Inner Circle

by Jerzy Peterkiewicz

  I knew what he implied by the future present. Leeds had a fool’s genius for innuendoes. ‘Leeds, Joker! come here,’ I said with as much authority as I could possibly give to my tone. ‘We must stand in a circle.’

  ‘Too late,’ Leeds answered. ‘Dear cousins, lift up your hearts and your big mouths. The goodies are falling from the sky.’

  And they were, in white and pink clouds: the food flakes sent down through the openings in the domes. ‘Look, a blue dome is gliding over our heads. Seems so near.’

  September spoke without any fear, and then came Rain’s cry:

  ‘Don’t eat! Try not to eat.’

  But all of us, except her, had already swallowed some flakes. For we were hungry and the hunger increased with the sight of food. I knew from previous experience that sleep came soon after eating, and after that the feeling of satiation. I was therefore afraid of sudden drowsiness, not so much for myself as for September, whom each one of the boxes tried to intercept.

  ‘September, take my hand,’ I said in a loud whisper, and she stopped looking at the sky. Then her hand, warm and moist, touched mine. Now I had them both at my side, Rain and September. ‘If you get sleepy,’ I spoke into her ear, ‘don’t worry, September, I shall be near you. And I’ll try to keep awake.’

  ‘Are they moving closer, Dover?’ September didn’t mean the domes, I knew that.

  ‘No, of course not. The boxes never move. They are stationary.’

  ‘But someone must have put them here in a line.’

  ‘Yes, September, someone did that. But, can’t you see, they are all fixed to the ground.’

  In accordance with all my recent misjudgements, I was, of course, proved wrong, and very soon. The boxes shifted during the night. We had fallen asleep, as we expected, after eating the sky flakes, but Rain managed to hold the three of us together. I woke up, feeling the pull of their hands on my belt. They pulled the hooks to warn me at once of what had happened.

  Our feet were propped up against the thresholds of two boxes. Their doors couldn’t swing because our legs had, in fact, prevented them from moving altogether.

  And now the thresholds prevented the feet from shifting down.

  ‘September, my good girl, you are stuck.’ I heard Leeds, but couldn’t see him at all. Not even his turret of a neck. ‘Lift up your feet, Dover, just as you can always lift up your heart. First your left, then your right, go on! there’s a brave lad. Oh, dear, you are positively glued on.’

  ‘Leeds, please come and help us. I feel so heavy. Where are you, Leeds!’

  September had drops of sweat on her forehead and they were rolling over her eyelids. Yet she didn’t dare to wipe them off in fear of losing Rain’s hand or mine.

  ‘Actually, I am standing behind the boxes. I mean on this side, the proper side, that is. Must have walked in my sleep. Silly Leeds, always doing the right thing when no one is looking. Should I have said “modest Leeds” perhaps? Well, never mind.’

  ‘Please, come here. You are my husband, the father of my child.’ I didn’t like this kind of plea being used by my second wife.

  ‘The child hasn’t been born yet,’ I said rather primly. And I tried to pull my feet out, one at a time. No, it didn’t work.

  ‘Bang! you’ve hit the nail on the head. Old sulk Dover has made a medical observation. Quite valid, too. Speaking for myself as a prospective father, I insist on a hygienic birth. That’s what the boxes are for, among other things.’

  ‘She won’t go in,’ Rain spoke with admirable assurance and calm. She didn’t give a warning, she stated a fact in the future present, as Leeds would have put it, or I myself for that matter. I turned to Rain, rubbing my cheek against the sand, and apologized to her, to September, and to the sand under my recumbent body:

  ‘Don’t blame me too much for taking you out of that little island. But it was also dangerous for our circle, in a different way. We had to leave sooner or later.’

  I received a blue smile from the depth of her eyes.

  ‘Of course, we had to leave. The tree rock was made sacred through rebirth and sacrifice. Besides, Dover, you entrusted the seeds to me. They were meant to be cast elsewhere.’

  The seeds. Yes, I had forgotten about them. Two small grains only, so hard and black. Confidence of a childish sort returned to me.

