The Space Trilogy

He had now been walking for about an hour, and it was nearly midday. No difficulty about his direction had yet occurred; he had merely to keep going uphill and he was certain of coming out of the forest to the mountain wall sooner or later. Meanwhile he felt remarkably well, though greatly chastened in mind. The silent, purple half light of the woods spread all around him as it had spread on the first day he spent in Malacandra, but everything else was changed. He looked back on that time as on a nightmare, on his own mood at that time as a sort of sickness. Then all had been whimpering, unanalysed, self-nourishing, self-consuming dismay. Now, in the clear light of an accepted duty, he felt fear indeed, but with it a sober sense of confidence in himself and in the world, and even an element of pleasure. It was the difference between a landsman in a sinking ship and a horseman on a bolting horse: either may be killed, but the horseman is an agent as well as a patient.

About an hour after noon he suddenly came out of the wood into bright sunshine. He was only twenty yards from the almost perpendicular bases of the mountain spires, too close to them to see their tops. A sort of valley ran up in the re-entrant between two of them at the place where he had emerged: an unclimbable valley consisting of a single concave sweep of stone, which in its lower parts ascended steeply as the roof of a house and farther up seemed almost vertical. At the top it even looked as if it hung over a bit, like a tidal wave of stone at the very moment of breaking; but this, he thought, might be an illusion. He wondered what the hrossa’s idea of a road might be.

He began to work his way southward along the narrow, broken ground between wood and mountain. Great spurs of the mountains had to be crossed every few moments, and even in that lightweight world it was intensely tiring. After about half an hour he came to a stream. Here he went a few paces into the forest, cut himself an ample supply of the ground weed, and sat down beside the water’s edge for lunch. When he had finished he filled his pockets with what he had not eaten and proceeded.

He began soon to be anxious about his road, for if he could make the top at all he could do it only by daylight, and the middle of the afternoon was approaching. But his fears were unnecessary. When it came it was unmistakable. An open way through the wood appeared on the left – he must be somewhere behind the hross village now – and on the right he saw the road, a single ledge, or in places, a trench, cut sidewise and upwards across the sweep of such a valley as he had seen before. It took his breath away – the insanely steep, hideously narrow staircase without steps, leading up and up from where he stood to where it was an almost invisible thread on the pale green surface of the rock. But there was no time to stand and look at it. He was a poor judge of heights, but he had no doubt that the top of the road was removed from him by a more than Alpine distance. It would take him at least till sundown to reach it. Instantly he began the ascent.

Such a journey would have been impossible on earth; the first quarter of an hour would have reduced a man of Ransom’s build and age to exhaustion. Here he was at first delighted with the ease of his movement, and then staggered by the gradient and length of the climb which, even under Malacandrian conditions, soon bowed his back and gave him an aching chest and trembling knees. But this was not the worst. He heard already a singing in his ears, and noticed that despite his labour there was no sweat on his forehead. The cold, increasing at every step, seemed to sap his vitality worse than any heat could have done. Already his lips were cracked; his breath, as he panted, showed like a cloud; his fingers were numb. He was cutting his way up into a silent arctic world, and had already passed from an English to a Lapland winter. It frightened him, and he decided that he must rest here or not at all; a hundred paces more and if he sat down he would sit for ever. He squatted on the road for a few minutes, slapping his body with his arms. The landscape was terrifying. Already the handramit which had made his world for so many weeks was only a thin purple cleft sunk amidst the boundless level desolation of the harandra which now, on the farther side, showed clearly between and above the mountain peaks. But long before he was rested he knew that he must go on or die.

The world grew stranger. Among the hrossa he had almost lost the feeling of being on a strange planet; here it returned upon him with desolating force. It was no longer ‘the world’, scarcely even ‘a world’: it was a planet, a star, a waste place in the universe, millions of miles from the world of men. It was impossible to recall what he had felt about Hyoi, or Whin, or the eldila, or Oyarsa. It seemed fantastic to have thought he had duties to such hobgoblins – if they were not hallucinations – met in the wilds of space. He had nothing to do with them: he was a man. Why had Weston and Devine left him alone like this?

But all the time the old resolution, taken when he could still think, was driving him up the road. Often he forgot where he was going, and why. The movement became a mechanical rhythm – from weariness to stillness, from stillness to unbearable cold, from cold to motion again. He noticed that the handramit – now an insignificant part of the landscape – was full of a sort of haze. He had never seen a fog while he was living there. Perhaps that was what the air of the handramit looked like from above; certainly it was different air from this. There was something more wrong with his lungs and heart than even the cold and the exertion accounted for. And though there was no snow, there was an extraordinary brightness. The light was increasing, sharpening and growing whiter and the sky was a much darker blue than he had ever seen on Malacandra. Indeed, it was darker than blue; it was almost black, and the jagged spines of rock standing against it were like his mental picture of a lunar landscape. Some stars were visible.

Suddenly he realised the meaning of these phenomena. There was very little air above him: he was near the end of it. The Malacandrian atmosphere lay chiefly in the handramits; the real surface of the planet was naked or thinly clad. The stabbing sunlight and the black sky above him were that ‘heaven’ out of which he had dropped into the Malacandrian world, already showing through the last thin veil of air. If the top were more than a hundred feet away, it would be where no man could breathe at all. He wondered whether the hrossa had different lungs and had sent him by a road that meant death for man. But even while he thought of this he took note that those jagged peaks blazing in sunlight against an almost black sky were level with him. He was no longer ascending. The road ran on before him in a kind of shallow ravine bounded on his left by the tops of the highest rock pinnacles and on his right by a smooth ascending swell of stone that ran up to the true harandra. And where he was he could still breathe, though gasping, dizzy and in pain. The blaze in his eyes was worse. The sun was setting. The hrossa must have foreseen this; they could not live, any more than he, on the harandra by night. Still staggering forward, he looked about him for any sign of Augray’s tower, whatever Augray might be.

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.

15

‘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 Hmãn. 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 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 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 hmãn 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 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’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 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.