Earthworks (6 page)

A light misty rain began to fall as we moved along. In fact this was insecticide, and the sprayers were already circling above the fields, sweeping over the land again and again on their morning flight, and not missing an inch. Being enclosed not only in my suit but in the tractor cab, I was doubly safe. We passed an area where a big machine was jetting out a chlorophyll correctant, sending a dense green mist out to meet the rain of insecticide. The crops there had failed, owing to an outbreak of the so-called topsoil physichosis, they stood there withered and brown, like old men planted after death,

It seemed to me for a while that I was moving over the face of
an alien planet. This was not a world that I could know, or that would tolerate me. To have stepped out on to the surface unprotected would have been to suffer a painful death.

At that reflection, a terrible sorrow moved like a worm in my heart. Somehow, I had been dispossessed. Most of the old features of the land had been removed or altered. Small hills had been blasted flat, streams and rivers flowed in straight lines across the landscape. As we climbed up towards a gradual escarpment, I recalled how a line of great trees had grown here a few years ago. Now the wind blew unobstructed, and the shoulder of land lay bare and dismal. Machines brooded there. This was my rendezvous. I went and reported with my work stamp to the foreman overseer.

We worked hard that day! It was complicated and perilous work — and unnecessary, too, if the truth is told.

For on the other side of the escarpment ran a main road, and on the other side of the main road lay the farm of a different farmer. Our Farmer owned many thousands of square miles of land. How many, I did not know, but it was understood that his territory stretched from the south coast up to the midlands; none of us at the village had any possible way of checking the truth of this. But we did know that this point marked one of the northern limits of his land. It was patrolled by fast automatic things, things that howled, bleeped and chattered to themselves — normally the only live things in the area, except for the traffic that did not stop and was not allowed to stop.

As the other men and I climbed the tall pylons, clamping the mesh to them, the traffic slid beneath us, cars and GEMs making down the road, carrying their passengers sealed safely within them from city to city.

In the city lived the Farmer. We did not know his name; he was too far above us for his name to be known in the village, even to the overseers. In the interests of efficiency, farms had slowly grown bigger and bigger, swallowing the little unproductive units. As the population grew, the farms had to grow. In the interests of the same bleak god Efficiency, the railways had long ago been lopped until they were a skeleton of fast main lines rushing between distant points with unimagined cargoes; their contact with ordinary people grew less and less.

As the population grew, and more land was required for agriculture, the road system underwent the same drastic simplification in the interests of the same alien god. Only a few main roads were allowed; they formed a gird across the land that would not have disgraced an euclidean textbook.

It was not without deliberation that the experts did away with most of the railways and most of the roads; for among the minions of the god Efficiency is one called Centralization. Centralization was well served by the amputation of the transport system. As a result of the amputation, villages and many town began to die. Efficiency was thus increased, Centralization established.

The only urban units now were the giant cities and the meagre villages, which latter in happier eras would have been called labour camps. But in this enlightened age, prisons were done away with, and you served your sentence for the most trivial offence by work on the land; “rustication”, they sometimes called it.

Despite all the machinery employed on the land, there was still plenty of work for humans, work often too dangerous for machines. Our work on the pylons was too precarious and difficult for any machine yet invented. The pylons stood along the line of the ridge where the trees I could remember had once grown. We were engaged in stringing a vast metal net between them, from six feet above ground to forty feet above. And as I climbed and clipped and riveted, I cursed the Farmer who sat in his office in the distant city, shuffling his papers and never seeing the sullen ground over which he ruled. At that time, I did not know enough to curse the system that had supplied the man.

Directly below me, the earth was broken and eroded. The infertile subsoil showed through. This was what had happened since shelter and binding provided by the trees were gone. The trees had been cut down to get rid of birds, which were currently being destroyed because of their ability to spread crop disease. Now we were building tree-substitutes; they would act as windbreaks, as the trees had done, and stop the wind from blowing away the soil and exposing more subsoil. Nobody admitted that this showed some sort of basic failure in the system.

As the man below me unrolled the steel mesh and I secured it, we gradually worked higher up the pylon. The nearest city came into view, its serried roofs visible through the mist. It squatted on a giant platform, raised on legs high above the surrounding land where the poisons in the country air could less easily reach its inhabitants.

A pang of homesickness ran through me, although I knew how overcrowded it was in the dark alleys of the metropolis.

Something else I could see from my vantage point. Breasting the road only a short way off lay the ruins of one of the old towns made obsolete when the grid-road system was established. Much of it had been cleared away to provide more arable land; but much remained.

Two years earlier, I had been engaged on that job of clearance myself. A landsman was made to work at anything during the term of his rustication. There in those ruins I had found a secret cache of books, and smuggled some back to the village. They lay hidden under a loose board under my bunk.

I resolved now to visit the ruins and see what else I could find. I hungered to do something forbidden.

We worked through the day, with a break at noon to drink turnip soup from a flying canteen. At dispersal time, when the hooters blew, it was easy for me to drive across to the broken township, since I was the only member of that work detail from our village. None of the work overseers cared a rap what happened to us after they had given out our work stamps.

I kept under the line of the ridge, out of sight of the things that squarked to each other as they patrolled the road. The ruins were dark, silted up, promising. My tractor bumped over a great pile of rubble in front of them. With a swing of the wheel, I twisted between two houses and under the awning of what had been a shop. I was immediately out of sight of prying eyes.

