Perelandra Read online

  ‘He has never bidden you not to,’ she said, less as a question than as a statement.

  ‘No,’ said Ransom.

  ‘There can, then, be different laws in different worlds.’

  ‘Is there a law in your world not to sleep in a Fixed Land?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Lady. ‘He does not wish us to dwell there. We may land on them and walk on them, for the world is ours. But to stay there to sleep and awake there …’ she ended with a shudder.

  ‘You couldn’t have that law in our world,’ said Ransom. ‘There are no floating lands with us.’

  ‘How many of you are there?’ asked the Lady suddenly.

  Ransom found that he didn’t know the population of the Earth, but contrived to give her some idea of many millions. He had expected her to be astonished, but it appeared that numbers did not interest her. ‘How do you all find room on your Fixed Land?’ she asked.

  ‘There is not one fixed land, but many,’ he answered. ‘And they are big: almost as big as the sea.’

  ‘How do you endure it?’ she burst out. ‘Almost half your world empty and dead. Loads and loads of land, all tied down. Does not the very thought of it crush you?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Ransom. ‘The very thought of a world which was all sea like yours would make my people unhappy and afraid.’

  ‘Where will this end?’ said the Lady, speaking more to herself than to him. ‘I have grown so old in these last few hours that all my life before seems only like the stem of a tree, and now I am like the branches shooting out in every direction. They are getting so wide apart that I can hardly bear it. First to have learned that I walk from good to good with my own feet … that was a stretch enough. But now it seems that good is not the same in all worlds; that Maleldil has forbidden in one what He allows in another.’

  ‘Perhaps my world is wrong about this,’ said Ransom rather feebly, for he was dismayed at what he had done.

  ‘It is not so,’ said she. ‘Maleldil Himself has told me now. And it could not be so, if your world has no floating lands. But He is not telling me why He has forbidden it to us.’

  ‘There’s probably some good reason,’ began Ransom, when he was interrupted by her sudden laughter.

  ‘Oh, Piebald, Piebald,’ she said, still laughing. ‘How often the people of your race speak!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Ransom, a little put out.

  ‘What are you sorry for?’

  ‘I am sorry if you think I talk too much.’

  ‘Too much? How can I tell what would be too much for you to talk?’

  ‘In our world when they say a man talks much they mean they wish him to be silent.’

  ‘If that is what they mean, why do they not say it?’

  ‘What made you laugh?’ asked Ransom, finding her question too hard.

  ‘I laughed, Piebald, because you were wondering, as I was, about this law which Maleldil has made for one world and not for another. And you had nothing to say about it and yet made the nothing up into words.’

  ‘I had something to say, though,’ said Ransom almost under his breath. ‘At least,’ he added in a louder voice, ‘this forbidding is no hardship in such a world as yours.’

  ‘That also is a strange thing to say,’ replied the Lady. ‘Who thought of its being hard? The beasts would not think it hard if I told them to walk on their heads. It would become their delight to walk on their heads. I am His beast, and all His biddings are joys. It is not that which makes me thoughtful. But it was coming into my mind to wonder whether there are two kinds of bidding.’

  ‘Some of our wise men have said …’ began Ransom, when she interrupted him.

  ‘Let us wait and ask the King,’ she said. ‘For I think, Piebald, you do not know much more about this than I do.’

  ‘Yes, the King, by all means,’ said Ransom. ‘If only we can find him.’ Then, quite involuntarily, he added in English, ‘By Jove! What was that?’ She also had exclaimed. Some thing like a shooting star seemed to have streaked across the sky, far away on their left, and some seconds later an indeterminate noise reached their ears.

  ‘What was that?’ he asked again, this time in Old Solar.

  ‘Something has fallen out of Deep Heaven,’ said the Lady. Her face showed wonder and curiosity: but on Earth we so rarely see these emotions without some admixture of defensive fear that her expression seemed strange to him.

  ‘I think you’re right,’ said he. ‘Hullo! What’s this?’ The calm sea had swelled and all the weeds at the edge of their island were in movement. A single wave passed under their island and all was still again.

  ‘Something has certainly fallen into the sea,’ said the Lady. Then she resumed the conversation as if nothing had happened.

  ‘It was to look for the King that I had resolved to go over today to the Fixed Land. He is on none of these islands here, for I have searched them all. But if we climbed high up on the Fixed Land and looked about, then we should see a long way. We could see if there are any other islands near us.’

  ‘Let us do this,’ said Ransom. ‘If we can swim so far.’

