Earthworks (5 page)

“That’s the way we go,” I said. I was full of power, a leader. “There’s civilization down there.”

Then reaction swept over me. I pitched face down on to the sand.

When I roused, it was with a warm liquid in my mouth. Someone squatted over me, feeding me soup. A light and a fire burned nearby, turning the rugged terrain of Thunderpeck’s face into an alien land.

“You’ll be all right,” he said. “Just drink this and don’t worry.”

“Doc, I’m sane, aren’t I? My head — I mean, the ship — it is wrecked?”

“Sure, sure. The moon’s rising. Can’t you see the ship?”

“It wasn’t another of my hallucinations?”

He pointed, and there was a mountain of shadow, very near: the
Trieste Star
, wallowing in the shallows. I sighed and drank the soup, unable to speak.

Abdul was suffering from delayed shock. As Thunderpeck attended to him I lay there looking up at the stars, wondering why I had done what I had done? Where did the immense satisfaction I felt come from? We were now exposed to a number of hazards, yet I gloated; why? Everything of the little I possessed was gone now, except for the letters of Justine to Peter, which I kept in an inner pocket; how was it that I felt no regret?

All I could tell myself was that the ship belonged to a company owned by the Farmer. I hated the Farmer, and by wrecking the ship I had, in however small a way, made an impression on his vile life. It was the only way I could strike back for the misery I and hundreds of others had undergone, working as landsman on his farm. And I had a nearer reason, though I hardly cared to face it then: the Farmer knew of my betrayal of Jess... Well, that’s all history now, but lying there on a beach hardly less fertile than the lands the Farmer owned, I allowed myself to drift to sleep recalling my time as a landsman (the current and polite name for criminal).

It may have been that obsolete monster lying in the water that brought me the dreams of the farm. The nuclear freighter was a mighty creation; yet it was doomed. In this respect, it resembled the farm. And there was a much deeper resemblance. About both was a primitive quality, a giant naked force with or in which man cannot live without being changed.

That giant dinosaur lying dead in the shallows I had myself ridden to death. But the life on the farm almost rode me to death.

The fields were all square or oblong, and many miles to a side. Where one or two of them abutted one of the rare roads, there a village was built. I used the old penal terminology — the “villages” were simply work camps to which we returned exhausted in the evening.

Hearing our guards shouting that first evening — still vivid! The loss of grip on life, after the prisons under the city, and now this muddy compound, its layout unknown, its uses unglimpsed, its smells unsmelt before.

“You lot over here, double to it! Look alive if you want to live!”

As we went as the voices ordered, glance backward to the long windowless car that had brought us — hated as it carried us half-suffocated on the journey here, now a splinter of longing at its security as it roars preparatory to going, to grinding through the gates, and down the long road for ever.

Strange enclosures — but improperly enclosed — to keep out the gasses blowing from the land. Shouting and stripping, the old loss of clothes, suffered before; the smell of nudity. Women in this place, too, looking no better for lacking their clothes. Terrific kick on my ankle, frantic hurry to bundle up clothes. Sick, so sick, yet still embarrassed — keen to see, shy to look. Then all jamming together, and the disgust of touch.

More shouting, but they must do it on purpose, and not for order, for it is too confusing. A guard up on a form hustling us by, hitting a woman over the breast and shoulder, clouting the man behind her who moved as if to her defence. Animal silence from us, as we throw our clothes in to a female guard behind a counter. These guards were often landsmen who had worked their term; unable to adjust to the life of the cities, they stayed on to serve out their ruptured lives in the village camps.

Naked, now we have nothing, nothing but the sweat and dirt on our bodies. Some horrible emaciation here, the swellings and deformation of avitaminosis, a hundred boils and blemishes, like live things growing on rocks. We plunge under a cold shower sprinkling a narrow and slippery corridor. Fear of water, red puckered elbow digs my blue ribs. The smell of the water, something in it that stings the eyes. An old man with rotting feet slipping, falling hard on his spiny backbone, groaning as we hustle him up. His little white organ, a sea shell. Shouting again, dodging blows into another room.

