Out of the Silent Planet Page 10

  Doubtless he exaggerated the time during which he thus wandered and watched the shadows from the rocks lengthening towards him. It cannot really have been long before he saw a light ahead-a light which showed how dark the surrounding landscape had become. He tried to run but his body would not respond. Stumbling in haste and weakness, he made for the light; thought he had reached it and found that it was far farther off than he had supposed; almost despaired; staggered on again, and came at last to what seemed a cavern mouth. The light within was an unsteady one and a delicious wave of warmth smote on his face. It was firelight.

  He came into the mouth of the cave and then, unsteadily, round the fire and into the interior, and stood still blinking in the light. When at last he could see, he discerned a smooth chamber of green rock, very lofty. There were two things in it. One of them, dancing on the wall and roof, was the huge, angular shadow of a sorn: the other, crouched beneath it, was the sorn himself.

  XV

  “COME IN, Small One,” boomed the sorn. “Come in and let me look at you.”

  Now that he stood face to face with the spectre that had haunted him ever since he set foot on Malacandra, Ransom felt a surprising indifference. He had no idea what might be coming next, but he was determined to carry out his programme; and in the meantime the warmth and more breathable air were a heaven in themselves. He came in, well in past the fire, and answered the sorn. His own voice sounded to him a shrill treble.

  “The hrossa have sent me to look for Oyarsa,” he said.

  The sorn peered at him. “You are not from this world,” it said suddenly.

  “No,” replied Ransom, and sat down. He was too tired to explain. “I think you are from Thulcandra, Small One,” said the sorn.

  “Why?” said Ransom.

  “You are small and thick and that is how the animals ought to be made in a heavier world. You cannot come from Glundandra, for it is so heavy that if any animals could live there they would be flat like plates-even you, Small One, would break if you stood up on that world. I do not think you are from Perelandra, for it must be very hot; if any came from there they would not live when they arrived here. So I conclude you are from Thulcandra.”

  “The world I come from is called Earth by those who live there,” said Ransom. “And it is much warmer than this. Before I came into your cave I was nearly dead with cold and thin air.”

  The sorn made a sudden movement with one of its long fore-limbs. Ransom stiffened (though he did not allow himself to retreat), for the creature might be going to grab him. In fact, its intentions were kindly. Stretching back into the cave, it took from the wall what looked like a cup. Then Ransom saw that it was attached to a length of flexible tube. The sorn put it into his hands.

  “Smell on this,” it said. “The hrossa also need it when they pass this way.”

  Ransom inhaled and was instantly refreshed. His painful shortness of breath was eased and the tension of chest and temples was relaxed. The sorn and the lighted cavern, hitherto vague and dream-like to his eyes, took on a new reality.

  “Oxygen?” he asked; but naturally the English word meant nothing to the sorn. “Are you called Augray?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said the sorn. “What are you called?”

  “The animal I am is called Man, and therefore the hrossa call me Hman. But my own name is Ransom.”

  “Man-Ren-soom,” said the sorn. He noticed that it spoke differently from the hrossa, without any suggestion of their persistent initial H.

  It was sitting on its long, wedge-shaped buttocks with its feet drawn close up to it. A man in the same posture would have rested his chin on his knees, but the sorn’s legs were too long for that. Its knees rose high above its shoulders on each side of its head-grotesquely suggestive of huge ears-and the head, down between them, rested its chin on the protruding breast. The creature seemed to have either a double chin or a beard; Ransom could not make out which in the firelight. It was mainly white or cream in colour and seemed to be clothed down to the ankles in some soft substance that reflected the light. On the long fragile shanks, where the creature was closest to him, he saw that this was some natural kind of coat. It was not like fur but more like feathers. In fact it was almost exactly like feathers. The whole animal, seen at close quarters, was less terrifying than he had expected, and even a little smaller. The face, it was true, took a good deal of getting used to-it was too long, too solemn and too colourless, and it was much more unpleasantly like a human face than any inhuman creature’s face ought to be. Its eyes, like those of all very large creatures, seemed too small for it. But it was more grotesque than horrible. A new conception of the sorns began to arise in his mind: the ideas of “giant” and “ghost” receded behind those of “goblin” and “gawk.”

  “Perhaps you are hungry, Small One,” it said.

  Ransom was. The sorn rose with strange spidery movements and began going to and fro about the cave, attended by its thin goblin shadow. It brought him the usual vegetable foods of Malacandra, and strong drink, with the very welcome addition of a smooth brown substance which revealed itself to nose, eye and palate, in defiance of all probability, as cheese. Ransom asked what it was.

  The sorn began to explain painfully how the female of some animals secreted a fluid for the nourishment of its young, and would have gone on to describe the whole process of milking and cheesemaking, if Ransom had not interrupted it.

  “Yes, yes,” he said. “We do the same on Earth. What is the beast you use?”

  “It is a yellow beast with a long neck. It feeds on the forests that grow in the handramit.

