The Eye of the Heron

4

The ringtree of Victoria led a double life. It began as a single, fast-growing seedling with serrated red leaves. When it matured it flowered lavishly with large, honey-colored blossoms. Wotsits and other small flying creatures, attracted by the sweet-tasting petals, ate them, and while doing so fertilized the bitter-flavored heart of the flower with pollen caught on their fur, scales, wings, or vanes. The fertilized remnant of the flower curled itself up into a hard-shelled seed. There might be hundreds of these on the tree, but they dried up and dropped off, one after another, leaving at last one single seed on a high central branch. This seed, hard and ill-flavored, grew and grew while its tree weakened and withered, until the leafless branches drooped sadly beneath the big, heavy, black ball of the seed. Then, some afternoon when the autumn sun shone through gaps in the rainclouds, the seed performed its extraordinary feat: time-ripened and sun-warmed, it exploded. It went off with a bang that could be heard for miles. A cloud of dust and fragments rose and drifted slowly off across the hills. All was over, apparently, with the ringtree.

But in a circle around the central stem, several hundred seedlets, exploded from the shell, were burrowing themselves with energy down into the damp rich dirt. A year later the shoots were already competing for root-room; the less hardy ones died. Ten years later, and for a century or two after that, from twenty to sixty copper-leaved trees stood in a perfect ring about the long-vanished central stem. Branch and root, they stood apart, yet touching, forty ringtrees, one tree-ring. Once every eight or ten years they flowered and bore a small edible fruit, the seeds of which were excreted by wotsits, pouchbats, farfallies, tree-coneys, and other fruit lovers. Dropped in the right spot, a seed germinated and produced the single tree; and it the single seed; and the cycle was repeated, from ringtree to tree-ring, timelessly.

Where the soil was favorable the rings grew interlocking, but otherwise no large plants grew in the central circle of each ring, only grasses, moss, and ferns. Very old rings so exhausted their central ground that it might sink and form a hollow, which filled with ground seepage and with rain, and the circle of high, old dark-red trees was then mirrored in the still water of a central pool. The center of a tree-ring was always a quiet place. The ancient, pool-centered rings were the most quiet, the most strange.

The Meeting House of Shantih stood outside town in a vale which contained such a ring: forty-six trees rearing their columnar trunks and bronze crowns around a silent circle of water, rough with rain, or cloud-gray, or bright with sunlight flashing through red foliage from a sky briefly clear. Roots of the trees grew gnarled at the water’s edge, making seats for the solitary contemplater. A single pair of herons lived in the Meeting-House Ring. The Victorian heron was not a heron; it was not even a bird. To describe their new world the exiles had had only words from their old world. The creatures that lived by the pools, one pair to a pool, were stilt-legged, pale-gray fish eaters: so they were herons. The first generation had known that they were not really herons, that they were not birds, nor reptiles, nor mammals. The following generations did not know what they were not, but did, in a way, know what they were. They were herons.

They seemed to live as long as the trees. Nobody had ever seen a baby heron, or an egg. Sometimes they danced, but if a mating followed the dance it was in the secrecy of the wilderness night, unseen. Silent, angular, elegant, they nested in the drifts of red leaves among the roots, and fished for water creatures in the shallows, and gazed across the pool at human beings with large, round eyes as colorless as water. They showed no fear of man, but never allowed a close approach.

The settlers of Victoria had never yet come upon any large land animal. The biggest herbivore was the coney, a fat slow rabbity beast with fine waterproof scales all over it; the biggest predator was the larva, red-eyed and shark-toothed, half a meter long. In captivity the larvas bit and screeched in insane frenzy till they died; the coneys refused to eat, lay down quietly, and died. There were big creatures in the sea; “whales” came into Songe Bay and were caught for food every summer; out at sea beasts huger than the whales had been seen, enormous, like writhing islands. The whales were not whales, but what the monsters were or were not, nobody knew. They never came near fishing boats. And the beasts of the plains and forests never came near, either. They did not run away. They simply kept their distance. They watched for a while, with clear eyes, and then moved away, ignoring the stranger.