  ‘Leeds, you belong to my circle!’ I said. ‘You shouldn’t be there. Now, don’t play one of your pranks.’

  ‘What pranks! I can’t cross the line. And September should be by her husband’s side. Just push your pretty legs a bit farther into the box, and you’ll glide straight into hubby’s arms.’

  ‘Don’t listen to him, September.’ Saying this, Rain first moved her elbows, then bent her legs. In a second she was up and looking at us.

  ‘If you stay there, Leeds. . . .’ Her voice became translucent, as it was on the islet.

  ‘If you prefer to stay there, you’d better cling to that box with all the strength you have.’

  I raised my neck and could just see his, jutting out, a turret misplaced between two boxes.

  ‘Where is Joker?’ I asked Rain.

  ‘Safe. Sitting in the sea. He chose the best place for protection.’

  ‘Fishing for Sailor, eh?’ the turret moved and fired a volley of chuckles.

  ‘My legs!’ September cried from the ground.

  ‘Press your back hard against the sand. I am coming.’ And Rain took September under the arms and dragged her away from the box. Then she helped me. Her strength flowed into my limbs and I was able to sit, then kneel.

  ‘The pain,’ I said, ‘here in my toes.’

  ‘My whole body aches,’ September whispered.

  Before the boxes swung their doors wide out and pushed forward, we were some twenty yards away from them, and I could feel the cool shadows of clouds passing overhead. No domes: we stood outside their protection or supervision, whichever meaning we attached to them at that dangerous moment. I watched Rain in front of us, the weight of her body resting on one leg which was in the humid sand up to the ankle.

  ‘I am ready,’ she said.

  I didn’t understand her intention. The shifting boxes, however, puzzled me far more, as well as those who guided them from above, if guidance were needed. The control might also come from underground, through the tubes, metal discs or micro-screens. Still, whoever and whatever manoeuvred the boxes, he and it couldn’t be found inside them, for there was nothing inside, except smells, sounds and pictures.

  I glanced beyond Rain. That neck of Leeds was still jutting out between two boxes, an observation turret or—what? How stupid of me, Leeds could have done some of the tricks. Pushing, too. He had been so efficient a pusher when he ran on the outside of our circle during the journey to the tree. Yet he had certainly not assembled several hundred boxes along the full stretch of the Safety Zone to welcome us on our return.

  ‘Look at the sand, Rain, they are pushing at it again,’ September said. Rain nodded and raised her right hand. It swung out in a wide opening gesture, very much like one of those doors, and the sun seemed to illuminate each finger separately. This lasted a moment longer than the flickering of light, or maybe the eyes retained Rain’s gesture in a concave mirror of suspense.

  Then the earth surface answered with a double thunder. It split, and a zigzagging line began to run along the boxes. The doors in front tripped one by one over it and fell down flat, the line sliced triangles under some boxes and they vanished in a whistle of dust. The clouds over our heads, the natural clouds, now appeared to be lower, they were sliding over one another, the dark over the grey in the likeness of the coloured domes.

  ‘September, Rain, Joker!’ I cried, stretching my hands out, no longer a binder of hoops but a loose axis in a broken wheel. ‘What is happening to us? What is. . . .’

  ‘The seeds, Dover!’ I heard Rain’s triumphant voice. ‘I have thrown them into the mouth of the earth, and look, Dover, how hungry she is!’

  The earth wa
s hungry below its bare trampled surface, between its veins of ore, within the subterranean channels of extinct water; once the soil had swallowed the first seeds, it wanted food to nourish them, it had to twist its own entrails, turn its skin inside out and devour the moist gravels in the sand.

  I saw metallic discs rising like crazy moons into the sky. I saw tubes and cables chasing the cracks which split the surface, or was it the other way round? Then a large reinforcement of boxes slowly crawled in. Near the front line they accelerated. Dust obscured shapes. Only doors were heard creaking, whining, slamming.

  ‘Cousins, it looks like a door-to-door stampede.’ Wherever he was hiding, Leeds certainly sounded true to himself, a wit for all occasions. To my annoyance September tried to call him through the shuffling noises; now she wanted to be by his side, regardless of danger.