  The young ones of our people who are not yet fit for much else drive the beasts down there in the mornings and follow them while they feed; then before night they drive them back and put them in the caves.”

  For a moment Ransom found something reassuring in the thought that the sorns were shepherds. Then he remembered that the Cyclops in Homer plied the same trade.

  “I think I have seen one of your people at this very work,” he said. “But the hrossa-they let you tear up their forests?”

  “Why should they not?”

  “Do you rule the hrossa?”

  “Oyarsa rules them.”

  “And who rules you?”

  “Oyarsa.”

  “But you know more than the hrossa?”

  “The hrossa know nothing except about poems and fish and making things grow out of the ground.”

  “And Oyarsa-is he a sorn?”

  “No, no, Small One. I have told you he rules all nau” (so he pronounced hnau) “and everything in Malacandra.”

  “I do not understand this Oyarsa,” said Ransom. “Tell me more.”

  “Oyarsa does not die,” said the sorn. “And he does not breed. He is the one of his kind who was put into Malacandra to rule it when Malacandra was made. His body is not like ours, nor yours; it is hard to see and the light goes through it.”

  “Like an eldil?”

  “Yes, he is the greatest of eldila who ever come to a handra.”

  “What are these eldila?”

  “Do you tell me, Small One, that there are no eldila in your world?”

  “Not that I know of. But what are eldila, and why can I not see them? Have they no bodies?”

  “Of course they have bodies. There are a great many bodies you cannot see. Every animal’s eyes see some things but not others. Do you not know of many kinds of body in Thulcandra?” Ransom tried to give the sorn some idea of the terrestrial terminology of solids, liquids and gases. It listened with great attention.

  “That is not the way to say it,” it replied. “Body is movement. If it is at one speed, you smell something; if at another, you hear a sound; if at another, you see a sight; if at another, you neither see nor hear nor nor know the body in any way. But mark this, Small One, that the two ends meet.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “If movement is faster, then that which moves is more nearly in two places at once.” />
  “That is true.”

  “But if the movement were faster still-it is difficult, for you do not know many words-you see that if you made it faster and faster, in the end the moving thing would be in all places at once, Small One.”

  “I think I see that.”

  “Well, then, that is the thing at the top of all bodies-so fast that it is at rest, so truly body that it has ceased being body at all. But we will not talk of that. Start from where we are, Small One. The swiftest thing that touches our senses is light. We do not truly see light, we only see slower things lit by it, so that for us light is on the edge-the last thing we know before things become too swift for us. But the body of an eldil is a movement swift as light; you may say its body is made of light, but not of that which is light for the eldil. His ‘light’ is a swifter movement which for us is nothing at all; and what we call light is for him a thing like water, a visible thing, a thing he can touch and bathe in-even a dark thing when not illumined by the swifter. And what we call firm things-flesh and earth-seems to him thinner, and harder to see, than our light, and more like clouds, and nearly nothing. To us the eldil is a thin, half-real body that can go through walls and rocks: to himself he goes through them because he is solid and firm and they are like cloud. And what is true light to him and fills the heaven, so that he will plunge into the rays of the sun to refresh himself from it, is to us the black nothing in the sky at night. These things are not strange, Small One, though they are beyond our senses. But it is strange that the eldila never visit Thulcandra.”

  “Of that I am not certain,” said Ransom. It had dawned on him that the recurrent human tradition of bright, elusive people sometimes appearing on the Earth-albs, devas and the like-might after all have another explanation than the anthropologists had yet given. True, it would turn the universe rather oddly inside out; but his experiences in the space-ship had prepared him for some such operation.

  “Why does Oyarsa send for me?” he asked.

  “Oyarsa has not told me,” said the sorn. “But doubtless he would want to see any stranger from another handra.”

  “We have no Oyarsa in my world,” said Ransom.

  “That is another proof,” said the sorn, “that you come from Thulcandra, the silent planet.”

  “What has that to do with it?”

  The sorn seemed surprised. “It is not very likely if you had an Oyarsa that he would never speak to ours.”

  “Speak to yours? But how could he-it is millions of miles away.”

  “Oyorsa would not think of it like that.”

  “Do you mean that he ordinarily receives messages from other planets?”

  “Once again, he would not say it that way. Oyarsa would not say that he lives on Malacandra and that another Oyarsa lives on another earth. For him Malacandra is only a place in the heavens; it is in the heavens that he and the others live. Of course they talk together . . .”

  Ransom’s mind shied away from the problem; he was getting sleepy and thought he must be misunderstanding the sorn.

  “I think I must sleep, Augray,” he said. “And I do not know what you are saying. Perhaps, too, I do not come from what you call Thulcandra.”

