Such study as has been possible at a distance, however, does not confirm the view of the Right Wing Church Party that they are the result of unchecked deviation. There is no evidence whatever that they are a form of sore on the earth’s surface destined to spread to all impure regions. Indeed, the contrary appears more likely. This is to say that just as Wild Country becomes tractable, and Badlands country slowly gives way to habitable Fringes country, so, it would seem, are the Blacklands contracting within the Badlands. Observations at the necessary distance cannot be detailed, but such as have been made indicate consistently that living forms are in the process, although in the most profane shapes, of encroaching upon this fearsome desolation.
That was one of the parts of the journal that got Marther into a lot of trouble with orthodox people, for it implied that deviations, so far from being a curse, were performing, however slowly, a work of reclamation. Along with half a dozen more heresies it landed Marther in court, and started agitation for a ban on further exploration.
In the middle of all the fuss, however, a ship called the Venture which had long been given up for lost, came sailing home to Rigo. She was battered and undermanned, her canvas was patched, her mizzen jury-rigged, and her condition foul, but she triumphantly claimed the honour of being the first to reach the lands beyond the Black Coasts. She brought back a number of objects including gold and silver and copper ornaments, and a cargo of spices to prove it. The evidence had to be accepted, but there was a lot of trouble over the spices, for there was no means of telling whether they were deviational, or the product of a pure strain. Strict churchgoers refused to touch them for fear they might be tainted; other people preferred to believe that they were the kind of spices referred to in the Bible. Whatever they were, they are profitable enough now for ships to sail south in search of them.
The lands down there aren’t civilized. Mostly they don’t have any sense of sin so they don’t stop Deviations; and where they do have a sense of sin, they’ve got it mixed up. A lot of them aren’t ashamed of Mutants; it doesn’t seem to worry them when children turn out wrong, provided they’re right enough to live and to learn to look after themselves. Other places, though, you’ll find Deviations who think they are normal. There’s one tribe where both the men and women are hairless, and they think that hair is the devil’s mark; and there’s another where they all have white hair and pink eyes. In one place they don’t think you’re properly human unless you have webbed fingers and toes; in another, they don’t allow any woman who is not multi-breasted to have children.
You’ll find islands where the people are all thickset, and others where they’re thin; there are even said to be some islands where both the men and women would be passed as true images if it weren’t that some strange deviation has turned them all completely black – though even that’s easier to believe than the one about a race of Deviations that has dwindled to two feet high, grown fur and a tail, and taken to living in trees. All the same, it’s queerer there than you’d ever credit; pretty nearly anything seems possible once you’ve seen it.
It’s pretty dangerous in those parts, too. The fish and the other things in the sea are bigger and fiercer than they are here. And when you do go ashore you never know how the local Deviations are going to take you. Some places they are friendly; in others they shoot poisoned arrows at you. On one island they throw bombs made of pepper wrapped in leaves, and when it gets in your eyes they charge with spears. You just never know.
Sometimes when the people are friendly you can’t understand a thing they’re trying to say and they can’t understand you, but more often if you listen a bit you’ll find out that a lot of their words are like our own but pronounced differently. And you find out some strange, disturbing things. They all have pretty much the same legends of the Old People as we have – how they could fly, how they used to build cities that floated on the sea, how any one of them could speak to any other, even hundreds of miles away, and so on. But what’s more worrying is that most of them – whether they have seven fingers, or four arms, or hair all over, or six breasts, or whatever it is that’s wrong with them – think that their type is the true pattern of the Old People, and anything different is a Deviation.
That seems silly at first, but when you find more and more kinds just as convinced of it as we are ourselves – well, you begin to wonder a bit. You start asking yourself: well, what real evidence have we got about the true image? You find that the Bible doesn’t say anything to contradict the people of that time being like us, but on the other hand it doesn’t give any definition of Man, either. No, the definition comes from Nicholson’s Repentances – and he admits that he was writing some generations after Tribulation came, so you find yourself wondering whether he knew he was in the true image, or whether he only thought he was. . . .
Uncle Axel had a lot more to say about Southern parts than I can remember, and it was all very interesting in its way, but it didn’t tell me what I wanted to know. At last I asked him point-blank.
‘ Uncle Axel, are there any cities there?’
‘Cities?’ he repeated. ‘Well, here and there you’ll find a town, of a kind. As big as Kentak, maybe, but built differently.’
‘ No,’ I told him. ‘ I mean big places.’ I described the city in my dream, but without telling him it was a dream.
He looked at me oddly. ‘ No, I never heard of any place like that,’ he told me.
‘ Farther on, perhaps. Farther than you went?’ I suggested.
He shook his head. ‘You can’t go farther on. The sea gets full of weed. Masses of weed with stems like cables. A ship can’t make her way through it, and it’s trouble enough to get clear of it once you get in it at all.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You’re quite sure there’s no city?’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘We’d have heard of it by this time if there was.’
I was disappointed. It sounded as if running away to the South, even if I could find a ship to take me, would be little better than running away to the Fringes. For a time I had hoped, but now I had to go back to the idea that the city I dreamt of must be one of the Old People’s cities after all.
Uncle Axel went on talking about the doubts of the true image that his voyage had given him. He laboured it rather a lot, and after a while he broke off to ask me directly:
‘You understand, don’t you, Davie, why I’ve been telling you all this?’
I was not sure that I did. Moreover, I was reluctant to admit the flaw in the tidy, familiar orthodoxy I had been taught. I recalled a phrase which I had heard a number of times.
‘ You lost your faith?’ I inquired.
Uncle Axel snorted, and pulled a face.
‘Preacher-words!’ he said, and thought for a moment. ‘I’m telling you,’ he went on,’ that a lot of people saying that a thing is so, doesn’t prove it is so. I’m telling you that nobody, nobody really knows what is the true image. They all think they know – just as we think we know, but, for all we can prove, the Old People themselves may not have been the true image.’ He turned, and looked long and steadily at me again.
‘ So,’ he said, ‘how am I, and how is anyone to be sure that this “difference” that you and Rosalind have does not make you something nearer to the true image than other people are? Perhaps the Old People were the image: very well then, one of the things they say about them is that they could talk to one another over long distances. Now we can’t do that – but you and Rosalind can. Just think that over, Davie. You two may be nearer to the image than we are,’
I hesitated for perhaps a minute, and then took a decision.
‘It isn’t just Rosalind and me, Uncle Axel,’ I told him. ‘There are others, too.’
He was startled. He stared at me.
‘ Others?’ he repeated. ‘ Who are they? How many?’