Quicksand Page 21

  Bit by bit, now the dam had been broken by his chance inquiry in her own language, he was assembling a picture of Urchin's world. Turning back the pages of his notebook, he found that although he might have copied down key-words and abbreviated sentences automatically during the past several sessions with her, on a second inspection they conjured up with present-time vividness the entire statement to which each corresponded.

  -- It's like my own life, isn't it? Forking outwards. And she's trapped in a dead end.

  The idea, with the overtones of forking, was lightning to him, illuminating a whole great landscape of possibilities.

  -- I see! Yes, I'm sure I get the picture now. Not so much a visitor as an explorer and researcher, but when she had to answer my first question she hadn't enough words to do more than approximate it.

  He broke in, regardless of the fact that she was still speaking. "Urchin, when is this 'other time' you come from?"

  "I can't explain. It's away from this one."

  "A long time ago, or still to come?"

  -- Harmless, to play with words and humour a lunatic's delusions. Nonetheless: strange, somehow fascinating. A way out of this world which traps me. If I could only . . .

  "N-no." She was shaking her head in despair. "Not in front, not behind. Northwest."

  She turned and gazed at him with pleading eyes, as though beseeching his comprehension.

  -- Mustn't let you down, girl, or you might let me down, and . . . Northwest? Off ahead but at some kinky weird angle?

  He said carefully, "Did you expect to come here?"

  "No!" A sudden gleam of hope. "You -- all this" -- a gesture to embrace the office, Chent Hospital, the world at large -- "not in our history."

  "What did you expect to find?"

  "They" -- he still hadn't established "their" identity, but they were apparently some figures of authority -- "send to report on . . ." She fumbled for the right term. "On Age of Muddled . . .?"

  "Confusion?" Paul ventured.

  "Right! To answer many questions because history had got . . . well . . . broken. To leave written accounts in special places for finding later."

  "Were you expecting to go back?"

  She hesitated; then she answered almost inaudibly, "It's not possible to go back. Time runs forward at fixed speed, limit like speed of light."

  -- I'm not sure I follow that, but there's a weird kind of consistency in all these things she's said. . . .

  He leafed back through his notes again.

  What is your history, Urchin? Have you found out what makes it different from ours?"

  "Rome."

  "What?"

  The tranquilhiser had given him back some of his powers of concentration; he was absently sifting his earlier records in the hope of finding further clues.

  -- But what to make of all this baffles me. Vague hints about a pastoral world without cities, people living to be a hundred and fifty, the epitome of Utopian wishful thinking!

  "Rome," Urchin said again. "You call your kind of writing Roman, don't you? There are very few and bad books about history in the library, but -- Wait, I show you." She opened her battered portfolio, which she had brought to this as to all recent sessions.

  "Just tell me," Paul sighed.

  Disappointed, she let the case slide to the floor. "If you say. Romans were conquerors, beat all others in what you call Mediterranean Sea, came to here even. Left strange writing, strange language. For me history says were people from . . . aaah!" She snapped her fingers, momentarily infuriated with herself for forgetting a word. "Middle Asia, that's it. Asia . . . Learn writing in North Italy, near what you say Alp Mountains, cut on edge of piece of wood so." She sawed the side of her right hand across the index finger of her left.

  Paul stared at her. Abruptly his mind locked into focus on what she had been telling him.

  -- Christ, it's ridiculous. Shoemaker said there were traces of Finno-Ugrian influence in the tape I gave him. And the shape of her eyes: an Asiatic overlay on a European bone structure. And she's just described the reason why runic is all spiky and straight while our kind of writing is curved. How far has she elaborated this wild notion of hers?

  "Why didn't you arrive where you expected to, Urchin? And where did you expect to come to?"

  "Town called" -- he missed the name, his ear not being attuned to the sounds of her own language. "Market for meat, cloth, vegetables, thirteen thousand people, ruled by Lord of West Mountain, about to start war against Middle Land Plain." She recited that tonelessly, as though recounting a dream of impossible happiness. "Instead, here I am. I have thought a lot, being alone in my room. What I think is, time is like . . . What is your name for the thing at the end of rivers?"

  "Ah -- mouth?"

  "No, no. When in flat land the water separates into many lines?"

  "I get you. A delta." He sketched the forking shape of one on his pad and showed it to her. She nodded vigorously.

  "Delta! Start here" -- she pointed to the main body of the river on his sketch -- "go here, or here, or here. Was Rome in your history, not in mine. I start here" -- she indicated the extreme left-hand mouth of the delta -- "and came to here" -- the first of the branches leading to the right-hand mouth.