The time factor was important; they would expect me to check in in the village within a certain time after the hooter, or else I’d be for no supper and the cells. For all that, I sat where I was for a moment, taking in the feel of the kind of place my ancestors — whoever those faceless optimists had been — lived in.

The shop window before which I had stopped was shattered. Through it lay darkness, darkness and mouldering things. The houses were only remains of houses, husks, their core eaten by the elements. Rubble had been bulldozed against them from behind, as high as the upper windows. It could not have been more desolate. The desolation was emphasized by the glimpse of bare tillage and struggling plant life visible between the buildings. Yet I saw here the ghost of a more human order of life, when the mass unit had not been the only standard. Here was the corpse of a world where the individual had had some status.

Clamping down my face-plate, I climbed out of the tractor. Moving fast now, I made my way between the buildings. This had been some sort of central part of the city; I recognized the building from which I had taken the books, without knowing what sort of building it was. In the books themselves I had found possible labels for it: bookstore, library, museum, reading-room; but which it was, or what the differences between the terms implied, I did not know.

The place was more in ruin than ever. The demolishers had broken down all the front of it before the operation was suspended; I climbed in through a back way, into a murky room. My heart beat very fast, my nerves stammered.

Something moved across the window through which I had scrambled. I turned. Two men jumped in and grasped me savagely by the arms. Before I could struggle, a dirty hand clamped over my face-piece and my head was jerked backwards.

They saw the yellow star on the breast of my suit.

“He’s only a landsman!” one said.

They let me stand up straight though they still held me tightly.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“We ask the questions here. Get moving, lander. The boss would like to meet you.” One of them produced a knife. Taking hold of my suit, he dug the knife into it, and jagged a cut in it about three inches long. I grabbed it in horror, pursing the lips of the gash so that the pure air did not pour out. This was standard procedure for dealing with anyone who looked like making trouble; with a cut in your suit to nurse, you are too busy to do anything else.

The shock threw me straight into an hallucination.

The men took me out of the ruined building to another I had not noticed before. It was miraculously preserved. Inside, it was furnished in the style of an earlier and more luxurious age, with curtains made of natural fabric hanging everywhere, and big dark musical instruments in a corner, and plants not used for eating, real woods, and strange pieces of furniture to sprawl on.

A fat man, such as you rarely see outside hospitals, sat at a table. He was eating ancient kinds of food, brightly coloured, with complicated instruments. When I entered, he pushed them aside. He stood up, and the man brought me over to him.

“You have anything of value?” he asked.

In my pocket, I had a picture of someone. It was someone I had loved, someone who depended on me; either I had let that person down or he or she — I knew not who it was — had let me down; but love was still predominant in the relationship, which continued strongly though it had been severed long ago. This picture was my own, my only, my valued symbol of this person.

I clutched the picture convulsively, “I have nothing for you,” I said.

The fat man sneered. “You must have something, you fool. This is the Twentieth Century, not the Twenty-Second; everyone has possessions still.”

The men wrenched my hand out of my pocket. I held the picture clenched in my right fist. They bent my forearm over the edge of the table. One of them brought the side of his palm down with a savage chopping motion. Pain scissored up my arm and shoulder. I cried and the picture fell on to the floor.

The fat man picked it up and walked over to a large tank standing by the window. I ran after him. The tank was full of a liquid with a familiar smell. How often have I not smelt it, in dreams and waking! It was a reinforced chlorinated hydrocarbon called Oxbenzide. We used it diluted to one part in ten thousand of water to kill off the hardiest pests. The fat man tossed my picture into it.

I saw that adored face curl down through the liquid, disappearing, seeming almost to suffer in the tortuous path it took.

I plunged my hand into the liquid to save it. The beloved picture was almost within my grasp when my arm began to dissolve. A lethal paralysis siphoned up my veins. In the liquid, nothing remained. Straining my mouth open in a sigh of shame and fear, I fell back, clutching my stump of arm. The dissolution was climbing towards my shoulder.

The evil hallucination burst, pitching me — still sobbing as if I would sob for ever — back into the real world.

I lay across a bundle of sacks in a dim-lit ruined room. A group of ragged men looked down at me. So I found myself for the first time in the company of the Travellers.

Chapter Four

So I have managed to get to the Travellers, after working for two months — or not working, which was as bad — on this manuscript. Perhaps I should have started with them, since they are so important a part of my life; for although I was with them for a short time only, the strangeness of them had terrific force: there was room in their system for trust and charity. And that was so although they were the most hunted of men. More importantly, the Travellers represented some sort of initiative for the future in a continent full of dead ends.

No, I could not start with them. You need courage to write, and courage grows by one’s own example more than by the example of others. You need courage because writing is confessing, and my biggest confession of all must come in this section. I loved the Travellers, yet I betrayed Jess! Also, the feel of how writing was has come over me; I have performed a sort of resurrection of this ancient art form. Syntactical arrangements, semantic mechanisms, come to my aid, allow me to convey my thoughts to no one! Or perhaps after this war, the remnants of humanity will rediscover caves and, crawling into them, confine their language again to paper, so coming to learn to read again. (Of course in my heart I have that hope.)

But will they understand? Have I put in too little or too much? Should I have left out the winters in the city, and the idiocy of my arrest, the clearing of snow in the villages, the despair, the knowledge that life always grew worse? Should I have put in my hallucinations, so real at the time and now, after a lapse of years, so repugnant to me, should I fiddle to produce footnotes, aping some of the books I find?