The Changes Trilogy

by Peter Dickinson

  Yes, they did smell. Geoffrey hadn’t remembered that. Or perhaps five years in a land without exhaust fumes had sharpened his senses. There was a very French-looking boy fishing wetly in the corner of the basin. Geoffrey dredged in his mind for scraps of language.

  “Nous sommes Anglais,” he said, shy with the certainty that he wouldn’t be able to manage much more.

  “Oh, are you?” said the boy. “So’m I. You mean you’ve only just come over? I say, you are late.” He gave a short laugh, as if at a joke he didn’t expect anyone else to see. “I’ll take you along to the office, though it’s probably shut—practically no one comes over any more. Monsieur Pallieu will be tickled pink to have a bit of work to do.”

  The “office” was upstairs in a harsh but handsome building close to the quay. It said DEPARTEMENT DES IMMIGRES on the door. There were voices inside.

  “You’re in luck,” said the boy. “He’s probably brought some crony back from lunch to help him swill Pernod.”

  He tapped on the door and lounged in without waiting for an answer, as though it were his own house. From behind they saw a ludicrous change come over his demeanor, as he clutched off his dripping beret and jerked his insolent slouch into respectful attention. He spoke politely.

  “I’ve brought two new immigrés to see you, Monsieur Pallieu. They’re kids.”

  “Diable!” said one voice.

  “Thank you, Ralph,” said another. “Let them come in.”

  The room was extremely hot, and smelled of dust, paper, gasfire, wet umbrellas and people. There were two men in it, a small gray gentleman who didn’t look like anyone in particular and introduced himself as M. Pallieu; and a larger man in an untidy tweed jacket who looked distinctly like somebody—he had a square, tanned face, close-cut black hair above it, and a bristling little moustache in the middle of it. M. Pallieu said he was General Turville, Inspecteur du Département. The two were sitting behind a desk which was covered with neat piles of paper, all containing rows of figures.

  The General muttered in French to M. Pallieu, and went over to stare out of the window at the rain. M. Pallieu fetched two chairs for the children.

  “Please sit down,” he said. “The General has kindly consented to wait while I take your particulars. We were, in fact, discussing the possibility of closing this office down, so you have arrived in the nick. Now”—he reached for a form—“names, please.”

  “Geoffrey and Sally Tinker.”

  “Your ages?”

  Geoffrey looked at Sally.

  “I’m eleven and he’s sixteen,” she said.

  “Do you not know your own age, young man?” said M. Pallieu.

  “They hit me on the head yesterday,” said Geoffrey, “and something seems to have gone wrong with my memory.”

  “Ah.” M. Pallieu didn’t seem at all surprised, but went on asking questions in his beautiful English and filling in the form. He had nearly finished when he said “Do you possess any money?”

  “I’ve got thirty gold sovereigns, and I suppose we could sell the boat if we had to.”

  “You came in your own boat? It is not stolen?”

  “No. It belonged to my Uncle Jacob, but he’s dead, and Sally is sure he left it to me.”

  “Ce bâteau-là?” the General barked from the window, so odd and abrupt a sound that at first Geoffrey thought he was only clearing his throat.

  “Yes, that’s her. She’s called Quern.”

  The General jerked his head at M. Pallieu, who went across the room and looked out of the window. He sounded a little less kindly when he turned back and spoke again.

  “Let us have this clear. You claim to have come from Wey-mouth in that white motorboat we can all see down there?”

  “Yes,” said Geoffrey. “Why?”

  “He doesn’t think we could have done it in a motorboat,” said Sally.

  “Exactly,” said M. Pallieu. “Furthermore, it is well known that the government of France is extremely interested to meet immigrés upon whom the English scene does not appear to produce its customary symptoms, and there have been a number of impostors who have made this claim. They expected to be given money.”

  “Did they come in motorboats?” asked Geoffrey.

  “Of course. That appeared to substantiate their claim.”

  “Oh dear,” said Sally.