  -- Good lord. You know, if one were to take this seriously, the "other Paul Fidlers" would . . .

  He looked at her in bewilderment. Since the initial breakthrough when he had somehow got her to confess what she believed to be her identity against the command of "they" who had forbidden her to admit it, the induction of a hypnotic state had become less and less important to make her talk. Now, one could hardly tell whether she had been ordered into trance or not. Certainly the full vigour and vitality of her personality was showing in her bright eyes, her tense voice.

  "How did you make the . . . the journey, Urchin?"

  "Literally, promise you, there are no words to say in this language. In my language there are no words to say engine, rocket, spaceman, which I see on television -- no word for television either. Is all different. We learned different things to do, studied different problems."

  -- A society that somehow diverged from ours, concentrating on time-travel as its ultimate achievement while ours is in jet airplanes and sending rockets to the moon. Did she have this moment in mind the night I first met her, when she went around the cars staring and touching them as though she had never seen anything of the kind before?

  With a sudden burst of energy, he said, "Tell me about the world you come from, Urchin."

  She looked doubtful. "Listen, Paul, first I explain one thing. When first I know what happened to me, how I got stuck and never can go back home, I wanted to explain who I am and why I came here. But I was forbidden. What you do with that clock and talking gently in low voice, was done to me to stop me telling people where I was going about other later things."

  -- She's got it all figured out, hasn't she? If somebody were to come from the future to the past, it would make sense to impose hypnotic commands against talking too freely, in case the people of the past took her seriously, did something different from what history recorded, and thus abolished the time she had started out from!

  There was a kind of fascination in this, like reading a well-constructed mystery novel for the sake of seeing how the author resolved all the misleading clues he'd planted. Paul challenged her.

  "Then how come you're taking so openly to me now?"

  "Language had changed between the Age of -- you said Confusion, yes? -- Age of Confusion and my time. Command was to not answer anyone asking in the old language, but you remembered what we say for 'hello' and this was permitted."

  She clasped his free hand suddenly in both of hers, and gazed into his eyes. "Paul, I'm so glad to be able to say these things! It was . . . it was full of pain to sit by myself and know I was the alonest person in the world."

  Paul disengaged his hand, trembling.

  -- I could lean over and put my arm around her and . . . Stop it. Stop it. It
's simple transference, it's a fixation like Maurice Dawkins's. Suppose it were Maurice looking at me with those bedroom eyes. For heaven's sake.

  "Tell me about your world. Go and sit down in your chair again, too."

  Sighing, she complied.

  "Tell me about . . ."

  -- What's the least emotively charged thing I can ask her? Politics, maybe. There's not likely to be much reason for arousing emotions over something that's been irrelevant to our world since Ancient Rome.

  "Tell me about the government. Who's in charge?"

  Obediently she leaned back and let her hands dangle over the chair's arms. "Is not like yours. Is very peacy . . . ah . . . peacish?"

  "Peaceful."

  "Peaceful, thank you. For two hundred eighty years is no wars, no mad people, no criminal. Rulers are men who we . . . selected for being good and kind. Must be father of family and all children speak In support of them. If even one son, one daughter, aged sixty years at least, says no, they are not chosen. Same way is in all places, because when there are not wars people do not like to be afraid of anyone, and mostly of all not the ones who tell them what to do."

  "Didn't you say something about people living to be a hundred and fifty years old?"

  "Children born at the time I left are expected, yes."

  -- A benevolent government, no crime, no insanity, this fantastic longevity . . . Why couldn't I have been born into a world like that, instead of this death-trap of H-bombs, road accidents, high taxes, and prisonlike mental asylums?

  For a few moments Paul let his imagination roam down paths of wishful thinking. Then he realised with a shock that he had kept Urchin long over the appointed time of her session, and there was a mound of work awaiting him on the desk.

  -- Almost, I could hope she doesn't abandon this fantasy too soon. To wander off once a day into a vision of perfection: it would be like a holiday. But I daren't take a real holiday.

  He clenched his fists in something close to panic.

  -- Because . . . who else would take her fantasy the way I do? Who else would have the insight and compassion to understand how real it is to her, who else would decline to say outright, "The woman's off her nut?" Who but me, haunted by the versions of myself who took the wrong turning down life's roadway and signalled their despair, as she puts it, Northwest across time?

  *32*

  The depth, the detail, the consistency, grew and grew and grew.

