Pallahaxi

by Michael Coney

  I slipped back to the house intending to say goodbye to my room, but was waylaid by mother. She was spreading bread with winternut paste; a pot of cocha juice stood on the table.

  “Drove, I want you to have something to eat before we go. You haven’t been eating well lately.”

  “Listen, mother,” I said patiently, “I’m not hungry. We never have the things I like, anyway.”

  She took this as criticism of her housekeeping abilities. “How can I be expected to feed everyone on the money I get, with all this rationing? You’ve no idea what it’s like. There’s nothing in the stores; nothing at all. Maybe you ought to do the shopping yourself someday, young man, instead of moping about the house all the holidays. Then you’d know what it’s like,”

  “I only said I wasn’t hungry, mother.”

  “Food is fuel for the body, Drove.” Father was standing by the doorway. “Just as distil is fuel for the motorcart. Without fuel in the form of food your body will not run. You will get cold, and die. In my position with the Government we are able to obtain food which others, less fortunate than ourselves, must do without. You should realize how lucky you are.”

  In a few short words my father was thus able to drive me insane with rage, while denying me the possibility of any reprisal. I wondered if he had the perception to know what he was doing. I wondered if he knew how much I disliked being told simple facts which I knew already, listening to educational comparisons of bodies and machines during the holidays and, above all, being told that I am lucky. I simmered quietly while we ate a dish of fried fish and dryfruit.

  My mother had been giving me speculative glances from time to time and I had thought that she was aware of my mood, but I should have known better. After the final glance—which could almost be described as crafty—she addressed father.

  “I wonder if we’ll see anything of that little girl again this summer, let’s see, what was her name, Hurt?”

  Father answered absently. “Daughter of the Cannery President, Konch? Goldenlips, or some such name. Fine girl. Fine girl.”

  “No, no, Burt. A little girl, she and Drove were such friends. Such a pity, her father was an innkeeper.”

  “Oh? Then I don’t think I remember.”

  I mumbled something and left the table quickly before mother could get around to her original intention, which was to ask me the name of the girl and to watch my face closely as I told her. I ran up the stairs to my room.

  The girl was not little; she was slightly smaller than myself and the same age, and her name—which I shall never forget so long as I live—was Pallahaxi-Browneyes.

  I stood at the window of my room and watched a group of kids playing around the public heater on the other side of the street, and thought about Browneyes. I wondered what she had been doing all winter in her magical town of Pallahaxi, and whether she had thought of me at all. I wondered if she would remember me, when we met again. Childhood days pass slowly and a lot happens in a year, and, despite my mother’s remarks, Browneyes and I had hardly known each other. We had only got around to speaking to each other in the last couple of days of the holiday; that’s how shy kids can be, at that age.

  But no day had passed since when I hadn’t seen her face in my mind’s eye; the cute dimples in her cheeks when she smiled—which was often—the wide shiny brownness of her eyes when she was sad—which was once, when we said goodbye and my parents looked on with indulgent relief. She was the daughter of an innkeeper and she lived in a house where people drank, and I know my parents were glad the holiday was over.

  The last thing I took from my room was a small green bracelet. Browneyes had dropped it one day and I’d picked it up but I hadn’t returned it. It would serve as a simple re-introduction, because I still felt shy about meeting her again. I slipped the trinket into my pocket and went down the stairs to rejoin my parents who were ready to go.

  As I passed through the kitchen I noticed a glass jar, empty. I picked it up and examined it closely, and smelt it.

  Mother had thrown my ice-goblin away.

  CHAPTER 2

  The final preparations were carried out in silence. Father lit the burners in ceremonial fashion while I, still smarting from the underhand way in which my ice-goblin had been disposed of, watched from the required distance and hoped the thing would blow up in his face. There was the usual muffled ‘poof’ as the evaporated distil ignited, and before long steam drifted from among the rods and cylinders and a stewing sound from the boiler announced that the motorcart was ready. We climbed in: father and mother side by side in the front seat, myself behind, next to the boiler. The friendly warmth soothed my temper; it is impossible for anybody to feel moody for long in the back seat of a motorcart. Soon we were passing through the back streets of Alika; people watched us in silence with none of the friendly waving I remembered from previous years.

