by John Wyndham
Also, I was soon helped by having a great many new things to think about.
Our schooling, as I have said, was sketchy; mostly writing, reading from a few simple books and the Bible and Repentances, which were not at all simple or easy to understand, and a little elementary figuring. It was not much equipment. Certainly it was far too little to satisfy Michael's parents, so they sent him to a school over in Kentak. There, he began to learn a lot of things our old ladies had never thought of. It was natural for him to want the rest of us to know about them, too. At first he was not very clear and the distance being so much more than we were used to gave us all trouble. But presently, after a few weeks' practice, it became much sharper and better, and he was able to hand on to the rest of us pretty nearly everything he was being taught — even some of the things he did not understand properly himself became clearer when we all thought about them, so that we were able to help him a little, too. And it pleased us to know that he was almost always at the top of his class,
It was a great satisfaction to learn and know more, it helped to ease one over a lot of puzzling matters, and I began to understand many of the things Uncle Axel talked about much better, nevertheless, it brought, too, the first taste of complications from which we would never again be free. Quite quickly it became difficult always to remember how much one was supposed to know. It called for a lot of restraint to remain silent in the face of simple errors, to listen patiently to silly arguments based on misconceptions, to do a job in the customary way when one knew there was a better way. ...
There were bad moments, of course; the careless remark that raised some eyebrows, the note of impatience towards those one should respect, the incautious suggestion; but the missteps were few, for the sense of danger now lay closer to the surface in all of us. Somehow, through caution, luck, and quick recoveries we managed to escape direct suspicion and live our two diverging lives for the next six years without the sense of peril becoming sharp.
Until, in fact, the day when we discovered that the eight of us had suddenly become nine.
9
It was a funny thing about my little sister, Petra. She seemed so normal. We never suspected — not one of us. She was a happy child, and pretty from a baby, with her close golden curls. I can still see her as a brightly-dressed little thing constantly dashing hither and thither at a staggering run, clasping an atrociously cross-eyed doll which she loved with uncritical passion. A toy-like creature herself, prone as any other child to bumps, tears, chuckles, solemn moments, and a very sweet trust. I loved her — everybody, even my father, conspired to spoil her, with an endearing lack of success. Not even a wandering thought of difference crossed my mind concerning her until it abruptly happened....
We were harvesting. Up in the twelve-acre there were six men mowing in echelon. I had just given up my scythe to another man, and was helping with the stocking by way of a breather when, without any warning, I was struck. ... I had never known anything like it. One moment I was contentedly, unhurriedly binding and propping up sheaves; the next, it was as if something had hit me physically, inside my head. Very likely I actually staggered under it. Then there was pain, a demand pulling like a fish-hook embedded in my mind. There was, in the surprise of the first few moments at any rate, no question whether or not I should go; I was obeying it, in a daze. I dropped the sheaf I was holding, and pelted off across the field, past a blur of amazed faces. I kept on running, I did not know why, except that it was urgent; across half the twelve-acre, into the lane, over the fence, down the slope of the East Pasture towards the river. . . .
Pounding across the slope on a slant I could see the field that ran down to the far side of the river, one of Angus Morton's fields, crossed by a path that led to the footbridge, and on the path was Rosalind, running like the wind.
I kept on, down to the bank, along past the footbridge, downstream towards the deeper pools. I had no uncertainty, I kept right on to the brink of the second pool, and went into a dive without a check. I came up quite close to Petra. She was in the deep water against the steep bank, holding on to a little bush. It was bent over and down, and the roots were on the point of pulling free. A couple of strokes took me near enough to catch her under the arms.
The compulsion ebbed suddenly and faded away. I towed her to an easier landing-place. When I found bottom and could stand up I saw Rosalind's startled face peering anxiously at me over the bushes.
'Who is it?' she asked, in real words, and a shaky voice. She put her hand on her forehead. 'Who was able to do that?'
I told her.
'Petra?' she repeated, staring incredulously.
