"You know what I'm talking about, at least!" Paul broke in.
"Am I supposed to be stupid? But why do you talk in that unkind
voice? Is it not true that he is" -- she snapped her fingers --
" beau. . . . Handsome?"
"So what?"
-- There suddenly seems to be a total barrier between us, almost
as complete as the barrier that shuts away disturbed mental patients.
. . . No, stop it.
He regained his self-control with an enormous effort. He said, "You want
another man just for a change. You're bored with me. Is that what you're
trying to say?"
"Paul, your voice is so hard and -- "
"Is it?" He took a step towards the bed; he still held the wet towel
with which he had wiped his chin, and she flinched as if expecting him
to strike her with it.
"You are afraid," she said. "Aren't you? You think you are not man enough
to interest me all the time, and this makes you frightened. Paul, for --
for goodness' sake! Here or in Llanraw a human being is a human being, and
there is nothing to be ashamed of in this simple fact, that we
are
human."
She swung both legs to the floor and sat with her hands clasping the side
of the mattress. " What makes you afraid? I am one single human person,
and so are you. I will not go away with Armand tomorrow because I am
amused by him and find him handsome. I don't know yet if he is kind,
like you; I don't know if he is gentle, like you. Perhaps he is selfish
like most people in your world -- who can say?"
"But you're determined to find out!"
"Why not?" She cocked her chin arrogantly. "I ask you again, what are
you afraid of? You have lived in England with another girl, you have
been with two others that I saw myself. Do you think there is no other
woman in this world for you? It is a bad place, but it is not all the
same as Chent Hospital!"
Paul felt the muscles of his face clamp into a mask of bitterness,
locking away any words he might have hoped to speak.
Not seeming to notice, Urchin went on, "So I'm sorry you did not find
someone today as I found Armand. Never mind."
"Never mind!" The dam holding back his voice shattered, but all that
passed it was that raging echo of her own words.
"Yes 'never mind' -- a good saying! We have such a saying in Llanraw."
She twisted lithely and leaned back on the pillows as though all discussion
were at an end. "Paul, you must know from being with me that there are
some things we have learned in Llanraw which seemingly you do not think of
here. I am -- what do they say in English? -- I am a handful for you.
Yes, I see why they say it: something picked up which leaks out between
the fingers. I tire you. I wear you out. You were tired today because
of it."
"I was tired because I took some -- "
"Paul!" The name was scarcely louder than a whisper, but it carried
such force he stopped in mid-sentence. "Paul, in your world everyone,
even you, seems to want to be ashamed of things which are not their fault.
I don't
blame
you for it, so don't make excuses." She held out her arms,
smiling. "Come to bed. Tonight I will not be . . . ah! . . .
demanding
.
Tomorrow night I shall see if there is something of Llanraw in Armand,
ask him to come to this room with us, and I shall teach you a game,
as I promised, that we have in Llanraw."
The world shuddered on its axis. Paul, fighting the temblor that made it
swirl about him, turned to the wash-basin and at last hung up the towel,
pleating it to the length of the rail with exaggerated care. Not looking
at Urchin, he said, "You mean you want two men at the same time."
"We will try and find you a girl if you prefer, but -- "
-- It isn't true. I've slipped off the pathway of real life and found myself
in one of the ruinous dead ends where the other Paul Fidlers live.
"But," she was continuing, "I did not see any I thought hopeful. Last week,
now, there was a tall blonde whom I -- "
"You're crazy," Paul said, and meant it with the whole of his being.
-- That reached her!
She sat bolt upright on the bed. She looked frightened. "Paul, you know
that I have had to show you many things that the body likes even though
you are a doctor who has studied its nerves! You said they were good
things, you shook and moaned and gasped and said you loved me."
-- True, damn it, true. From a finger's end she can milk more ecstasy
than Iris from my whole suffering corpse!
"I didn't mean to say
you're
crazy," Paul blurted desperately. "I mean
what you were talking about was crazy."
"Is this crazy?" She leapt from the bed and touched him in a way he had
never dreamed of before she used it on him in a
routiers
hotel on RN5,
that instantly brought his nerves tinglingly alive from crown to sole;
her fingers found the spot with the same precision she had used to lay
low Riley at the hospital dance. "The best thing in the life of a human
being is to use the body, and you in this world have never properly
learned how! It's your world that's crazy, not me!"
-- I wrote that down, almost in those words, I was going to say that in
my book about Llanraw!
But a vision of Maurice Dawkins, slurpily repulsive, came between him
and Urchin, and he looked at it -- which she could not see -- with eyes
like chips of stone. Before that glare she crumbled on the bed, sobs
erupting from the depths of her body to shake her helplessly.
"Paul" -- his name, deformed by weeping, was the first coherent sound he
detached from the moans she uttered -- "I can't help it! I have fought
it so long, but they made me this way, and . . ."
"Who?" Paul said, not because he expected an answer he could understand,
and she spoke the word he had heard before, in his office at Chent,
when she insisted she was forbidden to tell him who she was by command
of a mysterious "they."
At the fringe of his awareness something detestable crawled into view;
he sensed it without being able to focus his attention on it. Distracted,
no plan in mind, he sat down awkwardly beside her and tried to comfort
her, stroking her nape and back with steady passes of his fingers. She
relaxed little by little, until at last as if the fit of crying had
exhausted her she slumped into a sort of sleep.
"Urchin?" he said softly.
