The Changes Trilogy

by Peter Dickinson

  Then, he afterward realized, the disturbances invaded his own mind. At the time it seemed like more portents crowding in around him. A new tower sprouted to the north, with people moving about at the top of it, carrying lanterns. A dark beast, toad-shaped, big as a barn, heaved itself out of the forest and scrabbled at the stonework. Uncle Jacob stalked across the cobbles, cracking his thumbs in a shower of sparks; he looked angry, did not speak, and walked on into the dark. The whole landscape started to drift, to float away after the wailing noise, faster and faster, with a whirling, bucking motion, sucked on a roaring current of time which toppled over the edge of reality. They were falling, falling …

  The rest, for a while, was dreams, meaningless; shapeless, a dark chaos.

  When he woke up it was still dark. The clouds had gone, the moon was well down in the sky, a few red patches of embers showed where the stables and the sheds beyond them had been, and the earth was heaving in sudden stiff jerks and spasms. Tiles were clattering off the sheds all around the courtyard, and from the forest came the groaning of toppled trees. The steps on which they were sitting had tilted sideways. Sally lay across him with her head in his lap.

  “Wake up, Sal. Wake up and be ready to run. I think the tower might fall.”

  “Oh, Jeff, I’m frightened.”

  “So’m I. If it falls straight at us we’re done for, but if it looks like going a bit to one side we must run the other way. Don’t try to hide in any of the buildings—they might cave in too. I hope Mr. Furbelow will be all right.”

  You couldn’t prepare for the spasms, because they weren’t rhythmical, just shuddering jars from any direction, often with a deep booming noise under ground. Geoffrey looked around to see how the cottage was taking it, and saw in the moonlight a black ragged crack, inches wide, running up the stucco beside the door. They fell over twice as they moved away (it was like trying to stand in a bus without holding on and without looking where it’s going). They had to be careful, too, where they put their feet, because of the way the gaps between the cobbles widened and snapped together. They found a patch of flagstones, which seemed safer, and sat back to back, looking up to where the dark wedge of the tower blanked out a huge slice of stars.

  They waited for it to fall. It came down quite slowly.

  First there were three grunting spasms, all together, and a section of the outer wall over to their right fell with a gravelly roar into the ditch, taking the timber store with it. Then they saw the ground in that direction humping itself up into a wave which came grinding across the courtyard, six feet high, throwing off a spume of cobbles in the moonlight. They stood up. Sally turned to run.

  “Face it, Sal. Try and ride over it when it comes. Hold my hand. Run up.”

  The shock wave reached the paved area, tilting the stones over like the leaves of a book being flipped through. Geoffrey ran forward, dragging Sally with him, climbing and scrambling. Sally fell and he leaned forward, heaving at her arm. The stone he was standing on tilted suddenly the other way, breaking his grip and shooting him up onto the crest of the wave and down the other side. A stone fell painfully across his leg, pinning him by the ankle, and then Sally came floundering on top of him.

  “Are you all right, Jeff?”

  “Yes. Oh, look!”

  He pointed. The wave was past the tower now, but the tower was falling. First a big triangle of masonry slid out on the far side, broad at the top and narrow at the bottom, like wallpaper peeled downward off a wall. The boulders slid, coughing and roaring, down in a continuous avalanche that spilled away from the base right out to the windlass and flagstone over Merlin’s chamber. Something deep underground must have given way, for the tower continued to tilt in that direction, slow as the minute hand of a clock it seemed, but spilling more small avalanches from the ruined lip. It tilted, still almost whole, until it looked as though it could not possibly stand at that angle. Then the flaw below the foundation gave way with a final shudder; the severe curve of the outline crumpled; it was falling in hundreds of colossal fragments; there was one last roar and the tremor of booming hammer blows jarring the ground beneath them; dust smoked up in a huge pillar, higher than the tower had been, a wavering ghost of the solid stone; silence.

  The long hill of rubble, immovable thousands of tons, lay directly over the place where Merlin was buried.

