Earthworks

  Israt shrugged and looked contemptuous.

  “Because, my clever man, the contents of those letters we found on you are as damaging to Mr Mercator in the one state as the other. Von Vanderhoot was paid to make trouble for us. Don’t pretend you do not know that both states are particularly interested in Walvis Bay in this historic week.”

  This was getting beyond me.

  “Israt, I swear I am innocently involved in all this. What in particular is happening in Walvis Bay this week?”

  “You make fools of us both, Mr Noland, to make me repeat to you information you have long ago. This city is specially built on specially ceded land that belongs to none of the African states. There has been big argument over it since the twentieth century, but it is independent territory. Now it is used by the United African Nations, at the inspiration of President el Mahasset, to build a great sea-coast resort where all of Africa can meet on neutral territory and enjoy themselves. It is the greatest practical move ever made to unite our continent in reality and not just in name. And although a thousand enemies have delayed its building and sabotaged every step of progress, Walvis Bay will be officially opened tomorrow by President el Mahasset himself, for the greater glory of Africa, although it is not really finished and only a few guests are here. The world press and representatives of all nations are already pouring in; and that, as you know, is why — tomorrow will be the greatest day in Africa’s history!”

  I stood up. Thunderpeck and I looked at each other.

  “I never enjoy greatest days,” I said. “Doc, can you stay here and guard Israt, while I go along and see Mercator? If I’m not back in half an hour, you’d better tie this fellow up and get away as best you can.”

  “For God’s sake, Knowle, we don’t know this place! Where can we arrange to meet?”

  In his ear I said, so that Israt should not hear: “Outside this hotel is the biggest square in the city, President’s Square. The biggest building looking on to it has the tallest tower. Nobody could miss that. It’s a sort of temple. I will meet you there if we get split up — at the base of the tower.”

  He shook his head. “Mad,” he said. He was still shaking his head as I walked out of the room.

  I walked down the corridor in my white smock and dark glasses. As I went, I tried to assimilate what Israt had told us. What I had regarded as a city of despair was in fact a city of hope. That in itself would be enough to attract the vultures. I could imagine them clearly without having to be told about them: shabby little cliques with business interests, politicians with axes to grind, thugs who stood to gain by a divided Africa. Unconsciously, I began to allot a role to Mercator.

  After I had turned left down the corridor, I found myself before a door on which stood a small card bearing three words: PETER MERCATOR, ENGLAND. Looking uneasily round, I saw the four men I had robbed still feeding and drinking in the restaurant. No doubt they were some of the visiting dignitaries, here for the opening of Walvis Bay, or the grinding of a special axe. I thought what an old injustice it was, as old as man, that they should live so vilely well while the people they were supposed to represent languished in the confines of their lives on half-rations.

  When I knocked on Mercator’s door, a firm voice said: “Come in.”

  Entering, I found myself in a small hail with several doors leading off it. One of them was open. I glimpsed a room with a balcony and a view of sea and promenade. Sitting on the arm of a chair was a small neat man. Hypnotized, I went towards him.

  His hair was white, his face pallid, his eyebrows and goatee black, though streaked with grey. Though I had seen him only once in my life before, I could never forget that face. “Peter Mercator?” I asked. “Yes, come in,” said the Farmer.

  Chapter Nine

  In my boyhood, Hammer and I used to play Farmers and Landsmen. Or it would be Farmers and Travellers or Farmers and Citymen, but always Farmers and something. As small boys, we understood Farmers; they were big and powerful and cruel, as we longed to be while we went on our grimy tasks for our master.

  Farmers had the right to pursue. Farmers could beat. Although Hammer and I were much of a match when it came to running or to pitting puny muscle against muscle, when one of us played Farmer, he came the stronger. Under the mantle of that terrible title, the one became the superior of the other — even of the Traveller. So much is in a name. The rotten young teeth in our mouths grew white again when we became, briefly, Farmers.

