The Green Book

by Jill Paton Walsh

  For

  Robert, Matthew,

  and Kate

  J.P.W.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Gofish: Questions for the Author

  Chapter 1

  Father said, “We can take very little with us.” The list was in his hand. “Spade, saw, file, ax, for each family. Seeds, etc., will be provided. Iron rations will be provided. For each voyager a change of clothing, a pair of boots, one or two personal items only; e.g., a favorite cooking pan, a musical instrument (small and light), a picture (unframed). Nothing under this heading will be taken if it is bulky or heavy, fragile or perishable. One book per voyager.”

  It was easy to pack. We were allowed so little, and we didn’t have to bother about leaving anything tidy behind us. Only the books caused a little delay. Father said, “I must take this.” He showed us an ugly big volume called A Dictionary of Intermediate Technology. “But you must choose for yourselves,” he said. “It wouldn’t be fair of me to choose for you. Think carefully.”

  We didn’t think. We were excited, disturbed, and we hadn’t really understood that everything else would be left behind. Father looked wistfully at the shelves. He picked up The Oxford Complete Shakespeare. “Have you all chosen your books?” he asked. “Yes,” we told him. He put the Shakespeare back.

  We had time to waste at the end. We ate everything we could find.

  “I don’t want to eat iron,” Pattie said, but nobody knew what she meant.

  Then Father got out the slide projector, and showed us pictures of holidays we had once had. We didn’t think much of them.

  “Have they all gone brownish with age, Dad?” said Joe, our brother, the eldest of us.

  “No,” said Father. “The pictures are all right. It’s the light that has changed. It’s been getting colder and bluer now for years…but when I was young it was this lovely golden color, just like this—look.”

  But what he showed us—a beach, with a blue sea, and the mother we couldn’t remember lying on a towel, reading a book—looked a funny hue, as though someone had brushed it over with a layer of treacle.

  Pattie was glad that Father wasn’t going to be able to take the slide projector. It made him sad.

  And the next day we all went away, Father and Joe, and Sarah, and Pattie, and lots of other families, and left the Earth far behind.

  When this happened, we were all quite young, and Pattie was so young that later she couldn’t remember being on the Earth at all, except those few last hours, and even the journey was mostly forgotten. She could remember the beginning of the journey, because it was so exciting. When we could undo our seat belts, and look out of the windows, the world looked like a Chinese paper lantern, with painted lands upon it, and all the people on the ship looked at it, and some of the grownups cried. Father didn’t cry; he didn’t look, either.

  Joe went and talked to Father by and by, but Sarah and Pattie stood at a porthole all day long, and saw the world shrink and shrink and diminish down till it looked like a round cloudy glass marble that you could have rolled on the palm of your hand. Pattie was looking forward to going past the moon, but that was no fun at all, for the ship passed by the dark side, and we saw nothing of it. And then we were flying in a wide black starry sky, where none of the stars had names.

  At first there were voices from the world below, but not for long. The Disaster from which we were escaping happened much sooner than they had thought it would, and after two days the ship was flying in radio silence, alone, and navigating with a calculator program on the computer, and a map of magnetic fields.

  The journey was very boring. It was so long. The spaceship was big enough to frighten us when we thought of it flying through the void. Joe kept telling Pattie not to worry. “Heavy things don’t fall down in space,” he told her. “There’s nowhere for them to fall; no gravity.”

  “When I knock things over, they fall down, just like at home,” Pattie said, doubtfully.

  “That’s just the ship’s gravity machine, making it happen inside the ship,” said Joe. “To make us feel normal.”

  But the ship was small enough to frighten us too, when we thought of spending years inside it. “We will still be here when I’m fourteen!” said Joe, as though he found that as hard to believe as Pattie found the lack of gravity.

  “Better get used to it, then,” said Sarah. We had pills to make us sleep a lot of the time, but the rules said everyone had to be awake some of each forty-eight hours. When people were awake, they played games—Monopoly, and Go, and backgammon, and chess, and Mastermind, and Space Invaders, which were all on the ship’s computer and could be played with the video screens. And one of the grownups had even brought along as his special luxury a funny hand set for playing chess which let you play it with another person instead of with the computer. When we weren’t playing games, we could read the books we had brought. Joe asked Father why there were no books to read on the computer screens.

  Father told us that all the new, well-equipped spaceships belonged to big wealthy countries. They had flown off to find distant, promising-looking planets. “We were the bottom of the barrel,” he said, “the last few to go from an old and poorer country, and only an old ship available, and no time to outfit it properly. Our computer was intended for exploration journeys, not for colonization. It has no spare memory; it can barely manage our minimum needs. And there was so little fuel we couldn’t get lift-off with anything extra on board—no useful livestock, like sheep or cows; just ourselves, and what the organizers thought we needed for survival. But we are lucky to be away at all, remember, and they allocated us a much nearer destination so that our old ship could get us somewhere.”