Only the bright-winged farfallies and the wotsits ever consented to come near. Caged, a farfallie folded its wings and died; but if you put out honey for it, it might set up housekeeping on your roof, constructing there the little nest-like rain-cup in which, being semiaquatic, it slept. Wotsits evidently trusted in their peculiar ability to look like something else every few minutes. Occasionally they showed a positive desire to fly round and round a human being, or even to sit on him. Their shape-changing had in it an element of eye-fooling, perhaps of hypnosis, and Lev had sometimes wondered if the wotsits liked to use human beings to practice their tricks on. In any case, if you caged a wotsit, it turned into a shapeless brown lump like a clod of dirt, and after two or three hours, died.

None of the creatures of Victoria would be tamed, would live with man. None of them would approach him. They evaded; they slipped away, into the rain-shadowed, sweet-scented forests, or into the deep sea, or into death. They had nothing to do with man. He was a stranger. He did not belong.

“I had a cat,” Lev’s grandmother used to tell him, long ago. “A fat, gray cat with fur like the softest, softest treesilk. He had black stripes on his legs, and green eyes. He’d jump up on my lap, and put his nose under my ear, so I could hear him, and purr, and purr—like this!” The old lady would make a deep, soft, rumbling noise, to which the little boy listened with intense delight.

“What did he say when he was hungry, Nana?” He held his breath.

“PRRREEOWW! PRRREEOWW!”

She laughed, and he laughed.

There was only one another. The voices, the faces, the hands, the holding arms, of one’s own kind. The other people, the other aliens.

Outside the doors, beyond the small plowed fields, lay the wilderness, the endless world of hills and red leaves and mist, where no voice spoke. To speak, there, no matter what you said, was to say, “I am a stranger.”

“Some day,” the child said, “I’ll go and explore the whole world.”

It was a new idea he had had, and he was full of it. He was going to make maps, and everything. But Nana wasn’t listening. She had the sad look. He knew what to do about that. He came up quietly next to her and nuzzled in her neck below the ear, saying, “Prrrrr … .”

“Is that my cat Mino? Hello, Mino! Why,” she said, “it isn’t Mino, it’s Levuchka! What a surprise!”

He sat on her lap. Her large, old, brown arms were around him. On each wrist she wore a bangle of fine red soapstone. Her son Alexander, Sasha, Lev’s father, had carved them for her. “Manacles,” he had said when he gave them to her on her birthday. “Victoria manacles, Mama.” And all the grown-ups had laughed, but Nana had had the sad look while she laughed.

“Nana. Was Mino Mino’s name?”

“Of course, silly.”

“But why?”

“Because I named him Mino.”

“But animals don’t have names.”

“No. Not here.”

“Why don’t they?”

“Because we don’t know their names,” the grandmother said, looking out over the small plowed fields.

“Nana.”

“Well?” said the soft voice in the soft bosom against which his ear was pressed.

“Why didn’t you bring Mino here?”

“We couldn’t bring anything on the space ship. Nothing of our own. There wasn’t room. But anyhow, Mino was dead long before we came. I was a child when he was a kitten, and I was still a child when he was old and died. Cats don’t live long, just a few years.”

“But people live a long time.”

“Oh, yes. A very long time.”

Lev sat still on her lap, pretending he was a cat, with gray fur like the down of the cottonwool, only warm. “Prrr,” he said softly, while the old woman sitting on the doorstep held him and gazed over his head at the land of her exile.

As he sat now on the hard broad root of a ringtree at the edge of the Meeting Pool, he thought of Nana, of the cat, of the silver water of Lake Serene, of the mountains above it which he longed to climb, of climbing the mountains out of the mist and rain into the ice and brightness of the summits; he thought of many things, too many things. He sat still, but his mind would not be still. He had come here for stillness, but his mind raced, raced from past to future and back again. Only for a moment did he find quiet. One of the herons walked silently out into the water from the far side of the pool. Lifting its narrow head it gazed at Lev. He gazed back, and for an instant was caught in that round transparent eye, as depthless as the sky clear of clouds; and the moment was round, transparent, silent, a moment at the center of all moments, the eternal present moment of the silent animal.

The heron turned away, bent its head, searching the dark water for fish.

