To Conquer Chaos Page 10

  “You don’t understand, Grandfather! Weren’t you listening?”

  Grandfather blinked. Astonishingly, he gave a warm chuckle. “Beginning to talk my language, hey? All right, what’s the point I missed by not listening? Out with it!”

  “I said Jasper was dangerous,” Nestamay emphasised. She had refrained from telling this story for days on end, thinking it might be selfish or spiteful to do so. Now, though, it was clear that Grandfather had to be informed.

  “In what way?” Grandfather was suddenly tense.

  “The—uh—the other night when the thing hatched and we chased it out of Channel Nine, I was late reaching the office for my watch.”

  “I thought you were rather a long time getting there. I also thought the experience had frightened you badly enough for you not to do it again. What has this to do with Jasper?”

  “The reason I was late,” Nestamay said very carefully, “was that Jasper tried to make me skip my watch and go with him to some hiding-place he has around the other side of the Station.”

  Grandfather gave a thoughtful nod. He said, “You didn’t let him persuade you. And it wasn’t the alarm which saved you, either. Am I right?”

  “Y-yes.” Nestamay tried to reduce the hammering of her heart by drawing in another very deep breath and letting it out as slowly as she could. It made her throat seem to shudder by itself.

  “In which case it’s bad—he shouldn’t do it, and must be punished. But it hardly sounds dangerous, unless he came extremely close to persuading you.”

  “Not me,” Nestamay said, and closed her eyes. Here it was at last: the thing she had learned afterwards, the thing which had really brought on the tears. “Not me. Danianel. She—she wasn’t so obstinate.”

  Grandfather’s eyes switched to the kinship chart. There was a steel-blue blaze in them. He said, “Danianel?” And put his index and middle fingers, parted like a draftsman’s compass, on the two names on the chart.

  “Yes.” Nestamay put her hands up to cover her eyes. She was thinking of the months—years, almost—through which she had compelled herself to endure Jasper’s attentions, knowing she would sooner or later have to suffer them permanently, and thinking like an idiot that the unpleasant truth which was so clear to her after Grandfather’s instruction must be equally clear, equally significant to Jasper.

  “Danianel’s last watch was last night,” Grandfather said. “How much of it did she skip?”

  “I don’t know.” Nestamay tossed her hair back again. “I wasn’t there.”

  “Then how do you know?”

  “Jasper boasted about it to me. This afternoon. When he was out with the working party at the ovens.”

  There was a long silence. At last she looked at Grandfather, and was surprised and shocked to see that he had put his head forward in his hands, as she had often done.

  She moved to his side instantly, her arm going as though by reflex around his shoulders. She felt his body shaking in a slow old-man rhythm.

  “Sometimes I wonder, Nestamay—” His words came gravelly and reluctant. “Is there any point in going on? There’s nothing I can do about Jasper, girl. He’s what he is, and all the talking-to and all the beatings in the world won’t cure him, and he’s still the only possible mate for you of the young men we have. Look at the chart!”

  He straightened, rubbing his nose with two fingers. “I wish it were otherwise! But see—he preserves two genetic lines which are otherwise united with lines forbidden for you! Are we to lose them? Are we to lose a pair of hands when we have so few?” He made a lost, helpless gesture. “When we’re reduced to this, I’m not sure any longer whether we can continue the struggle.”

  Horrified, Nestamay drew back her arm as the old man moved to a more comfortable position. His gnarled fingers sought and clasped her work-toughened young ones. He continued in a haunted voice, pleading for understanding with his eyes.

  “I remember foreseeing this a long time ago, Nestamay! I talked about it, over and over, with you father. I’ve never discussed your father with you, have I? Or not properly. For all I know, you may think I drove him to his death out of overweening pride!” He gave a short bitter laugh.

  “I didn’t drive him. He went, bravely and willingly. He knew—I knew—we’d come in a little while to the state we’re now in, where we have to keep a tainted genetic line because we have nothing else to replace it. Generation after generation there’s been a fining-down; at first the mixing could be random, but the recessives showed up eventually, and lines which could have masked them were lost in accidents or because things came out of the dome and killed …” He wiped his brow with his hand.