  There were some chickens in cages on the ship, with two very noisy cocks who had lost their sense of timing in the flight through darkness and crowed at all the wrong times when we were trying to sleep. And there were rabbits too; we could let them out and play with them. Rabbits are fun when you are very small and like furry things, but they aren’t much fun, really. You can’t teach them tricks. All they ever think about is munching. And when we got bored with rabbits, all we had was that one book each to go back to. Of course, we tried to read slowly. “Read each sentence at least twice, before you read another,” the rule books said, under “Helpful Suggestions.” But Sarah couldn’t read that slowly. At home she read four or five books every week. She finished her book quickly and then wanted to borrow Pattie’s.

  Pattie wouldn’t let her. So she swapped with Joe, and read his. He had brought Robinson Crusoe. Sarah didn’t much like Robinson Crusoe.

  “You’d better think about him, old girl,” Joe said to her. “That island is just like where we’re going, and we have to scratch a living on it, just like Crusoe.”

  “Well, I hope we don’t have to pray and carry on like him,” said Sarah.

  Joe didn’t like Sarah’s book any better than she liked his. Hers was called The Pony Club Rides Again. Joe didn’t like horses, and he couldn’t resist telling Sarah that, after all, she would never see a horse again as long as she lived.

  So then they both wanted to borrow Pattie’s book. Pattie wouldn’t lend it. “I haven’t finished it myself yet,” she kept saying. “It’s not fair. You finished yours before you had to lend it.”

  In the end, Father made her give it to them. It was thin and neat, with dark green silky boards covered with gold tooling. The edges of the pages were gilded and shiny. It had a creamy silk ribbon to mark the place, and pretty brown and white flowered end-papers. And it was quite empty.

  “There’s nothin
g in it!” cried Sarah, staring.

  “It’s a commonplace book,” said Joe.

  “What’s that?” asked Sarah.

  “A sort of jotter, notebook thing, for thoughts you want to keep.”

  “And she’s been pretending to read it for months!” said Sarah, beginning to giggle. They both laughed and laughed. Other people came by and asked what the joke was. Everyone laughed.

  “Oh, Pattie, dear child,” said Father when he heard about it. He didn’t laugh, he looked a mixture between sad and cross.

  “It was my choose,” said Pattie very fiercely, taking her book back and holding it tight.

  Father said, “She was too young. I should have chosen for her. But no use crying over spilt milk.”

  We did get used to being on the ship, in the end. A funny thing happened to the way people felt about it. At first, everyone had hated it, grumbled all the time about tiny cubicles, about no exercise, about nothing to do. They had quarreled a lot. Grownup quarreling isn’t very nice. We were luckier than most families; we didn’t seem to quarrel, though we got very cross and scratchy about things, just like other people. But time went by, and people settled down to playing games, and sleeping, and talking a little, and got used to it, and so when at last everyone had had four birthdays on the ship, and the journey had been going on for what seemed like forever and ever, and the Guide told us all there were only months to go now, people were worried instead of glad.

  “We shall be lucky if we can walk more than three steps, we’re so flabby,” said Father, and people began to do pushups in their cabins, and line up for a turn on the cycle machine for exercising legs.

  Joe began to ask a lot of questions. He didn’t like the answers he got and he talked to Pattie and Sarah about it after lights-out in sleeping times. “They just don’t know what this place is going to be like,” he told them. “They think it should support life; they know there is plant growth on it, and they suppose that means we could grow wheat. But there may be wild animals, or any kind of monster people on it already, they don’t know.”

  “Couldn’t there possibly be wild ponies, Joe?” said Sarah.

  “No, sis, I don’t think so,” said Joe, very kindly. “And if this place isn’t any good, we can’t go anywhere else. The fuel won’t last. All they’ve got for us if it isn’t any good are pills.”

  “I don’t want to take pills,” said Pattie.

  “We’ll have to, if all the others are taking them,” Sarah told her. “We couldn’t be left alone.”

  “I think we ought to be allowed a choose,” said Pattie.

  “Oh, Pattie!” said Joe, grinning at her from his bunk. “You’re a fine one to talk about choosing! What good is your choosing, you goose!”

  Chapter 2

  A time came when we reached the light of a new sun. Bright golden light filled the spaceship from the starboard portholes. The cocks woke up and crowed as if for all the missing mornings on the whole long trip. The sun warmed the ship, and made it hard to sleep at sleeping time. And then the new planet loomed up on the starboard side. It looked unlike the Earth, said the grownups, who could remember what the Earth had looked like. It was redder and shinier; it had no cloud drifts around it. When it got near, it looked like maps in bright colors. It didn’t look green. People spent all day looking anxiously through the portholes at it, trying to guess the meaning of what they could see. Just before touchdown, we could all see a land with mountains, craggy and rocky, and large lakes lying on the land surface everywhere; but as the ship came in to land, nightfall was racing us across the ground—a big black shadow, engulfing everything, moving faster than we were ourselves, its crescent edge going at a dizzy speed, and leaving us behind, so that we landed in total darkness. It was an auto-control landing anyway. It happened smoothly. The ship landed at a steep angle, but immediately straightened up by leveling its podlike legs. Then it switched off its own gravity and hummed quietly into run-down cycles.

