Out Of The Silent Planet (20 page)

After a prolonged calculation, Weston, in a shaken voice, replied that if they had not made
it in ninety days they would never make it, and they would, moreover, be dead of suffocation.

'Ninety days you shall have,' said Oyarsa. 'My sorns and pfifltriggi will give you air
(we also have that art) and food for ninety days. But they will do something else to your
ship. I am not minded that it should return into the heaven if once it reaches Thulcandra.
You, Thick One, were not here when I unmade my dead hrossa whom you killed: the Thin One will
tell you. This I can do, as Maleldil has taught me, over a gap of time or a gap of place.
Before your sky-ship rises, my sorns will have so dealt with it that on the ninetieth day
it will unbody,' it will become what you call nothing. If that day finds it in heaven your
death will be no bitterer because of this; but do not tarry in your ship if once you touch
Thulcandra. Now lead these two away, and do you, my children, go where you will. But I
must talk with Ransom.'

ALL THAT afternoon Ransom remained alone answering Oyarsa's questions. I am not allowed to record
this conversation, beyond saying that the voice concluded it with the words: 'You have shown me
more wonders than are known in the whole of heaven.'

After that they discussed Ransom's own future. He was given full liberty to remain in
Malacandra or to attempt the desperate voyage to Earth. The problem was agonizing to him.
In the end he decided to throw in his lot with Weston and Devine.

'Love of our own kind,' he said, 'is not the greatest of laws, but you, Oyarsa, have said it is
a law. If I cannot live in Thulcandra, it is better for me not to live at all.'

'You have chosen rightly,' said Oyarsa. 'And I will tell you two things. My people will take
all the strange weapons out of the ship, but they will give one to you. And the eldila of deep
heaven will be about your ship till it reaches the air of Thulcandra, and often in it. They
will not let the other two kill you.'

It had not occurred to Ransom before that his own murder might be one of the first expedients
for economizing food and oxygen which would occur to Weston and Devine. He will now astonished
at his obtuseness, and thanked Oyarsa for his protective measures. Then the great eldil
dismissed him with these words:

'You are guilty of no evil, Ransom of Thulcandra, except a little fearfulness. For that, the
journey you go on is your pain, and perhaps your cure: for you must be either mad or brave
before it is ended. But I lay also a command on you; you must watch this Weston and this Devine
in Thulcandra if ever you arrive there. They may yet do much evil in, and beyond, your world.
From what you have told me, I begin to see that there are eldila who go down into your air,
into the very stronghold of the Bent One; your world is not so fast shut as was thought in
these parts of heaven. Watch those two bent ones. Be courageous. Fight them. And when you have
need, some of our people will help. Maleldil will show them to you. It may even be that you
and I shall meet again while you are still in the body; for it is not without the wisdom of
Maleldil that we have met now and I have learned so much of your world. It seems to me that
this is the beginning of more comings and goings between the heavens and the worlds and between
one world and another, though not such as the Thick One hoped. I am slowed to tell you this.
The year we are now in but heavenly years are not as yours - has long been prophesied as a
year of stirrings and high changes and the siege of Thulcandra may be near its end. Great
things are on foot. If Maleldil does not forbid me, I will not hold aloof from them. And
now, farewell.'

It was through vast crowds of all the Malacandrian species that the three human beings embarked
next day on their terrible journey. Weston was pale and haggard from a night of calculations
intricate enough to tax any mathematician even if his life did not hang on them. Devine was
noisy, reckless and a little hysterical. His whole view of Malacandra had been altered overnight
by the discovery that the 'natives' had an alcoholic drink, and he had even been trying to
teach them to smoke. Only the pfifltriggi had made much of it. He was now consoling himself
for an acute headache and the prospect of a lingering death by tormenting Weston. Neither partner
was pleased to find that all weapons had been removed from the spaceship, but in other respects
everything was as they wished it. At about an hour after noon Ransom took a last, long look
at the blue waters, purple forest and remote green walls of the familiar handramit, and
followed the other two through the manhole. Before it was closed Weston warned them that
they must economize air by absolute stillness. No unnecessary movement must be made during
their voyage; even talking must be prohibited.

