The Chrysalids

4

This was a time when I passed out of a placid period into one where things kept on happening. There wasn’t much reason about it; that is to say, only a few of the things were connected with one another: it was more as if an active cycle had set in, just as a spell of different weather might come along.

My meeting with Sophie was, I suppose, the first incident; the next was that Uncle Axel found out about me and my half-cousin, Rosalind Morton. He — and it was lucky it was he, and no one else — happened to come upon me when I was talking to her.

It must have been a self-preserving instinct which had made us keep the thing to ourselves, for we’d no active feeling of danger - I had so little, in fact, that when Uncle Axel found me sitting behind a rick chatting apparently to myself, I made very little effort to dissemble. He may have been there a minute or more before I became aware of somebody just round the corner of my eye, and turned to see who it was.

My Uncle Axel was a tall man, neither thin nor fat, but sturdy, and with a seasoned look to him. I used to think when I watched him at work that his weathered hands and forearms had some sort of kinship with the polished wood of the helves they used. He was standing in his customary way, with much of his weight upon the thick stick he used because his leg had been wrongly set when it was broken at sea. His bushy eyebrows, a little touched with grey, were drawn closer by a half-frown, but the lines on his tanned face were half-amused as he regarded me.

‘Well, Davie boy, and who would you be chattering away so hard to? Is it fairies, or gnomes, or only the rabbits?’ he asked.

I just shook my head. He limped closer, and sat down beside me, chewing on a stalk of grass from the rick.

‘Feeling lonely?’ he inquired.

‘No,’ I told him.

He frowned a bit again. ‘Wouldn’t it be more fun to do your chattering with some of the other kids?’ he suggested. ‘More interesting than just sitting and talking to yourself?’

I hesitated, and then because he was Uncle Axel and my best friend among the grown-ups, I said:

‘But I was.’

‘Was what?’ he asked, puzzled.

‘Talking to one of them,’ I told him.

He frowned, and went on looking puzzled.

‘Who?’

‘Rosalind,’ I told him.

He paused a bit, looking at me harder.

‘H’mm — I didn’t see her around,’ he remarked.

‘Oh, she isn’t here. She’s at home — at least, she’s near home, in a little secret tree-house her brothers built in the spinney,’ I explained. ‘It’s a favourite place of hers.’

He was not able to understand what I meant at first. He kept on talking as though it were a make-believe game; but after I had tried for some time to explain he sat quiet, watching my face as I talked, and presently his expression became very serious. After I’d stopped he said nothing for a minute or two, then he asked:

‘This isn’t play-stuff — it’s the real truth you’re telling me, Davie boy?’ And he looked at me hard and steadily as he spoke.

‘Yes, Uncle Axel, of course,’ I assured him.

‘And you never told anyone else — nobody at all?’

‘No. It’s a secret,’ I told him, and he looked relieved.

He threw away the remains of his grass-stalk, and pulled another out of the rick. After he had thoughtfully bitten a few pieces off that and spat them out he looked directly at me again.

‘Davie,’ he said, ‘I want you to make me a promise.’

‘Yes, Uncle Axel?’

‘It’s this,’ he said, speaking very seriously. ‘I want you to keep it secret. I want you to promise that you will never, never tell anyone else what you have just told me — never. It’s very important: later on you’ll understand better how important it is. You mustn’t do anything that would even let anyone guess about it. Will you promise me that?’

His gravity impressed me greatly. I had never known him to speak with so much intensity. It made me aware, when I gave my promise, that I was vowing something more important than I could understand. He kept his eyes on mine as I spoke, and then nodded, satisfied that I meant it. We shook hands on the agreement. Then he said:

‘It would be best if you could forget it altogether.’

I thought that over, and then shook my head.

‘I don’t think I could, Uncle Axel. Not really. I mean, it just is. It’d be like trying to forget—’ I broke off, unable to express what I wanted to.

‘Like trying to forget how to talk, or how to hear, perhaps?’ he suggested.

‘Rather like that — only different,’ I admitted.

He nodded, and thought again.

‘You hear the words inside your head?’ he asked.