  Of course, neither of us knew what Farmer properly was, or what he did. But we knew that life in the platform cities depended on the Farmers; because they held the food for the mouths of the people, they also held the knife at their throats. Because the Farmer was a shadowy figure, he was the more terrifying. We saw people dying from various sophisticated nutritional ills, or from brute starvation, and we blamed the Farmers.

  Hammer and I were as subtle as a cement wall. We had no learning, and an intelligence as narrow and sharp as a knife. At night beneath our blankets, our dreams were ashy fires burning in caves.

  That one day I remember when I played the Farmer. Inside me, all the cruelties gave me strength, yet I could not capture Hammer. He was playing one of the Travellers. We pictured those men as wearing bright rags, seven feet tall, with a mane of hair hanging over their cats’ eyes, and the swaggering postures that they used for freedom.

  Traveller Hammer catapulted up the weary side streets of the Shuttered Quarter, suddenly swinging into side alleys, lying by broken walls till I passed, whooping back on his tracks, kicking himself round corners, sometimes with my hand poised above — but never quite closing on — his shaggy collar. Because of some special sickness that had swept this part of the city several seasons past, it has been boarded up and was deserted, despite the fearful crowding in the rest of the city.

  Officially it was deserted. The human rat lived everywhere in the city, the thinnest plank sheltered him. We had found our way through the boards. So had many other humans, the real Unspeakables of the city, who now shacked up here against the mud and dust of that winter. In fact, our errand for our master lay with these people, and we had traded his rags in the Shuttered Quarter at a price to his advantage. Our grimy game of Farmer celebrated the deal.

  Clattering round a corner went Hammer, into a walled yard. The wall at the far end was no higher than his chest, but I saw he was too winded to climb it. He sprawled in a corner, gasping.

  A sort of hut was there, built of some old bricks and boxes, and with a warped plastic sheet for roof, secured into place with stones. From this dwelling had come a man. He now leant shuddering against the low wall, and we watched him die.

  He had the Flakers, as it was known — some sort of a flesh disease. Neither Hammer nor I had seen its effects before. The man vibrated considerably, and went into a sort of hopping dance. As he did so, he pulled off the remnants of his clothes. At the same time, pieces of his flesh fell off, for all the world like bits of rag. I seem to remember that his cheeks went first.

  There was little blood, just these falling leaves in the sudden autumn of his flesh.

  We couldn’t help it. Together we burst into laughter. It was a wonderful sight, made the funnier because the man paid no attention to us. He went on doing that funny dance, which at first we imitated; but the comedy of it was too much, and soon we were forced just to watch. As the man sank down on to his threadbare knees, someone threw a stone at us.

  A woman crouched in the entrance to the improvised hut. You would not have thought the little place could have housed two of them. We ran more from her face than from the stone she threw. Her face was stretched so long it had teeth and darkness in it. Only when we were out of the yard did we dare to laugh again.

  Through the city we went, our game of Farmer forgotten. It was time to go home. We put arms round each other’s shoulders, partly from affection, partly to keep together in the mob of people pressing along once we got free of the Shuttered Quarter. Of traffic, there was only the occasional
public vehicle. Everything else that was mechanical and had to move, moved under the surface of the city, in the serviceways. But the people — a throng, composed of separate bodies, of groups, of processions, pushing this way and that — the people devoured the street space.

  Some people walked with intent, some with the shuffle that denotes no purpose or no destination. When you can find no work, you can find no money to pay for rooms; then you are turned into the street, where you can be arrested for vagrancy. But when you find work — the successful housing of yourself and your family into one room drives you to madness, to suffocation, to boredom, to quarrels, and to the streets once more. Married couples take to sleeping by turn in the rooms while the other partner walks outside. That way they get peace, and avoid begetting. And walking can be a substitute for hunger, the tiredness of the legs overcoming the pinch of the intestines. It deadens anxious nerves, and brings a slinking peace of mind. It is an entertainment, a way of life, a sort of death.