'I shall speak only in an emergency,' he said.

'Thank God for that, anyway,' was Devine's last shot. Then they screwed themselves in.

Ransom went at once to the lower side of the sphere, into the chamber which was now most
completely upside down, and stretched himself on what would later become its skylight.
He was surprised to find that they were already thousands of feet up. The handramit was
only a straight purple line across the rose-red surface of the harandra. They were above the
junction of two handramits. One of them was doubtless that in which he had lived, the other
that which contained Meldilorn. The gully by which he had cut off the corner between the two,
on Augray's shoulders, was quite invisible.

Each minute more handramits came into view - long straight lines, some parallel, some intersecting,
some building triangles. The landscape became increasingly geometrical. The waste between
the purple lines appeared perfectly flat. The rosy colour of the petrified forests accounted
for its tint immediately below him; but to the north and east the great sand deserts of which
the sorns had told him were now appearing as illimitable stretches of yellow and ochre. To the
west a huge discoloration began to show. It was an irregular patch of greenish blue that looked
as if it were sunk below the level of the surrounding harandra. He concluded it was the forest
low-land of the pfifltriggi - or rather one of their forest lowlands, for now similar patches
were appearing in all directions, some of them mere blobs at the intersection of handramits,
some of vast extent. He became vividly conscious that his knowledge of Malacandra was minute,
local, parochial. It was as if a sorn had journeyed forty million miles to the Earth and spent
his stay there between Worthing and Brighton. He reflected that he would have very little to
show for his amazing voyage if he survived it: a smattering of the language, a few landscapes,
some half-understood physics - but where were the statistics, the history, the broad survey
of extra-terrestrial conditions, which such a traveller ought to bring back? Those handramits,
for example. Seen from the height which the space-ship had now attained, in all their unmistakable
geometry, they put to shame his original impression that they were natural valleys. There were
gigantic feats of engineering, about which he had learned nothing; feats accomplished, if
all were true, before human history began... before animal history began. Or was that only
mythology? He knew it would seem like mythology when he got back to Earth (if he ever got back),
but the presence of Oyarsa was still too fresh a memory to allow him any real doubts. It even
occurred to him that the distinction between history and mythology might be itself meaningless
outside the Earth.

The thought baffled him, and he turned again to the landscape below - the landscape which became
every moment less of a landscape and more of a diagram. By this time, to the east, a much
larger and darker patch of discoloration than he had yet seen was pushing its way into the
reddish ochre of the Malacandrian world - a curiously shaped patch with long arms or horns
extended on each side and a sort of bay between them, like the concave side of a crescent. It
grew and grew. The wide dark arms seemed to be spread out to engulf the whole planet. Suddenly
he saw a bright point of light in the middle of this dark patch and realized that it was not
a patch on the surface of the planet at all, but the black sky showing behind her. The smooth
curve was the edge of her disk. At this, for the first time since their embarkation, fear took
hold of him. Slowly, yet not too slowly for him to see, the dark arms spread farther and even
farther round the lighted surface till at last they met. The whole disk, framed in blackness,
was before him. The faint percussions of the meteorites had long been audible; the window through
which he was gazing was no longer definitely beneath him. His limbs, though already very light,
were almost too stiff to move, and he was very hungry. He looked at his watch. He had been at
his post, spellbound, for nearly eight hours.

He made his way with difficulty to the sunward side of the ship and reeled back almost blinded
with the glory of the light. Groping, he found his darkened glasses in his old cabin and got
himself food and water: Weston had rationed them strictly in both. He opened the door of the
control room and looked in. Both the partners, their faces drawn with anxiety, were seated before
a kind of metal table; it was covered with delicate, gently vibrating instruments in which
crystal and fine wire were the predominant materials. Both ignored his presence. For the rest
of the silent journey he was free of the whole ship.

