Earthworks Page 4

  Hearing our guards shouting that first evening — still vivid! The loss of grip on life, after the prisons under the city, and now this muddy compound, its layout unknown, its uses unglimpsed, its smells unsmelt before.

  “You lot over here, double to it! Look alive if you want to live!”

  As we went as the voices ordered, glance backward to the long windowless car that had brought us — hated as it carried us half-suffocated on the journey here, now a splinter of longing at its security as it roars preparatory to going, to grinding through the gates, and down the long road for ever.

  Strange enclosures — but improperly enclosed — to keep out the gasses blowing from the land. Shouting and stripping, the old loss of clothes, suffered before; the smell of nudity. Women in this place, too, looking no better for lacking their clothes. Terrific kick on my ankle, frantic hurry to bundle up clothes. Sick, so sick, yet still embarrassed — keen to see, shy to look. Then all jamming together, and the disgust of touch.

  More shouting, but they must do it on purpose, and not for order, for it is too confusing. A guard up on a form hustling us by, hitting a woman over the breast and shoulder, clouting the man behind her who moved as if to her defence. Animal silence from us, as we throw our clothes in to a female guard behind a counter. These guards were often landsmen who had worked their term; unable to adjust to the life of the cities, they stayed on to serve out their ruptured lives in the village camps.

  Naked, now we have nothing, nothing but the sweat and dirt on our bodies. Some horrible emaciation here, the swellings and deformation of avitaminosis, a hundred boils and blemishes, like live things growing on rocks. We plunge under a cold shower sprinkling a narrow and slippery corridor. Fear of water, red puckered elbow digs my blue ribs. The smell of the water, something in it that stings the eyes. An old man with rotting feet slipping, falling hard on his spiny backbone, groaning as we hustle him up. His little white organ, a sea shell. Shouting again, dodging blows into another room.

  Again the guards hurry us. A young man with a good chin protests, is struck — they drag him outside, kicking the bare legs that he tried to hook about the doorpost; tremble of sympathetic fear for him, his softness, part-selfish.

  An issue of clothes. The uniform. Strange gladness at the blue jacket. We are being given something! Presents from the Farmer. We look at each other, shyly, knowing we will have to know each other, but now only thinking that these are stout good kit, so that something shines in our faces. Isn’t giving kindness, even with the kicks? In line, we take the things, secretly agog, jostle together in the little room, and still cowed scramble into blue serge blouse and trousers. No garment has a sex, all are trousers and blouses. We stand there awkwardly, awaiting more shouts, strange in every way. We look at each other, do not dare talk. The guards cluster at the door, chatter together, laugh perfunctorily.

  We stood there for a long time. I saw how short the sleeves of my tunic were; a man next to me with a scarlet birthmark over his forehead and eyebrow — Duffy, I knew him as later — had a blouse far too big for him. Our eyes met. Everything was assessed, the profit, the risk. The guards kicked their heels; all government machines work the same way, infinite hustle, infinite delay. I slipped off my blouse.

  Slowly, Duffy nodded. His eyes never leaving the guards, he slipped off his blouse. We exchanged garments, a better fit. At once the guards began to bellow.

  Again we were on the trot, being allocated our huts. Like cattle, we teemed through the door. In the stream of bodies, I had no time nor space to get the blouse over my right shoulder. As I shot through the doorway, one of the guards landed a terrific blow on that shoulder. I slipped, fell down the two steps outside, carrying another fellow with me. Sharp pain in my leg. The other fellow was up in a flash and off. I took longer. A guard waiting outside roughly swung me round as I came up. My face struck the edge of the open door.

  Terrible fury and pain, a high noise in the head. My nose began to bleed. Cupping it, I slobbed forward and along into Dormitory Five of B Block. Miserably, I fell on to the nearest empty bed.

