Lanark looked hard into Sludden’s face. The shape seemed the same but the substance had changed. This was the eager, slightly desperate face of a burdened and caring man. With a pang of pity Lanark knew Sludden would have very little domestic peace with Rima. Lanark said, “I don’t want to talk to journalists.”
“Don’t worry. Just appearing to them is the main thing.”
A shaded lamp on the mantelpiece cast an oval of soft light on the small group before the hearth. Sludden, Gilchrist, a quiet-looking man and a reckless-looking man sat on a long leather sofa facing the fire. A grey-haired lady Lanark had seen in the chapterhouse sat on an armchair with a briefcase on her lap. Lanark pushed his own chair as far back into the shadow as possible. Sludden said, “These two gentlemen fully understand the situation. They’re on our side, so there’s no need to worry.”
The quiet man said quietly, “We aren’t interested in the detailed character stuff. We just want to convey that the right man has been found for the right job.”
“A new figure strides into the political arena,” said the reckless man. “Where does he come from?”
“From Unthank,” said Sludden. “He and I were close friends in our early days. We hung about sowing our wild oats with the same bohemian crowd, measuring out our life with coffee spoons and trying to find a meaning. I did nothing at all in those days but Lanark, to his credit, produced one of the finest fragments of autobiographical prose and social commentary it has been my privilege to criticize.”
“No use to our readers,” said the reckless man. The quiet man said, “We can use it. What happened then?”
“He entered the institute and worked with Ozenfant. Although a mainstay of the energy division, his qualities were not appreciated and eventually, sickened by bureaucratic ineptitude, he returned to Unthank: but not before registering a strong personal protest to the lord president director.”
“Room for a bit of dramatic detail here,” said the reckless man. “Exactly why did you quarrel with Ozenfant?”
Lanark tried to remember. At last he said, “I didn’t quarrel with him. He quarrelled with me, about a woman.”
“Better leave that out,” said Sludden.
“All right,” said the quiet man. “He returned to Unthank. And then?”
“I can tell you what happened then,” said Gilchrist amiably. “He devoted himself to public service by working in the Central Centre for Employment, Stability and Surroundings. I was his boss and I soon realized he was something of a saint. When confronted by human suffering he had absolutely no patience with red tape. To be frank, he often went too fast for me, and that is why he is exactly the lord provost the region needs. I can imagine no better politician to represent Greater Unthank at the forthcoming general assembly.”
“Good!” said the reckless man. “I wonder if Provost Lanark would care to say something quotable about what he is going to do at the Provan assembly?”
After thinking for a while Lanark said boldly, “I will try to tell the truth.”
“Couldn’t you make it more emphatic?” said the reckless man.
“Couldn’t you say, ‘Come hell or high water, I will tell the world the TRUTH’?”
“Certainly not!” said Lanark crossly. “Water has nothing to do with my visit to Provan.”
“Come what may, the world will hear the truth,” murmured the quiet man. “We’ll quote you as saying that.”
“Very good, gentlemen!” said Sludden, standing up. “Our provost is leaving now. It’s a very ordinary departure so you needn’t watch. If you want a photograph Mr. Gilchrist’s secretary can provide one. I’m sorry my wife was not here to offer you stronger refreshment, but you will find a bottle of sherry and a half bottle of whisky on the telephone-stand outside. Consume them at your leisure. Mr. Gilchrist will drive you back into town.”
Everybody stood up.
Sludden showed Gilchrist and the journalists out. The grey-haired lady sighed and said, “Communicating with the press is a science I will nefer understand. This briefcase, Mr. Lanark, holts passcart, identification paper and three reports relating to the Unthank region. Before you speak in Provan I advise you to master them. There is a seismological report on the effect of pollution upon the Merovicnic discontinuity. There is a sanitary report on the probability of typhoid and related epidemics. There is a social report cuffering all the olt ground—no region our size has so much unemployment, uses so much corporal punishment in schools, has so many children cared for by the state, so much alcoholism, so many adults in prison or such a shortage of housing. It is all very olt stuff but people should be reminded. The seismological report is the only von whose language is at all technical because it contains an analysis of certain deep Permian samples vich may haf a commercial value. I haf put in a dictionary of scientific terms to help you out.” “Thank you,” said Lanark, taking the case. “Are you Mrs. Schtzngrm?”