  “There is no future for our generations,” said March Jordill. “Below a certain living level, there is nothing for the individual but today. The power to speculate and plan ahead were hard won; the human race grasped that power only for a brief while before letting it slip away. When you don’t think about tomorrow, you see no contradiction in raising a large family to starve and cause you to starve. The poor have inherited the world and beat it about the head with their stringy untiring reproductive organ.” March Jordill, the Ragman, was my master, and Hammer’s.

  We forced our way back to his place, through the rogues and Unspeakables. Some streets were being widened, to provide a better thoroughfare for the population. Some were being narrowed, to provide extra rooms for the population.

  March Jordill’s was a gaunt house, containing offices of tiny companies — the Megapole Sickness Fund, United Milk Water Stiffener Company, Preghast Associates, Human Water Development Finance, Breeze Fumigation Company, Parallax Birth-Death Bidders, Unclepox — where the directors and secretaries slept, dreaming of their luck, under the desks, come nightfall — with the March Jordill Rags Co. on the top floor, its sagging roof pointing towards the still unpopulated stars. That top floor was the first home I had known.

  Hammer had been sold into apprenticeship to Jordill; I had been given to him from the orphanage. We knew we were in luck. March Jordill was mad. To work for a sane man was disaster in the grinding survival conditions of the city. And we were lucky that the Human Water Development Finance lay so near. We saved our water, precious and golden, never letting a drop go astray, leaking it into containers, to get the pittance per gallon it would fetch in the offices below us. A week’s leak made us millionaires compared with many of the other young ruffians we knew along the street.

  My master was found on the roof, where he liked to go when there was no business in the musty rooms below, lolling and talking to the broken-nosed widow woman Lamb who performed many tasks for him, from the most casual to the most awful and intimate, perhaps in the hope that he would marry her and raise her above her official Unspeakable status.

  As we went round to him, Jordill gripped us and looked us up and down. Half his face, the lower half, was all but empty. Into the upper half were crowded all the hair left to him, the furrows that marked his brow, his eyebrows, his deep eyes in their tuckers of flesh, his blunt brief nose with its tip upturned rudely towards the world. In the lower half, set above the blank spade of his chin, lay the neat divide of his mouth. That mouth, almost lipless, opened and shut like a sort of fly-trapping plant when he spoke.

  “So you boys have escaped the combined stewpots of the city’s rascals, and are back to me again — with a handsome profit, I hope?” he said.

  Hammer had not the same respect for our master that I held. He struggled out of his grip and stood back.

  “We got what you told us,” he said.

  “I expected no less of you, boy. Hand it over, then.”

  “I’ve got it, Master,” I said. From under the tunic that covered my ribs, I pulled the little ornament that the people of the Shuttered Quarter had given me in exchange for the rags we had taken them. I would have given it to the master, but he snatched it from me and held it aloft, laughing from his pale mouth, so that his chin and head tipped different ways. He threw it to the widow woman Lamb, who caught it neatly and held it between her eyes and the sky, making a ticking noise with her tongue as she did so.

  “One of them!” she said.

  “Worth a bit when melted down, worth more when sold to the Manskin Believers!”

  “There aren’t none of them left!” exclaimed old Lamb, shocked by the mention of this outlaw creed. “They was all routed out by the police and sent for landsmen long ago, back before Jack died.”

  “I know better — as usual I know better,” March Jordill said, splitting his face with another laugh. “Nothing is ever eradicated, Lambkin, no shred of clothing, no weed, no sin, no hope. The Manskins are cleverer now, and do their snatching in more devious ways, but their belief has died no more than they, and once we contact them with this nice idol of their faith, they’ll pay handsomely.”

  “Master March, it’s illegal, and I fear for you — ”

  They went into one of their arguments that I did not attempt to follow. Hammer slipped away, scowling because I would not join him. But I stood long hours not understanding a tenth of what March Jordill said in order to grasp a little, and now that I was growing older I understood more. Now I gathered from his conversation that this ornament we had carried back for him from the Shuttered Quarter was in fact an image of a forbidden cult, of which there were many in the teeming byways near us.