  When the gravity machine switched off, everyone felt lightheaded, and, indeed, light. The planet’s own gravity was less than the ship had got us used to. Pattie found she could jump up and touch her cabin roof, and land without thudding enough to make anyone cross. Everyone felt full of energy, and eagerness to get out. But the Guide said the ship must be kept locked till daylight. So little was known, it would be dangerous to go out.

  Arthur, the head of one of the families, said he would go and have a look, at his own risk, and then the Guide spoke to us very sternly.

  “It’s natural to feel excited,” he said. “But this is not a holiday. We are a handpicked group; we are the minimum number that can possibly survive and multiply. Between us we have the skills we require. But the loss of a single member of our party will endanger the survival of us all. There is no such thing, Arthur, as ‘your own risk.’ Not any more. And may we all remember that.”

  We sat around, fidgeting, restless, talking together in lowered voices, waiting for dawn. None of the games interested us now. Pattie couldn’t sleep, though Father made her lie down on her bunk. The feeling of suspense, the unfamiliar rhythm of the machines running themselves toward shutdown, the altered pitch of the voices around her kept her awake so late, so long, that when dawn broke at last she was fast asleep and did not see it.

  But Sarah told her it had come like a dark curtain being swept aside in a single rapid movement; for a few minutes there was a deep indigo light, and after that, brilliance.

  The Guide walked around the ship, looking out of each porthole in turn. All that he could see was rocks, white and gray, rather glittery crags, all very near the ship, blocking any distant view. They gave Arthur a breathing mask and put him through the inner door to the ship’s main hatch, closing it behind him before he opened the outer door. He came back very quickly. “Come out,” he said. “The air is good.”

  So we trooped down the ramp and found ourselves in the shadow of the ship, in a narrow gully between one rock face and another. It seemed to be a sort of hanging valley in a hill. A tiny runnel of flowing clear liquid threaded between rocks in the bottom of the dip, over a bed of silver-white sand and pebbles. Malcolm, the party’s chemist, took a sample of the stream in a little specimen bottle, to test it.

  Pattie was so sleepy after the night before that she could hardly walk, and Father picked her up and carried her, nodding with drowsiness, rather than leave her alone in the ship. She went in his arms, up the slope toward a gentle saddle between one side of the valley and the other, where all the others were walking. It was easy to walk, even up the slope; Pattie felt light and easy to carry. So up we all went to the rim of the hollow, and looked over.

  Before us lay a wide and gentle plain sloping to the shores of a round wide lake some miles across. Beyond the lake, a very high mountain with perfectly symmetrical slopes rose into the sky, topped with snow. A mirror image of the lovely mountain hung inverted in the lake, quite still, for the surface was like glass, perfectly unruffled by even the slightest impulse of the air. The surface of the plain was gray and silver, shining like marcasite in places, in others with a pewter sheen. To the left and right of the plain, on gentle hills, were wide sweeps of woodland, with quite recognizable and normal trees, except that the leaves upon them were not green but shades of red, and shining, like the blaze of an amazing autumn. It was very beautiful, and perfectly silent, and perfectly still.

  The children ran forward onto the open expanse of land before them, shouting. And at once we were limping, crying, and hopping back. We were still wearing the soft ship slippers we had been given to keep down the noise in the corridors of the spacecraft, and the pretty gray grass and flowers had cut through the thin leather at once, and cut our feet. The Guide ordered the crate of boots to be brought from the store and unpacked. Someone fetched ointment and bandages. Meanwhile, we stooped and picked the sharp plants, which broke easily in our fingers when gathered; they seemed to be made of glass, sharp and shining like jewels. But as soon as we all had boots on,
we could walk over them safely, for the growth was crushed beneath the soles, as fragile and as crunchy to walk on as the frost-stiffened grass of winter on Earth.

  We all walked over the crisp and sparkling frost plain, down toward the shores of the lake. It took an hour to reach it. The lake shore was a wide silver beach, made of soft bright sand, like grains of worn-down glass. And all the time we walked toward the lake, it did not move, or ruffle, even enough to shake the curtains of reflected mountain and reflected sky that hung in it. And though the air smelled good and sweet to breathe, it was windless, and as still as the air in a deep cave underground. Only the little rivulet that followed us across to the lake from the crag valley where the ship had lodged moved; it chuckled gently from stone to stone, and sparkled as brightly as the glass leaves and grass. When we got to the beach, Pattie went to look where it joined the lake, to see if it would make some splash or ripples for just a little way, but it seemed to slide beneath the surface at once and made only the faintest ripple ring, quickly dying in the brilliant mirror of the lake.

  “I think we may be lucky,” said the Guide. “I think this place is good.”

  People laughed, and some of the grownups kissed each other. The children ran to the edge of the lake and made it splash. Jason’s mother ran along the beach, calling to the wading children not to drink from the lake until Malcolm had made sure it was water. Everyone was thirsty from walking, and the lake looked clear and good, but we all obediently drank from the flagons of recycled water from the ship.

  “Right,” said the Guide. “We shall begin the settlement program. And first we need to name the place we are about to build. The instructions suggest that the youngest person present should give the name. That can’t include the real babies, obviously; Pattie or Jason—which is the youngest?”