She replied in the tone he had heard many times before at Chent and in
who could count how many places since where the need to hear her tell
of Llanraw had overcome his desire to let her be. The loathsome thing
creeping around his mind seemed to chuckle as he realised he had put
her into a hypnotic trance by his caresses, which preserved the single
element she seemed to find indispensable: a regular rhythm.
He withdrew the stroking hand and linked its fingers with those of the
other to stop them shaking. He said, "Urchin, what did they do to you?"
Later, he looked about him at the room. Although they had shared it for
all the nights since their arrival in Louze, there was nothing familiar
in it bar the hideous clock that he had set, according to habit, where
the figure of Time might witness their love-making and sprinkle benisons
on them with its wagging scythe. All the rest was strange, impossible,
incomprehensible: the wash-basin, the bidet, the cupboard where they had
hung their clothes, even the very bed on which they took their pleasure.
Paul Fidler had retreated somewhere out of contact with the lax body
that bore his face and name. From a vantage point across a gulf spanned
by no named direction, he looked down on the man who had been sitting
beside the lovely naked girl now dozing quietly against the pillows.
He saw the hands of that man open a case brought from some distant,
fabulous country and without error take from it a short glass cylinder
capped with a shiny needle and pistoned with a smooth steel plunger. This
he then carried to the basin where there was water; also, close at hand,
there was a bottle containing white tablets, which he shook out without
counting and broke to dust in a saucer. Mixed with water, they dissolved,
were poured into the glass cylinder which they nearly filled.
"Lie still," he heard a voice say; it was connected with the creature
who shared his name. "This will make you sleep."
The needle pierced the delicate pale skin of the girl's arm where a
bluish vein shadowed it from below, and the plunger drove the liquid down.
There was a silence which seemed to stretch across those same dimensionless
gulfs before the hand withdrew the needle, the head bowed, the lips touched
the lips of the sleeping girl, and a single drop of blood ran down to stain
the coverlid.
*42*
-- Intravenously it should be fatal in half an hour at most, but kindly:
a gentle slowing of the heart, the brain being already lost to any
thoughts but dreams.
Paul wandered down the beach, his consciousness seeming to follow his body
at a distance, like a child's balloon trailed on a long loose string.
-- There is no such place as Llanraw, never has been, never will be;
how was I convinced that there was?
The mistral took small account of night and day. It spoke to him when it
whined in the rigging of the boats, and since he paid it no attention
showed its anger by tossing sand in his face. He spat out the grains
without resentment.
-- "They" did this to her, she fought it (at Chent the agony), but in
the end they were too strong for her although she had fled beyond their
reach . . .
At the casino, despite the onset of the mistral, lights and music.
-- Define "they." Against the impersonal menace of the sea at night: easy.
The greatest tyrants a race with a history of clever tyranny has ever
spawned.
The wind said loud and clear, "No-o-o Llan-raw-aw-aw!" He gave a foolish
nod in approval of its insight. He had come to the mole leading to the
casino; it was broader than a tightrope, but either side of it the sea
was whipped by the wind and if he looked down he felt he was poised over
an abyss. Also there were people at the casino and he had the impression
that if they saw him they would mock. He turned back and continued along
the beach instead.
-- Paul the dupe Fidler, who believed a pack of lies so heartily he threw
away a marriage, the chance of a child, a career with the prize labelled
"Consultant" at its peak . . . Better here on the shore. Quieter except
for the wind. The lights out in so many of the promenade cafés. Which
way to Llanraw from Louze?
Dry sharp sand filtered into the sides of his shoes and abraded the skin
of his feet. He welcomed the sensation as a kind of penance.
-- The fact that I forgot, or overlooked: so silly, such a simple thing.
That a half-truth is also half a lie. Somewhere not called Llanraw but
perhaps away at this impossible angle from now where the other Paul Fidlers
also live, is the half-true truth that they are human beings. But in no
vision of paradise called Llanraw. In a prison-world ruled by "they"
who can take the spark and essence of a person out at will . . .
He drew a deep breath, and the torrent of his thoughts settled to a pace
at which he could review what he had been told tonight and, using for
a guide facts that be himself had observed and preferred to disregard,
sort the truths from the half-truths.
-- If only I had asked one question I'd have known, but I chose rather
to be blind. I should have asked, "Why does the peaceful land of Llanraw
teach its children to kill with no other weapons than their hands?" Under
my nose! Under my stupid bloody nose!
He moaned aloud for a little, then checked himself, irrationally afraid
of being heard.
-- So, more calmly now: there is not a second Eden called Llanraw,
where men and. beasts live harmoniously in fields of gorgeous flowers
and lovers drift on scent towards the stars. There is an inconceivable
dictatorship ruled by a handful of men and women who are only
restrained from squandering the lives of the masses under them by a
single consideration. Bought or stolen skills have made them effectively
immortal, and they love their long lives marginally more than they love
the total power they might win at the cost of slaughtering a billion in
a war where they would risk being numbered with the dead.
-- Quarrelling without fighting, jealous but afraid to strike, they grow
bored. As a palliative, whim suggests orgy. But the pullulating billions
of Man sprawl across the raped face of Earth; it is not only for the rulers,
refusing offspring because they will not share their privileges, but for
the masses too that sex must be reduced to a simple drug. Hence millions
of sterile women, neutered like Urchin, to furnish it in bulk, and in
their production every now and then an error of judgment, the mixture
made too rich.