are going to take you. Some places they are friendly; in others they shoot poisoned arrows at you. On one island they throw bombs made of pepper wrapped in leaves, and when it gets in your eyes they charge with spears. You just never know.

Sometimes when the people are friendly you can’t understand a thing they’re trying to say and they can’t understand you, but more often if you listen a bit you’ll find out that a lot of their words are like our own but pronounced differently. And you find out some strange, disturbing things. They all have pretty much the same legends of the Old People as we have — how they could fly, how they used to build cities that floated on the sea, how any one of them could speak to any other, even hundreds of miles away, and so on. But what’s more worrying is that most of them — whether they have seven fingers, or four arms, or hair all over, or six breasts, or whatever it is that’s wrong with them — think that their type is the true pattern of the Old People, and anything different is a Deviation.

That seems silly at first, but when you find more and more kinds just as convinced of it as we are ourselves — well, you begin to wonder a bit. You start asking yourself: well, what real evidence have we got about the true image? You find that the Bible doesn’t say anything to contradict the people of that time being like us, but on the other hand it doesn’t give any definition of Man, either. No, the definition comes from Nicholson’s Repentances — and he admits that he was writing some generations after Tribulation came, so you find yourself wondering whether he knew he was in the true image, or whether he only thought he was….

Uncle Axel had a lot more to say about Southern parts than I can remember, and it was all very interesting in its way, but it didn’t tell me what I wanted to know. At last I asked him point-blank.

‘Uncle Axel, are there any cities there?’

‘Cities?’ he repeated. ‘Well, here and there you’ll find a town, of a kind. As big as Kentak, maybe, but built differently.’

‘No,’ I told him. ‘I mean big places.’ I described the city in my dream, but without telling him it was a dream.

He looked at me oddly. ‘No, I never heard of any place like that,’ he told me.

‘Farther on, perhaps. Farther than you went?’ I suggested.

He shook his head. ‘You can’t go farther on. The sea gets full of weed. Masses of weed with stems like cables. A ship can’t make her way through it, and it’s trouble enough to get clear of it once you get in it at all.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You’re quite sure there’s no city?’

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘We’d have heard of it by this time if there was.’

I was disappointed. It sounded as if running away to the South, even if I could find a ship to take me, would be little better than running away to the Fringes. For a time I had hoped, but now I had to go back to the idea that the city I dreamt of must be one of the Old People’s cities after all.

Uncle Axel went on talking about the doubts of the true image that his voyage had given him. He laboured it rather a lot, and after a while he broke off to ask me directly:

‘You understand, don’t you, Davie, why I’ve been telling you all this?’

I was not sure that I did. Moreover, I was reluctant to admit the flaw in the tidy, familiar orthodoxy I had been taught. I recalled a phrase which I had heard a number of times.

‘You lost your faith?’ I inquired.

Uncle Axel snorted, and pulled a face.

‘Preacher-words!’ he said, and thought for a moment. ‘I’m telling you,’ he went on, ‘that a lot of people saying that a thing is so, doesn’t prove it is so. I’m telling you that nobody, nobody really knows what is the true image. They all think they know — just as we think we know, but, for all we can prove, the Old People themselves may not have been the true image.’ He turned, and looked long and steadily at me again.

‘So,’ he said, ‘how am I, and how is anyone to be sure that this “difference” that you and Rosalind have does not make you something nearer to the true image than other people are? Perhaps the Old People were the image: very well then, one of the things they say about them is that they could talk to one another over long distances. Now we can’t do that — but you and Rosalind can. Just think that over, Davie. You two may be nearer to the image than we are,’

I hesitated for perhaps a minute, and then took a decision.

‘It isn’t just Rosalind and me, Uncle Axel,’ I told him. ‘There are others, too.’

He was startled. He stared at me.

‘Others?’ he repeated. ‘Who are they? How many?’

I shook my head.

‘I don’t know who they are — not names, I mean. Names don’t have any thinking-shapes, so we’ve never bothered. You just know who’s thinking, like you know who’s talking. I only found out who Rosalind was by accident.’

He went on looking at me seriously, uneasily.

‘How many of you?’ he repeated.

‘Eight,’ I told him. ‘There were nine, but one of them stopped about a month ago. That’s what I wanted to ask you, Uncle Axel, do you think somebody found out—? He just stopped suddenly. We’ve been wondering if anybody knows…. You see, if they found out about him—’ I let him draw the inference himself.

Presently he shook his head.

‘I don’t think so. We should be pretty sure to have heard of it. Perhaps he’s gone away, did he live near here?’

‘I think so — I don’t know really,’ I said, ‘but I’m sure he’d have told us if he was going away.’

‘He’d have told you if he thought anybody had found out, too, wouldn’t he?’ he suggested. ‘It looks to me more as if it’d be an accident of some kind, being quite sudden like that. You’d like me to try to find out?’

‘Yes, please. It’s made some of us afraid,’ I explained.

‘Very well.’ He nodded. ‘I’ll see if I can. It was a boy, you say. Not very far from here, probably. About a month ago. Any more?’

I told him what I could, which was very little. It was a relief to know that he would try to find out what had happened. Now that a month had gone by without a similar thing happening to any of the rest of us we were less anxious than we had been, but still far from easy.

Before we parted he returned to his earlier advice to remember that no one could be certain of the true image.

Later, I understood why he gave it. I realized, too, that he did not greatly care what was the true image. Whether he was wise or not in trying to forestall both the alarm and the sense of inferiority that he saw lying in wait for us when we should become better aware of ourselves and our difference, I cannot say. It might have been better to have left it awhile — on the other hand, perhaps it did something to lessen the distress of the awakening….

At any rate, I decided, for the moment, not to run away from home. The practical difficulties looked formidable.