Out of the Silent Planet Read online

  ‘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 smell 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 - alns, 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.’

  ‘Oyarsa 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 telescope, 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 recognised 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.

  16

  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 brossa, 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 hma¯n and how 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 50777. ‘And close it up when you do not.’

  Aug
ray 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‘S hands 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 50777, ‘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 patience 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.

  The landscape which he saw from his high, swaying post of observation was a solemn one. The bandramit was nowhere to be seen. On each side of the shallow gully in which they were walking, a world of naked, faintly greenish rock, interrupted with wide patches of red, extended to the horizon. The heaven, darkest blue where the rock met it, was almost black at the zenith, and looking in any direction where sunlight did not blind him, he could see the stars. He learned from the sorn that he was right in thinking they were near the limits of the breathable. Already on the mountain fringe that borders the harandra and walls the handramit, or in the narrow depression along which their road led them, the air is of Himalayan rarity, ill breathing for a hross, and a few hundred feet higher, on the harandra proper, the true surface of the planet, it admits no life. Hence the brightness through which they walked was almost that of heaven -celestial light hardly at all tempered with an atmospheric veil.

  The shadow of the sorn, with Ransom’s shadow on its shoulder, moved over the uneven rock unnaturally distinct like the shadow of a tree before the headlights of a car; and the rock beyond the shadow hurt his eyes. The remote horizon seemed but an arm’s length away. The fissures and moulding of distant slopes were clear as the background of a primitive picture made before men learned perspective. He was on the very frontier of that heaven he had known in the space-ship, and rays that the air-enveloped words cannot taste were once more at work upon his body. He felt the old lift of the heart, the soaring solemnity, the sense, at once sober and ecstatic, of life and power offered in unasked and unmeasured abundance. If there had been air enough in his lungs he would have laughed aloud; and now, even in the immediate landscape, beauty was drawing near. Over the edge of the valley, as if it had frothed down from the true harandra, came great curves of the rose-tinted, cumular stuff which he had seen so often from a distance. Now on a nearer view they appeared hard as stone in substance, but puffed above and stalked beneath like vegetation; his original simile of giant cauliflower turned out to be surprisingly correct - stone cauliflowers the size of cathedrals and the colour of pale rose. He asked the sorn what it was.

  ‘It is the old forests of Malacandra,’ said Augray. ‘Once there was air on the harandra and it was warm. To this day, if you could get up there and live, you would see it all covered with the bones of ancient creatures; it was once full of life and noise; it was then these forests grew, and in and out among their stalks went a people that have vanished from the world these many thousand years. They were covered not with fur but with a coat like mine. They did not go in the water swimming or on the ground walking; they glided in the air on broad flat limbs which kept them up. It is said they were great singers, and in those days the red forests echoed with their music. Now the forests have become stone and only eldila can go among them.’

  ‘We still have such creatures in our world,’ said Ransom. ‘We call them birds. Where was Oyarsa when all this happened to the harandra?’

  ‘Where he is now.’

  ‘And he could not prevent it?’

  ‘I do not know. But a world is not made to last for ever, much less a race; that is not Maleldil’s way.’

  As they proceeded the petrified forests grew more numerous, and often for half an hour at a time the whole horizon of the lifeless, almost airless, waste blushed like an English garden in summer. They passed many caves where, as Augray told him, sorns lived; sometimes a high cliff would be perforated with countless holes to the very top and unidentifiable noises came hollowly from within. ‘Work’ was in progress, said the sorn, but of what kind it could not make him understand. Its vocabulary was very different from that of the hrossa. Nowhere did he see anything like a village or city of sorns, who were apparently solitary not social creatures. Once or twice a long pallid face would show from a cavern mouth and exchange a horn-like greeting with the travellers, but for the most part the long valley, the rock-street of the silent people, was still and empty as the harandra itself.

  Only towards afternoon, as they were about to descend into a dip of the road, they met three sorns together coming towards them down the opposite slope. They seemed to Ransom to be rather skating than walking. The lightness of their world and the perfect poise of their bodies allowed them to lean forward at right angles to the slope, and they came swiftly down like full-rigged ships before a fair wind. The grace of their movement, their lofty stature, and the softened glancing of the sunlight on their feathery sides, effected a final transformation in Ransom’s feelings towards their race. ‘Ogres’ he had called them when they first met his eyes as he struggled in the grip of Weston and Devine; ‘Titans’ or ‘Angels’ he now thought would have been a better word. Even the faces, it seemed to him, he had not then seen aright. He had thought them spectral when they were only august, and his first human reaction to their lengthened severity of line and profound stillness of expression now appeared to him not so much cowardly as vulgar. So might Parmenides or Confucius look to the eyes of a Cockney schoolboy! The great white creatures sailed towards Ransom and Augray and dipped like trees and passed.