‘Well, not exactly “hear”, and not exactly “see”,’ I told him. ‘There are — well, sort of shapes — and if you use words you make them clearer so that they’re easier to understand.’

‘But you don’t have to use words — not say them out loud as you were doing just now?’

‘Oh, no — it just helps to make it clearer sometimes.’

‘It also helps to make things a lot more dangerous, for both of you. I want you to make another promise — that you’ll never do it out loud any more.’

‘All right, Uncle Axel,’ I agreed again.

‘You’ll understand when you’re older how important it is,’ he told me, and then he went on to insist that I should get Rosalind to make the same promises. I did not tell him anything about the others because he seemed so worried already, but I decided I’d get them to promise, too. At the end he put out his hand again, and once more we swore secrecy very solemnly.

I put the matter to Rosalind and the others the same evening. It crystallized a feeling that was in all of us. I don’t suppose that there was a single one of us who had not at some time made a slip or two and brought upon himself, or herself, an odd, suspicious look. A few of these looks had been warnings enough to each; it was such looks, not comprehended, but clear enough as signs of disapproval just below the verge of suspicion, that had kept us out of trouble. There had been no acknowledged, co-operative policy among us. It was simply as individuals that we had all taken the same self-protective, secretive course. But now, out of Uncle Axel’s anxious insistence on my promise, the feeling of a threat was strengthened. It was still shapeless to us, but it was more real. Furthermore, in trying to convey Uncle Axel’s seriousness to them I must have stirred up an uneasiness that was in all their minds, for there was no dissent. They made the promise willingly; eagerly, in fact, as though it was a burden they were relieved to share. It was our first act as a group; it made us a group by its formal admission of our responsibilities towards one another. It changed our lives by marking our first step in corporate self-preservation, though we understood little of that at the time. What seemed most important just then was the feeling of sharing…

Then, almost on top of that personal event came another which was of general concern; an invasion in force from the Fringes.

As usual there was no detailed plan to deal with it. As near as anyone came to organization was the appointment of headquarters in the different sectors. Upon an alarm it was the duty of all able-bodied men in the district to rally at their local headquarters, when a course of action would be decided according to the location and extent of the trouble. As a method of dealing with small raids it had proved good enough, but that was all it was intended for. As a result, when the Fringes people found leaders who could promote an organized invasion there had been no adequately organized system of defence to delay them. They were able to push forward on a broad front, mopping up little bands of our militia here and there, and looting as they liked, and meeting nothing to delay them seriously until they were twenty-five miles or more into civilized parts.

By that time we had our forces in somewhat better order, and neighbouring districts had pulled themselves together to head off a further widening, and harry the flanks. Our men were better armed, too. Quite a lot of them had guns, whereas the Fringes people had only a few that they had stolen, and depended chiefly on bows, knives, and spears. Nevertheless, the width of their advance made them difficult to deal with. They were better woodsmen and cleverer at hiding themselves than proper human beings, so that they were able to press on another fifteen miles before we could contain them and bring them to battle.

It was exciting for a boy. With the Fringes people little more than seven miles away, our yard at Waknuk had become one of the rallying points. My father, who had had an arrow through his arm early in the campaign, was helping to organize the new volunteers into squads. For several days there was a great bustling and coming and going as men were registered and sorted, and finally rode off with a fine air of determination, and the women of the household waving handkerchiefs at them.

When they had all departed, and our workers, too, the place seemed quite uncannily quiet for a day. Then there came a single rider, dashing back. He paused long enough to tell us that there had been a big battle and the Fringes people, with some of their leaders taken prisoner, were running away as fast as they could, then he galloped on with his good news.

That same afternoon a small troop of horsemen came riding into the yard, with two of the captured Fringes leaders in the middle of them.

I dropped what I was doing, and ran across to see. It was a bit disappointing at first sight. The tales about the Fringes had led me to expect creatures with two heads, or fur all over, or half a dozen arms and legs. Instead, they seemed at first glance to be just two ordinary men with beards - though unusually dirty, and with very ragged clothes. One of them was a short man with fair hair which was tufted as though he had trimmed it with a knife. But when I looked at the other I had a shock which brought me up dumbfounded, and staring at him. I was so jolted I just went on staring at him, for, put him in decent clothes, tidy up his beard, and he’d be the image of my father….