Again the guards hurry us. A young man with a good chin protests, is struck — they drag him outside, kicking the bare legs that he tried to hook about the doorpost; tremble of sympathetic fear for him, his softness, part-selfish.

An issue of clothes. The uniform. Strange gladness at the blue jacket. We are being given something! Presents from the Farmer. We look at each other, shyly, knowing we will have to know each other, but now only thinking that these are stout good kit, so that something shines in our faces. Isn’t giving kindness, even with the kicks? In line, we take the things, secretly agog, jostle together in the little room, and still cowed scramble into blue serge blouse and trousers. No garment has a sex, all are trousers and blouses. We stand there awkwardly, awaiting more shouts, strange in every way. We look at each other, do not dare talk. The guards cluster at the door, chatter together, laugh perfunctorily.

We stood there for a long time. I saw how short the sleeves of my tunic were; a man next to me with a scarlet birthmark over his forehead and eyebrow — Duffy, I knew him as later — had a blouse far too big for him. Our eyes met. Everything was assessed, the profit, the risk. The guards kicked their heels; all government machines work the same way, infinite hustle, infinite delay. I slipped off my blouse.

Slowly, Duffy nodded. His eyes never leaving the guards, he slipped off his blouse. We exchanged garments, a better fit. At once the guards began to bellow.

Again we were on the trot, being allocated our huts. Like cattle, we teemed through the door. In the stream of bodies, I had no time nor space to get the blouse over my right shoulder. As I shot through the doorway, one of the guards landed a terrific blow on that shoulder. I slipped, fell down the two steps outside, carrying another fellow with me. Sharp pain in my leg. The other fellow was up in a flash and off. I took longer. A guard waiting outside roughly swung me round as I came up. My face struck the edge of the open door.

Terrible fury and pain, a high noise in the head. My nose began to bleed. Cupping it, I slobbed forward and along into Dormitory Five of B Block. Miserably, I fell on to the nearest empty bed.

The dormitory guard was there, a permanent man who slept at one end of the hut and was in charge of it. I knew, as I saw segments of him from between bloody parted fingers, that he would he coming to haul me off my bed. In the fury of hurt, I determined to destroy him the very moment he touched me. I jerked my fists from my face and turned to confront him. It was Hammer!

“Boy,” March Jordill once said to Hammer, in one of our evening sessions as we sorted rags, “you’re an awkward and infernal little cuss, but given the chance you would not have made a bad citizen. That may sound a pretty low level of praise, but it is a stamp you will always bear on you, God knows why, whatever scrapes you get into. No one will ever get any real use out of you, but you’ll never make a really successfully bad citizen. They’ll hate you for that, so watch it.”

But we didn’t hate Hammer in Dormitory Five. He still had the negative goodness in him that Jordill had recognized in the little fat lout with the sprue. Much as he swore at us, much as he drove us (and he had to drive us or we would not go), he had compassion, and but for Hammer it is unlikely I would have survived those arduous years. He was rough, foulmouthed, and a saint. Not that Hammer could do anything to mitigate the crushing crudity of our way of life. Medical treatment was nil, there were no laundry facilities, and I never changed those clothes in which I began my sentence.

“They don’t care if you snuff out,” Hammer said one night at bunk-time. “The human body provides valuable phosphates for the land. You’re worth more dead than alive to them, and look at the precious dirt you carry round with you!”

Certainly it was true that the mechanicals and robots that slaved among us were more valuable than we. Scratched and battered though they were, they worked better than we did. Every landsman made it a point of pride to do his tasks as slowly and badly as it was possible to do without tasting the overseer’s whip.

Of all the sad and dehumanized people in our village, I think I was the only one who could read; what a precious thing that archaic art was to me; and I did not let even Hammer know my secret.