Lev stood up, trying to move as quietly and deftly as the heron itself, and left the circle of the trees, passing between two of the massive red trunks. It was like going through a door into a different place entirely. The shallow valley was bright with sunlight, the sky windy and alive; sun gilt the red-painted timber roof of the Meeting House, which stood on the south-facing slope. A good many people were at the Meeting House already, standing on the steps and porch talking, and Lev quickened his pace. He wanted to run, to shout. This was no time for stillness. This was the first morning of the battle, the beginning of victory.

Andre hailed him: “Come on! Everybody’s waiting for Boss Lev!”

He laughed, and ran; he came up the six steps of the porch in two strides. “All right, all right, all right,” he said, “what kind of discipline is this, where are your boots, do you consider that a respectful position, Sam?” Sam, a brown, stocky man wearing only white trousers, was standing calmly on his head near the porch railing.

Elia took charge of the meeting. They did not go inside, but sat around on the porch to talk, for the sunlight was very pleasant. Elia was in a serious mood, as usual, but Lev’s arrival had cheered the others up, and the discussion was lively but brief. The sense of the meeting was clear almost at once. Elia wanted another delegation to go to the City to talk with the Bosses, but no one else did; they wanted a general meeting of the people of Shantih. They arranged that it would take place before sundown, and the younger people undertook to notify outlying villages and farms. As Lev was about to leave, Sam, who had serenely stood on his head throughout the discussion, came upright in a single graceful motion and said to Lev, smiling, “Arjuna, it will be a great battle.”

Lev, his mind busy with a hundred things, smiled at Sam and strode off.

The campaign which the people of Shantih were undertaking was a new thing to them, and yet a familiar one. All of them, in the Town school and the Meeting House, had learned its principles and tactics; they knew the lives of the hero-philosophers Gandhi and King, and the history of the People of the Peace, and the ideas that had inspired those lives, that history. In exile, the People of the Peace had continued to live by those ideas; and so far had done so with success. They had at least kept themselves independent, while taking over the whole farming enterprise of the community, and sharing the produce fully and freely with the City. In exchange, the City provided them tools and machinery made by the Government ironworks, fish caught by the City fleet, and various other products which the older-established colony could more easily provide. It had been an arrangement satisfactory to both.

But gradually the terms of the bargain had grown more unequal. Shantih raised the cottonwool plants and the silktrees, and took the raw stuff to the City mills to be spun and woven. But the mills were very slow; if the townsfolk needed clothes, they did better to spin and weave the cloth themselves. The fresh and dried fish they expected did not arrive. Bad catches, the Council explained. Tools were not replaced. The City had furnished the farmers tools; if the farmers were careless with them it was up to them to replace them, said the Council. So it went on, gradually enough that no crisis arose. The people of Shantih compromised, adjusted, made do. The children and grandchildren of the exiles, now grown men and women, had never seen the technique of conflict and resistance, which was the binding force of their community, in action.

But they had been taught it: the spirit, the reasons, and the rules. They had learned it, and practiced it in the minor conflicts that arose within the Town itself. They had watched their elders arrive, sometimes by passionate debate and sometimes by almost wordless consent, at solutions to problems and disagreements. They had learned how to listen for the sense of the meeting, not the voice of the loudest. They had learned that they must judge each time whether obedience was necessary and right, or misplaced and wrong. They had learned that the act of violence is the act of weakness, and that the spirit’s strength lies in holding fast to the truth.

At least they believed all that, and believed that they had learned it beyond any shadow of a doubt. Not one of them, under any provocation, would resort to violence. They were certain, and they were strong.

“It won’t be easy, this time,” Vera had said to them, before she and the others left for the City. “You know, it won’t be easy.”

They nodded, smiling, and cheered her. Of course it wouldn’t be easy. Easy victories aren’t worth winning.

As he went from farm to farm southwest of Shantih, Lev asked people to come to the big meeting, and answered their questions about Vera and the other hostages. Some of them were afraid of what the City men might do next, and Lev said, “Yes, they may do worse than take a few hostages. We can’t expect them simply to agree with us, when we don’t agree with them. We’re in for a fight.”

“But when they fight they use knives—and there’s that—that whipping place, you know,” said a woman, lowering her voice. “Where they punish their thieves and … .” She did not finish. Everyone else looked ashamed and uneasy.