  “Freezing Parls I,” a little girl with no arms shouted.

  We passed the final public heater, a small thing of vertical tubes leaking a tiny feather of steam, then we were in open country. Father and mother were talking to each other but I could not hear what they said; the pistons were hissing and thumping right behind me. I leaned forward.

  “Is that where they found Aunt Zu?” I shouted.

  Of course I knew they had found her there; people talk. It seemed that a search party had been sent out, a small number of brave spirits fortified with heavy furs and hot bricks and, I should imagine, stomachs full of distil. They had found Aunt Zu just a hundred paces from the safety of the public heater. She had been hugging an anemone tree, trying to climb its slippery trunk to crawl into the dubious haven of its stomach in search of warmth. She was, they said, screaming continuously and her fingers had dug so deeply into the resilient flesh of the tree that they had to be levered apart with sticks. She was naked, so my informant told me ghoulishly; by this time the story was circulating around school. The tree had snatched the clothes from her back and eaten them, but Aunt Zu was too heavy to be lifted and too weak to climb.

  “I would rather you did not refer to your aunt, Drove,” mother said. “There are some things it is better to forget. Look, isn’t that a lovely view?”

  Hills rolled away before us like the slow waves of the sea when the grume is at its height. Here and there were cultivated fields of root crops but mostly the land was open range where lox grazed peacefully in the continuous sun of early summer. Everything was fresh and green after the long winter and the streams and rivers still flowed; later on they would dry up with the heat. Nearby a team of four lox dragged a heavy plough through the soil; two lorin walked upright between them, occasionally patting their smooth flanks and no doubt giving mental encouragement. A farmer sat atop the plough on a precarious seat, uttering meaningless farming cries. Like many people who spend their life under the sun Phu he was mutated, his favour taking the form of an extra arm on his right side. In the hand he brandished a whip.

  We passed occasional small villages, taking in water from time to time at tiny cottages where farmwives eyed us sullenly from low doorways and children could be seen lurking within. Here the mutations were many and father complimented one man on his multifingered hands.

  The man continued to work the pump, water gushing in rhythmic spurts. “Phu looked kindly on me, I reckon,” he panted. “This is hard country. A man needs all the help he can get.” His fingers danced among the machinery of the motorcart, checking a pin here, tightening a nut there. He pushed an old leather funnel into the watertank and tilted the bucket carefully.

  “I suppose things get short here, with the war…” ventured father with surprising diffidence. For once he was out of his element, here in this primitive country. Through the open door of the hovel I caught sight of a lorin, actually sitting in a chair.

  “What war?” asked the man.

  I thought a lot about this remark as we continued our journey into the barren lands of the equatorial regions and the sun circled
closer and closer to the horizon. Travelling, I had lost track of time, and with the continuous sunlight of early summer, one standard day followed another with only periodic tiredness to acquaint me of their passage. It seemed that the only elements of existence were the desert, the occasional ground-drivet, the seat beneath me, and the chugging of the steam engine.

  Then there was a diversion; we met a fish-truck broken down at the roadside. The crew of two sat dejectedly beside their stricken vehicle. In the manner of their kind, a few lorin had materialized from the empty desert and sat with the men in pointless mimicry.

  My father mumbled something to mother and I have no doubt that he was considering driving straight on by, but he braked at the last moment and stopped several paces past the truck. There was a dreadful stench of fish.

  “I can take you as far as Bexton Post,” father called over his shoulder as the two men hurried up. “You can get a message out from there. You’ll have to ride on the fuel bunker, there’s no room inside.”