“Eva Schtzngrm, yes. There is von other matter personal to yourself,” she said, lowering her voice. “In crossing the intercal-endrical zone by air I think you vill pass very rapidly through the menopause barrier.”
“What?” said Lanark, alarmed.
“No neet to worry. You are not a voman and so vill not be greatly changed. But you may haf very odd experiences of contraction and expansion which neet not be referred to after-vards. Don’t vorry about them. Don’t vorry.”
Sludden looked round the door and said, “Angus has set up the lights. Let’s go to the airfield.”
They went through a kitchen to a back door and followed an electric cable which snaked up a path between seedy cabbage stumps.
“Remember,” said Sludden, “your best tactic is open denunciation. It’s pointless complaining to the council chiefs when the other delegates aren’t present, and vice versa. The leaders must be shamed into making concrete promises in the hearing of the rest.”
“I wish you were going instead,” said Lanark. They reached an overgrown privet hedge whose top leaves were black against a low glowing light. Sludden, then Lanark, then Mrs. Schtzngrm pushed through a gap onto the airfield. This was almost too narrow to be called a field, being a grassy triangular space on the summit of a hill completely surrounded by back gardens. A square tarpaulin was spread on the grass with three electric lights placed round it, and in the centre of the tarpaulin, upon very broad feet and short bowed legs, stood something like a bird. Though too large for an eagle it had the same shape and brownish gold feathers. The figures U-1 were stencilled on the breast. In the back between the folded wings was an opening about eighteen inches wide, though overlapping feathers made it seem narrower. As far as Lanark could see the interior was quilted with blue satin. He said, “Is this a bird or a machine?”
“A bit of both,” said Sludden, taking the briefcase from Lanark’s hand and tossing it into the cavity.
“But how can it fly when it’s hollow inside?”
“It draws vital energy from the passenger,” said Mrs. Schtzngrm.
“I haven’t enough energy to fly that to another city.”
“A credit cart vill allow the vehicle to draw energy from your future. You haf a cart?”
“Here,” said Sludden. “I took it from his other suit. Angus, the chair, please.”
The chauffeur brought a kitchen chair from the darkness and placed it beside the bird; Lanark, feebly protesting, was helped onto it by Sludden.
“I don’t like doing this.”
“Just step inside, Mr. Delegate.”
Lanark put one foot in the cavity, then the other. The bird rocked and settled as he slid down inside; then the head came up and turned completely round so that he was faced by the down-curving dagger point of the great beak. “Give it this,” said Sludden, handing him the credit card. Lanark held it by an extreme corner and thrust it shyly toward the beak, which snapped it up. A yellow light went on in the glassy eyes. The head turned away and lowered out of sight. Mrs. Schtzngrm said, “He cannot fly till you haf put yourself mos
tly inside. Remember, the less you think the faster he vill go. Do not fear for your goot clothing, the interior is sanitizing and vill launder and trim you while you sleep.”
The smooth strong satin inside the bird supported Lanark as though he sat in a chair, but when he pulled his arms in it stretched him out and the rear end sank until his feet inside the neck felt higher than his face. This looked out of the cleft between two brown wings, which started rising higher and higher on each side. Squinting forward he could see a bungalow roof with a yellow square of window. The black shape of someone’s head and shoulders looked out of this, and if the window belonged to Sludden’s house the watcher was surely Sandy and at once the grotesque flimsy aircraft and being a delegate and a provost seemed stupid evasions of the realest thing in the world and he shouted “No!” and began struggling to get out but at that moment the arching wings on each side thrashed down and with a thunderous wump-wump-wump he was flung upward feet first like a javelin and a sore blast of cold air on the brow knocked him out of his senses.
CHAPTER 40.