  -- The place is called what I first misheard as Lion Roar; as near as I can transliterate it that would be Llanraw with a sort of Welsh double L. An interesting dialect survival, presumably from the pre-Roman linguistic substratum in our world, showing Celtic influence. It was a minor miracle she recognised my bastard accent when I demanded of her, " Tiriak-no?" It's not a K, it's more a click of the tongue, just as in Llanraw the final sound is nasalised like the French bon .

  "What does the name Llanraw mean?"

  "Nobody is sure any longer, but there is an idea that it means 'rock in a storm,' because it was stormy when the conquerors came to it by sea."

  -- Rock in a storm! And isn't that what it's becoming to me, the one steadfast thing I can turn to when the world threatens to sink me without trace?

  "You said the town you meant to come to when you left your home was a market for cloth, vegetables and meat. But you won't touch meat, will you?"

  A shudder that racked her whole tiny body. "In my world, Paul, to kill an animal for meat was a religious thing, long ago. That's why in the Age of Confusion there was a special market, and great ceremonies when the meat was sold. Seeing it openly in your shops made me want to -- to return my last food. What would you say?"

  "Vomit."

  "Yes."

  "So you don't kill for food any longer."

  "No. We keep . . . uh . . . pets? I thought that was right. But we let animals go where they want to in the countryside, and if there are too many we go and give them drugs so there are not so many young ones."

  "What about the animals that are fierce and dangerous?"

  "What kind of animals?"

  "Well -- big animals that do eat meat, that kill other animals because that's the diet they've always had."

  "In Llanraw there are none. In far lands where there are few people, we let them do as they wish."

  "But there was a religious ceremony when animals were killed?"

  "What you would call the butchers were . . ." A snap of the fingers. "Men in charge of the religion!"

  "Priests?"

  "I think so. And afterwards they must go to a river and wash the blood off and say they are sorry to the spirits of the animals."

  -- Like Eskimos, that. The range of her vision is unbelievable!

  "But this was long ago. It's wasting work to make meat for food, and cruel too. More people eat food grown off one piece of ground than eat animals which ate the food off it. Is this clear?"

  "Yes, perfectly clear."

  She stared wistfully out of the window. "Those same hills in my world, they are planted with high beautiful trees and the fields with flowers taller than you -- blue, red, white, yellow. When the wind blows you can smell the flowers at the seashore, there in the west." She hesitated. "It was hardest to say goodbye to the flowers, know I would not see them again."

  Paul gazed at her, awed by the courage it would take to cast oneself adrift from everything familiar -- not simply parents and lovers, but the very sounds, scents, colours of the customary world.

  "And to go above the sea of flowers in the air, to see the wind making them shiver! Once we drifted four whole days and nights before we had to put out the . . . the heater? Oh, I did not explain! A big round hollow thing with warmer air in it that is light and lifts up into the sky."

  "A balloon. A hot-air balloon."

  "Yes." She was almost overcome by the memory, that was plain. "In summer, with little wind -- four days before we saw the sea and had to let the balloon come down."

  Paul shied away from asking who the other member of the "we" had been.

  So, now, two sets of notes were being compiled: the slimmer for Alsop's attention and eventual inclusion in the general hospital records, giving only the baldest indication of progress -- "Patient today was communicative under hypnosis and further success was achieved in enlarging her vocabulary in significant areas" -- and the fatter, now numbering hundreds of pages, documenting the strange and lovely world of Llanraw.

  Under heading after heading he listed the explanations Urchin had given him, becoming almost drunk on the visions the words implied.

  "In Llanraw parents do not punish their children. If a child does wrong the parents ask themselves what they have done to set a bad example. A child is regarded as an independent and responsible individual from the moment it learns to talk comprehensibly, and its education and life's work are adapted to its intrinsic capabilities. Pushing a child into work for which it is not fitted is regarded as cruel, and there appears to be none of that craving for vicarious status which mars so many childhoods in our world."

  -- Mine too. Bright or not bright, they shouldn't have driven me, bribed me, compelled me up the educational ladder.

  "In Llanraw marriage consists in a vow taken before the assembled community that the couple will accept the responsibility of bearing and raising children and remain their best friends for as long as they live, to whom they may always turn for help, and advice. Conception without such previous public pledges is regarded as offensive to the unborn child and the administration of an abortifacient is compulsory. Owing to the seriousness with which parenthood is undertaken, there is no excess population pressure, nor any social pressure on young people to marry and bear children as frequently happens in our world, thus ensuring that too many children are subconsciously resented by their parents."