  The dormitory guard was there, a permanent man who slept at one end of the hut and was in charge of it. I knew, as I saw segments of him from between bloody parted fingers, that he would he coming to haul me off my bed. In the fury of hurt, I determined to destroy him the very moment he touched me. I jerked my fists from my face and turned to confront him. It was Hammer!

  “Boy,” March Jordill once said to Hammer, in one of our evening sessions as we sorted rags, “you’re an awkward and infernal little cuss, but given the chance you would not have made a bad citizen. That may sound a pretty low level of praise, but it is a stamp you will always bear on you, God knows why, whatever scrapes you get into. No one will ever get any real use out of you, but you’ll never make a really successfully bad citizen. They’ll hate you for that, so watch it.”

  But we didn’t hate Hammer in Dormitory Five. He still had the negative goodness in him that Jordill had recognized in the little fat lout with the sprue. Much as he swore at us, much as he drove us (and he had to drive us or we would not go), he had compassion, and but for Hammer it is unlikely I would have survived those arduous years. He was rough, foulmouthed, and a saint. Not that Hammer could do anything to mitigate the crushing crudity of our way of life. Medical treatment was nil, there were no laundry facilities, and I never changed those clothes in which I began my sentence.

  “They don’t care if you snuff out,” Hammer said one night at bunk-time. “The human body provides valuable phosphates for the land. You’re worth more dead than alive to them, and look at the precious dirt you carry round with you!”

  Certainly it was true that the mechanicals and robots that slaved among us were more valuable than we. Scratched and battered though they were, they worked better than we did. Every landsman made it a point of pride to do his tasks as slowly and badly as it was possible to do without tasting the overseer’s whip.

  Of all the sad and dehumanized people in our village, I think I was the only one who could read; what a precious thing that archaic art was to me; and I did not let even Hammer know my secret.

  We were roused early by sirens and a visit from the overseers, driven to get to our work. The monotony of life! — varied only by the seasons that even the Farmer far away in his city could not abolish.

  Those years were made of hardship. Better things also lay among their lost months. A kindness from a fellow could charm your whole day. And in the summer came the sun in strength, to put into limbs a life that in winter they lacked. Also there were the women in the village, with whom we could taste the poor man’s traditional pleasure.

  Death was there, too, that other great deliverer of man from his monotony. No longer could I laugh at it as I did when Hammer and I were boys, as it showed itself now in true form with which you could never come to terms, a thing of sudden collapses, of sweats, strange noises, vomiting, rolling eyes, and involuntary bowel movements.

  For all that, the longer one served in a village, the easier life became. Although the system was not designed to admit trust, the land could not be worked without it, and so gradually one showed one was not just a madman, and a strictly limited measure of freedom was granted; which freedom depended largely on the fact that there was almost nowhere to escape to.

  Because nothing but what a man regards as true freedom — whatever that happens to be — is tolerable to him, even the best day was stamped with the monotony of the least, and my last day in the village began just as inauspiciously as all the others.

  As I said, we were forced to rise early. Our dormitories were plastic huts arranged about a central mess hall. Round our huts was a fence of barbed wire; beyond that we were surrounded by garages, maintenance sheds, and the administrative block; then there was wire again. All round the squalid little encampment stretched the land.

  I left my hut at six-thirty, wearing my landsuit, which was an all-enclosing suit like an asbestos suit: light but ai
r-tight, and with a helmet attached. I kept the face-plate open, since the day looked fresh and the previous day’s spraying in this area had been negligible. England on a May morning can feel good, even to a landsman. You remember the winter and are grateful. The whole sky was a bed of little fleecy cirrus clouds — hardly clouds, for the sun shone bright and chill through them. A yellow mist like a coating on a sick tongue lay over the land, a reminder of the spraying for dilly beetle we had given the place two days before. It exuded a scent that stuck slightly in the throat; most men kept their face-plates closed because of it, but I insisted in keeping mine open, fool that I was.

  I pushed through the airlock into the messing hall. Everything was very noisy there. People were still dazed with sleep and morning, but they talk as much as they can then because they may not have the chance to speak to another human until evening. At least, that’s how it is in summer: in winter when it’s dark, they are much more quiet. The mess is like a morgue in January.