We were roused early by sirens and a visit from the overseers, driven to get to our work. The monotony of life! — varied only by the seasons that even the Farmer far away in his city could not abolish.

Those years were made of hardship. Better things also lay among their lost months. A kindness from a fellow could charm your whole day. And in the summer came the sun in strength, to put into limbs a life that in winter they lacked. Also there were the women in the village, with whom we could taste the poor man’s traditional pleasure.

Death was there, too, that other great deliverer of man from his monotony. No longer could I laugh at it as I did when Hammer and I were boys, as it showed itself now in true form with which you could never come to terms, a thing of sudden collapses, of sweats, strange noises, vomiting, rolling eyes, and involuntary bowel movements.

For all that, the longer one served in a village, the easier life became. Although the system was not designed to admit trust, the land could not be worked without it, and so gradually one showed one was not just a madman, and a strictly limited measure of freedom was granted; which freedom depended largely on the fact that there was almost nowhere to escape to.

Because nothing but what a man regards as true freedom — whatever that happens to be — is tolerable to him, even the best day was stamped with the monotony of the least, and my last day in the village began just as inauspiciously as all the others.

As I said, we were forced to rise early. Our dormitories were plastic huts arranged about a central mess hall. Round our huts was a fence of barbed wire; beyond that we were surrounded by garages, maintenance sheds, and the administrative block; then there was wire again. All round the squalid little encampment stretched the land.

I left my hut at six-thirty, wearing my landsuit, which was an all-enclosing suit like an asbestos suit: light but air-tight, and with a helmet attached. I kept the face-plate open, since the day looked fresh and the previous day’s spraying in this area had been negligible. England on a May morning can feel good, even to a landsman. You remember the winter and are grateful. The whole sky was a bed of little fleecy cirrus clouds — hardly clouds, for the sun shone bright and chill through them. A yellow mist like a coating on a sick tongue lay over the land, a reminder of the spraying for dilly beetle we had given the place two days before. It exuded a scent that stuck slightly in the throat; most men kept their face-plates closed because of it, but I insisted in keeping mine open, fool that I was.

I pushed through the airlock into the messing hall. Everything was very noisy there. People were still dazed with sleep and morning, but they talk as much as they can then because they may not have the chance to speak to another human until evening. At least, that’s how it is in summer: in winter when it’s dark, they are much more quiet. The mess is like a morgue in January.

One thing I will say for the village. While you live, they expect good work from you, and so you get your regular 20 grammes of animal protein every other day, at supper. In the cities, during the frequent unexplained shortages, you can go weeks sometimes with no meat ration at all. In the orphanage, we were always on half-rations. None of which makes village breakfasts appear better than they are.

After you have eaten the poisonous slop they call porridge, straight round to the overseer to find what job you are given. You are searched and checked before being let through into the outer perimeter. Then round to the garages, since the ideal is to be away before seven. The inspectors and overseers are there to see you move.

This morning, I was told I had a detail some miles away, at a point which I already knew from previous details. It was a fine morning for a drive; I climbed gladly into a tractor and fed it the co-ordinates, and it set out at once.

That brief time alone was worth an extra bowl of soup! Strictly speaking, the camp overseers are meant to ride with you and hand you over to the work-point overseers. But not only are they perpetually short of staff, but the overseers are lazy men, and often as crawling with ills as the landsmen under them. So if they think you are trustworthy and will not try to escape, they send you out alone. They know there’s nowhere for you to go; the whole damned island is a sort of prison camp.

Of course, you might always run off and join the Travellers. But officially the Travellers are treated as a superstition, like the crackpot religions that thrive in the camps, for all that officialdom does its best to stamp them out. There have been cases (or so every landsman fervently believes) where Travellers have surrounded villages in strength, burnt them down, hanged all the guards and overseers, and released all the inmates. Myself, I was sceptical; I had never seen a Traveller, and my upbringing taught me not to believe anything I could not shake a fist at.