  ‘We shall ride,’ said the Lady. Then she knelt down on the shore – and such grace was in all her movements that it was a wonder to see her kneel – and gave three low calls all on the same note. At first no result was visible. But soon Ransom saw broken water coming rapidly towards them. A moment later and the sea beside the island was a mass of the large silver fishes: spouting, curling their bodies, pressing upon one another to get nearer, and the nearest ones nosing the land. They had not only the colour but the smoothness of silver. The biggest were about nine feet long and all were thick-set and powerful-looking. They were very unlike any terrestrial species, for the base of the head was noticeably wider than the foremost part of the trunk. But then the trunk itself grew thicker again towards the tail. Without this tailward bulge they would have looked like giant tadpoles. As it was, they suggested rather pot-bellied and narrow-chested old men with very big heads. The Lady seemed to take a long time in selecting two of them. But the moment she had done so the others all fell back for a few yards and the two successful candidates wheeled round and lay still with their tails to the shore, gently moving their fins. ‘Now, Piebald, like this,’ she said, and seated herself astride the narrow part of the right-hand fish. Ransom followed her example. The great head in front of him served instead of shoulders so that there was no danger of sliding off. He watched his hostess. She gave her fish a slight kick with her heels. He did the same to his. A moment later they were gliding out to sea at about six miles an hour. The air over the water was cooler and the breeze lifted his hair. In a world where he had as yet only swum and walked, the fish’s progress gave the impression of quite an exhilarating speed. He glanced back and saw the feathery and billowy mass of the islands receding and the sky growing larger and more emphatically golden. Ahead, the fantastically shaped and coloured mountain dominated his whole field of vision. He noticed with interest that the whole school of rejected fish were still with them – some following, but the majority gambolling in wide extended wings to left and right.

  ‘Do they always follow like this?’ he asked.

  ‘Do the beasts not follow in your world?’ she replied. ‘We cannot ride more than two. It would be hard if those we did not choose were not even allowed to follow.’

  ‘Was that why you took so long to choose the two fish, Lady?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course,’ said the Lady. ‘I try not to choose the same fish too often.’

  The land came towards them apace and what had seemed level coastline began to open into bays and thrust itself forward into promontories. And now they were near enough to see that in this apparently calm ocean there was an invisible swell, a very faint rise and fall of water on the beach. A moment later the fishes lacked depth to swim any further, and following the Green Lady’s example, Ransom slipped both his legs to one side of his fish and groped down with his toes. Oh, ecstasy! – they touched solid
pebbles. He had not realised till now that he was pining for ‘fixed land’. He looked up. Down to the bay in which they were landing ran a steep narrow valley with low cliffs and outcroppings of a reddish rock and, lower down, banks of some kind of moss and a few trees. The trees might almost have been terrestrial: planted in any southern country of our own world they would not have seemed remarkable to anyone except a trained botanist. Best of all, down the middle of the valley – and welcome to Ransom’s eyes and ears as a glimpse of home or of heaven – ran a little stream, a dark translucent stream where a man might hope for trout.

  ‘You love this land, Piebald?’ said the Lady, glancing at him.

  ‘Yes,’ said he, ‘it is like my own world.’

  They began to walk up the valley to its head. When they were under the trees the resemblance of an early country was diminished, for there is so much less light in that world that the glade which should have cast only a little shadow cast a forest gloom. It was about a quarter of a mile to the top of the valley, where it narrowed into a mere cleft between low rocks. With one or two grips and a leap the Lady was up these, and Ransom followed. He was amazed at her strength. They emerged into a steep upland covered with a kind of turf which would have been very like grass but that there was more blue in it. It seemed to be closely cropped and dotted with white fluffy objects as far as the eye could reach.

  ‘Flowers?’ asked Ransom. The Lady laughed.

  ‘No. These are the Piebalds. I named you after them.’ He was puzzled for a moment but presently the objects began to move, and soon to move quickly, towards the human pair whom they had apparently winded – for they were already so high that there was a strong breeze. In a moment they were bounding all about the Lady and welcoming her. They were white beasts with black spots about the size of sheep but with ears so much larger, noses so much more mobile, and tails so much longer, that the general impression was rather of enormous mice. Their claw-like or almost hand-like paws were clearly built for climbing, and the bluish turf was their food. After a proper interchange of courtesies with these creatures, Ransom and the Lady continued their journey. The circle of golden sea below them was now spread out in an enormous expanse and the green rock pillars above seemed almost to overhang. But it was a long and stiff climb to their base. The temperature here was much lower, though it was still warm. The silence was also noticeable. Down below, on the islands, though one had not remarked it at the time, there must have been a continual background of water noises, bubble noises, and the movement of beasts.