  Chapter 13

  TIDYING UP

  That was the last upheaval. Soon there was a faint staining of dawn light over the eastern horizon. The courtyard was a Wilderness of tumbled stones and half the outer wall was down. Two of the dogs were dead and a third was whining miserably, its leg trapped between cobbles. Maddox stood with his back to the worst of the wreckage, as if to make clear that anything that had happened wasn’t his fault. At first Geoffrey, after he’d levered the flagstone away, had thought that his own ankle was broken, but he found he could just stand on it and hobbled over to see what had become of Mr. Furbelow. The shelter had collapsed, but the bench had fallen sideways across a protruding mound of cobbles and was still protecting the damaged leg. When Geoffrey cleared the furs and timber away he found the old man staring placidly upward.

  “Would you like some more morphine, sir?”

  “No, thank you. Aspirin will be adequate now. There is some on the second shelf behind my desk. What has happened?”

  “The tower fell down.”

  “Ah.”

  There was a long pause before he spoke again.

  “I thought it was beautiful. Strange that we are the only three who ever saw it.”

  Geoffrey fetched the aspirin and took some himself. Then he tried to free the hound with the trapped leg, but it slashed with its teeth whenever he came close. In the end he threw a fur over its head and twisted the corners, making a sort of tough sack which Sally held tight while he unwedged the stones. They’d been loosened by the earthquake and gave easily. The dog limped away. The children lay down in piles of furs and slept.

  They were woken by sunlight and hunger. Geoffrey’s leg was very sore, so he took more aspirin and sat while Sally fetched bread and apples; there wasn’t much left when they’d finished breakfast.

  It was only then that Geoffrey noticed what had happened to the rockpile made by the ruins of the tower. It had contracted into a single solid ridge of unhewn rock, like the cliffs on the higher ground; small stonecrops and grasses already grew from its crannies. Merlin must still be alive, then, deep underground, and had drawn the whole ruin of his tower over him to keep him safe from any future Furbelows. Geoffrey tried to picture him, asleep in the greenish light, cold as solid carbon dioxide, waiting, waiting.… He spoke his thought aloud.

  “What do you think he’s waiting for?”

  It was Mr. Furbelow who answered.

  “I’ve thought about that a lot. I think he’s waiting until there are more people like him. I think he became bored with people in his own time, galloping about and thumping each other, so he just put himself to sleep, until there were people he could talk to as equals.”

  “But there can’t be anyone else like him,” said Sally.

  “Not yet, my dear, but one day, perhaps. You know, even after all this I still cannot believe in magic. Abracadabra and so on. I think he is a mutant.”

  “A what?”

  “A mutant. I read about mutants in Reader’s Digest, which my late wife regularly subscribed to. It said that we all have, laid up inside us, a pattern of molecules which dictates what we are like—brown hair, blue eyes, that sort of thing, the features we inherit from our parents. And the patterns of molecules govern other things, it said, such as having two arms and two legs because we belong to the species homo sapiens. A monkey is a monkey, with a tail, because of the pattern it inherits, and a fly is a fly, with faceted eyes, for the same reason. But apparently the pattern can be upset, by cosmic rays and atom bombs and such, and then you get a new kind of creature, with things about it which it didn’t inherit from its parents and its species, and that’s called
a mutant.”

  “He was very big,” said Sally, “and a funny rusty color.”

  “Yes, and he had hair on his palms,” said Geoffrey.

  “It appears,” said Mr. Furbelow, “that most mutations are of that order, not mattering much one way or the other. Or else they are positively bad, such as not having a proper stomach, which means that the mutation dies out. But every now and then you get one which is really an improvement on the existing species, and then you get the process called evolution. I think I’ve got that right.”

  “It makes sense,” said Geoffrey. “But we’ve got to think about how we’re going to get out of here. He won’t make any more food for us now. And we must decide what we’re going to tell people when we do get out.”

  “But where did he get all that strength from?” said Sally. “Did he just have a bigger mind?”

