The Chrysalids

weren’t quite sure what to do with us. They argued a bit over that, but they were much more interested in the great-horses really, I think. The man on this horse seems to be quite harmless. He’s talking to Petra with an odd sort of earnestness — I’m not sure he isn’t a little simple.’

‘Can you find out what they’re intending to do with you?’

‘I did ask, but I don’t think he knows. He’s just been told to take us somewhere.’

‘Well—’ Michael seemed at a loss for once. ‘Well, I suppose all we can do is wait and see — but it’ll do no harm to let him know we’ll be coming after you.’

He left it at that for the moment.

I struggled and wriggled round. With some difficulty I managed to get on to my feet and stand up in the swaying basket. The man in the other pannier looked round at me quite amiably.

‘Whoa, there!’ he said to the great-horse, and reined in. He unslung a leather bottle from his shoulder, and swung it across to me on the strap. I uncorked it, drank gratefully, and swung it back to him. We went on.

I was able to see our surroundings now. It was broken country, no longer thick forest, though well-wooded, and even a first look at it assured me that my father had been right about normality being mocked in these parts. I could scarcely identify a single tree with certainty. There were familiar trunks supporting the wrong shape of tree: familiar types of branches growing out of the wrong kind of bark, and bearing the wrong kind of leaves. For a while our view to the left was cut off by a fantastically-woven fence of immense bramble trunks with spines as big as shovels. In another place a stretch of ground looked like a dried-out river-bed full of large boulders, but the boulders turned out to be globular fungi set as close together as they could grow. There were trees with trunks too soft to stand upright, so that they looped over and grew along the ground. Here and there were patches of miniature trees, shrunk and gnarled, and looking centuries old.

I glanced surreptitiously again at the man in the other pannier. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with him except that he looked very dirty, as were his ragged clothes and crumpled hat. He caught my eye on him.

‘Never been in the Fringes before, boy?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I told him. ‘Is it all like this?’

He grinned, and shook his head.

‘None of it’s like any other part. That’s why the Fringes is the Fringes; pretty near nothing grows true to stock here, yet.’

‘Yet—?’ I repeated.

‘Sure. It’ll settle down, though, in time. Wild Country was Fringes once, but it’s steadier now; likely the parts you come from were Wild Country once, but they’ve settled down more. God’s little game of patience I reckon it is, but He certainly takes His time over it.’

‘God?’ I said doubtfully. ‘They’ve always taught us that it’s the Devil that rules in the Fringes.’

He shook his head.

‘That’s what they tell you over there. ‘Tisn’t so, boy. It’s your parts where the old Devil’s hanging on and looking after his own. Arrogant, they are. The true image, and all that…. Want to be like the Old People. Tribulation hasn’t taught ‘em a thing….

‘The Old People thought they were the tops, too. Had ideals, they did; knew just how the world ought to be run. All they had to do was get it fixed up comfortable, and keep it that way; then everybody’d be fine, on account of their ideas being a lot more civilized than God’s.’

He shook his head.

‘Didn’t work out, boy. Couldn’t work out. They weren’t God’s last word like they thought: God doesn’t have any last word. If He did He’d be dead. But He isn’t dead; and He changes and grows, like everything else that’s alive. So when they were doing their best to get everything fixed and tidy on some kind of eternal lines they’d thought up for themselves, He sent along Tribulation to bust it up and remind ‘em that life is change.

‘He saw it wasn’t going to come out the way things lay, so He shuffled the pack to see if it wouldn’t give a better break next time.’

He paused to consider that a moment, and went on:

‘Maybe He didn’t shuffle quite enough. The same sequences seem to have got kind of stuck together some places. Parts where you come from, for instance. There they are, still on the same lines, still reckoning they’re the last word, still trying their damnedest to stay as they are and fix up just the same state of affairs that brought Tribulation last time. One day He’s going to get pretty tired of the way they can’t learn a lesson, and start showing them another trick or two.’

‘Oh,’ I said, vaguely but safely. It was odd, I felt, how many people seemed to have positive, if conflicting, information upon God’s views.

The man did not seem altogether satisfied that he had got his point home. He waved his hand at the deviational landscape about us, and I suddenly noticed his own irregularity: the right hand lacked the first three fingers.

‘Some day,’ he proclaimed, ‘something is going to steady down out of all this. It’ll be new, and new kinds of plants mean new creatures. Tribulation was a shake-up to give us a new start.’

‘But where they can make the stock breed true, they destroy Deviations,’ I pointed out.

‘They try to; they think they do,’ he agreed. ‘They’re pig-headedly determined to keep the Old People’s standards — but do they? Can they? How do they know that their crops and their fruit and their vegetables are just the same? Aren’t there disputes? And doesn’t it nearly always turn out that the breed with the higher yield is accepted in the end? Aren’t cattle cross-bred to get hardiness, or milk-yield, or meat? Sure, they can wipe out the obvious deviations, but are you sure that the Old people would recognize any of the present breeds at all? I’m not, by any means. You can’t stop it, you see. You can be obstructive and destructive, and you can slow it all up and distort it for your own ends, but somehow it keeps on happening. Just look at these horses.’

‘They’re government approved,’ I told him.

‘Sure. That’s just what I mean,’ he said.

‘But if it keeps on anyway, I don’t see why there had to be Tribulation,’ I objected.

‘For other forms it keeps on keeping on,’ he said, ‘but not for man, not for kinds like the Old People and your people, if they can help it. They stamp on any change: they close the way and keep the type fixed because they’ve got the arrogance to think themselves perfect. As they reckon it, they, and only they, are in the true image; very well, then it follows that if the image is true, they themselves must be God: and, being God, they reckon themselves entitled to decree, “thus far, and no farther.” That is their great sin: they try to strangle the life out of Life.’

There was an air about the last few sentences, rather out of keeping with the rest, which caused me to suspect I had encountered some kind of creed once more. I decided to shift the conversation on to a more practical plane by inquiring why we had been taken prisoner.

He did not seem very sure about that, except to assure me that it was always done when any stranger was found entering Fringes territory.

I thought that over, and then got into touch with Michael again.

‘What do you suggest we tell them?’ I asked. ‘I imagine there’ll be an examination. When they find we’re physically normal we shall have to give some reason for being on the run.’

‘Best to tell them the truth, only minimize it. Play it right down the way Katherine and Sally did. Just let them know enough to account for it,’ he suggested.

‘Very well,’ I agreed. ‘Do you understand that, Petra? You tell them you can just make think-pictures to Rosalind and me. Nothing about Michael, or Sealand people.’

‘The Sealand people are coming to help. They’re not so far away as they were, now,’ she told us confidently.

Michael received that with scepticism. ‘All very nice — if they can. But don’t mention them.’

‘All right,’ Petra agreed.

We discussed whether we would tell our two guards about the intended pursuit, and decided it would do no harm.

The man in the other pannier showed no surprise at the news.

‘Good. That’ll suit us,’ he said. But he explained no further, and we plodded steadily on.