Out Of The Silent Planet (8 page)

Ransom rose to his knees. The creature leaped back, watching him intently, and they became
motionless again. Then it came a pace nearer, and Ransom jumped up and retreated, but not
far; curiosity held him. He summoned up his courage and advanced holding out his hand; the
beast misunderstood the gesture. It backed into the shallows of the lake and he could see
the muscles tightened under its sleek pelt, ready for sudden movement. But there it stopped;
it, too, was in the grip of curiosity. Neither dared let the other approach, yet each repeatedly
felt the impulse to do so himself, and yielded to it. It was foolish, frightening, ecstatic
and unbearable all in one moment. It was more than curiosity. It was like a courtship - like
the meeting of the first man and the first woman in the world; it was like something beyond
that; so natural is the contact of sexes, so limited the strangeness, so shallow the reticence,
so mild the repugnance to be overcome, compared with the first tingling intercourse of two
different, but rational, species.

The creature suddenly turned and began walking away. A disappointment like despair smote Ransom.
'Come back,' he shouted in English. The thing turned, spread out its arms and spoke again in
its unintelligible language; then it resumed its progress. It had not gone more than twenty
yards away when Ransom saw it stoop down and pick something up. It returned. In its hand
(he was already thinking of its webbed fore-paw as a hand) it was carrying what appeared to
be a shell - the shell of some oyster-like creature, but rounder and more deeply domed. It
dipped the shell in the lake and raised it full of water. Then it held the shell to its own
middle and seemed to be pouring something into the water. Ransom thought with disgust that
it was urinating in the shell. Then he realized that the protuberances on the creature's belly
were not genital organs nor organs at all; it was wearing a kind of girdle hung with various
pouch~like objects, and it was adding a few drops of liquid from one of these to the water
in the shell. This done it raised the shell to its black lips and drank - not throwing back
its head like a man but bowing it and sucking like a horse. When it had finished it refilled
the shell and once again added a few drops from the receptacle - it seemed to be some kind
of skin bottle - at its waist. Supporting the shell in its two arms, it extended them towards
Ransom. The intention was unmistakable. Hesitantly, almost shyly, he advanced and took the cup.
His fingertips touched the webbed membrane of the creature's paws and an indescribable thrill
of mingled attraction and repulsion ran through him; then he drank. Whatever had been added
to the water was plainly alcoholic; he had never enjoyed a drink so much.

'Thank you,' he said in English. 'Thank you very much.'

The creature struck itself on the chest and made a noise. Ransom did not at first realize what
it meant. Then he saw that it was trying to teach him its name - presumably the name of the
species.

"Hross,' it said, 'hross,' and flapped itself.

'Hross,' repeated Ransom, and pointed at it; then 'Man,' and struck his own chest.

'Hma - hma - hman,' imitated the hross. It picked up a handful of earth, where earth appeared
between weed and water at the bank of the lake.

'Handra,' it said. Ransom repeated the word. Then an idea occurred to him.

'Malacandra?' he said in an inquiring voice. The hross rolled its eyes and waved its arms,
obviously in an effort to indicate the whole landscape. Ransom was getting on well. Handra
was earth the element; Malacandra the 'earth' or planet as a whole. Soon he would find out
what Malac meant. In the meantime 'H disappears after C' he noted, and made his first step
in Malacandrian phonetics. The hross was now trying to teach him the meaning of 'handramit'.
He recognized the root handra- again (and noted 'They have suffixes as well as prefixes'),
but this time he could make nothing of the hross's gestures, and remained ignorant what a
handramit might be. He took the initiative by opening his mouth, pointing to it and going
through the pantomime of eating. The Malacandrian word for food or eat which he got in return
proved to contain consonants unreproducible by a human mouth, and Ransom, continuing the
pantomime, tried to explain that his interest was practical as well as philological. The
hross understood him, though he took some time to understand from its gestures that it was
inviting him to follow it. In the end, he did so.