I carried my little sister ashore, and laid her on the grass. She was exhausted, and only semi-conscious, but there did not seem to be anything seriously wrong with her.
Rosalind came and knelt on the grass on the other side of her. We looked down at the sopping dress and the darkened, matted curls. Then we gazed across her, at one another.
'I didn't know,' I told her. 'I'd no idea she was one of us.'
Rosalind put her hands to her face, finger-tips on her temples. She shook her head slightly and looked at me from disturbed eyes.
'She isn't,' she said. 'Something like us, but not one of us. None of us could command like that. She's something much more than we are.'
Other people came running up then; some who had followed me from the twelve-acre, some from the other side, wondering what had made Rosalind go tearing out of the house as if it were on fire. I picked Petra up to carry her home. One of the men from the field looked at me in a puzzled way:
'But how did you know?' he asked. 'I didn't hear a thing.'
Rosalind turned an incredulous expression of surprise towards him.
'What! With the way she was yelling! I'd've thought anybody who wasn't deaf would have heard her half-way to Kentak.'
The man shook his head doubtfully, but the fact that we had both apparently heard it seemed confirmation enough to make them all uncertain.
I said nothing. I was busy trying to fend off agitated questions from the others, telling them to wait until either I or Rosalind was alone and could attend to them without rousing suspicions.
That night, for the first time for years, I had a once-familiar dream, only this time when the knife gleamed high in my father's right hand, the deviation that struggled in his left was not a calf, it was not Sophie, either; it was Petra. I woke up sweating with fright....
The next day I tried to send thought-shapes to Petra. It seemed to me important for her to know as soon as possible that she must not give herself away. I tried hard, but I could make no contact with her. The rest tried, too, in turn, but there was no response. I wondered whether I should try to warn her in ordinary words, but Rosalind was against that.
'It must have been panic that brought it out,' she said. 'If she isn't aware of it now, she probably doesn't even know it happened, so it might easily be an unnecessary danger to tell her about it at all. She's only a little over six, remember. I don't think it is fair, or safe, to burden her until it's necessary.'
There was general agreement with Rosalind's view. All of us knew that it is not easy to keep on watching each word all the time, even when you've had to practise it for years. We decided to postpone telling Petra until either some occasion made it necessary, or until she was old enough to understand more clearly what we were warning her about; in the meantime we would test occasionally to see whether we could make contact with her, otherwise the matter should rest as it stood at present.
We saw no reason then why it should not continue to stand as it did, for all of us; no alternative, indeed. If we did not remain hidden, we should be finished.
In the last few years we had learnt more of the people round us, and the way they felt. What had seemed, five or six years ago, a kind of rather disquieting game had grown grimmer as we understood more about it. Essentially, it had not changed. Still our whole consideration if we were to survive must be to keep our true se
lves hidden; to walk, talk, and live indistinguishably from other people. We had a gift, a sense which, Michael complained bitterly, should have been a blessing, but was little better than a curse. The stupidest norm was happier; he could feel that he belonged. We did not, and because we did not, we had no positive — we were condemned to negatives, to not revealing ourselves, to not speaking when we would, to not using what we knew, to not being found out — to a life of perpetual deception, concealment, and lying. The prospect of continued negativeness stretching out ahead chafed him more than it did the rest of us. His imagination took him further, giving him a clearer vision of what such frustrations were going to mean, but it was no better at suggesting an alternative than ours were. As far as I was concerned a firm grasp of the negative in the cause of survival had been quite enough to occupy me; I was only just beginning to perceive the vacancy left by the absent positive. It was chiefly my appreciation of danger that had sharpened as I grew up. That had become hardened one afternoon of the summer in the year before we discovered Petra.