  “On the other hand,” said M. Pallieu, “they were not children. Nor did many of them have as much as thirty gold sovereigns. With the General’s permission, we had better hear your story and then we can perhaps judge.”

  “They were trying to drown us for being witches,” said Sally, “but Jeff made a fog and swam me round to the harbor and found some of the stuff you put in the engine to make it go and I pushed a man overboard and we got out of the harbor and then the engine stopped and the fog went away and the men came after us in boats and Jeff made a wind and abolished them and mended the engine and I helped him and then I made supper on a sort of oven that went whish with blue fire which came out of a bottle and here we are.”

  “Let us take it more slowly,” said M. Pallieu.

  He asked questions for what seemed hours. Sally had to do most of the answering. The General leaned over the desk and barked occasionally. They kept coming back to the starting of the engine in the harbor and the mending of it out at sea. At one point the General himself tramped down to Quern and nosed around. He came back with some odd things, including a mildewy burgee and a packet of very moldy biscuits. At last they had a low-voiced talk in French. Then M. Pallieu turned to the children.

  “Well,” he said, “we think that either you are telling the truth or that some adult has arranged an extraordinarily thorough piece of deception and used you as a bait. Even so, how would he obtain five-year-old English gingersnaps? So, really, we do not think you are impostors, but we wish there was some way of proving your story. There are many things about it that are most important—this business about making weather, for instance. That would explain much.”

  “Would it help if Jeff stopped the rain?” said Sally.

  The two men looked at him, and he realized he would have to try. He reached up under his jersey, under his left arm, and pulled out the rolled robe. He unrolled it and hung it over the back of a chair while he took his jersey off. Then he put the robe on. Odd how familiar the silly garment felt, as a knight’s armor must, or a surgeon’s mask, something they’d worn as a piece of professional equipment every time they did their job. He opened the casement and leaned his hand on the sill, staring at the sky. He did not feel sure he could do it; the power in him seemed weak, like a radio signal coming from very far away. He felt for the clouds with his mind.

  From above they were silver, and the sun trampled on them, ramming his gold heels uselessly into their clotting softness. But there were frail places in the fabric. Push now, sun, here, at this weakness, ram through with a gold column, warming the under air, hammering it hard, as a smith hammers silver. Turn now, air, in a slow spiral, widening, a spring of summer, warmth drawing in more air as the thermal rises to push the clouds apart, letting in more sun to warm the under air. Now the fields steam, and in the clouds there is a turning lake of blue, a turning sea, spinning the rain away. More sun …

  “He always goes like that,” said Sally. “We never knew when to wake him.”

  In the streets the humps of the cobbles were already dry, and the lines of water between them shone in the early evening light. The cafe proprietor on the far side of the basin was pulling down a blue and red striped awning with CINZANO written on it.

  The General was using the telephone, forcing his fierce personality along the wires to bully disbelieving clerks at the far end. At last he seemed to get the man he wanted, changed his tone and listened for a full two minutes. Then he barked “Merci bien” and put the receiver down. He turned and stared at the children.

  “Vous ne parlez pas français?” he said.

  “Un peu,” said Geoffrey, “mais …” The l
anguage ran into the sand.

  “And I too the English,” said the General. “How they did teach us badly! Monsieur Pallieu will speak, and I will essay to comprehend.”

  “The General,” said M. Pallieu, “has been speaking to the meteorological office at Paris. We wished to know whether this break in the clouds was just coincidence. After all, you might have felt a change coming, and risked it. But, apparently, he is satisfied that you, Mr. Tinker, did the trick yourself. Now, you must understand that the only phenomenon we have actually been able to observe over England during the last five years has been the weather. Most Western powers—France, America, Russia, Germany—have sent agents in to your island, but very few have returned. Some, we think, were killed, and some simply decided to stay: ‘went native,’ you might say. Those who did return brought no useful information, except that the island was now fragmented into a series of rural communities, united by a common hostility to machines of any sort, and by a tendency to try to return to the modes of living and thought that characterized the Dark Ages. The agents themselves say that they felt similar urges, and were tempted to stay too.

