Earthworks (2 page)

The fellow was certainly dead. He was well dressed, though he was soaked with sea water, arid his smell was high. His white sylk trousers clung to him. My dead man had arrived; punctual to the tick of fate, our courses had intersected.

“He came over the water,” Di said. “Upright, with a stagger. Like he was walking on top of the waves! Scared me stiff, it did!”

On the man’s back was strapped one of the new anti-gravity units, a cumbersome affair almost the size of a refrigerator. Since neither of us knew how to switch it on or off, we had an awkward job pulling the man over the rail. He came at last. Something — perhaps a seagull — had pecked out one of his eyes. He gave me his silent frozen scream and I felt like screaming back.

“Let’s get him in Number Two Deckswab Locker,” I said. Until we switched the unit off, the corpse would continue to drift. At the time it appeared to be only luck that he had fetched up against the side of the
Trieste Star,
but he had not then set in motion the chain of death that followed his vile presence.

The locker housed one of the automated deck cleaners that were activated every morning at dawn. The machine stood bright and unseeing as we bundled our new-found companion into the locker. As soon as we had him secure, Di turned and ran for the rail, and vomited into the sea. I turned and made my way into my cabin and lay down. My brain felt as if it were throbbing and pulsing like a heart.

There are rational things which can be accepted and rational things which can’t. I could accept all the reasons for being on a rotten obsolete ship like the
Trieste Star
; I could not accept the reasons for a dead man coming aboard. I rang for Doctor Thunderpeck.

“Di just told me about the corpse. You lie there and take it quietly, Knowle,” he said when he arrived. He started to open his little black bag and bring out some tablets.

“I’ll give you a sedative.”

“Have you got something special to cure dead men? It’s bad enough sailing on this stinking ship but to think we’re being pursued here across miles of empty ocean by a corpse — ”

As I accepted his tablets and a beaker of water, Thunderpeck said gently: “You like it on this ship, Knowle, remember that. Remember what you were before you joined the Travellers, and the penalty for that was death.”

“Don’t remind me of the Travellers!” That I definitely remember saying, and fairly often, for I was feeling guilty then about what I had done to the other Travellers.

“And in the city — you weren’t happy there, were you?”

“Look, I know you’re right, but I’ve told you before I’m cursed. How did that corpse get here to me? Don’t tell me that was coincidence.”

“I tell you nothing. You can work it out for yourself.” Thunderpeck loved to lecture me. “You know the cost of these new anti-gravity units; it’s phenomenal. Only a very rich man could afford one. There are few of them in production as yet; they go only to heart cases. A ten-stone man can wear one of these units and adjust it so that he weighs only two stone. It saves the heart pump a lot of work. So we know our friend was rich and suffered from cardiac trouble. Right. Where do such people often live? On the coast, by the sea, for the good of their health. So he died walking along the front — people do, you know. An offshore breeze carried him out to us.”

“But we’re heading for the Skeleton Coast, Doc, if you remember. Nobody lives along there! — No one in their right mind!”

“All right, Knowle, you know best. Now lie down and get some rest. Your persecution complex is showing.”

When he had gone, I lay there in the half-light thinking. I thought about the
Trieste Star.
Certainly it was a refuge to me, more than Thunderpeck knew. It travelled and it was isolated, and that suited me. But all the time, far away on the continents, Thunderpeck’s “progress” was hunting it down, numbering its days. When I had signed on a dozen years ago, the ports and cargoes were prosperous; now the situation was different. This wonderful leviathan of metal, almost automatic, nuclear-powered, with a registered tonnage of 81,300 tons, a length of 998 feet 3 inches and a beam of 139 feet 1 inch, this super-ship, was obsolescent. Its day was done.

Modern as the
Trieste Star
was, it was old-fashioned and being superseded by super-tonnage hydrofoils or the massive new GEMs which could travel almost anywhere, and saw no difference between land or sea. I hated those metal doughnuts, riding on their pillar of air. It gave me ironic satisfaction to think that they might in their turn be superseded if the newly invented anti-gravity devices were developed to the point where they could carry heavy loads, and carry them economically.