  Finally, when the cracking surface trapped the new advance of boxes, the low clouds opened over our heads, and the rain, real rain, poured into the thirsty stomach of the earth. It swelled and belched out the hygienic contraptions inserted by man.

  ‘I can see a tunnel going right into the Underground,’ said a gurgling sort of voice. ‘And if this rain doesn’t stop, it will sure drown a terrible lot of kid brothers in all those tube trains.’ Joker wasn’t joking: he believed that children came from underground.

  2

  Had any of the skymen wanted a report from me as leader of a broken circle, I would have reported two human species lost, one gained, and the sudden reappearance of a natural species, hitherto totally extinct in the British Isles. I think I would then describe the phenomenon in some detail.

  It happened during the torrential rain, when exactly I couldn’t tell, because mindful of my responsibilities, I protected my two wives with my whole body.

  Otherwise, they might have been washed down into one of the crevices, for the ground was flooded and the stones slippery. I took the emerging phenomenon for a mushroom.

  One knew so much about mushrooms, those in the earth and those in the sky, from the old micro-documents always available for viewing in any of the boxes. But no fungus could have grown that quickly and that high unless it exploded into the atmosphere.

  In no time the thing was taller than September, later it became twice my height and size, finally it spread its top somewhere within a thinning cloud.

  ‘Isn’t it beautiful and real, my tree?’ Rain combed her wet hair with one hand and with the other pointed to the sky. ‘It’s even more real, Dover, than the rain from the clouds.’

  Then she and September embraced the tree. They needed their four arms to encompass the trunk.

  ‘A real tree

  Sees only me.’

  September laughed at her nursery rhyme, but it was truly meant for a child. For the same night, after the rain had stopped, she gave premature birth to a very normal child. She laid the boy in a hollow scooped out by the gushing water under the first giant tree.

  On the screens inside the boxes we had, of course, learnt all about the birds and the bees, though we were not expected to see a single living specimen outside. It was supposed to be nine months for a human cocoon. But September’s pregnancy lasted only nine days. Her womb must have been as much starved as the belly of the earth. They both rushed into growth, feeding themselves on whatever they could find and devour within their dormant flesh. The first tree, Rain’s cedar, skipped centuries, leaping bough after bough into its own glory of being a tree. It required but a few urgent hours to place its crown on a cloud. This is the beginning of my reign, it rustled to the light and moisture on its branches.

  Other trees followed the ascension of the cedar, but they grew with lesser urgency, and took days instead of hours to reach the sky.

  As for the human losses, they were presumed rather than final.

  Joker had swum from wet to wetter, out of the sea into the flood, which he didn’t think funny at all; then he got stuck in the frame of a shattered box, plucked some courage and looked farther than his feet. He saw the opening of a tunnel, degutted from cables and pipes, and informed us about his discovery. Unable to move back, Joker pondered over the continuing splatter above and below, then passed his worry on to me.

  No, he didn’t want any more kid brothers to drown, especially in the Tube. Water would travel on the Circle Line, just think of that. Would it hurt to dive, he asked me, into a watery sort of tunnel, and before I could say yes, he jumped, crashing that frame. And September told me she would miss him very much, because Joker was such a recent husband.

  Leeds had vanished between complaints, so to speak. He first complained about the boxes. There he was most loyally behind them, and they treated him abominably. He got pushed around, had his neck and buttocks knocked on an average by two doors per second; moreover, when he finally decided to take refuge in one of the stationary boxes, he couldn’t squeeze in at all. Disgraceful negligence in high places, he grunted, they should have been designed to fit a chap who had put on some weight. He had no idea that it could ever happen to him, meaning, of course, the insufficient size of the box, not his prodigious enlargement.

  Well, so that’s that, Leeds observed amidst the swishing strands of rain; he had to lodge a formal complaint. A chap needed reassurance from the authorities on whose side he had always tried to be; didn’t he say often enough that all was well under the domes, despite overcrowding? Good food, heated air, convenient tubes everywhere, micro-screens, micro-entertainment, sex whenever jostling didn’t interfere, and many other goodies free of charge, free of work, free of old age.