  In spite of the cold - which made him often dismount and take a spell on foot - he did not wish for the end of the journey; but Augray had his own plans and halted for the night long before sundown at the home of an older sorn. Ransom saw well enough that he was brought there to be shown to a great scientist. The cave, or, to speak more correctly, the system of excavations, was large and many-chambered, and contained a multitude of things that he did not understand. He was specially interested in a collection of rolls, seemingly of skin, covered with characters, which were clearly books; but he gathered that books were few in Malacandra.

  ‘
It is better to remember,’ said the sorns.

  When Ransom asked if valuable secrets might not thus be lost, they replied that Oyarsa always remembered them and would bring them to light if he thought fit.

  ‘The hrossa used to have many books of poetry,’ they added. ‘But now they have fewer. They say that the writing of books destroys poetry.’

  Their host in these caverns was attended by a number of other sorns who seemed to be in some way subordinate to him; Ransom thought at first that they were servants but decided later that they were pupils or assistants.

  The evening’s conversation was not such as would interest a terrestrial reader, for the sorns had determined that Ransom should not ask, but answer, questions. Their questioning was very different from the rambling, imaginative inquiries of the hrossa. They worked systematically from the geology of Earth to its present geography, and thence in turn to flora, fauna, human history, languages, politics and arts. When they found that Ransom could tell them no more on a given subject - and this happened pretty soon in most of their inquiries -they dropped it at once and went on to the next. Often they drew out of him indirectly much more knowledge than he consciously possessed, apparently working from a wide background of general science. A casual remark about trees when Ransom was trying to explain the manufacture of paper would fill up for them a gap in his sketchy answers to their botanical questions; his account of terrestrial navigation might illuminate mineralogy; and his description of the steam engine gave them a better knowledge of terrestrial air and water than Ransom had ever had. He had decided from the outset that he would be quite frank, for he now felt that it would be not hnau, and also that it would be unavailing, to do otherwise. They were astonished at what he had to tell them of human history - of war, slavery and prostitution.

  ‘It is because they have no Oyarsa,’ said one of the pupils.

  ‘It is because every one of them wants to be a little Oyarsa himself,’ said Augray.

  ‘They cannot help it,’ said the old sorn. ‘There must be rule, yet how can creatures rule themselves? Beasts must be ruled by hnau and hnau by eldila and eldila by Maleldil. These creatures have no eldila. They are like one trying to lift himself by his own hair - or one trying to see over a whole country when he is on a level with it - like a female trying to beget young on herself.’

  Two things about our world particularly stuck in their minds. One was the extraordinary degree to which problems of lifting and carrying things absorbed our energy. The other was the fact that we had only one kind of hnau: they thought this must have far-reaching effects in the narrowing of sympathies and even of thought.

  ‘Your thought must be at the mercy of your blood,’ said the old sorn. ‘For you cannot compare it with thought that floats on a different blood.’

  It was a tiring and very disagreeable conversation for Ransom. But when at last he lay down to sleep it was not of the human nakedness nor of his own ignorance that he was thinking. He thought only of the old forests of Malacandra and of what it might mean to grow up seeing always so few miles away a land of colour that could never be reached and had once been inhabited.

  17

  Early next day Ransom again took his seat on Augray’s shoulder. For more than an hour they travelled through the same bright wilderness. Far to the north the sky was luminous with a cloud-like mass of dull red or ochre; it was very large and drove furiously westward about ten miles above the waste. Ransom, who had yet seen no cloud in the Malacandrian sky, asked what it was. The sorn told him it was sand caught up from the great northern deserts by the winds of that terrible country. It was often thus carried, sometimes at a height of seventeen miles, to fall again, perhaps in a handramit, as a choking and blinding dust storm. The sight of it moving with menace in the naked sky served to remind Ransom that they were indeed on the outside of Malacandra - no longer dwelling in a world but crawling over the surface of a strange planet. At last the cloud seemed to drop and burst far on the western horizon, where a glow, not unlike that of a conflagration, remained visible until a turn of the valley hid all that region from his view.

  The same turn opened a new prospect to his eyes. What lay before him looked at first strangely like an earthly landscape - a landscape of grey downland ridges rising and falling like waves of the sea. Far beyond,