It took him only as far as where it had got the shell, and here, to his not very reasonable
astonishment, Ransom found that a kind of boat was moored. Man-like, when he saw the artefact
he felt more certain of the hross's rationality. He even valued the creature the more because
the boat, allowing for the usual Malacandrian height and flimsiness, was really very like an
earthly boat; only later did he set himself the question, 'What else could a boat be like?'
The hross produced an oval platter of some tough but slightly flexible material, covered it
with strips of a spongy, orange-coloured substance and gave it to Ransom. He cut a convenient
length off with his knife and began to eat; doubtfully at first and then ravenously. It had a
bean-like taste but sweeter; good enough for a starving man. Then, as his hunger ebbed, the
sense of his situation returned with dismaying force. The huge, seal-like creature seated
beside him became unbearably ominous. It seemed friendly; but it was very big, very black,
and he knew nothing at all about it. What were its relations to the sorns? And was it really
as rational as it appeared?

It was only many days later that Ransom discovered how to deal with these sudden losses
of confidence. They arose when the rationality of the hross tempted you to think of it as
a man. Then it became abominable - a man seven feet high, with a snaky body, covered, face
and all, with thick black animal hair, and whiskered like a cat. But starting from the other
end you had an animal with everything an animal ought to have - glossy coat, liquid eye,
sweet breath and whitest teeth - and added to all these, as though Paradise had never been
lost and earliest dreams were true, the charm of speech and reason. Nothing could be more
disgusting than the one impression; nothing more delightful than the other. It all depended
on the point of view.

WHEN RANSOM had finished his meal and drunk again of the strong waters of Malacandra, his host
rose and entered the boat. He did this head-first like an animal, his sinuous body allowing
him to rest his hands on the bottom of the boat while his feet were still planted on the
land. He completed the operation by flinging rump, tail and hind legs all together about
five feet into the air and then whisking them neatly on board with an agility which would
have been quite impossible to an animal of his bulk on Earth.

Having got into the boat, he proceeded to get out again and then pointed to it. Ransom understood
that he was being invited to follow his example. The question which he wanted to ask above all
others could not, of course, be put. Were the hrossa (he discovered later that this was the plural
of hross) the dominant species on Malacandra, and the sorns, despite their more man-like shape,
merely a semi-intelligent kind of cattle? Fervently he hoped that it might be so. On the other
hand, the hrossa might be the domestic animals of the sorns, in which case the latter would be
superintelligent. His whole imaginative training somehow encouraged him to associate superhuman
intelligence with monstrosity of form and ruthlessness of will. To step on board the hross's boat
might mean surrendering himself to sorns at the other end of the journey. On the other hand,
the hross's invitation might be a golden opportunity of leaving the sorn-haunted forests for ever.
And by this time the hross itself was becoming puzzled at his apparent inability to understand it.
The urgency of its signs finally determined him. The thought of parting from the hross could
not be seriously entertained; its animality shocked him in a dozen ways, but his longing to
learn its language, and, deeper still, the shy, ineluctable fascination of unlike for unlike,
the sense that the key to prodigious adventure was being put in his hands - all this had really
attached him to it by bonds stronger than he knew. He stepped into the boat.

The boat was without seats. It had a very high prow, an enormous expanse of free-board, and
what seemed to Ransom an impossibly shallow draught. Indeed, very little of it even rested on
the water; he was reminded of a modern European speed-boat. It was moored by something that
looked at first like rope; but the hross cast off not by untying but by simply pulling the
apparent rope in two as one might pull in two a piece of soft toffee or a roll of plasticine.
It then squatted down on its rump in the stern-sheets and took up a paddle - a paddle of
such enormous blade that Ransom wondered how the creature could wield it, till he again
remembered how light a planet they were on. The length of the hross's body enabled him to
work freely in the squatting position despite the high gunwale. It paddled quickly.

For the first few minutes they passed between banks wooded with the purple trees, upon a waterway
not more than a hundred yards in width. Then they doubled a promontory, and Ransom saw that
they were emerging on to a much larger sheet of water - a great lake, almost a sea. The hross,
now taking great care and often changing direction and looking about it, paddled well out
from the shore. The dazzling blue expanse grew moment by moment wider around them; Ransom could
not look steadily at it. The warmth from the water was oppressive; he removed his cap and jerkin,
and by so doing surprised the hross very much.

