Earthworks (7 page)

No way of solving these problems exists any more. The conventions collapsed like old bridges. On the one side of the gulf is the mind, eternal and untouched — on the other, the body, running, jumping, bleeding. Better to copy the method of the thrillers I find among old book piles (converted by the passage of two hundred years into the subtlest of all signposts to those old days of plenty), and stick to the body. The mind can take care of itself, as it has had to from the very beginning; it’s not as smart as body, but it can survive. And when I cannot resist it, I will pop up and be my own editor and commentator.

With this coaxing, imagine for yourself my feelings: I lay on the sacks looking at those ragged men. Nobody spoke, I could not speak, my brain numbed by the illusion that I had lost my arms. My breath rattled in my throat, changing tempo only when the leader of the Travellers came up to look to me.

The faces of all but him were the faces of men and women of that time: faces lean and desiccated by the effects of constant malnutrition and hardship, faces in which could be read the determination to wrest, what little they could from life and the sort of intelligence which hunts under the name of cunning. The women, reduced almost to sexlessness by their rough garments, hardly looked gentler than the men. Though the room was dim, I saw their faces clearly; the door had been converted into a crude airlock to trap most of the drifting gasses from entering, and few of them wore landsuits.

The leader’s face was different from the others. It had acquired in its starved lines an asceticism that transcended hunger. He was instantly marked out, not only as a man who had suffered, for nobody present had escaped that, but as a man whose spirit had transmuted the suffering into something finer. Before setting eyes on him, I had never appreciated the difference between mere endurance and durability. Directly I saw him, although I had never seen such a face before, I knew I could expect mercy at his hands.

He came forward with some sort of an adhesive patch, and with it mended the gash his men had cut in my suit. All the while, he looked penetratingly at me.

“You are sick, friend,” he said. “You’ve been babbling! Unlatch your face-plate and let’s have a look at you. You’re a landsman, aren’t you?”

“I’ve got to get back to the village,” I said. “I’ll be late. You know what that means — either the cells or the Gas House!”

“You’d be better advised to stay with us,” he said.

One of the women said: “We can’t afford to let him go now we’ve got him, Jess. He might tell the guards on us. He’s a Traveller now.”

Jess! This was Jess! Throughout the prison villages, that was the name they spoke when they spoke of the Travellers. To landsmen it meant hope, to overseers fear. I knew his life was a legend and there was a reward on his head.

Jess said to me: “We were all landsmen once, convicts sentenced to work on the land, as you are. We have escaped. We broke free and now we obey no order but our own. Will you join us?”

“Where are you escaping to? There’s nowhere to go,” I said.

“That we will tell you in due time. First we must know if you will join us?”

I looked down at my hands. In fact it was not a question in which I had any freedom to answer as I would; that sort of question was gone from the world; I thought that for my throat’s sake there was only one answer I could give; now I knew where they met, I could not be trusted back in a village. “I will join you,” I said.

“His tractor will come in handy, any case,” one of the men remarked. “We can use that.”

“No,” Jess said. “They will soon track down a lost machine; men take a deal more hunting, and are less important anyway. What’s your name, friend?”

“Knowle Noland.”

“You call me Jess — just that. We Travellers form a brotherhood and you’ll soon get to know us. What little we have, we share.”

“I’ve heard your name spoken.”

“Right, Knowle, go and start up your tractor. Set it going across the farm, so that it heads well away from here, and then jump out and come back to me.”

Stiffly, I clamped up my face-plate. They looked at me hungrily and in silence. I could feel their lack of trust. Without a word, I turned and walked out under the wet blankets that formed an airlock at the door. Outside, an early evening calm was falling over the ruined remains of the town. A pair of sentries were snuggled into the rubble; they watched me without speaking.

I picked my way past the place where they had captured me, which was only a few yards away. I came to my tractor, climbed in, started it. Slowly, I backed it from the awning and pointed its nose towards the miles of open field.

What life would be like among the Travellers, except that it would be unimaginably hard, I knew not. Life at the village was something I knew. If I drove back there fast, I might get no worse punishment than a week in the Gas House. The Gas House was the nickname for the factory — one stood outside every village — where the produce of the land went before it was carried away on autotrucks to the city. In the factory, the poisons on which the produce had been nourished, the phosphates, potassiums, magnesiums, and the insecticides and arsenicals with which it had been protected, were sluiced off under heavy sprays. Working those sprays, manipulating the foodstuffs, was not in itself a hard punishment. But every week in that poisonous atmosphere was a year off a man’s life. Robots were not allowed in there; they would seize up, and they were too expensive to risk.

Revving the engine, I looked back into the ruins. I saw half a dozen heads, half a dozen rifles. I was being covered. They would shoot if I tried to make a break for the village. Without further thought, I set the tractor in motion, jammed one of my cable tools down against the fuel pedal, and jumped. For a moment I stood there, watching the machine gather speed and head away over the open land, straight through a cabbage crop. Then I turned back to the ruins.

“You’re not so clever as I expected,” I told Jess. “The trail of that tractor will be easily visible to anyone who cares to investigate.”

“We’re moving out of here in an hour or two, when it’s dusk,” he said. “Now come with us and eat. You’re a Traveller now.”

The soup was vegetable water. The meat was that of a cow they had stolen from a cattle pen some miles away. The beast had been fed on stilbestrol to promote growth; its flesh was pulpy and obviously lacked key nutrients. Stilbestrol itself was known — and had been known for over a couple of centuries — as a carcinogen; but we had no option but to eat it. In the frantic drive to keep food production level with population increase, no pure food, as the ancients would have recognized it, was left on the planet, except perhaps in a few remote corners.

But if the food was bad, I found the company good.

