Earthworks (20 page)

“Let me show you how mistaken you have been and are. Both Peter and I belong to one of the numerous secret religions that proliferate throughout the miserable cities of the world. But ours, the cult of Abstinence, is the strictest of all. Have you heard of the Abstainers?”

I had, but I thought it was only a fad that entertained some members of the upper echelons of society.

“The Abstainers,” Justine said, “do all in their power to get the mass of people to use proper methods of birth control; yet although some of these methods have been in existence for centuries, you cannot force them successfully on a population that has sunk below a certain level of social awareness.”

“Who caused it to sink?” I asked hotly. “You forget that I can read, Justine! I’m not the fool you take me for. I’ve studied history books. I know the poor people were once a darn sight better off than we are now.”

Despairingly, she said: “History is not only confined to books. It’s the medium in which we live. It is true that the poor were once better off, but they have sunk under their own weight! The farmers know that the way they have to exploit the land to feed the great greedy mass is wrong, but what else can they do? What does the average moron care for the law of diminishing returns? The demand is for quantity. The farmers have to meet that demand or they themselves are imprisoned. Land conservation just doesn’t make economic sense when there are twenty-four thousand million people in the world.”

“You’ve learnt your lesson well! Have you done?” I spoke sullenly. There were pains in my belly.

“No, I’ve not done. I was telling you about the Abstainers. We have vowed to abstain from sexual intercourse, and — ”

“That’s impossible!”

“We have proved it is possible, and so have others before us. To your kind, loving may have no more significance than a glass of hooch. To us it is deeply significant, and a thing of deep disgust, for from it comes the propagation of the human species, and that is already enough out of hand.”

At that, I could not help laughing. “Much good a handful of you can do!”

“But we can! We can kill the President, we can start a world war! It’s the only way to break the awful cycle that has become established. Try to understand, Knowle, please. The
status quo
must be thrown on to its ear. Human life is no longer sacred — we are at a period of history where it is a blasphemy, love-making a perversion! The whole world situation is a tragedy!

“Think of the cities, Knowle — you lived in them most of your life, think of the degraded rabble that inhabits them, divorced from the earth and from any natural and lovely thing, slaves to ignorance and superstition and illness. Examine your own unhappy life! Think of what it is like to labour on the land. Once it was a good thing! Now — you know this — you have to cross the earth as if you crossed the face of Mars; you have to be branded a criminal before you can be directed to go there. Shouldn’t a system that has brought such things about go toppling into the dust?”

We stood staring at each other, both brought to silence. I cannot tell what I thought, only that I trembled. There I stood, and she poured me coffee from her vacuum flask and brought it to me. Still I stood there.

“Think of the misery of your own life, the guilt and sickness and mistrust, and how it should never have been so,” she said. Her tone was only compassionate. When I did not answer, she did not press me.

Absent, I drank the coffee. At last I said: “But if this war comes, who’s to survive?”

She gave me then a gentle look, and for the first time I knew I was in the presence of the woman who had written the love letters.

“The people best equipped to survive,” she answered, “will survive. I mean the only people who even in these grim past years have had the courage to live their independent lives — the Travellers. You know something of them, I believe.”

“I do.”

She sat down. Slowly I sank beside her. She laid a hand on my knee, where it remained limply as if it had passed on a burden too great for it.

“We’re not really assassins, Knowle,” she said. “We’re mid wives. A new way of living has got to come, and the sooner the old one goes the better.”

As she handed me the rifle, I could hear the sound below us of many people assembling in the square. Inside the temple, untroubled by the terrors of the world, the voices of the faithful rose and fell. Ignoring the rumbling of my empty stomach, I cradled the rifle under one arm and crawled towards the nearest window slit.