Because of the hydrofoils and GEMs, we were reduced to calling at dumps like the Skeleton Coast for a load of sand, to carry to a soil manufacturer in Liverpool. The costs of the voyage would barely be covered.

What the soil manufacturer did with the sand when we delivered it was a matter beyond the bounds of our interest. I’m an intelligent and self-educated man, but it was sufficient even for me to know that the sand could be made into a soil good enough at least to raise vegetables fit to feed beef animals on.

“The world’s hunger takes many sophisticated forms,” March Jordill once told me. We were sorting rags. It was evening; I can remember now how the light was. He spoke to me like an equal. “Even religion has become subordinate to hunger, as everything else has, just as in the under-peopled world of the past the thinking of the west, when it had plenty, was subordinated to plenty. We can see that now, though they couldn’t at the time.”

Sand! It was a noble trade, carting sand round the world. March Jordill, great philosopher and ragman, would have appreciated my graduation from ragman to sandman. He liked small things. A grain of sand might have interested him. The sand we got off the Skeleton Coast was mainly quartz grains, with gypsum and rock salt also, and traces of rare minerals not worth separating, tourmaline and thorium compounds. But for a slice of luck, the whole world might have been made of sand. I begin to get the feel of this writing. It’s just a matter of recalling everything and omitting some things, only you have to get the proportions right.

Perhaps I ought not to omit what I heard a popular speaker say about hunger: “Our hunger is our civilization. We have brought beauty and strength from it.” I was nine when he said that, and just out of the orphanage. Hammer and I stood at the back of the crowd. When Hammer heard what the man said, he looked down at his own bulging belly, caused by the sprue, laughed, and hit me and ran off.

All your life comes back to you when you sit and think like this. I can remember — I can
feel
that cheezey bed Hammer and I dossed in, under the table. If I chased the straight line of my thoughts, what a maze I’d write!

Listening to all the tiny noises of the ship, watching colours create themselves in the darkness of my head, my thoughts remained soggy with the complexities of soil manufacture, one of the sciences we heard so much about in the land-starved cities. Soil — dirt — dirty days as a landman on a farm — heavy beds, the Gas House — the poor land — working under the supreme rule of the Farmer. I still had nightmares about the Farmer — he pursued me almost as doggedly as did the Figure!

Old childhood rhyme, learnt in the orphanage, never forgotten, hopping on one leg, counting out who was next to be Wolf:

Farmer farmer eat your earth —

Coffin cradle coffin berth

Send us food or send us measles —

You’re the — maimer —
of—
dis — eases

And not only the Farmer, but the man I betrayed when I slipped away — got hauled away, I should say — from the farm to become a Traveller. We will get to that some time. Over and over, my mind roamed back to those times, if not when it was rational, then when it roared up the dark old mountains into nightmare and delusion.

Moved by a compulsion, I rose from the bunk and slipped my feet into my sneakers. Feet, shoe, leg, bunk support, floor, shadows, made a mysterious pattern across my vision. What could I smell? Sometimes it was like onions, sometimes like violets. I seemed to remember it from a former time.

Outside the cabin, the set was arranged as it ever was: cardboard deck, plastic sea. The sun lit it too badly, like overdone studio-lighting on a film set. Alarmed about it, I addressed myself.

“I’m very near it again. Now I know the whole thing is an illusion. It’s a fake and I’m somewhere else — not on a ship at all. The props are wearing thin! The motion of the ship is incorrect, some of the shadows are misplaced. There must be a better world than this! Gradually, I’m working my way through to reality. And in Number Two Deckswab Locker... Is that where the truth lies? Can it be that truth lies?”

I’d forgotten what lay or stood in Number Two Deckswab Locker. Nobody was on deck, nobody walked on the sea. I went over to the locker and opened it.