  “It was baby Dan who drove your father out, if anyone drove him,” He wiped his brow with his hand.

  “Baby Dan?” echoed Nestamay in an incredulous tone. She stared at the pasty-pale fatness of her brother, playing with his blanket on the other side of the hovel.

  “Of course. Only an accident kept the same thing from happening to you. He’s a mere three years younger than you, you realise—a total failure as a human being, a mere vegetable, an infant until he dies. He’s proof of what I’d previously just warned about. When he was a year old, or thereabouts, it was beyond doubt that he was an imbecile. And, seeing he could hide the truth no longer from himself, your father—my son also, remember!—set out to hunt for someone else. Anyone else! Anyone would be better than your Jaspers, your Danianel’s, and the other blockheads of this generation!”

  After that they sat in silence for a long time. Baby Dan grew tired of playing with his blanket, rolled over and went to sleep as unfussily as a real baby. Nestamay watched him.

  “You should have told me before, Grandfather,” she said. “I—I thought some very bad things about you because you didn’t.”

  “I don’t like talking about it,” Grandfather snapped. “Didn’t I just remind you your father was also my son—my only son?”

  He picked up his pointer-stick and sighed heavily. “Well, it’s no use fretting about what might have been. We have to make the best of what we’ve got. And you’re the best of what we’ve got right now, Nestamay—the brightest member of your generation, the only person in the Station who could possibly learn everything I know and hope to add to it.”

  “But—!” The tortured cry was wrung from Nestamay. “But what for? If our genetic lines are all going to produce a baby Dan sooner or later, what’s the use of struggling?”

  “We aren’t the only people in the universe,” Grandfather said. “Sometimes it seems like it. But somewhere there are other people, and some day we may find them, and when we do meet strangers we must be able to say to them, ‘We kept up the struggle.’ Because if we can’t say that, what right will we have to be respected as human beings?”

  XV

  Conrad was completely dazed by the speed of events after Yanderman forced the insane-seeming promise out of him. A score of times a protest or withdrawal rose to his lips; always Yanderman forestalled the utterance with some point requiring immediate action.

  A safe place for them to go, first. Conrad dredged one up from the not-so-distant past—a hideaway under an overhanging shelf of rock on the eroded side of a hill, where he had sometimes taken refuge from taunting children when he was ten or twelve years old. (He had sometimes dreamed of one day taking Idris there, in privacy. That was dead.)

  Things necessary for them to take, next. Yanderman’s directions were crisp and rapid. Certain things he chose himself; Conrad would never have known they were important, for he didn’t know what they were at all. A magnetic compass, for instance. He had never seen one in Lagwich.

  On the other hand, he knew very well what a gun was. The fact that he didn’t even consider looking for one was due to his assumption that a gun was the last thing the departing soldiers were likely to have abandoned. Yanderman knew better. Intensive searching located several, of which he chose the two best, as well as a bag of ammunition. Conrad was awed when the weapons we
re handed to him, but his companion allowed him no time to examine them.

  “Get on with it, boy!” Yanderman rapped again and again. “The soldiery will be back some time, you know—they’ll regret wrecking the camp, and they’ll drift back when they get bored watching Lagwich defy them.”

  “Yes—what about Lagwich?” Conrad countered. It was as near as he could come to breaking his given word.

  “Do you care?” Yanderman grunted. “You said not any more. And I certainly don’t. Let ’em sweat it out as best they can. Pick up that side of meat over there. I thought I’d never have an appetite again, but I’m getting hungry. And you look as though you never had a square meal in your life “

  Obeying, Conrad persisted, “But what’s going to happen to Lagwich? What’s going to happen to the army?”