  One thing I will say for the village. While you live, they expect good work from you, and so you get your regular 20 grammes of animal protein every other day, at supper. In the cities, during the frequent unexplained shortages, you can go weeks sometimes with no meat ration at all. In the orphanage, we were always on half-rations. None of which makes village breakfasts appear better than they are.

  After you have eaten the poisonous slop they call porridge, straight round to the overseer to find what job you are given. You are searched and checked before being let through into the outer perimeter. Then round to the garages, since the ideal is to be away before seven. The inspectors and overseers are there to see you move.

  This morning, I was told I had a detail some miles away, at a point which I already knew from previous details. It was a fine morning for a drive; I climbed gladly into a tractor and fed it the co-ordinates, and it set out at once.

  That brief time alone was worth an extra bowl of soup! Strictly speaking, the camp overseers are meant to ride with you and hand you over to the work-point overseers. But not only are they perpetually short of staff, but the overseers are lazy men, and often as crawling with ills as the landsmen under them. So if they think you are trustworthy and will not try to escape, they send you out alone. They know there’s nowhere for you to go; the whole damned island is a sort of prison camp.

  Of course, you might always run off and join the Travellers. But officially the Travellers are treated as a superstition, like the crackpot religions that thrive in the camps, for all that officialdom does its best to stamp them out. There have been cases (or so every landsman fervently believes) where Travellers have surrounded villages in strength, burnt them down, hanged all the guards and overseers, and released all the inmates. Myself, I was sceptical; I had never seen a Traveller, and my upbringing taught me not to believe anything I could not shake a fist at.

  A light misty rain began to fall as we moved along. In fact this was insecticide, and the sprayers were already circling above the fields, sweeping over the land again and again on their morning flight, and not missing an inch. Being enclosed not only in my suit but in the tractor cab, I was doubly safe. We passed an area where a big machine was jetting out a chlorophyll correctant, sending a dense green mist out to meet the rain of insecticide. The crops there had failed, owing to an outbreak of the so-called topsoil physichosis, they stood there withered and brown, like old men planted after death,

  It seemed to me for a while that I was moving over the face of an alien planet. This was not a world that I could know, or that would tolerate me. To have stepped out on to the surface unprotected would have been to suffer a painful death.

  At that reflection, a terrible sorrow moved like a worm in my heart. Somehow, I had been dispossessed. Most of the old features of the land had been removed or altered. Small hills had been blasted flat, streams and rivers flowed in straight lines across the landscape. As we climbed up towards a gradual escarpment, I recalled how a line of great trees had grown here a few years ago. Now the wind blew unobstructed, and the shoulder of land lay bare and dismal. Machines brooded there. This was my rendezvous. I went and reported with my work stamp to the foreman overseer.

  We worked hard that day! It was complicated and perilous work — and unnecessary, too, if the truth is told.

  For on the other side of the escarpment ran a main road, and on the other side of the main road lay the farm of a different farmer. Our Farmer owned many thousands of square miles of land. How many, I did not know, but it was understood that his territory stretched from the south coast up to the midlands; none of us at the village had any possible way of checking the truth of this. But we did know that this point marked one of the northern limits of his land. It was patrolled by fast automatic things, things that howled, bleeped and chattered to themselves — normally the only live things in the area, except for the traffic that did not stop and was not allowed to stop.

  As the other men and I climbed the tall pylons, clamping the mesh to them, the traffic slid beneath us, cars and GEMs making down the road, carrying their passengers sealed safely within them from city to city.

  In the city lived the Farmer. We did not know his name; he was too far above us for his name to be known in the village, even to the overseers. In the interests of efficiency, farms had slowly grown bigger and bigger, swallowing the little unproductive units. As the population grew, the farms had to grow. In the interests of the same bleak god Efficiency, the railways had long ago been lopped until they were a skeleton of fast main lines rushing between distant points with unimagined cargoes; their contact with ordinary people grew less and less.