He was laughing, a laugh more of power than mirth! I saw exactly the way his lips curled back, wrinkling up to bare the enamel of his teeth, the skin of his gums, in a yellow and terrible humour. It was — it was the Farmer!

“Noland, No. 14759180! You knew I was on the ship all the time, didn’t you?” he said. I had not remembered he was so large.

A jolly man, the way the fierce are jolly.

“I knew there was something wrong.”

“Not exactly wrong, Noland. It’s just that you aren’t real; you understand that?”

I kept a sailor’s knife in my belt; but if I was not real, could I do him any damage?

“You’ve come because I betrayed Jess, haven’t you?”

“And for all your other sins.”

Behind the Farmer was not the locker but something else. My eyes refused to tell me what I saw there. It was an emptiness, but a tainted and unlicensed emptiness, as if when you were talking to a friend, you suddenly realized that you could see straight through one of his eyes and out the back of his head. So supposing he was not real?

With the thought, I launched myself forward, pulling out the knife. As we came together, I sank the knife into the Farmer’s ribs. That was real enough! But still he smiled, smiled as we fell together and rolled on the ground. Hugging him, intercorpse. But his smile — no, the world was spinning — his smile stank, and where his eyes had been... The peculiar clarity of vision drew me down into little ripe craters, where worms, white and so exquisitely built, threaded themselves through a dirty fabric. At once, I fell through the fabric of consciousness.

When the fabric reknitted itself, I was lying on the deck. Before I opened my eyes, I felt its heat beneath me, and the power of the sun on the back of my neck. I struggled up and opened my eyes. Beside me, yawning horribly in its eternal slumber, was the corpse that Di Skumpsby and I had pushed into the locker, still attached to its anti-gravity unit. I must have switched off the power as I attacked it, believing it to be the Farmer. I thanked my stars that the hallucination had been so brief. Sometimes, when the migraines come on, I go into that underworld of the spirit for hours. I did go. I used to go. Your tenses get confused over so long.

Peering round the green-painted deck equipment, I saw Di Skumpsby up for’ard. He stood by the rail, staring out across the waters. Maybe he was looking out for another corpse to come into his arms.

Ignoring the pulse in my head, I turned to the thing beside me. It looked as if Thunderpeck’s diagnosis of the matter was correct; the man was old and wore a fine ring on one veined hand. His clothes were good. I wondered who he had been, this poor old bundle who had chosen an offshore wind to breathe his last sigh into. Averting my eyes from his face, I slid a hand into his jacket and felt into his inside pocket. There was a wallet there, and a thin bundle of letters, secured together by a rubber band. I transferred them to my pocket.

Under the corpse’s right arm, a red knob protruded forward from the anti-gravity unit’s casing. I eased this gently upward. A steady hum, almost noiseless beneath the sounds of the ship, came into being; at the same time, the corpse began to stir and rise. Keeping a firm hold of it, I manoeuvred it back into the locker and shut the door on it. Then I went back to my bunk to look at the letters.

Chapter Two

At chow time, I was still under the spell of the letters. The food was the usual highly flavoured stuff; the flavour was artificial and the foods were packed with preservatives. Since they had been chemically grown in the first place, the whole meal, like every meal, was artificial, and I swallowed a couple of vitamin pills afterwards, just to humour my metabolism. My metabolism still felt somewhat shaky; despite the sedative Thunderpeck had given me, I had not slept, so engrossed was I in the letters I had found on the dead man.

There were only six of them, six letters and a telegram. They were all from a girl who signed herself Justine. They were love letters.

Well, they weren’t entirely love letters. Much of them was taken up with political matters, and about the various nations of Africa. I have never understood any politics, much less the complex African variety. I skipped those bits.

The world and its nations were at peace at that time. Many harsh things could be said against our bleak social system, but to have peace was worth a great deal; that I often said. For some years, we had been hearing about the threat of war among the nations of Africa, the virile young peoples whose technologies often surpassed those of Europe and America; but a strong man, Sayid Abdul el Mahasset, had become President of Africa and temporarily brought about an uneasy peace among the nations under him.