“They’re caught in the circle of violence that brought them here,” said Lev. “We aren’t. If we stand firm, all of us together, then they’ll see our strength; they’ll see it’s greater than theirs. They’ll begin to listen to us. And to win free, themselves.” His face and voice were so cheerful as he spoke that the farmers could see that he was speaking the simple truth, and began to look forward to the next confrontation with the City instead of dreading it. Two brothers with names taken from the Long March, Lyons and Pamplona, got especially worked up; Pamplona, who was rather simple, followed Lev around from farm to farm the rest of the morning so he could hear the Resistance Plans ten times over.

In the afternoon Lev worked with his father and the other three families that farmed their bog-rice paddy, for the last harvest was ripe and must be got in no matter what else was going on. His father went on with one of these families for supper; Lev went to eat with Southwind. She had left her mother’s house and was living alone in the little house west of town which she and Timmo had built when they married. It stood by itself in the fields, though within sight of the nearest group of houses outlying from the town. Lev, or Andre, or Martin’s wife Italia, or all three of them, often came there for supper, bringing something to share with Southwind. She and Lev ate together, sitting on the doorstep, for it was a mild, golden autumn afternoon, and then went on together to the Meeting House, where two or three hundred people were already gathered, and more coming every minute.

Everyone knew what they were there for: to reassure one another that they were all together, and to discuss what was to be done next. The spirit of the gathering was festive and a little excited. People stood up on the porch and spoke, all saying in one way or another, “We’re not going to give in, we’re not going to let our hostages down!” When Lev spoke he was cheered: grandson of the great Shults who led the Long March, explorer of the wilderness, and a general favorite anyhow. The cheering was interrupted, there was a commotion in the crowd, which now numbered over a thousand. Night had come on, and the electric lights on the Meeting House porch, powered by the town generator, were feeble, so it was hard to see what was going on at the edge of the crowd. A squat, massive, black object seemed to be pushing through the people. When it got nearer the porch it could be seen as a mass of men, a troop of guards from the City, moving as a solid block. The block had a voice: “Meetings … order … pain,” was all anyone could hear, because everyone was asking indignant questions. Lev, standing under the light, called for quiet, and as the crowd fell silent the loud voice could be heard:

“Mass meetings are forbidden, the crowd is to disperse. Public meetings are forbidden by order of the Supreme Council upon pain of imprisonment and punishment. Disperse at once and go to your homes!”

“No,” people said, “why should we?”—“What right have they got?”—“Go to your own homes!”

“Come on, quiet!” Andre roared, in a voice nobody knew he possessed. As they grew quiet again he said to Lev in his usual mumble, “Go on, talk.”

“This delegation from the City has a right to speak,” Lev said, loud and clear. “And to be heard. And when we’ve heard what they say, we may disregard it, but remember that we are resolved not to threaten by act or word. We do not offer anger or injury to these men who come amongst us. What we offer them is friendship and the love of truth!”

He looked at the guards, and the officer at once repeated the order to disperse the meeting in a flat, hurried voice. When he was through, there was silence. The silence continued. Nobody said anything. Nobody moved.

“All right now,” the officer shouted, forcing his voice, “get moving, disperse, go to your homes!”

Lev and Andre looked at each other, folded their arms, and sat down. Holdfast, who was also up on the porch, sat down too; then Southwind, Elia, Sam, Jewel, and the others. The people on the meeting ground began to sit down. It was a queer sight in the shadows and the yellowish, shadow-streaked light: the many, many dark forms all seeming to shrink to half their height, with a faint rustling sound, a few murmurs. Some children giggled. Within half a minute they were all sitting down. No one remained afoot but the troop of guards, twenty men standing close together.

“You’ve been warned,” the officer shouted, and his voice was both vindictive and embarrassed. He was evidently not sure what to do with these people who now sat silently on the ground, looking at him with expressions of peaceable curiosity, as if they were children at a puppet show and he was the puppet. “Get up and disperse, or I’ll begin the arrests!”

Nobody said anything.

“All right, arrest the thir—the twenty nearest. Get up. You, get up!”

The people spoken to or laid hands on by the guardsmen got up, and stood quietly. “Can my wife come too?” a man asked the guard in a low voice, not wanting to break the great, deep stillness of the crowd.

“There will be no further mass meetings of any kind. By order of the Council!” the officer bawled, and led his troop off, herding a group of about twenty-five townsfolk. They disappeared into the darkness outside the reach of the electric lights.