  “Of course, at first we tried to send airplanes over, but the pilots, without exception, lost confidence in their ability to fly their machines before they were across the coast. Some managed to turn back but most crashed. Then we tried with pilotless planes; these penetrated further, but were met before long with freak weather conditions of such ferocity that they were broken into fragments.

  “Despite these warnings, a number of English exiles formed a small army, backed financially by unscrupulous interests, and attempted an invasion. They said that the whole thing was a Communist plot, and that the people of England would rally to the banner of freedom. Of the three thousand who left, seven returned in two stolen boats. They told a story of mystery and horror, of ammunition that exploded without cause, of strange monsters in the woods, of fierce battles between troops who were all parts of the same unit, of a hundred men charging spontaneously over a cliff, and so on. Since then we have left England alone.

  “Except for the spy satellites, though even these are to some extent affected by the British phenomenon. They send us very poor pictures, with no detail, but at least we can see the weather pattern. This is very strange. For centuries, the English climate has been an international joke, but now you have perfect weather—endless fine summers, with rain precisely when the crops need it; deep snow every Christmas, followed by iron frosts which break up into early, balmy springs; and then the pattern is repeated. But the pattern itself is freckled with sudden patches of freak weather. There was, for instance, a small thunder area which stayed centered over Norwich for three whole weeks last autumn, while the rest of the country enjoyed ideal harvest weather. There are some extraordinary cloud formations on the Welsh border, and up in Northumberland. But anywhere may break out into a fog, or a storm, or a patch of sun, against all meteorological probability, in just the way you brought the sun to us now.

  “So you are doubly interesting to us, Mr. Tinker. First, because you explain the English weather pattern. And secondly, because you appear to be genuinely immune to the machine phobia which affects anyone who sets foot in England. You seem to be the first convincing case in the twenty million people who have left England.”

  “Twenty million!” said Geoffrey. “How did they all get out?”

  “The hour brings forth the man,” said M. Pallieu, “especially if there is money involved. All one summer the steamers lay off the coast, on the invisible border where the effect begins to manifest itself, and the sailing boats plied out to them. Most had given all they possessed to leave. They came by the hundred thousand. I had twelve men working under me in Morlaix alone, and in Calais they had three whole office buildings devoted to coping with the torrent of refugees. That is what you English were, refugees. When I was your age, Mr. Tinker, I saw the refugees fleeing west before Hitler’s armies, carrying bedding, babies and parrots, wheeling their suitcases in barrows and prams, a weeping, defeated people. That is how they came to us, five years ago.

  “And nobody knows how many have died. There can, one imagines, be no real medicine. Plague must have ravaged the cities. We know from the satellites that London and Glasgow burned for weeks. And still we do not know what has caused this thing.”

  “Why does it matter so much to you?” asked Geoffrey. It was the General who answered.

  “If this can arrive to England,” he said, “it can arrive to France. And to Russia. And to America. Your country has a disease, boy. First we isolate, then we investigate. It is not for England we work, but for Europe, for the world, for France.”

  “Well,” said Geoffrey, “I’ll tell you everything I can, but it isn’t much because I’ve lost my memory. And so will Sal, but I honestly don’t think she knows much about what happens outside Weymouth. Really what I’d like to do is go back, if you’ll help me, and try and find out—not for France or the world or anything, but just to know.” (And for Uncle Jacob: and he wasn’t going to tell them about Radnor, if he could help it.)

  “Can I come too?” said Sally.

  “No,” said Geoffrey and M. Pallieu together.

  “Yes, she must go,” said the General.

  “I don’t think I like it here,” said Sally. “I think those things are horrible.”

  She pointed out of the window at a Renault squealing ecstatically around a right-angled bend at sixty mph and accelerating away across the bridge, watched by a benign gendarme.