When he returned to the dark side, the world they were leaving hung in the star-strewn sky
not much bigger than our earthly moon. Its colours were still visible - a reddish-yellow disk
blotched with greenish blue and capped with white at the poles. He saw the two tiny
Malacandrian moons - their movement quite perceptible - and reflected that they were among
the thousand things he had not noticed during his sojourn there. He slept, and woke, and saw
the disk still hanging in the sky. It was smaller than the Moon now. Its colours were gone
except for a faint, uniform tinge of redness in its light; even the light was not now
incomparably stronger than that of the countless stars which surrounded it. It had ceased
to be Malacandra; it was only Mars.

He soon fell back into the old routine of sleeping and basking, punctuated with the making of
some scribbled notes for his Malacandrian dictionary. He knew that there was very little
chance of his being able to communicate his new knowledge to man, that unrecorded death in
the depth of space would almost certainly be the end of their adventure. But already it had
become impossible to think of it as 'space'. Some moments of cold fear he had; but each time
they were shorter and more quickly swallowed up in a sense of awe which made his personal
fate seem wholly insignificant. He could not feel that they were an island of life journeying
through an abyss of death. He felt almost the opposite - that life was waiting outside the
little iron eggshell in which they rode, ready at any moment to break in, and that, if it
killed them, it would kill them by excess of its vitality. He hoped passionately that if they
were to perish they would perish by the 'unbodying' of the space-ship and not by suffocation
within it. To be let out, to be set free, to dissolve into the ocean of eternal noon, seemed
to him at certain moments a consummation even more desirable than their return to Earth. And
if he had felt some such lift of the heart when first he passed through heaven on their outward
journey, he felt it now tenfold, for now he was convinced that the abyss was full of life in
the most literal sense, full of living creatures.

His confidence in Oyarsa's words about the eldila increased rather than diminished as they
went on. He saw none of them; the intensity of light in which the ship swam allowed none of
the fugitive variations which would have betrayed their presence. But he heard, or thought
he heard, all kinds of delicate sound, or vibrations akin to sound, mixed with the tinkling
rain of meteorites, and often the sense of unseen presences even within the space-ship
became irresistible. It was this, more than anything else, that made his own chances of life
seem so unimportant. He and all his race showed small and ephemeral against a background of
such immeasurable fullness. His brain reeled at the thought of the true population of the
universe, the three-dimensional infinitude of their territory, and the unchronicled aeons
of their past; but his heart became steadier than it had ever been.

It was well for him that he had reached this frame of mind before the real hardships of their
journey began. Ever since their departure from Malacandra, the thermometer had steadily
risen; now it was higher than it had stood at any time on their outward journey. And still
it rose. The light also increased. Under his glasses he kept his eyes habitually tight shut,
opening them only for the shortest time for necessary movements. He knew that if he reached
Earth it would be with permanently damaged sight. But all this was nothing to the torment
of heat. All three of them were awake for twenty-four hours out of the twenty-four, enduring
with dilated eyeballs, blackened lips and froth-flecked cheeks the agony of thirst. It would
be madness to increase their scanty rations of water madness even to consume air in
discussing the question.

He saw well enough what was happening. In his last bid for life Weston was venturing inside
the Earth's orbit, leading them nearer the Sun than man, perhaps than life, had ever been.
Presumably this was unavoidable; one could not follow a retreating Earth round the rim of
its own wheeling course. They must be trying to meet it to cut across... it was madness!
But the question did not much occupy his mind; it was not possible for long to think of
anything but thirst. One thought of water; then one thought of thirst; then one thought of
thinking of thirst; then of water again. And still the thermometer rose. The walls of the
ship were too hot to touch. It was obvious that a crisis was approaching. In the next few
hours it must kill them or get less.