  “Perhaps,” said Mr. Furbelow. “But that would not be necessary. Did you know there was a great big bit of your mind you don’t use at all? Nobody knows what it’s for. I read that somewhere else, in another Reader’s Digest I expect. I’ve wondered about all this a lot, you know, and I think perhaps that Man’s next bit of evolution might be to learn to use that part of his brain, and that would give him powers he doesn’t have now. And I cannot see why this jump should not occur from time to time in just one case but fail to start a new evolutionary chain. There have been other marvelous men besides Merlin, you know, if you read the stories. Perhaps some of them put themselves to sleep in the same way, and are waiting. Quite often they did not die—they just disappeared.”

  “I suppose,” said Geoffrey, “it was the delirium which made him change England back to the Dark Ages. He was muddled, and wanted everything to be just as he was used to it. So he made everyone think machines were wicked, and forget how to work them.”

  “Do you think there were people who could change the weather in his day?” asked Sally. “Like you can, Jeff. He must have given you the power for some reason. Or perhaps there were just people who said they could, and he forgot. He must have been very muddled between what was dream and what was real.”

  “Did you make the ice on the steps?” asked Mr. Furbelow.

  Geoffrey felt like a thief caught stealing, but nodded. Mr. Furbelow was silent.

  “You were justified,” he said at last, “taking one thing with another. I thought about myself a lot in the night, when it seemed as if I were shortly to meet my Creator, and I discovered I had been blind and selfish. I tried to use him, you know—like a genie in a bottle. But he was too strong for me, and I let him lie there in his cave, lost and sick, lost and sick. It was a sinful thing to do.”

  “Do you think England will start being ordinary again now?” said Sally.

  “Yes,” said Geoffrey. “And we really must decide what we are going to tell people—the General, for instance. He’ll start digging if we tell him Merlin’s down there.”

  “General?” asked Mr. Furbelow.

  They explained, Geoffrey feeling more like a thief than ever. Mr. Furbelow looked to and fro between them with sharp, glistening eyes.

  “Goodness me,” he said when they’d finished, “I never heard of anything more gallant in all my born days. Fancy their sending two children on a journey like that! And your carrying it off so! Do you mean that all the tale of the leech, your guardian, was an invention? It quite took me in, I must confess. Well, that has given me something to think about! Where were we?”

  “Trying to decide what to tell the General,” said Sally. “If we ever see him again. We must go before the wolves get hungry.”

  “Does everyone agree that we cannot tell the truth?” asked Mr. Furbelow.

  “Yes,” said the children together.

  “Then we must have a story,” said Mr. Furbelow. “You had best work one out, Geoffrey, as you seem to have the knack.”

  “Simple and mysterious,” said Sally. “Then we needn’t pretend to understand it either.”

  “Have you got any horse bait left, Sal?” said Geoffrey. “We’ve got to make a sort of litter for Mr. Furbelow, and Maddox will have to carry it.”

  “I’ve got four bits. Two to get him up this side, and two down the other. Then we can go and get help.”

  They worked out the story while Geoffrey labored and contrived: there had been no tower; the outer wall had been built by a big man with a beard, who had simply appeared one day, had sat down in front of Mr. Furbelow’s house and begun to meditate. He had never spoken a word, but the walls and the forest had grown around him, and the dogs had appeared. He had produced food out of thin air, and Mr. Furbelow had felt constrained to wait on him. When the children came he had become enraged, wrecked the place and left, stalking off down the valley. That was all they knew.

  “What about our clothes?” said Sally.

  “We’ll have to hide them,” said Geoffrey. “And Mr. Furbelow’s medicines.”

  By some miracle the true well had not caved in. Sally threw down it anything that spoiled the story, and then piled hundreds of cobblestones on top. They found some old clothes in chests of drawers in the cottage, mothy but wearable. The litter was a horrible problem, as most of the usable materials had been destroyed by fire or earthquake, and Geoffrey’s ankle seemed to be hurting more and more. He was still hobbling around looking for lashings when the first jet came over, in the early afternoon.

