Chapter 11:
TRENCH WARFARE
Everyone had now seated themselves around the table. Viney looked ready to speak and they were content for her to open the meeting.
“I was as surprised as anyone at what happened just a little while ago. It wasn’t just us – everyone on Vika felt that shock.” Viney paused for a moment. “I’ve been feeling quite strange the last few days, as though I’m going to change in some way or other. It’s a very odd feeling. At our last meeting I didn’t really feel like speaking at all.
“When we had our first meeting, here in this gallery, I was excited to be taking part in something new, and even more excited when we realised it meant a visit to another world. I suppose I thought of it as being a continuation of that first vision of our planet, as though we would be looking at everything from the outside, without being involved.
“As far as I’m concerned, that shock we all felt explained the strange feelings I’d been having. I realised that it was not going to be like that at all. We could not visit another planet and perhaps make contact with its inhabitants without it affecting us. Affecting us and changing us. Does what I’m saying make sense? Have any of you been feeling the same way?”
“I have,” said Bavilan. “I’ve been feeling uneasy, almost nervous, and I don’t know why.” He looked pleased to be responding to Viney’s question, Vonn thought.
“Me, too,” said Sumar.
It seemed that every member of the group had been disturbed by unaccustomed thoughts and feelings in the last few days, and each of them felt reassured to find they were not alone in this.
The group sat in silence for a while, waiting for the direction of the meeting to become clear. Eedo was the first to speak: “I think we have some sort of choice to make. Life has presented this undertaking to us as a group and to each one of us as individuals. Our feelings tell us that it is not going to be easy. As Viney said, we will not be going as passive spectators. Perhaps we will encounter things that we do not like at all. We are not accustomed to that on Vika. Our new planet looks tranquil and beautiful floating out there in space, but perhaps it is not so beautiful when you get there.”
“Do you mean we might choose not to go after all?” Toln asked. He sounded disappointed.
Annilex looked at him kindly. “Yes, we can make that choice if we want to. No one is forcing us to go. Even though we have designed a wonderful ship for our journey, and have even given it a name, it can remain in the realm of untried possibilities with no harm done. Life has given us a new endeavour, but it has also given us a jolt. The fact that everyone on Vika felt that jolt suggests to me that it is not only our group, here in this gallery in Library Seven, who will be affected, but everybody else as well. We are being invited to choose, not just for ourselves but on behalf of everybody else, too. It’s a big responsibility and I think it is quite right that we have been called together like this.”
“I wonder if the jolt is also to do with things happening on our new planet? If there are people there – or perhaps beings who are not like people at all – maybe they felt the jolt too,” said Akkri.
Korriott had the dreamy expression on her face that they were beginning to recognise. “Not all of them,” she said. “Just a few. Ones we are going to be connected with.”
“So there are people there!” said Ky.
“Yes,” Korriott continued, “there are people there, and in order to be able to make a proper choice, I think we need to know more about the conditions they live in. What is it like to be there, on that planet? We will be looked after physically, we can be sure of that, but what will it feel like to be in contact with a way of life that is possibly very different from our own?”
“Shall we have a look?” Viney asked.
There was no immediate feeling of agreement. Everyone realised that what they saw might not be to their liking. “I think we are making progress,” said Ky. “It’s as if we have started to make contact already. There is nothing in our experience here on Vika to make us reluctant to find out something new, yet here we are, hesitating to do so. That’s a big change in itself.”
“We have learnt to trust life in many ways,” said Korriott. “Our trust is greater now than it was in the days before the foundation of our city, and life has given us many blessings. I suspect that we are being given the opportunity to move on further. We are coming to realise, here in this meeting, that if we undertake this journey we will need to trust life to take care of more than just our physical needs. Have we the courage to trust life to look after our emotional needs, too? If we encounter things that are ugly or shocking or frightening, for instance?”
There was a long silence. They all knew that Korriott had identified the root cause of their hesitation. ‘Ugly’, ‘shocking’, frightening’, were ideas they understood, but they were not a normal part of their Vikan existence. Could they trust life sufficiently to embark on such uncharted seas?
“I still want to go,” said Toln.
Eedo started to chuckle. She did not know why his single-minded persistence should amuse her so much. It was as if his words had burst some pent-up dam inside her, and soon the whole group was laughing or chuckling or grinning, too. Toln looked pleased. He knew he had been the one to break the spell.
“Shall we have a look, then?” Viney asked again.
“Yes, shall we?” Tamor added, looking round at the others.
This time the familiar awareness of mutual agreement was felt by them all, together with something new – a shared acknowledgement of nervousness at the unknown emotional territory they were about to enter. One by one they stood up so that the surface of the table could serve as a background or focus for their collective vision. Together they constituted a receiver sensitive enough to bridge the gap of a billion billion miles.
A picture was beginning to take shape, not in the sudden glorious rush of their first sight of that planet, but gradually, hesitantly, fearfully. A vast ruined landscape came into view with black and yellow smoke drifting across it. Lines of foul trenches cut across a field of slimy mud and shattered trees. And there were men there, not weird alien creatures, but men, looking very much like Vikans save for the ugliness of their attire. A huge red sun showed itself from time to time, low down on the horizon, through breaks in the dull grey clouds, and strange flashes of light and eruptions of black smoke speckled the scene.