It was a bad season, that. We had lost three fields, so had Angus Morton. Altogether there had been thirty-five field-burnings in the district. There had been a higher deviation rate among the spring-births of the stock — not only our own stock, but everyone's, and particularly among the cattle — than had been known for twenty years. There seemed to be more wildcats of various sizes prowling out of the woods by night than ever before. Every week someone was before the court charged with attempted concealment of deviational crops, or the slaughter and consumption of undeclared Offences among stock, and to cap it all there had been no less than three district alerts on account of raids in force from the Fringes. It was just after the stand-down following the last of these that I happened across old Jacob grumbling to himself as he forked muck in the yard.
'What is it?' I asked him, pausing beside him.
He jabbed the fork into the muck and leant one hand on the shaft. He had been an old man forking muck ever since I could remember, I couldn't imagine that he had ever been, or would be, anything else. He turned to me a lined face mostly hidden in white hair and whiskers which always made me think of Elijah.
'Beans,' he said. 'Now my bloody beans are wrong. First my potatoes, then my tomatoes, then my lettuces, now my goddam beans. Never knew a year like it. The others I've had before, but who ever heard of beans getting tabulated?'
'Are you sure?' I said.
'Sure. 'Course I am. Think I don't know the way a bean ought to look, at my age?'
He glared at me out of the white fuzz.
'It's certainly a bad year,' I agreed.
'Bad,' he said, 'it's ruination. Weeks of work gone up in smoke, pigs, sheep and cows gobbling up good food just to produce 'bominations. Men making off and standing-to so's a fellow can't get on with his own work for looking after theirs. Even my own bit of garden as tribulated as hell itself. Bad! You're right. And worse to come, I reckon.' He shook his head. 'Aye, worse to come,' he repeated, with gloomy satisfaction.
'Why?' I inquired.
'It's a judgment,' he told me. 'And they deserve it. No morals, no principles. Look at young Ted Norbet — gets a bit of a fine for hiding a litter of ten and eating all but two before he was found out. Enough to bring his father up out of his grave. Why, if he'd done a thing like that — not that he ever would, mind you — but if he had, d'you know what he'd have got?' I shook my head. 'It'd have been a public shaming on a Sunday, a week of penances, and a tenth of all he had,' he told me, forcibly. 'So you'd not find people doing that kind of thing much then — but now —! What do they care about a bit of fine?' He spat disgustedly into the muck-pile. 'It's the same all round. Slackness, laxness, nobody caring beyond a bit of lip-service. You can see it everywhere nowadays. But God is not mocked. Bringing Tribulation down on us again, they are: a season like this is the start. I'm glad I'm an old man and not likely to see the fall of it. But it's coming, you mark my words.
'Government regulations made by a lot of snivelling, weak-hearted, weak-witted babblers in the East. That's what the trouble is. A lot of namby-pamby politicians, and churchmen who ought to know better, too; men who've never lived in unstable country, don't know anything about it, very likely never seen a mutant in their lives, and they sit there whittling away year after year at the laws of God, reckoning they know better. No wonder we get seasons like this sent as a warning, but do they read the warning and heed it, do they —?' He spat again.
'How do they think the south-west was made safe and civilized for God's people? How do they think the mutants were kept under, and the Purity standards set up? It wasn't by fiddling little fines that a man could pay once a week and not notice. It was by honouring the law, and punishing anybody who transgressed it so that they knew they were punished.
'When my father was a young man a woman who bore a child that wasn't in the image was whipped for it. If she bore three out of the image she was uncertified, outlawed, and sold. It made them careful about their purity and their prayers. My father reckoned there was a lot less trouble with mutants on account of it, and when there were any, they were burnt, like other deviations.'
'Burnt!' I exclaimed.
He looked at me. 'Isn't that the way to cleanse deviations?' he demanded fiercely.