As he sat his horse, looking round, he noticed me; casually at first, in passing, then his gaze switched back and he stared hard at me. A strange look that I did not understand at all came into his eyes….

He opened his mouth as if to speak, but at that moment people came out of the house — my father, with his arm still in a sling, among them — to see what was going on.

I saw my father pause on the step and survey the group of horsemen, then he, too, noticed the man in the middle of them. For a moment he stood staring, just as I had done — then all his colour drained away, and his face went blotchy grey.

I looked quickly at the other man. He was sitting absolutely rigid on his horse. The expression on his face made something clutch suddenly in my chest. I had never seen hatred naked before, the lines cut deep, the eyes glittering, the teeth suddenly looking like a savage animal’s. It struck me with a slap, a horrid revelation of something hitherto unknown, and hideous; it stamped itself on my mind so that I never forgot it….

Then my father, still looking as though he were ill, put out his good hand to steady himself against the door-post, and turned back into the house.

One of the escort cut the rope which held the prisoner’s arms. He dismounted, and I was able to see then what was wrong with him. He stood some eighteen inches taller than anyone else, but not because he was a big man. If his legs had been right, he would have stood no taller than my father’s five-feet-ten; but they were not: they were monstrously long and thin, and his arms were long and thin, too. It made him look half-man, half-spider….

His escort gave him food and a pot of beer. He sat down on a bench, and his bony knees stuck up to seem almost level with his shoulders. He looked round the yard, noticing everything as he munched his bread and cheese. In the course of his inspection he perceived me again. He beckoned. I hung back, pretending not to see. He beckoned again. I became ashamed of being afraid of him. I went closer, and then a little closer still, but keeping warily out of range, I judged, of those spidery arms.

‘What’s your name, boy?’ he asked.

‘David,’ I told him. ‘David Strorm.’

He nodded, as if that were satisfactory.

‘The man at the door, with his arm in a sling, that would be your father, Joseph Strorm?’

‘Yes,’ I told him.

Again he nodded. He looked round the house and the outbuildings.

‘This place, then, would be Waknuk?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I said again.

I don’t know whether he would have asked more, for at that point somebody told me to clear off. A little later they all remounted, and soon they moved away, the spidery man with his arms tied together once more. I watched them ride off in the Kentak direction, glad to see them go. My first encounter with someone from the Fringes had not, after all, been exciting; but it had been unpleasantly disturbing.

I heard later that both the captured Fringes men managed to escape that same night. I can’t remember who told me, but I am perfectly certain it was not my father. I never once heard him refer to that day, and I never had the courage to ask him about it….

Then scarcely, it seemed, had we settled down after the invasion and got the men back to catching up with the farm work, than my father was in the middle of a new row with my half-uncle, Angus Morton.

Differences of temperament and outlook had kept them intermittently at war with one another for years. My father had been heard to sum up his opinion by declaring that if Angus had any principles they were of such infinite width as to be a menace to the rectitude of the neighbourhood; to which Angus was reputed to have replied that Joseph Strorm was a flinty-souled pedant, and bigoted well beyond reason. It was not, therefore, difficult for a row to blow up, and the latest one occurred over Angus’ acquisition of a pair of great-horses.

Rumours of great-horses had reached our district though none had been seen there. My father was already uneasy in his mind at what he had heard of them, nor was the fact that Angus was the importer of them a commendation; consequently, it may have been with some prejudice that he went to inspect them.

His doubts were confirmed at once. The moment he set eyes on the huge creatures standing twenty-six hands at the shoulder, he knew they were wrong. He turned his back on them with disgust, and went straight to the inspector’s house with a demand that they should be destroyed as Offences.

‘You’re out of order this time,’ the inspector told him cheerfully, glad that for once his position was incontestable.’ They’re Government-approved, so they are beyond my jurisdiction, anyway.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ my father told him. ‘God never made horses the size of these. The Government can’t have approved them.’