  This idol of the Manskin cult was a bare ugly thing with two male faces, one on its head, one on its chest. Its feet stood apart, its buttocks were braced, it clenched its fists against its metal shoulders. Although I did not like it, I did not dare laugh at it.

  “Don’t understand it all, at all,” old Lamb said, making the wry face that usually went with her shaken head, “in my young days there wasn’t all this trouble, everyone believing something different.”

  “Ah, you’re wrong there,” March Jordill said with relish, for he loved to emphasize other people’s wrongness. “Everyone has begun to believe the same again, now that human self-consciousness is sinking back into mass consciousness. We’re witnessing the belief in only one thing, though it comes superficially disguised in many forms — the belief in the animal darkness from which we rose so comparatively short a time ago.

  Over-population has not only brought a collapse of economic organization, which is and always was dependent on agricultural organization, but a collapse in mental organization. We’re all animists again. This compulsively vile little idol — ”

  “It’s all very well you talking, but I don’t see why people shouldn’t have as many children as they want. It’s the only right that hasn’t been taken away from them, heaven knows.” Old Lamb always grew heated on this subject, having borne fifteen children herself. “I know what’s to blame! It isn’t nobody’s fault here, it’s the fault of these African states you hear about. They don’t help anybody, they just go on fighting each other and don’t bother about us in the poorer nations. People say to me, Why should they bother about us? but I say, we’re human same as them, aren’t we? Why shouldn’t a white man be as good as a black man, I say. I tell ’em! I’m used to speaking out straight, ah, and in language as anyone can understand, not this high-flown stuff you gets out of them old books. I used to speak out straight to Jack and all. I never stood any nonsense from any man — ”

  “You must have stood a good deal to have been so prodigal of progeny,” Jordill observed. “But don’t you see the emergence of the African nations is the consequence of our downfall, not its cause. Alas, the demise of the historic sense! In one part of the world after another, man has outrun his natural resources, simply because he will not curb his natural tendencies at the same time as he curbs his natural enemies. The Middl
e East, the East, became impoverished and worn out, then Europe, then America and the Usser. So the nations withered and collapsed, until now there remains no power but the African states. The topsoil there — in many regions — is still rich enough to support a pugnacious and aware set of nations. That situation won’t last, of course. Unless something radical happens pretty fast, we shall then see the end of mankind. But look at the rabble flocking down in the street! You think they care?”

  “Well, I don’t know about that, but I used to say to Jack before he got himself trampled to death in that riot, ‘Jack,’ I said, ‘you may be bigger than me, but that’s a fact you haven’t got half so much sense as me, worshipping these strange religions, if you’d call them that.’ He became an Abstainer for a brief period, right when it wasn’t fashionable, as certain people seem to think it is now — you know, didn’t want to lie with me or anything like that. O’ course, being a man, he couldn’t keep that up for long.”

  “Even in its happiest historical period, the intellect was never a very certain ruler of the body...”

  So their talk would flow on, while I stood there slackmouthed, listening. I was not only puzzled by what March Jordill said, but by the way he said it, for in these conversations it was as if he worked himself into the part of a seer, and spoke in an ornate (what I learnt through reading to know as a literary) manner; the more he adopted this fashion, the less likely old Lamb was to understand him; and so I came to realize that he was talking mainly for his own benefit. It was only much later, when I was a convict and had the leisure of thought permitted to a landsman, that it struck me that in this my master was no different from old Lamb herself, or from countless others I met. Even the old books I found: had their authors gone to their great trouble in order to communicate with other people or to commune with themselves? Thus I arrived at a picture of my world, where all were so assailed by others that in defence they turned in towards their own selves. Once I believed that this was the only piece of knowledge I possessed not owned by March Jordill. Now I do not even know if it is knowledge.