Behind them the crowd was silent.

A voice rose from it, singing. Other voices joined in, softly at first. It was an old song, from the days of the Long March on Earth.

As the group of guards and prisoners went on into the darkness the singing did not sound fainter behind them but stronger and clearer, as all the hundreds of voices joined and sent the music ringing over the dark quiet lands between Shantih and the City of Victoria.

The twenty-four people who had been arrested by the guards, or had voluntarily gone off with them, returned to Shantih late the following day. They had been put into a warehouse for the night, perhaps because the City Jail had no room for so many, and sixteen of them women and children. There had been a trial in the afternoon, they said, and when it was done they were told to go home. “But we’re supposed to pay a fine,” old Pamplona said importantly.

Pamplona’s brother Lyons was a thriving orcharder, but Pamplona, slow and sickly, had never amounted to much. This was his moment of glory. He had gone to prison, just like Gandhi, just like Shults, just like on Earth. He was a hero, and delighted.

“A fine?” Andre asked, incredulous. “Money? They know we don’t use their coins—”

“A fine,” Pamplona explained, tolerant of Andre’s ignorance, “is that we have to work for twenty days on the new farm.”

“What new farm?”

“Some kind of new farm the Bosses are going to make.”

“The Bosses are going in for farming?” Everybody laughed.

“They’d better, if they want to eat,” a woman said.

“What if you don’t go work on this new farm?”

“I don’t know,” Pamplona said, getting confused. “Nobody said. We weren’t supposed to talk. It was a court, with a judge. The judge talked.”

“Who was the judge?”

“Macmilan.”

“Young Macmilan?”

“No, the old one, the Councillor. The young one was there, though. A big fellow he is! Like a tree! And he smiles all the time. A fine young man.”

Lev came, at a run, having just got news of the prisoners’ return. He hugged the first ones he came to, in the excited group that had gathered in the street to welcome them. “You’re back, you’re back—All of you?”

“Yes, yes, they’re all back, you can go eat supper now!”

“The others, Hari and Vera—”

“No, not them. They didn’t see them.”

“But all of you—They didn’t hurt you?”

“Lev said he couldn’t eat anything till you got back, he’s been fasting.”

“We’re all right, go eat some dinner, what a stupid thing to do!”

“They treated you well?”

“Like guests, like guests,” old Pamplona asserted. “We’re all brothers. Isn’t that so? A good big breakfast they gave us, too!”

“Our own rice we grew, that’s what they gave us. Fine hosts! to lock their guests up in a barn as black as night and as cold as last night’s porridge, I have an ache in every bone and I want a bath, every one of those guard people was crawling with lice, I saw one right on his neck, the one that arrested me, a louse the size of your fingernail, ugh, I want a bath!” This was Kira, a buxom woman who lisped because she had lost her two front teeth; she said she didn’t miss the teeth, they got in the way of her talking anyhow. “Who’ll put me up for the night? I’m not going to walk home to East Village with every bone aching and a dozen lice creeping up and down my backbone!” Five or six people at once offered her a bath, a bed, hot food. All the freed prisoners were looked after and made much of. Lev and Andre went off down the little side street that led to Lev’s home. They walked in silence for a while.

“Thank God!” said Lev.

“Yes. Thank God. They’re back; it worked. If only Vera and Jan and the others had come back with them.”

“They’re all right. But this lot—none of them was ready, they hadn’t thought about it, they hadn’t prepared themselves. I was afraid they’d be hurt, I was afraid they’d be frightened, get angry. It was our responsibility, we led the sit-down. We got them arrested. But they held out. They weren’t frightened, they didn’t fight, they held fast!” Lev’s voice shook. “It was my responsibility.”

“Ours,” Andre said. “We didn’t send them, you didn’t send them; they went. They chose to go. You’re worn out, you ought to eat. Sasha!” They were at the door of the house. “Make this man eat. They fed his prisoners, now you feed him.”

Sasha, sitting by the hearth sanding down a hoe handle, looked up; his mustache bristled, his eyebrows bristled over his deep-set eyes. “Who can make my son do what he doesn’t want to do?” he said. “If he wants to eat, he knows where the soup bowl is.”