These outcasts now accepted me easily enough as one of them (though I was careful not to let them know I could read print, since I soon discovered that every one of them, even Jess, was illiterate). So I found out something of the way of life of the Travellers.

I cannot say I became one of them. Nor was I with them for long. But that experience was vital, and some of the lessons of survival that I picked up then, with Jess and Garry and Haagman and the others, have been useful to me recently. And the touch of freedom I experienced — so novel was it that it frightened me at the time; but it has grown in me since.

Almost before the meal was over, the men were putting their kit together, though they had little enough in the way of possessions. They moved out in single file, into the gathering dark. As I got up, Jess detained me.

“I must question you on one thing, Knowle,” he said. “Our biggest problem is not the enemy but the disease. Cancerous people we’re happy to have, because it isn’t infectious, but tuberculous or other diseases we sometimes have to turn away. Now, when you were brought before me, you were plainly in a kind of senseless state, and crying out about losing something and I don’t know what. You will have to tell me what it is that ails you.”

Letting my head hang, I tried to find myself words. The truth is that I was very ashamed of my ailment.

“If it’s some kind of a mental thing, we don’t mind that. Most of us are out of our right minds anyhow.”

In a low voice, I said: “It was a sort of food poisoning I got as a child in the orphan centre in the city. A doctor said it affected a part of my brain and my retina. He called it a scintillating scotoma, I think, with something else I can’t remember. That was why I was arrested and made to serve as a landsman — I had a sort of vision one day when I was in the street, and I walked out into the traffic way and caused a bus to run up on to the pavement. So they sentenced me to the village.”

He said gently: “You must become one of us in mind as well as in the flesh. It’s your only hope of survival. We have a talent for recognizing those who may betray us. We shall know when you are really a Traveller, heart and soul, and then you may get a woman and we will look after you whatever happens; no true Traveller ever deserts or betrays another.”

“You needn’t think I would ever betray you! I’m not that kind,” I said angrily.

With infinite calm, he looked into my eyes. That lean face seemed keep enough to cut into my inner mind.

“If you are with us long enough, you will grow to know yourself. It is that that makes the desperate life of a Traveller worth living; you can escape the guards, but never yourself. When that day comes, you will see where betrayal lies.”

I remembered his words bitterly later, though at the time they meant little to me. This I will say: that in that ragged bunch of desperadoes survived, I do believe, all that was left of the nobler codes of an earlier way of life, debased, trampled by the necessities of life, hut still apparent. And Jess kept the spirit alive in the others. Without him, some of them would have been little better than wolves.

Soon it was dark, and we were moving.

I fell in with a man called Garry, a soft-spoken man who rarely smiled. His silence made me welcome. We moved two abreast, the couples spaced apart.

Overhead, a lonely Iron Wing was dusting crops. We paid it no attention. It was robot-controlled and would not see us. We were moving away from the village from which I came. Disquiet rose in me. I longed to get back to that world I knew, to Hammer, to the familiar routine. I did not wish to be a Traveller, to be bound to cross and re-cross for ever the reeking earth without hope or home. But how could I escape from this band?

The Travellers formed a free society within the great prison of England. Because conditions on the farmlands were so inimical to life, only men and women convicted of “crimes” worked there. To keep up the number of land workers, the laws in the great teeming cities had to be made increasingly strict, so that new infringements would maintain a supply of new labour. But some of these labourers escaped from the villages, and formed themselves into bands.

There was no hope of their getting back to their families in the cities. The cities, perching on their high platforms above the land, were impossible to enter illegally, or almost so. So the Travellers travelled, living as free a life as possible within their wide prison, until they were hunted down by machines or dogs or men.

We showed we were free all right. We marched till near morning, and then camped in an old garage, no longer used, on the edge of a main highway. Easy though it was, the pace we had kept almost killed me, for I was unused to their sort of walking. But I saw now why they were legend; they came and went as they pleased, often on regular routes of their own; they migrated and hibernated, they appeared and disappeared.

“Where are we heading?” I asked Garry.

He named the place, without particularizing too much, as if he had not too much faith in me. He told me we were escorting two men who were merely passing through this territory. They had come from the north and would be passed over to another band of Travellers farther south. They were heading for the sea, and hoped eventually to sail to Africa and freedom.

“Aren’t we going to the coast?” I asked.

He shook his head. With prompting, he described the shore that I had never seen, and the sea beating endlessly against a margin endlessly bound by concrete and plastic and metal — for the old beaches had all been eaten away in the manufacture of artificial soil.

He snuggled down to sleep. Tired though I was, I remained awake until long after the daylight insinuated itself through a hundred cracks into our shelter.

Over the days that followed, I learnt more about the travelling life. Though I admired it, some sort of fear kept me from feeling myself part of it.

Jess himself never made any attempt to extend his liberty, however much he helped others. He lived his desperate life in the heart of the enemy. The same held for his more faithful followers. Some of the men — now that their faces became individualized and less strange to me, I saw they numbered about twenty-five — told me that it was fairly simple to remain at liberty as long as one kept away from the villages and did not venture on to the roads, all of which were well patrolled by robots.

“Besides, robots are fools,” one of the women said. “By relying so heavily on their machines, the Farmers don’t realize what liberty they give us.”

“But what sort of liberty is it, after all?” the man next to her growled. “The liberty to die far from a doctor, and to starve ragged in the winter! Why, a couple of winters ago I spent two months lying in a village north of here within the shadow of death. How I pulled through, it was a miracle! But for Nan, I’d be a gonner. I tell you, it’s well enough to be a Traveller at this time of year, when you see the sun through the stinking mists, but when the frosts come — ah, the winter’s a cruel time. Every summer, I spoil the bright days thinking of the cold ones what’s in store.”