  It was very high, trailing a feathery line of vapor, and curved down out of sight beyond the hills. Ten minutes later it came back again, squealing down the valley at a few hundred feet. Sally waved a piece of the sheet which Geoffrey had been tearing into strips for the litter.

  “He’ll never see that,” he said. The pain in his leg made him snarly. “We ought to try and make a smoke signal or something. Damp straw would do it.”

  “What can we light it with?” asked Sally.

  “Oh hell. There might be some hot embers in the stables if you went and blew on them. You’d need something to scoop them up with, and—”

  “He’s coming back.”

  The jet came up the valley, even lower, flaps down, engine full of the breathy roar of a machine not going its natural pace. Sally waved her sheet again. The wings tilted, and they could see the pilot’s head, but so small that they couldn’t be sure whether he was looking at them or not. The wings tilted the other way, then toward them again, then away.

  “He’s seen us,” said Geoffrey. “He’s waggling his wings.”

  The engine note rose to its proper whine, the nose tilted up and up until the plane was in a roaring vertical climb. It twisted its path again and whistled southward. In less than a minute it was a dot over the southern horizon, trailing its streak of vapor.

  “He was looking for us,” said Sally.

  “Yes,” said Geoffrey. “We’d better stay. The litter wasn’t going to work anyway.”

  “I hope they come soon,” said Sally. “I’m hungry.”

  “I have just remembered,” said Mr. Furbelow, “there might be some cans in the cupboard in the kitchen. I haven’t thought about them for five years. It was not the sort of thing he would have cared for.”

  There was some stewing steak and the trick with the embers worked, so they supped by a crackling fire in the open, like boy scouts, and slept under the stars.

  Five helicopters came next morning, clattering along below a gray sky. A group of very tough-looking men jumped out of each machine and ran to the outer wall, where they trained their automatic weapons on the silent forest. Sally ran to warn them not to shoot the wolfhounds, who, restless with hunger, had gone hunting. One of the men aimed a gun at her as she talked, and she came back. Officers snapped orders, pointed out arcs of fire and doubled onto the next group. Three men stood in the middle of the courtyard in soldierly, commanding attitudes. They watched the activity for a while and then strolled over toward the cottage. The one in the middle was the General.

  Geoffrey stood up, forgetting about his ankle. Ambushed by the pain he sp
rawled sideways, and stayed sitting as the three approached.

  “Aha!” barked the General. “You do not obey the orders, young man. I say to you to make a reconnaissance (he pronounced the word the French way) and you defeat the enemy, you alone. That is no path to promotion. But this is the enemy, then?”

  He pointed at Mr. Furbelow. He seemed very pleased.

  “No,” said Geoffrey. “This is Mr. Furbelow. He broke his leg in the storm, and I tried to set it, but I think he ought to go to hospital as soon as possible.”

  “But the enemy?” snapped the General. He didn’t seem interested in Mr. Furbelow’s leg.

  “You mean the Necromancer,” said Sally. “We only just saw him. He got angry when we came and he went away. Mr. Furbelow can tell you far more about him than we can.”

  The General turned again to the old man on the ground, and stared at him in silence.

  “How did you find out so quickly?” said Geoffrey.

  One of the other men answered, an Englishman.

  “Half a dozen radio hams suddenly came on the air. They hadn’t a clue what was up, but the fact that they could work their sets at all encouraged us to send reconnaissance planes over. One of them spotted this place—we knew where you were heading for, of course—and here we are.”

  “Tour Necromancer,” said the General, “what is he?”

  “Honestly we don’t know. He just sat and thought, Mr. Furbelow says. He’s been living with him for five years, but he’s really much too tired to tell you anything now. Why don’t you send him off to hospital, let him have a good rest, and then I’m sure he’ll tell you all he knows?”

  The Englishman spoke to the General in French, and the General grunted. The third man yelled an order, and two soldiers doubled over from one of the gun positions. They ran to the helicopters and ran back with a stretcher, onto which they quickly and tenderly eased Mr. Furbelow. They must have practiced the job a hundred times in their training.