  But—justice had to be invoked once in a while, when a chap wanted to be reassured that he was well looked after, boxes or no boxes. Oh, yes, he read in a screen-microbook about previous complaints. Not very many, no, just one or two, and the skymen considered them with great care. On whose side did he think the skymen were, I asked Leeds. On justice’s side, of course, Leeds replied. And after slapping his belly to indicate determination, he wobbled into the debris of the hygiene boxes, and left us under the rain clouds in the Safety Zone, before the birth of the cedar and the birth of his own child.

  Now he was probably whirling in the crowds, a barrel with a turret, set in this precious jewel, this multitudinous England. No matter what might yet befall Leeds and his complaint, I presumed him to be a returnable loss.

  Meanwhile, I seemed to have regained my central position; I had a smallish circle with two wives and a baby, no male intruders, and giant trees formed our natural line of defence. The boxes had withdrawn from the Safety Zone altogether; the warning signs lay either broken or buried in the sand; the domes ceased to provide us with food outside their range. We were, in fact, on our own.

  It amused me, while resting in the shade of the cedar, to think that the Safety Zone had reversed its original meaning and become a safe place, after all. I experienced a curious sense of freedom, limited by the zonal area and yet unlimited in the new growth.

  The two black seeds had stirred a revolt under the surface. They must have attracted bits of matter from the deeper layers, and cleansed them of lifeless dust. New roots groped their way towards the soil, thin, timid and yet obedient to the instinct that pushed them up.

  Rain was our food taster; she walked about under her trees, she walked along the seashore, she bent over green wisps sprouting from the earth, she buried her fingers in the moist patches probing the sand for mushrooms, real mushrooms juicy with real rain. We ate whatever she chose for us; we often had pains twisting the bowels and would retch the new food out with more pain. But slowly, day after day, we were acquiring the knowledge and the need of natural nourishment. And I liked drinking fresh rain-water from Rain’s cupped hands. I also desired her, because now she had cedar fragrance on her skin and the embracing warmth of sea waves in her touch and voice.

  ‘September wants you,’ she told me when I openly asked her to join her body with mine. ‘She is the mother of many children to come.’

  ‘Why not you, Rain?’ I embraced he
r, breathing in the fragrance of growth which she absorbed from the air of this safe Safety Zone. ‘You are also my wife.’ Then I added meekly in a whisper: ‘My first wife.’

  ‘I know, Dover. But now I stand within two generations, surrounded by trees born in my sign and by men born in the sign of September.’

  ‘Rain in the centre of a double circle.’

  ‘You might call it that, Dover. It has the roundness which needs no sides.’

  But Rain neither played the part of a priestess nor suggested by her behaviour that our legs and bellies rubbed off purity from love each time they met in an act. On the contrary, she encouraged September to invite my desires, she taught her postures and signs so that her body would be as flexible as ten women together displaying love to a man.

  ‘Remember, remember, you held my head, September,’ she said and smiled. ‘I will hold yours today and see love with your own eyes.’

  Rain knelt and drew September’s head to her breasts; she told her to embrace my neck with her legs and September did that, staring at me until Rain closed her eyes. It was Rain’s mouth speaking the caresses of September, and it was September’s distance under her shut eyelids which ended deep between the limbs of Rain. Linked together, they did possess me both with one body and one awareness.

  ‘We are not jealous of each other,’ Rain said after the act, and September confirmed this with a kiss between the breasts. ‘Why should Leeds or Joker matter to you, Dover? We are all sharers of the same beginning, chosen perhaps by the child tree, perhaps tossed about by coincidence.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind Leeds. He has far less power than I thought.’

  ‘What is power?’ asked September. To which a quick answer came. It was visual and suspended like a threat. Along the line where the clouds seemed to be edged with the colours of the domes, a winding script appeared. It resembled the characters inscribed on the rock, which Sailor had called Chinese, but soon the script loosened and shaped itself into large letters.

  Contaminated area below. Beware of trees.