  “It doesn’t matter what happens to them!” Yanderman exclaimed. “Oh—! Oh, I guess the town can stand a siege for a while, and the men aren’t properly officered and we didn’t come equipped to tackle even such rudimentary fortifications as Lagwich has. Maybe some bright character will put a ballista together and toss some incendiaries into the town—smoke the people out. More likely he won’t be able to organise a big enough squad of co-operative men. They’ll drift away, pick up some loot from the camp, or wander to another town and raid it before the people get wise.

  “And back in Esberg there’ll be political chaos, and half a dozen would-be usurpers will impugn Duke Paul’s heir and try to confiscate his property and withdraw his titles on the grounds of wilful malfeasance, and—and the hell with them.”

  He settled an immense burden of salvaged equipment around himself on an improvised harness made from half a dozen soldiers’ belts, and ended, “Right! Lead me to this safe hiding place you told me of.”

  That was the point at which Conrad almost turned and fled. The single thing which restrained him was his burning need to know what only Yanderman could tell him: the explanation of the mysterious visions which had plagued him all his life, and which—having believed them to be unique to himself—he now knew were shared by a certain Granny Jassy and any number of other people.

  “That’s better,” Yanderman sighed, rubbing his fingers on a tuft of grass to cleanse them of grease from the meat they had charred, rather than cooked, over a clear smokeless fire of minute wood-chips. “Now, Conrad, I’ll ease your mind a little. Pass me that canteen of water, will you?”

  Conrad did so. Yanderman sucked lengthily at it and gave it back with a murmur of thanks.

  “Yes!” he resumed. “It was sheer sick anger, of course, which made me conceive this crazy plan in the first place—this plan to venture into the barrenland. That was before I knew about you. And then, when you said what you said, all of a sudden the idea seemed less crazy. In fact, it began to make excellent sense.”

  He gave Conrad a shrewd glance. “Don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? I can read it in your face—deep down you’re scared stiff of the suggestion. If you had anywhere else to go, any friends to turn to, you wouldn’t be out here in the lee of a sandstone hill with a foreigner whose head is ringing with grandiose delusions!”

  Conrad managed a threadbare smile in reply.

  “Did you hear from any of our men who had liberty in Lagwich how we worked our way here—how we knew what sort of terrain we had to cross even before sending out scouts?”

  “No—uh—I don’t think so.”

  “That was thanks to Granny Jassy. And this.” Yanderman caught up the crystal ball and let it swing on its chain. “Take a good look at it. In fact—keep on looking at it while I tell you the story.”

  Puzzled, but eager for information and less frightened now he had filled his belly and rested a while, Conrad did as he was told.

  Yanderman’s voice droned evenly on, recounting how Duke Paul had decided to investigate the fantastic tales some people told in Esberg, how ideas copied from these tales, which hitherto had never been taken seriously, had proved to work in practice and had given Esberg a complete military ascendancy over its rival cities to the south, how men had gone to dig up mounds and found ruins and relics in incredible quantity, how Duke Paul had then turned his attention to stories about the barrenland and come to the conclusion that it was artificial, made, and even now—on the evidence of Rost’s so-called “devil”—must have people within it.

  Conrad, his eyes moving back and forth with the unending motion of the crystal ball, found the willpower to voice a foggy objection. He remembered the coming of the “devil” from the barrenland, and the arguments used by the wise men to show it could not be human. Yanderman dismissed them curtly, never varying the swing of the crystal ball.

  “Think now about the visions you’ve had, Conrad,” he urged. “Have you seen the barrenland as it might once have been? Have you seen it peopled, built on, prosperous?”

  Conrad gave a sluggish nod. All his old resolutions never to share his secret with anyone except Idris had faded away. He was sure Yanderman wasn’t going to mock him, and it meant so much to him to be taken seriously that he let the words stream out of their own accord.

  As he talked, the shiny ball of crystal from which he now could not tear away his fascinated gaze seemed to expand and fill his entire field of vision. Dazzling, it blinded him. And then, out of the blindness, something new and yet familiar emerged. The forms were the forms of his old visions, but the detail, the colour, the words were a thousand times clearer than he had ever known them before.