  They were now entering into a kind of bay or reentrant of turf between two of the green pillars. Seen from below these had appeared to touch one another; but now, though they had gone in so deep between two of them that most of the view was cut off on either hand, there was still room for a battalion to march in line. The slope grew steeper every moment; and as it grew steeper the space between the pillars also grew narrower. Soon they were scrambling on hands and knees in a place where the green walls hemmed them in so that they must go in single file, and Ransom, looking up, could hardly see the sky overhead. Finally they were faced with a little bit of real rock work – a neck of stone about eight feet high which joined, like a gum of rock, the roots of the two monstrous teeth of the mountain. ‘I’d give a good deal to have a pair of trousers on,’ thought Ransom to himself as he looked at it. The Lady, who was ahead, stood on tiptoe and raised her arms to catch a projection on the lip of the ridge. Then he saw her pull, apparently intending to lift her whole weight on her arms and swing herself to the top in a single movement. ‘Look here, you can’t do it that way,’ he began, speaking inadvertently in English, but before he had time to correct himself she was standing on the edge above him. He did not see exactly how it was done, but there was no sign that she had taken any unusual exertion. His own climb was a less dignified affair, and it was a panting and perspiring man with a smudge of blood on his knee who finally stood beside her. She was inquisitive about the blood, and when he had explained the phenomenon to her as well as he could, wanted to scrape a little skin off her own knee to see if the same would happen. This led him to try to explain to her what was meant by pain, which only made her more anxious to try the experiment. But at the last moment Maleldil apparently told her not to.

  Ransom now turned to survey their surroundings. High overhead, and seeming by perspective to lean inwards towards each other at the top and almost to shut out the sky, rose the immense piers of rock – not two or three of them, but nine. Some of them, like those two between which they had entered the circle, were close together. Others were many yards apart. They surrounded a roughly oval plateau of perhaps seven acres, covered with a finer turf than any known on our planet and dotted with tiny crimson flowers. A high, singing wind carried, as it were, a cooled and refined quintessence of all the scents from the richer world below, and kept these in continual agitation. Glimpses of the far-spread sea, visible between pillars, made one continually conscious of great height; and Ransom’s eyes, long accustomed to the medley of curves and colours in the floating islands, rested on the pure lines and stable masses of this place with great refreshment. He took a few paces forward into the cathedral spaciousness of the plateau, and when he spoke his voice woke echoes.

  ‘Oh, this is good,’ he said. ‘But perhaps you – you to whom it is forbidden – do not feel it so.’ But a glance at the Lady’s face told him he was wrong. He did not know what was in her mind; but her face, as once or twice before, seemed to shine with something before which he dropped his eyes. ‘Let us examine the sea,’ she said presently.

  They made the circle of the plateau methodically. Behind them lay the group of islands from which they had set out that morning. Seen from this altitude it was larger even than Ransom had supposed. The richness of its colours – its orange, its silver, its purple and (to his surprise) its glossy blacks – made it seem almost heraldic. It was from this direction that the wind came; the smell of those islands though faint, was like the sound of running water to a thirsty man. But on every other side they saw nothing but the ocean. At least, they saw no islands. But when they had made almost the whole circuit, Ransom shouted and the Lady pointed almost at the same moment. About two miles off, dark against the coppery-green of the water, there was some small round object. If he had been looking down on an earthly sea Ransom would have taken it, at first sight, for a buoy.

  ‘I do not know what it is,’ said the Lady. ‘Unless it is the thing that fell out of Deep Heaven this morning.’

  ‘I wish I had a pair of field-glasses,’ thought Ransom, for the Lady’s words had awakened in him a sudden suspicion. And the longer he stared at the dark blob the more his suspicion was confirmed. It appeared to be perfectly spherical; and he thought he had seen something like it before.