  The men grunted thanks, swung themselves on behind me, and we were moving again. “Hello there, Sonny,” one of them shouted through the maze of flashing rods.

  “What went wrong with the truck?” I yelled back. I resented them invading my privacy and thought the question might annoy the man.

  He grinned ruefully and stepped around the running board, seating himself firmly beside me and forcing me to edge closer to the boiler. I stared ahead, furious with myself for having invited conversation. For once my parents had been proved right. This is a class of person it does not pay to encourage.

  “Freezing thing’s freezing well clogged up,” he explained earthily. “No distil, y’see.” He glanced at the cans on the fuel bunker. “Except for some lucky freezers. We had the truck converted for woodburning—that way you have to build a freezing great fire under the boiler and you have to remember to keep throwing on logs. Well, we remembered that all right; it was the cannery was at fault. They forgot to give us brushes to clean out the tubes—like long thin flues they are. And now they’re all clogged up with freezing soot and the freezing truck won’t go.”

  “Listen, there’s no need to swear like that.”

  “Cocky little freezer, aren’t you? Your dad’s some sort of Parl, I reckon, is he? Must be, to run a motorcart like this.” His eyes kept straying to the cans and his presence had become overpowering, menacing. My parents sat in front, side by side, oblivious, discussing shortages.

  “Father holds an important position,” I said firmly to hide the fear within. The phraseology was not mine—I was repeating the words I’d heard my mother use on many occasions. For the first time it occurred to me that I was unsure of their meaning. I visualized a group of pinnacles, snowy like mountain peaks in winter. Father sat atop the tallest, while his underlings perched on subordinate peaks. The general public huddled in the valleys, awed by the majesty of it all.

  “I’m sure he does, lad. Sits at the same desk every day, I’ll bet—except once a year when he takes you all on holiday to the coast to watch the grume, and you stay at a hotel called Seaview.”

  “If you must know, father has a holiday cottage at Pallahaxi.”

  “I suppose he would have.” He smiled at me with blackened teeth, his eyes remaining cold. “Now, let me ask you something. What do you think I do?”

  “You drive a fish truck.”

  “And that’s all there is to it? No, boy. I see the world. Or at least”—he corrected himself—” I see the land of Erto, all of it, not just the little bit between Alika and Pallahaxi. I’ve driven the whole coast from the old cannery at Pallahaxi right around to Horlox in the north and Ibana in the south where Erto meets with Asta and the border guards are—or were, before the freezing war made it so you didn’t know where the border is. And I’ve driven the old border road both north and south in the shadow of the Great Central Range where the sun Phu is like a furnace in the sky and no two animals look alike—and no two men, either. You know your geography, boy?”

  I knew what I’d been taught, and I knew this was not the right time to air my knowledge; this gross fellow would contradict everything I said. It is difficult for a person like me, one who has not travelled much, to visualize the globe, the planet on which we live. I’d been taught to think of it all as a ball held in a hand. The ball is the world, the hand is the single continental mass. This mass is divided into two by the first set of knuckles, representing the Great Central Range and the boundary between Erto and Asta. One half (the back of the hand) is Asta, the other half (the fingers) represent the deeply indented land of Erto. This hand-continent wraps almost around the globe, leaving three oceans: the huge polar oceans and the long, narrow ocean joining the two, through which the grume flows in summer. I can visualize this, just and only just.

  The fish-trucker was talking on. “I’ve been caught in snow and ice, all out of fuel and only the little heat left in the boiler to keep warm by; the cold eating in at the gaps in my clothes enough to drive another man mad, and I’ve come through it. I’ve driven through the wetlands and had the truck sink up to its axles and an ice-devil snatch at the wheels, and my foot too—and I’ve organized lorin and harnessed lox and dragged the truck free. I’ve been attacked by grummets on the coast road and beaten them off with a shovel until the land all around was white with feathers and red with blood, and those that were left took off screaming. Now, what do you think of that, boy?”

  “I think you’re pretty much as conceited as my father is,” I said sourly.