  “You would soon be accustomed to them,” said M. Pallieu.

  “You’d better stay, Sal,” said Geoffrey. “Honestly, England sounds much more dangerous. Nobody is going to drown you here, just for drawing pictures.”

  The General grunted and looked at Sally.

  “You are right, mamselle, you must go,” he said. “Your brother has no memory of what arrives in England today. He must have a guide, and you are the only possible. Michel, it is necessary.” He spoke firmly in French to. M. Pallieu, and Geoffrey, used now to the sound of the language, grasped that he was saying that the children had not much to tell, but might possibly find out more than previous agents. Then he turned to Geoffrey.

  “Young man, with your powers you have weapons that are stronger, in the conditions, than the antitank gun. If we send you to England, what will you do? You cannot explore a whole island, two hundred thousand square miles.”

  “I think I’d go and explore the freak weather centers,” said Geoffrey. “That one on the Welsh borders sounds interesting.”

  “Why?” The General pounced on him, overbore him, wore him down with stares and grunts. In the end it seemed simplest to tell them about Uncle Jacob’s message, and the gossip about the Radnor border.

  “Understood,” said the General. “We must direct you to that point. You will find the location and the cause of the disturbance. And when you are returned, you can make us some more French weather. For the five years past we have endured your horrible English weather. The rain must go somewhere, is it not, Michel?”

  He laughed, a harsh yapping noise, as if he were not used to the exercise.

  “Yes, General,” said M. Pallieu sadly.

  Chapter 4

  BACK

  A fortnight later, in a warm dusk, they were lounging up the Solent under the wings of a mild wind from the southwest, passengers only, on a beautiful thirty-foot ketch skippered by Mr. Raison, a solemn fat furniture designer who’d been one of the first to leave England. The General had chosen him, hauled him all the way up from Nice, because he had once kept a yacht on Beaulieu River, with his own smart teak bungalow by the shore. He had spent every weekend of his English life sailing devotedly on those waters, until he could smell his way home in a pitch-black gale.

  The crew was English too. They were brothers called Basil and Arthur. Six years before they had lived near Bournemouth, fishermen in the off season, but making most of their livelihood out of trips for tourists in the delicious
summer months. Now they owned a small garage in Brest, which the General had threatened to close down unless they joined the adventure—but Geoffrey, knowing them now, realized they would have come of their own accord if they had been asked in the right way.

  The ketch belonged to an angry millionaire, who hadn’t been willing to lend it until he received a personal telephone call from the President of France. (His wife had put on her tiara to listen to the call on an extension.) It was the best boat anyone knew of which did not have an engine. The point was that they still knew absurdly little about the reaction of England to machines. Would the people sense the presence of a strange engine, even if it wasn’t running? Would the weather gather its forces to drive them back? Sally thought not, but it wasn’t worth the risk.

  They were going to have to rely on an engine in the end. This was the upshot of the second lot of arguments in Morlaix. (The first had been about whether Sally should come at all, Geoffrey and M. Pallieu versus Sally and the General. Sally’s side had won hands down, partly because Sally really was the only one who knew what she was talking about, and partly because the General had enough willpower to beat down three Geoffreys and twenty M. Pallieus.) The problem had been how the children should move the hundred and fifty miles across England to the Welsh borders. Should they walk, and risk constant discovery in a countryside where every village (Sally said) regarded all strangers as enemies? Obviously not, if they could help it.

  At first they’d assumed that any mechanical means were out of the question, and the General had scoured the country for strong but docile ponies. But the riding lessons had been a disaster: Sally was teachable, but Geoffrey was not. Five minutes astride the most manageable animal in northern France left him sore, sulky and irresponsible. They persevered for five days, at the end of which it was clear that he would never make a long journey in that fashion, though he could now actually stay in the saddle for perhaps half an hour at a time. But he obviously didn’t belong there. The most dimwitted peasant in England would be bound to stare and ask questions.