  You have already heard that Ransom had been in that world which men call Mars but whose true name is Malacandra. But he had not been taken thither by the eldila. He had been taken by men, and taken in a space-ship, a hollow sphere of glass and steel. He had, in fact, been kidnapped by men who thought that the ruling powers of Malacandra demanded a human sacrifice. The whole thing had been a misunderstanding. The great Oyarsa who has governed Mars from the beginning (and whom my own eyes beheld, in a sense, in the hall of Ransom’s cottage) had done him no harm and meant him none. But his chief captor, Professor Weston, had meant plenty of harm. He was a man obsessed with the idea which is at this moment circulating all over our planet in obscure works of ‘scientification’, in little Interplanetary Societies and Rocketry Clubs, and between the covers of monstrous magazines, ignored or mocked by the intellectuals, but ready, if ever the power is put into its hands, to open a new chapter of misery for the universe. It is the idea that humanity, having now sufficiently corrupted the planet where it arose, must at all costs contrive to seed itself over a larger area: that the vast astronomical distances which are God’s quarantine regulations, must somehow be overcome. This for a start. But beyond this lies the sweet po
ison of the false infinite – the wild dream that planet after planet, system after system, in the end galaxy after galaxy, can be forced to sustain, everywhere and for ever, the sort of life which is contained in the loins of our own species – a dream begotten by the hatred of death upon the fear of true immortality, fondled in secret by thousands of ignorant men and hundreds who are not ignorant. The destruction or enslavement of other species in the universe, if such there are, is to these minds a welcome corollary. In Professor Weston the power had at last met the dream. The great physicist had discovered a motive power for his space-ship. And that little black object, now floating beneath him on the sinless waters of Perelandra, looked to Ransom more like the space-ship every moment. ‘So that,’ he thought, ‘that is why I have been sent here. He failed on Malacandra and now he is coming here. And it’s up to me to do something about it.’ A terrible sense of inadequacy swept over him. Last time – in Mars – Weston had had only one accomplice. But he had had firearms. And how many accomplices might he have this time? And in Mars he had been foiled not by Ransom but by the eldila, and specially the great eldil, the Oyarsa, of that world. He turned quickly to the Lady.

  ‘I have seen no eldila in your world,’ he said.

  ‘Eldila?’ she repeated as if it were a new name to her. ‘Yes. Eldila,’ said Ransom, ‘the great and ancient servants of Maleldil. The creatures that neither breed nor breathe. Whose bodies are made of light. Whom we can hardly see. Who ought to be obeyed.’

  She mused for a moment and then spoke. ‘Sweetly and gently this time Maleldil makes me older. He shows me all the natures of these blessed creatures. But there is no obeying them now, not in this world. That is all the old order, Piebald, the far side of the wave that has rolled past us and will not come again. That very ancient world to which you journeyed was put under the eldila. In your own world also they ruled once: but not since our Beloved became a Man. In your world they linger still. But in our world, which is the first of worlds to wake after the great change, they have no power. There is nothing now between us and Him. They have grown less and we have increased. And now Maleldil puts it into my mind that this is their glory and their joy. They received us – us things of the low worlds, who breed and breathe – as weak and small beasts whom their lightest touch could destroy; and their glory was to cherish us and make us older till we were older than they – till they could fall at our feet. It is a joy we shall not have. However I teach the beasts they will never be better than I. But it is a joy beyond all. Not that it is better joy than ours. Every joy is beyond all others. The fruit we are eating is always the best fruit of all.’

  ‘There have been eldila who did not think it a joy,’ said Ransom.

  ‘How?’

  ‘You spoke yesterday, Lady, of clinging to the old good instead of taking the good that came.’

  ‘Yes – for a few heart-beats.’

  ‘There was an eldil who clung longer – who has been clinging since before the worlds were made.’

  ‘But the old good would cease to be a good at all if he did that.’

  ‘Yes. It has ceased. And still he clings.’

  She stared at him in wonder and was about to speak, but he interrupted her.

  ‘There is not time to explain,’ he said.

  ‘No time? What has happened to the time?’ she asked.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘That thing down there has come through Deep Heaven from my world. There is a man in it: perhaps many men –’

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘it is turning into two – one big and one small.’

  Ransom saw that a small black object had detached itself from the space-ship and was beginning to move uncertainly away from it. It puzzled him for a moment. Then it dawned on him that Weston – if it was Weston – probably knew the watery surface he had to expect on Venus and had brought some kind of collapsible boat. But could it be that he had not reckoned with tides or storms and did not foresee that it might be impossible for him ever to recover the space-ship? It was not like Weston to cut off his own retreat. And Ransom certainly did not wish Weston’s retreat to be cut off. A Weston who could not, even if he chose, return to Earth, was an insoluble problem. Anyway, what could he, Ransom, possibly do without support from the eldila? He began to smart under a sense of injustice. What was the good of sending him – a mere scholar – to cope with a situation of this sort? Any ordinary pugilist, or, better still, any man who could make good use of a tommy-gun, would have been more to the purpose. If only they could find this King whom the Green Woman kept on talking about …

  But while these thoughts were passing through his mind he became aware of a dim murmuring or growling sound which had gradually been encroaching on the silence for some time. ‘Look,’ said the Lady suddenly,