‘But they have,’ said the inspector. ‘What’s more,’ he added with satisfaction, ‘Angus tells me that knowing the neighbourhood so well he has got attested pedigrees for them.’

‘Any government that could pass creatures like that is corrupt and immoral,’ my father announced.

‘Possibly,’ admitted the inspector, ‘but it’s still the Government.’

My father glared at him.

‘It’s easy to see why some people would approve them,’ he said. ‘One of those brutes could do the work of two, maybe three, ordinary horses — and for less than double the feed of one. There’s a good profit there, a good incentive to get them passed — but that doesn’t mean that they’re right. I say a horse like that is not one of God’s creatures — and if it isn’t His, then it’s an Offence, and should be destroyed as such.’

‘The official approval states that the breed was produced simply by mating for size, in the normal way. And I’d defy you to find any characteristic that’s identifiably wrong with them, anyway,’ the inspector told him.

‘Somebody would say that when he saw how profitable they could be. There’s a word for that kind of thinking,’ my father replied.

The inspector shrugged.

‘It does not follow that they are right,’ my father persisted. ‘A horse that size is not right — you know that unofficially, as well as I do, and there’s no getting away from it. Once we allow things that we know are not right, there’s no telling where it will end. A god-fearing community doesn’t have to deny its faith just because there’s been pressure brought to bear in a government licensing office. There are plenty of us here who know how God intended his creatures to be, even if the Government doesn’t.’

The inspector smiled. ‘As with the Dakers’ cat?’ he suggested.

My father glared at him again. The affair of the Dakers’ cat rankled.

About a year previously it had somehow come to his knowledge that Ben Dakers’ wife housed a tailless cat. He investigated, and when he had collected evidence that it had not simply lost its tail in some way, but had never possessed one, he condemned it, and, in his capacity as a magistrate, ordered the inspector to make out a warrant for its destruction as an Offence. The inspector had done so, with reluctance, whereupon Dakers promptly entered an appeal. Such shilly-shallying in an obvious case outraged my father’s principles, and he personally attended to the demise of the Dakers’ cat while the matter was still sub judice. His position, when a notification subsequently arrived stating that there was a recognized breed of tailless cats with a well-authenticated history, was awkward, and somewhat expensive. It had been with very bad grace that he had chosen to make a public apology rather than resign his magistracy.

‘This,’ he told the inspector sharply, ‘is an altogether more important affair.’

‘Listen,’ said the inspector patiently. ‘The type is approved. This particular pair has confirmatory sanction. If that’s not good enough for you, go ahead and shoot them yourself — and see what happens to you.’

‘It is your moral duty to issue an order against these so-called horses,’ my father insisted.

The inspector was suddenly tired of it.

‘It’s part of my official duty to protect them from harm by fools and bigots,’ he snapped.

My father did not actually hit the inspector, but it must have been a near thing. He went on boiling with rage for several days and the next Sunday we were treated to a searing address on the toleration of Mutants which sullied the Purity of our community. He called for a general boycott of the owner of the Offences, speculated upon immorality in high places, hinted that some there might be expected to have a fellow-feeling for Mutants, and wound up with a peroration in which a certain official was scathed as an unprincipled hireling of unprincipled masters and the local representative of the Forces of Evil.

Though the inspector had no such convenient pulpit for reply, certain trenchant remarks of his on persecution, contempt of authority, bigotry, religious mania, the law of slander, and the probable effects of direct action in opposition to Government sanction achieved a wide circulation.

It was very likely the last point that kept my father from doing more than talk. He had had plenty of trouble over the Dakers’ cat which was of no value at all: but the great-horses were costly creatures; besides, Angus would not be one to waive any possible penalty….

So there was a degree of frustration about that made home a good place to get away from as much as possible.

Now that the countryside had settled down again and was not full of unexpected people, Sophie’s parents would let her go out on rambles once more, and I slipped away over there when I could get away unnoticed.

Sophie couldn’t go to school, of course. She would have been found out very quickly, even with a false certificate; and her parents, though they taught her to read and write, did not have any books, so that it wasn’t much good to her. That was why we talked — at least I talked — a lot on our expeditions, trying to tell her what I was learning from my own reading books.