Provan
He wakened cradled in stillness and looking at a bright full moon. The surrounding sky held a few big stars. His eyes were so dazzled that he rested them on the deep spaces between, but other stars started glittering there, and then whole. constellations; he could not watch a space, however tiny, without the silver dust of a galaxy coming to glimmer in it. With outspread wings his aircraft seemed hanging, slightly tilted, between the ceiling of stars and a floor of smooth clouds which spread, like them, from horizon to horizon, and was that most mysteriously splendid of all colours, whiteness seen by a dim light. This thinned and opened under him and for a moment the craft seemed to overturn, for the bright moon shone through the opening. He was looking down into the sky reflected in a circular lake, reflected and magnified, for a black speck in the centre of the lower moon was clearly a reflection of his bird-machine. The lake, though sombre, had colour of its own. A jet black halo surrounded the reflected moon, and a ring of deep blue water flecked with stars surrounded that. To left and right was a beach of pure sand as pearly-pale as the clouds, and the round lake and its beaches were enclosed by two curving shores which made the shape of an eye. And Lanark saw that it was an eye, and the feeling which came to him then was too new to have a name. His mouth and mind opened wide and the only thought left was a wonder if he—a speck of a speck floating before that large pupil—was seen by it. In an effort to think something else he looked up at the stars but looked down again almost at once, and the eye was nearer now, he could only see the stars reflected in the depth. There was a sound like remote thunder or the breathings of wind in the ear. “Is … is … is …” it said. “Is … if … is ….” He knew that half the stars were seeing the other half and smiled slightly, not knowing up from down or caring which was which. Then, dazed by infinity, he did not fall asleep but seemed to float out into it.
He wakened next in pale cold azure. He was above a plain of snowy clouds with a blue bird-like shadow skimming over them on one side and on the other, not far above the horizon, a small piercing sun which seemed to shoot golden wires at his eyes when he glimpsed it. Sometimes he passed through fountains of birdsong squirting up through rifts in the clouds and looked down for a moment on grass or rocks a mile or so beneath, but the only steady sound was the quietly thudding wings of the eagle-machine muted by the thin air. His body lay relaxed and warm on the firm satin. His face lay in a pool of cold air as refreshing as a rinse of cold water. On the horizon ahead he saw a mountain of white cloud as single as a milk jug on the edge of a bare table. A bird-shaped black dot, casting a fleck of shadow, seemed to cross the side of it. Later, when the peak and precipices of the mountain floated above him, creamy and dazzling toward the sun and toning into blue shadow away from it, he saw that the cloudy plain ended here and a real mountain stood under the cloud one. It had a sharp summit and granite precipices and was highest of a jagged range rising from heathery purple moors. It combined the massiveness of great sculptures with the most delicately imagined detail. A drifting movement on the shadowy side of a glen resolved into a herd of deer. A small loch on the moor had a waterfall spilling out of it and an angler, knee deep, near the edge. He saw differently coloured fields with white farmhouses along a shore, and a bay where the sand under shallow water was lemon-yellow with reddish gardens of weed. Farther out the water was ribbed by sea swells and ruffled all over by little waves that sparkled where the sunlight caught them. He passed over a pale green, slow-foaming triangle of wake with a long tanker moving onward at the tip. Then conversational sounds came from inside his eagle-machine, and he pulled his head in out of the sunlight.
A small voice near his toes was saying “… identify self. This is Provan Air Authority addressing the U-1 flight from Unthank. Repeat: will passenger please identify self. Over.” “I am the Lord Provost of the Greater Unthank region,” said Lanark firmly, yet with elation, “and delegate to the general assembly of council states.”
“Please rep—please rep—please repeat. Over.”
Lanark said it again.
“The U-1 flight from Unthank may proceed to Hampden as planned on beam co—beam co—beam coordinate zero flux zero parahelion 43 minutes 19 point nought 7 seconds epihelion ditto neg—ditto neg—ditto negating impetus reversal flow 22 point nought 2—nought 2—nought 2—nought 2—nought 2 beyond the equinoctial of Quebus on the international nerve—national nerve—national nerve-circuit-decimal-calendar-cortexin-quantum-clock. Message understood? Over.”