  As the population grew, and more land was required for agriculture, the road system underwent the same drastic simplification in the interests of the same alien god. Only a few main roads were allowed; they formed a gird across the land that would not have disgraced an euclidean textbook.

  It was not without deliberation that the experts did away with most of the railways and most of the roads; for among the minions of the god Efficiency is one called Centralization. Centralization was well served by the amputation of the transport system. As a result of the amputation, villages and many town began to die. Efficiency was thus increased, Centralization established.

  The only urban units now were the giant cities and the meagre villages, which latter in happier eras would have been called labour camps. But in this enlightened age, prisons were done away with, and you served your sentence for the most trivial offence by work on the land; “rustication”, they sometimes called it.

  Despite all the machinery employed on the land, there was still plenty of work for humans, work often too dangerous for machines. Our work on the pylons was too precarious and difficult for any machine yet invented. The pylons stood along the line of the ridge where the trees I could remember had once grown. We were engaged in stringing a vast metal net between them, from six feet above ground to forty feet above. And as I climbed and clipped and riveted, I cursed the Farmer who sat in his office in the distant city, shuffling his papers and never seeing the sullen ground over which he ruled. At that time, I did not know enough to curse the system that had supplied the man.

  Directly below me, the earth was broken and eroded. The infertile subsoil showed through. This was what had happened since shelter and binding provided by the trees were gone. The trees had been cut down to get rid of birds, which were currently being destroyed because of their ability to spread crop disease. Now we were building tree-substitutes; they would act as windbreaks, as the trees had done, and stop the wind from blowing away the soil and exposing more subsoil. Nobody admitted that this showed some sort of basic failure in the system.

  As the man below me unrolled the steel mesh and I secured it, we gradually worked higher up the pylon. The nearest city came into view, its serried roofs visible through the mist. It squatted on a giant platform, raised on legs high above the surrounding land where the poisons in the country air could less easily reach its inhab
itants.

  A pang of homesickness ran through me, although I knew how overcrowded it was in the dark alleys of the metropolis.

  Something else I could see from my vantage point. Breasting the road only a short way off lay the ruins of one of the old towns made obsolete when the grid-road system was established. Much of it had been cleared away to provide more arable land; but much remained.

  Two years earlier, I had been engaged on that job of clearance myself. A landsman was made to work at anything during the term of his rustication. There in those ruins I had found a secret cache of books, and smuggled some back to the village. They lay hidden under a loose board under my bunk.

  I resolved now to visit the ruins and see what else I could find. I hungered to do something forbidden.

  We worked through the day, with a break at noon to drink turnip soup from a flying canteen. At dispersal time, when the hooters blew, it was easy for me to drive across to the broken township, since I was the only member of that work detail from our village. None of the work overseers cared a rap what happened to us after they had given out our work stamps.

  I kept under the line of the ridge, out of sight of the things that squarked to each other as they patrolled the road. The ruins were dark, silted up, promising. My tractor bumped over a great pile of rubble in front of them. With a swing of the wheel, I twisted between two houses and under the awning of what had been a shop. I was immediately out of sight of prying eyes.

  The time factor was important; they would expect me to check in in the village within a certain time after the hooter, or else I’d be for no supper and the cells. For all that, I sat where I was for a moment, taking in the feel of the kind of place my ancestors — whoever those faceless optimists had been — lived in.

  The shop window before which I had stopped was shattered. Through it lay darkness, darkness and mouldering things. The houses were only remains of houses, husks, their core eaten by the elements. Rubble had been bulldozed against them from behind, as high as the upper windows. It could not have been more desolate. The desolation was emphasized by the glimpse of bare tillage and struggling plant life visible between the buildings. Yet I saw here the ghost of a more human order of life, when the mass unit had not been the only standard. Here was the corpse of a world where the individual had had some status.