The world, I was able to tell her, was generally thought to be a pretty big place, and probably round. The civilized part of it — of which Waknuk was only a small district — was called Labrador. This was thought to be the Old People’s name for it, though that was not very certain. Round most of Labrador there was a great deal of water called the sea, which was important on account of fish. Nobody that I knew, except Uncle Axel, had actually seen this sea because it was a long way off, but if you were to go three hundred miles or so east, north, or north-west you would come to it sooner or later. But south-west or south, you wouldn’t; you’d get to the Fringes and then the Badlands, which would kill you.

It was said, too, though nobody was sure, that in the time of the Old People, Labrador had been a cold land, so cold that no one could live there for long, so they had used it then only for growing trees and doing their mysterious mining in. But that had been a long, long time ago. A thousand years? — two thousand years? — even more, perhaps? People guessed, but nobody really knew. There was no telling how many generations of people had passed their lives like savages between the coming of Tribulation and the start of recorded history. Only Nicholson’s Repentances had come out of the wilderness of barbarism, and that only because it had lain for, perhaps, several centuries sealed in a stone coffer before it was discovered. And only the Bible had survived from the time of the Old People themselves.

Except for what these two books told, the past, further back than three recorded centuries, was a long oblivion. Out of that blankness stretched a few strands of legend, badly frayed in their passage through successive minds. It was this long line of tongues that had given us the name Labrador, for it was unmentioned in either the Bible or Repentances, and they may have been right about the cold, although there were only two cold months in the year now — Tribulation could account for that, it could account for almost anything….

For a long time it had been disputed whether any parts of the world other than Labrador and the big island of Newf were populated at all. They were thought to be all Badlands which had suffered the full weight of Tribulation, but it had been found that there were some stretches of Fringes country in places. These were grossly deviational and quite godless, of course, and incapable of being civilized at present, but if the Badland borders there were withdrawing as ours were, it might one day be possible to colonize them.

Altogether, not much seemed to be known about the world, but at least it was a more interesting subject than Ethics which an old man taught to a class of us on Sunday afternoons. Ethics was why you should, and shouldn’t, do things. Most of the don’ts were the same as my father’s, but some of the reasons were different, so it was confusing.

According to Ethics, mankind — that was us, in civilized parts — was in the process of climbing back into grace; we were following a faint and difficult trail which led up to the peaks from which we had fallen. From the true trail branched many false trails that sometimes looked easier and more attractive; all these really led to the edges of precipices, beneath which lay the abyss of eternity. There was only one true trail, and by following it we should, with God’s help and in His own good time, regain all that had been lost. But so faint was the trail, so set with traps and deceits, that every step must be taken with caution, and it was too dangerous for a man to rely on his own judgment. Only the authorities, ecclesiastical and lay, were in a position to judge whether the next step was a rediscovery, and so, safe to take; or whether it deviated from the true re-ascent, and so was sinful.

The penance of Tribulation that had been put upon the world must be worked out, the long climb faithfully retraced, and, at last, if the temptations by the way were resisted, there would be the reward of forgiveness — the restoration of the Golden Age. Such penances had been sent before: the expulsion from Eden, the Flood, pestilences, the destruction of the Cities of the Plain, the Captivity. Tribulation had been another such punishment, but the greatest of all: it must, when it struck, have been like a combination of all these disasters. Why it had been sent was as yet unrevealed, but, judging by precedent, there had very likely been a phase of irreligious arrogance prevailing at the time.

Most of the numerous precepts, arguments, and examples in Ethics were condensed for us into this: the duty and purpose of man in this world is to fight unceasingly against the evils that Tribulation loosed upon it. Above all, he must see that the human form is kept true to the divine pattern in order that one day it may be permitted to regain the high place in which, as the image of God, it was set.

However, I did not talk much about this part of Ethics to Sophie. Not, I think, because I ever actually classified her in my mind as a Deviation, but it had to be admitted that she did not quite qualify as a true image, so it seemed more tactful to avoid that aspect. And there were plenty of other things to talk about.