“It sounds like gibberish to me,” said Lanark.
“Proceed as planned. Repeat: as planned. Repeat: as planned. Out.”
There was a click and silence. He lay thinking of how he kept being pushed into certain actions, and how people kept talking to him as though he had planned them. But perhaps the message had not been for him but for his aircraft. It had sounded very like a machine talking to a machine. He pushed his head out into sunlight again.
He was flying up a wide and winding firth with very different coasts. To the right lay green farmland with clumps of trees and reservoirs in hollows linked by quick streams. On the left were mountain ridges and high bens silvered with snow, the sun striking gold sparkles off bits of sea loch between them. On both shores he saw summer resorts with shops, church spires and crowded esplanades, and clanging ports with harbours full of shipping. Tankers moved on the water, and freighters and white-sailed yachts. A long curving feather of smoke pointed up at him from a paddle steamer churning with audible chunking sounds toward an island big enough to hold a grouse moor, two woods, three farms, a golf course and a town fringing a bay. This island looked like a bright toy he could lift up off the smoothly ribbed, rippling sea, and he seemed to recognize it. He thought, ‘Did I have a sister once? And did we play together on the grassy top of that cliff among the yellow gorse-bushes? Yes, on that cliff behind the marine observatory, on a day like this in the summer holidays. Did we bury a tin box under a gorse root in a rabbit hole? There was a half-crown piece in it and a silver sixpence dated from that year, and a piece of our mothers jewellery, and a cheap little notebook with a message to ourselves when we grew up. Did we promise to dig it up in twenty-five years? And dug it up two days later to make sure it hadn’t been stolen? And were we not children then? And was I not happy?’
The shores grew steeper, more wooded and close together; the firth was pinched between them to a water-lane marked by buoys and light-towers. In places docks embanked it and vessels were being built or unloaded beneath the arms of cranes. Then the high land sloped away left and right and he came to a valley, a broad basin of land filled by a city with the river gleaming toward a centre of spires, towers and high white blocks. The eagle-machine left the river and soared in a long curve over sloping hills to the south, then to the east, then to the north. It crossed tenements of clean stone enclosing gardens where children played and lines of washing flapped in a slow breeze. There was a holiday in
this city for the air was transparent and the bowling greens and tennis courts busy with players. The width and beauty of the view, its clearness under the sun seemed not only splendid but familiar. He thought, ‘All my life, yes, all my life I’ve wanted this, yet I seem to know it well. Not the names, no, the names have gone, but I recognize the places. And if I really lived here once, and was happy, how did I lose it? Why am I only returning now?’
Sometimes he heard a sound like a slow explosion, a huge soft roaring from the city centre, and looking over there he saw tiny bird shapes moving to and fro. A shadow touched him and looking upward he saw, overhead toward the east, a great eagle crossing his course with the sign Z-1 on the underside of the breast. He realized his own craft was following a spiral path aimed at the city centre and getting lower all the time. It soared down the tree-filled gorge of another river, a small one linking parks full of strollers and sunbathers. Children on a grassy slope waved handkerchiefs at him and he thought, ‘Soon I’ll see the university.’ A moment later he looked down on twin quadrangles framed by pinnacled rooftops. He thought, ‘Soon we’ll reach the river with the big dock basin and cranes and warehouses’, but this time he was wrong. The small river entered a mainstream which spread out into arms of quiet water, but these lay among paths and trees surrounding a gigantic sports stadium. Figures were racing and vaulting round the tracks, on the rich green grass of the centre rested athletes in variously coloured suits, from the crowded terraces a dull hubbub of applause welled into a roar. Lanark’s aircraft joined five or six others circling overhead. At intervals one would drop toward a white canvas square spread before the main grandstand with red, blue and black target rings painted on it. A voice over a loudspeaker was saying “… and now Posky, Podgorny, Paleologue and Norn are entering the last lap; and just descending, bang on target, is Premier Kostoglotov of the Scythian People’s Republic; and Norn and Paleologue are passing, yes, passing Podgorny into second place, almost neck and neck, and the gap between them and Posky is closing fast”—here a great roar went up—
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