'Yes,' I admitted, 'with crops and stock, but —'
'The other kind is the worst,' he snapped, 'it is the Devil mocking the true image. Of course they should be burnt like they used to be. But what happened? The sentimentalists in Rigo who never have to deal with them themselves said: "Even though they aren't human, they look nearly human, therefore extermination looks like murder, or execution, and that troubles some people's minds." So, because a few wishy-washy minds did not have enough resolution and faith, there were new laws about near-human deviations. They mustn't be cleansed, they must be allowed to live, or die naturally. They must be outlawed and driven into the Fringes, or, if they are infants, simply exposed there to take their chance — and that is supposed to be more merciful. At least the Government has the sense to understand that they mustn't be allowed to breed, and sees to it that they shan't — though I'd be willing to bet there's a party against that, too. And what happens? You get more Fringes dwellers, and that means you get more and bigger raids and lose time and money holding them back — all lost because of a namby-pamby dodging of the main issue. What sort of thinking is it to say "Accursed is the Mutant," and then treat him like a half-brother?'
'But a mutant isn't responsible for —' I began.
'"Isn't responsible,"' sneered the old man. 'Is a tiger-cat responsible for being a tiger-cat? But you kill it. You can't afford to have it around loose. Repentances says to keep pure the stock of the Lord by fire, but that's not good enough for the bloody Government now.
'Give me the old days when a man was allowed to do his duty and keep the place clean. Heading right for another dose of Tribulation we are now.' He went on muttering, looking like an ancient and wrathful prophet of doom.
'All these concealments — and they'll try again for want of a proper lesson; women who've given birth to a Blasphemy just going to church and saying how sorry they are and they'll try not to do it again; Angus Morton's great-horses still around, an "officially approved" mockery of the Purity Laws; a damned inspector who just wants to hold his job and not offend them in Rigo — and then people wonder why we get tribulated seasons ...' He went on grumbling and spitting with disgust, a venomously puritanical old man. .. .
I asked Uncle Axel whether there were a lot of people who really felt the way old Jacob talked. He scratched his cheek, thoughtfully.
'Quite a few of the old ones. They still feel it's a personal responsibility — like it used to be before there were inspectors. Some of the middle-aged are that way, too, but most of them are willing enough to leave it as it is. They're not so set on the forms as their fathers were. They don't reckon it matters much what way it's done so long as the mutants don't breed and things go along all right �
� but give them a run of years with instability as high as it is this year, and I'd not say for certain they'd take it quietly.'
'Why should the deviation-rate suddenly get high some years?' I asked him.
He shook his head. 'I don't know. Something to do with the weather, they say. Get a bad winter with gales from the south-west, and up goes the deviation-rate — not the next season, but the one after that. Something comes over from the Badlands, they say. Nobody knows what, but it looks as though they're right. The old men see it as a warning, just a reminder of Tribulation sent to keep us on the right path, and they make the most of it. Next year's going to be a bad one, too. People will listen to them more then. They'll have a sharp eye for scapegoats.' He concluded by giving me a long, thoughtful look.
I had taken the hint and passed it on to the others. Sure enough the season had been almost as tribulated as the one before, and there was a tendency to look for scapegoats. Public feeling towards concealments was noticeably less tolerant than it had been the previous summer, and it increased the anxiety we should in any case have felt over our discovery of Petra.
For a week after the river incident we listened with extra care for any hint of suspicion about it. We found none, however. Evidently it had been accepted that both Rosalind and I, in different directions, had happened to hear cries for help which must, in any case, have been faint at the distance. We were able to relax again — but not for long. Only about a month went by before we had a new source of misgiving.
Anne announced that she was going to marry....
10
There was a shade of defiance in Anne, even when she told us.
At first we did not take it very seriously. We found it difficult to believe, and we did not want to believe, that she was serious. For one thing, the man was Alan Ervin, the same Alan I had fought on the bank of the stream, and who had informed on Sophie. Anne's parents ran a good farm, not a great deal smaller than Waknuk itself; Alan was the blacksmith's son, his prospects were those of becoming the blacksmith himself in his turn. He had the physique for it, he was tall and healthy, but that was about as far as he went. Quite certainly Anne's parents would be more ambitious for her than that; so we scarcely expected anything to come of it.