  “We will both sleep presently,” said the sorn. “But first I will show you Thulcandra.” It rose and Ransom followed it into the back of the cave. Here he found a little recess and running up within it a winding stair. The steps, hewn for sorns, were too high for a man to climb with any comfort, but using hands and knees he managed to hobble up. The sorn preceded him. Ransom did not understand the light, which seemed to come from some small round object which the creature held in its hand. They went up a long way, almost as if they were climbing up the inside of a hollow mountain. At last, breathless, he found himself in a dark but warm chamber of rock, and heard the sorn saying:

  “She is still well above the southern horizon.” It directed his attention to something like a small window. Whatever it was, it did not appear to work like an earthly telescopes Ransom thought; though an attempt, made next day, to explain the principles of the telescope to the sorn threw grave doubts on his own ability to discern the difference. He leaned forward with his elbows on the sill of the aperture and looked. He saw perfect blackness and, floating in the centre of it, seemingly an arm’s length away, a bright disk about the size of a half-crown. Most of its surface was featureless, shining silver; towards the bottom markings appeared, and below them a white cap, just as he had seen the polar caps in astronomical photographs of Mars. He wondered for a moment if it was Mars he was looking at; then, as his eyes took in the markings better, he recognized what they were-Northern Europe and a piece of North America. They were upside down with the North Pole at the bottom of the picture and this somehow shocked him. But it was Earth he was seeing-even, perhaps, England, though the picture shook a little and his eyes were quickly getting tired, and he could not be certain that he was not imagining it. It was all there in that little disk-London, Athens, Jerusalem, Shakespeare. There everyone had lived and everything had happened; and there, presumably, his pack was still lying in the porch of an empty house near Sterk.

  “Yes,” he said dully to the sorn. “That is my world.” It was the bleakest moment in all his travels.

  XVI

  RANSOM AWOKE next morning with the vague feeling that a great weight had been taken off his mind. Then he remembered that he was the guest of a sorn and that the creature he had been avoiding ever since he landed had turned out to be as amicable as the hrossa, though he was far from feeling the same affection for it. Nothing then remained to be afraid of in Malacandra except Oyarsa. “The last fence,” thought Ransom.

  Augray gave him food and drink.

  “And now,” said Ransom, “how shall I find my way to Oyarsa?”

  “I will carry you,” said the sorn. “You are too small a one to make the journey yourself and I will gladly go to Meldilorn. The hrossa should not have sent you this way. They do not seem to know from looking at an animal what sort of lungs it has and what it can do. It is just like a hross. If you died on the harandra they would have made a poem about the gallant hman andhow the sky grew black and the cold stars shone and he journeyed on and journeyed on; and they would have put in a fine speech for you to say as you were dying . . . and all this would seem to them just as good as if they had used a little forethought and saved your life by sending you the easier way round.”

  “I like the hrossa,” said Ransom a little stiffly. “And I think the way they talk about death is the right way.”

  “They are right not to fear it, Ren-soom, but they do not seem to look at it reasonably as part of the very nature of our bodies-and therefore often avoidable at times when they would never see how to avoid it. For example, this has saved the life of many a hross, but a hross would not have thought of it.”

  He showed Ransom a flask with a tube attached to it, and, at the end of the tube, a cup, obviously an apparatus for administering oxygen to oneself.

  “Smell on it as you have need, Small One,” said the sorn. “And close it up when you do not.”

  Augray fastened the thing on his back and gave the tube over his shoulder into his hand. Ransom could not restrain a shudder at the touch of the sorn’shands upon his body; they were fan-shaped, seven-fingered, mere skin over bone like a bird’s leg, and quite cold. To divert his mind from such reactions he asked where the apparatus was made, for he had as yet seen nothing remotely like a factory or a laboratory.

  “We thought it,” said the sorn, “and the pfifltriggi made it.”

  “Why do they make them?” said Ransom. He was trying once more, with his insufficient vocabulary, to find out the political and economic framework of Malacandrian life.

  “They like making things,” said Augray. “It is true they like best the making of things that are only good to look at and of no use. But sometimes when they are tired of that they will make things for us, things we have thought, provided they are difficult enough. They have not pati
ence to make easy things however useful they would be. But let us begin our journey. You shall sit on my shoulder.”

  The proposal was unexpected and alarming, but seeing that the sorn had already crouched down, Ransom felt obliged to climb on to the plume-like surface of its shoulder, to seat himself beside the long, pale face, casting his right arm as far as it would go round the huge neck, and to compose himself as well as he could for this precarious mode of travel. The giant rose cautiously to a standing position and he found himself looking down on the landscape from a height of about eighteen feet.

  “Is all well, Small One?” it asked.

  “Very well,” Ransom answered, and the journey began.

  Its gait was perhaps the least human thing about it. It lifted its feet very high and set them down very gently. Ransom was reminded alternately of a cat stalking, a strutting barn-door fowl, and a high-stepping carriage horse; but the movement was not really like that of any terrestrial animal. For the passenger it was surprisingly comfortable. In a few minutes he had lost all sense of what was dizzying or unnatural in his position. Instead, ludicrous and even tender associations came crowding into his mind. It was like riding an elephant at the zoo in boyhood-like riding on his father’s back at a still earlier age. It was fun. They seemed to be doing between six and seven miles an hour. The cold, though severe, was endurable; and thanks to the oxygen he had little difficulty with his breathing.