  He came to himself with a start. It was growing dark, and the little smokeless fire had gone out. Yanderman was sitting facing him with an enigmatic smile, the crystal ball hidden now inside his shirt.

  “Awake, Conrad?”

  “I—I haven’t been asleep. Have I?” Intensely puzzled, Conrad rubbed his eyes automatically.

  “Not exactly, no. You’ve been in a trance, which isn’t quite the same thing.” Yanderman stretched his legs as though he felt cramp after sitting a long time in the same position; the action informed Conrad that his limbs too were appallingly stiff.

  “Then—oh, explain!” he demanded.

  “I’ll do my best. As nearly as we were able to work it out, Duke Paul, myself and the other Esberg thinkers who tackled the problem, these visions aren’t simply dreams, but memories which have become available to us in a way we can’t account for. Possibly the time to which they refer was a time when there were simply so many people that their minds resonated together and created a—” He checked. “You don’t understand that analogy, I see. Have you ever handled a musical instrument?”

  “Yes, a clay flute.”

  “I meant a stringed instrument. You can see the phenomenon clearly there. Well, never mind. Let’s just say that we’re satisfied that these memories are based on realities of the distant past. In every generation since whatever catastrophe undid the greatness of those days, a few people have been born who were capable of describing their visions; from these descriptions word of mouth transmission has evolved a number of folk tales and fables. The recurrence of those with direct perception has kept the tradition from being hopelessly garbled. Granny Jassy was the best subject we’d ever found in Esberg, but I must say that what you’ve been telling me these past few hours puts everything Granny Jassy ever said completely in the shade.” He gave a sober headshake.

  “Me?” Conrad was startled. “Do you mean I’m one of these—how did you put it?—‘few people in each generation’?”

  Yanderman shivered for no perceptible cause. He said, “I’d go further. You’re not one of a few, but unique.”

  It seemed that this ought to be a source of pride. Conrad tried to regard it as such, but his brain was still misty with the after-effects of his recent trance.

  “Did nobody in Lagwich care about your gift?” Yanderman pressed him. “Didn’t a single person take it seriously?”

  “Until a day or two ago I’d have answered that at least one person did,” Conrad muttered. “A girl called—oh, ne
ver mind. She turned out like all the others in the end.”

  He looked miserably down at the ground near Yanderman’s feet, and for the first time became aware that there was a pile of yellow paper there, covered with close scribbled writing. He gave the older man an inquiring glance.

  “Call it the first fruit of my research into your mind,” Yanderman explained. “I made notes of as many of the things you described as I could manage. You can visualise the barrenland before it was made barren, as you know; in two or three more sessions it should be possible to extract from what you tell me the kind of information which will enable us to cross it and survive. Most importantly, you remember the course of streams and rivers. You can visualise distances, too, with impressive accuracy. What I want to prepare”—he took up a pencil and a fresh sheet of paper—“is a map of the nearer part of the barrenland on which we can work out a path involving not more than a few hours’ travel away from water at any point. We can carry food and fuel between us, enough for the whole journey, if we can avoid having to load up with more than a canteen of water apiece.”

  He sketched a rough circle on the paper, occupying almost the entire square of the sheet. In the centre of it he put a cross.

  “But even more important,” he said under his breath, “is to know what was sited there in the middle.”

  “Why?”

  “Rost’s ‘devil’, of course.” Yanderman stared down at the paper for a long moment, then grunted and put it aside. He rose to his feet, stretching limb by limb.

  “I still don’t see how it’s possible for these visions of mine to be memories of the past,” Conrad ventured. “Or rather I don’t see why they necessarily have a connection with anything real.”

  “Don’t you?” Yanderman sounded surprised. “Boy, where in Lagwich would you have got concepts like the ones you describe? I suppose mere imagination could carry the mind from a Lagwich-sized village to a city of a million people. But there’s a gap between anything in your direct experience and the notion of self-controlling machines, of flying through the air, walking to other worlds. As a matter of fact,” he added with a rueful smile, “that last one is so fantastic I’m inclined to wonder whether it’s not an exception.”