  Suddenly he laughed, a giant roar of genuine amusement which sent his disgusting fishy breath rolling around my face. “And you’re right, boy; you’ve hit it right on the head. It’s what a man thinks of himself that matters—not what others think of him. I’m sure your father’s a good man in his own way, for all that he’s a Parl. Well, now. Are we friends?” He shoved his hand under my nose and I noticed for the first time that he possessed only two fingers on each hand; giant pincers starting at the wrist. His hand would never have served as an example of continental mass. I shook the strange object, more from interest than friendship.

  By now his companion, no doubt feeling out of things, had thrust his narrow head perilously through the whirling machinery between us and was joining in the conversation, a connecting rod flashing an inch from his throat. Only a man with as long a neck as he could have accomplished this feat.

  So the journey continued and I began to enjoy the company of my strange travelling companions. The large man beside me introduced himself as Pallahaxi-Grope and his friend as Juba-Lofty; and between them they contrived to spin yarns of the road until the houses appeared before us and the darting birds in the sky signified that we had reached Bexton Post. I don’t like being taken for a fool and I hoped they hadn’t thought I’d believed all they told me. I said so.

  Grope squeezed my shoulder in his bifurcated grip as the motorcart slowed down. “It’s the meaning behind the story that counts, Drove boy. A story is told for a purpose, and the way it’s told has a purpose too. The truth or otherwise of the story is immaterial. Remember that.”

  They shook hands again, thanked my father for the ride, then walked off in the direction of the message post, a small hut white with newspigeon dung.

  I had not been looking forward to our arrival at Bexton Post. Before we left Alika there had been rumours of a clampdown on travelling due to the war, and I was half expecting to find there was a message for us saying we had to turn back. I was relieved that father ignored the message post, instead making his way along the single, dusty main street in the direction of the town’s only eating place, while the newspigeons clattered overhead.

  Bexton Post is a small town, hardly more than a cluster of dwellings and stores which owe their existence to the message post and the fact of the town’s position at the edge of the Yellow Mountains which separate the desert from the fertile coastal plain. The hills ahead were bare and brown and sculptured by erosion, but be
yond them lay grazing lands, rivers and towns. I could hardly wait to see something green again.

  The township was busy at this hour. People thronged the streets, peering into windows which displayed newspapers, dried and canned food and weirdly shaped examples of lorin art while they waited for the steam-buses which were shortly due to depart. The main purpose of these vehicles was to transport the pigeons to the next message posts in the communications networks, but they doubled as passenger vehicles for the sake of economy. Father bought a newspaper; in this outlandish spot it took the form of a series of news releases pinned together, rather than a paper as we in Alika understand it. THE BEXTON MERCURY, the flysheet announced grandly, STRAIGHT FROM THE PIGEON’S LEG. We entered a stuva bar and sat down to a poor meal of thin broth, vegetables and dry-fruit. Water was rationed; at first I thought we weren’t getting any, but I saw father show his card to the waiter; a strange furry little man, but pleasant.

  Father was reading the paper; he uttered an exclamation of annoyance.

  “There’s nothing in here about the opening of the new cannery!”

  “Maybe it was in yesterday’s paper, Burt,” said mother anxiously, glancing around. I sympathized with her; father had a knack of attracting attention. Everyone in the stuva bar seemed to be looking at us.

  “Mestler’s not going to like this. The release should have been today. Why do we always have these foul-ups; that’s what I’d like to know? Rax!” He fell mercifully silent, staring into his water.

  “Forget it, dear. This is a holiday,” murmured mother soothingly.

  I felt compelled to make a comment; encouraged, I think, by my father’s despondency. “I don’t see that it matters. It doesn’t make any difference if people are told about it or not.”

  Father’s eyes had accumulated little creases around them and muscles were pulsing at the corners of his jaw. “Are you suggesting that I, and Parliament, do not know our own business best, Drove?”