He rose cautiously to a standing position and surveyed the Malacandrian prospect which had opened
on every side. Before and behind them lay the glittering lake, here studded with islands, and
there smiling uninterruptedly at the pale blue sky; the sun, he noticed, was almost immediately
overhead - they were in the Malacandrian tropics. At each end the lake vanished into more
complicated groupings of land and water, softly, featherily embossed in the purple giant weed.
But this marshy land or chain of archipelagoes, as he now beheld it, was bordered on each side
with jagged walls of the pale green mountains, which he could still hardly call mountains, so
tall they were, so gaunt, sharp, narrow and seemingly unbalanced. On the starboard they were
not more than a mile away and seemed divided from the water only by a narrow strip of forest;
to the left they were far more distant, though still impressive - perhaps seven miles from the
boat. They ran on each side of the watered country as far as he could see, both onwards and behind
them; he was sailing, in fact, on the flooded floor of a majestic canyon nearly ten miles wide
and of unknown length. Behind and sometimes above the mountain peaks he could make out in many
places great billowy piles of the rose-red substance which he had yesterday mistaken for cloud.
The mountains, in fact, seemed to have no fall of ground behind them; they were rather the
serrated bastion of immeasurable tablelands, higher in many places than themselves, which made
the Malacandrian horizon left and right as far as eye could reach. Only straight ahead and straight
astern was the planet cut with the vast gorge, which now appeared to him only as a rut or crack
in the tableland.

He wondered what the cloud-like red masses were and endeavoured to ask by signs. The question
was, however, too particular for sign-language. The hross, with a wealth of gesticulation -
its arms or fore-limbs were more flexible than his and in quick motion almost whip-like -
made it clear that it supposed him to be asking about the high ground in general. It named
this harandra. The low, watered country, the gorge or canyon, appeared to be handramit. Ransom
grasped the implications, handra earth, harandra high earth, mountain, handramit, low earth,
valley. Highland and lowland, in fact. The peculiar importance of the distinction in Malacandrian
geography he learned later.

By this time the hross had attained the end of its careful navigation. They were a couple of
miles from land when it suddenly ceased paddling and sat tense with its paddle poised in the
air; at the same moment the boat quivered and shot forward as if from a catapult. They had
apparently availed themselves of some current. In a few seconds they were racing forward at
some fifteen miles an hour and rising and falling on the strange, sharp, perpendicular waves
of Malacandra with a jerky motion quite unlike that of the choppiest sea that Ransom had ever
met on Earth. It reminded him of disastrous experiences on a trotting horse in the army; and
it was intensely disagreeable. He gripped the gunwale with his left hand and mopped his brow
with his right the damp warmth from the water had become very troublesome. He wondered if the
Malacandrian food, and still more the Malacandrian drink, were really digestible by a human
stomach. Thank heaven he was a good sailor! At least a fairly good sailor. At least -
Hastily he leaned over the side. Heat from blue water smote up to his face; in the depth he
thought he saw eels playing: long, silver eels. The worst happened not once but many times.
In his misery he remembered vividly the shame of being sick at a children's party ... long
ago in the star where he was born. He felt a similar shame now. It was not thus that the
first representative of hummity would choose to appear before a new species. Did hrossa
vomit too? Would it know what he was doing? Shaking and groaning, he turned back into the
boat. The creature was keeping an eye on him, but its face seemed to him expressionless;
it was only long after that he learned to read the Malacandrian face.

The current meanwhile seemed to be gathering speed. In a huge curve they swung across the
lake to within a furlong of the farther shore, then back again, and once more onward, in
giddy spirals and figures of eight, while purple wood and jagged mountain raced backwards
and Ransom loathingly associated their sinuous course with the nauseous curling of the
silver eels. He was rapidly losing all interest in Malacandra: the distinction between Earth
and other planets seemed of no importance compared with the awful distinction of earth
and water. He wondered despairingly whether the hross habitually lived on water. Perhaps
they were going to spend the night in this detestable boat ...