They could see it more clearly now and much closer. A group of men were huddled in one of the trenches. They wore heavy brown coats and clumsy metal helmets. Some of them looked quite young, not much older than Vill or Bavilan. Their faces were grey with fear and fatigue, and one of the older men was crying. Several of them had ragged pieces of red-stained cloth bound around their foreheads or hands.
There was a sudden shout of “Gas!” A horrible yellow-green ooze was drifting towards their trench. The men fumbled in coarse-looking containers slung around their shoulders, and fastened hideous masks with animal-like snouts to their faces. One of the young ones was having difficulty getting his mask on. A wreath of the filthy smoke seemed to caress him and he fell into the mud in a paroxysm of coughing. Then there was a great flash. The ground heaved and a huge column of mud lifted into the air and rained back onto the earth. Where the men had been huddled there was just a gaping crater of red-stained slime.
“I feel sick,” said Akkri. The vision had suddenly cut out. They stood staring at the polished surface of the table, hardly daring to look at one another.
“Let’s sit down,” said Tamor.
For several minutes no one felt like saying anything. Vill broke the silence: “So that is what their world is like.”
“I do still want to go there,” said Toln.
There was no laughter this time. Annilex looked at him with respect. “Do you, Toln? I think you must have a type of courage that we Vikans have not had to make use of for many centuries.”
“Those other worlds,” said Yask, “the ones found unsuitable for contact – are they even more terrible than that? Could anything be more terrible than that?”
Korriott was leaning back in her chair, her eyes closed, an expression of pain and sorrow on her face. “I don’t know about those other worlds, but even worse things have been done on our new planet than what we have just witnessed – far, far worse. Thankfully it is not the whole story. There is beauty there as well as ugliness, and love and loyalty and compassion and tenderness. There are people there who have developed what we might term ‘good qualities’ far beyond anything we have ever needed on Vika. And there are those who are far worse than anything we have ever dreamed possible. It is a world of much greater extremes than ours. That is our challenge. Do we have the courage to allow our feelings to respond to that much wider range of experience?”
“That redness,” said Vill, and she paused. They had all noticed the redness and had not wanted to think about it too much. “Is it their blood, do you think? They look very much the same as us, but perhaps they have red blood, not golden blood like ours.”
“Yes, I think it’s their blood,” said Ky. “And did you notice their skin? It seemed to be grey or white, not golden brown.”
“I wonder what colour their eyes are?” said Sumar. “And weren’t those masks horrible! They seemed to be for keeping the gas away from them.”
“We understood one of their words!” Vonn exclaimed. “I’ve been wondering if we will have to learn their language before we go there, but it looks as if that is already taken care of.”
“Yes, life has already provided us with everything we need for our expedition. Their language is completely different from ours and in many ways they think differently, too, but we will understand them and I think we will find that they understand us, even though we will be speaking to them in our own Vikan language,” Korriott replied.
“And those dreadful flashes and bangs, and the gas, was that actually caused by other people there, other people of the same kind?” asked Akkri. He could hardly believe it.
“Yes,” said Korriott, “I’m afraid that is the case.”
There was another long silence. They were beginning to recover from the first shock of their vision as their normal tranquil outlook reasserted itself. Viney took the lead once more. “Shall we see what else life is bringing into our awareness? And how about staying in our chairs this time? We managed to design our spacecraft without a table or a screen for it to take shape on.”
Vonn closed her eyes. She knew that what she would see would be the shared vision of all the others, too. Yes, there was beauty on that planet, a fierce, magnificent beauty unlike anything she had seen on Vika. She saw a jagged, snow-covered mountain range, gleaming in morning sunshine; she saw islands of emerald green jungle with beaches of white sand, set in a turquoise sea; she saw a land of endless snow and a land of endless sand.
In the hot, sandy wasteland she saw people, many people. They looked different to the men in coats they had seen before. These people wore colourful robes and their skin was shiny black. There were hundreds of them – or was it thousands? – confined within a high fence, in a rectangular compound of sun-baked earth. At each corner of the rectangle was a wooden tower, and in each tower were men in caps and jackets and trousers and boots, looking down at the throng below.
Two women were squatting in the dust, close to the only gate of the compound. Their faces and arms were thin with starvation. One of them was holding a baby. Its eyes looked huge in its wizened face and its arms and legs were like sticks. The other woman had a pottery bowl with a little water in it. Vonn could feel her longing to drink the water, but she kept looking at the woman with the baby. Then, as if she could bear it no longer, she reached over and gave the bowl to the mother, who dipped her finger into it and moistened the baby’s parched lips.
“Could we do that?” asked Annilex, quietly.
Vonn saw swamps and rivers; she saw mountains that belched out fire; and she saw a great city.
A brown river snaked through the city on its way to the sea. Many bridges crossed the river. One of them was suspended between two elaborately decorated towers. Nearby was a huge, grey, stone building with thick walls around it. For some reason Vonn felt a shudder go through her as she looked at it. Further along the same bank of the river there was another huge stone building. “Look! It’s got a dome on top of it!” Akkri exclaimed. On top of the dome was a golden cross, catching the last rays of the evening sun.
The vision faded and the group sat back in their chairs, exhausted.
“When are we going to go?” Vill asked.
It was clear to them all that they would go and that the city they had seen was to be their destination.
“A week from now?” Akkri suggested. He felt quite nervous saying it, but it seemed easier than putting it off longer. A week would be long enough for everyone to say their goodbyes to friends and relations in other parts of Vika.
“Suits me,” said Yask, and in those few words the decision was made and agreed by them all.
* * *