In the last few years we had learnt more of the people round us, and the way they felt. What had seemed, five or six years ago, a kind of rather disquieting game had grown grimmer as we understood more about it. Essentially, it had not changed. Still our whole consideration if we were to survive must be to keep our true selves hidden; to walk, talk, and live indistinguishably from other people. We had a gift, a sense which, Michael complained bitterly, should have been a blessing, but was little better than a curse. The stupidest norm was happier; he could feel that he belonged. We did not, and because we did not, we had no positive – we were condemned to negatives, to not revealing ourselves, to not speaking when we would, to not using what we knew, to not being found out – to a life of perpetual deception, concealment, and lying. The prospect of continued negativeness stretching out ahead chafed him more than it did the rest of us. His imagination took him further, giving him a clearer vision of what such frustrations were going to mean, but it was no better at suggesting an alternative than ours were. As far as I was concerned a firm grasp of the negative in the cause of survival had been quite enough to occupy me; I was only just beginning to perceive the vacancy left by the absent positive. It was chiefly my appreciation of danger that had sharpened as I grew up. That had become hardened one afternoon of the summer in the year before we discovered Petra.
It was a bad season, that. We had lost three fields, so had Angus Morton. Altogether there had been thirty-five field-burnings in the district. There had been a higher deviation rate among the spring-births of the stock – not only our own stock, but everyone’s, and particularly among the cattle – than had been known for twenty years. There seemed to be more wildcats of various sizes prowling out of the woods by night than ever before. Every week someone was before the court charged with attempted concealment of deviational crops, or the slaughter and consumption of undeclared Offences among stock, and to cap it all there had been no less than three district alerts on account of raids in force from the Fringes. It was just after the stand-down following the last of these that I happened across old Jacob grumbling to himself as he forked muck in the yard.
‘What is it?’ I asked him, pausing beside him.
He jabbed the fork into the muck and leant one hand on the shaft. He had been an old man forking muck ever since I could remember, I couldn’t imagine that he had ever been, or would be, anything else. He turned to me a lined face mostly hidden in white hair and whiskers which always made me think of Elijah.
‘Beans,’ he said. ‘Now my bloody beans are wrong. First my potatoes, then my tomatoes, then my lettuces, now my goddam beans. Never knew a year like it. The others I’ve had before, but who ever heard of beans getting tabulated?’
‘Are you sure?’ I said.
‘ Sure. ‘Course I am. Think I don’t know the way a bean ought to look, at my age?’
He glared at me out of the white fuzz.
‘It’s certainly a bad year,’ I agreed.
‘Bad,’ he said, ‘it’s ruination. Weeks of work gone up in smoke, pigs, sheep and cows gobbling up good food just to produce ‘bominations. Men making off and standing-to so’s a fellow can’t get on with his own work for looking after theirs. Even my own bit of garden as tribulated as hell itself. Bad! You’re right. And worse to come, I reckon.’ He shook his head. ‘Aye, worse to come,’ he repeated, with gloomy satisfaction.
‘Why?’ I inquired.
‘It’s a judgement,’ he told me. ‘And they deserve it. No morals, no principles. Look at young Ted Norbet – gets a bit of a fine for hiding a litter of ten and eating all but two before he was found out. Enough to bring his father up out of his grave. Why, if he’d done a thing like that – not that he ever would, mind you – but if he had, d’you know what he’d have got?’ I shook my head. ‘ It’d have been a public shaming on a Sunday, a week of penances, and a tenth of all he had,’ he told me, forcibly. ‘So you’d not find people doing that kind of thing much then – but now -! What do they care about a bit of fine?’ He spat disgustedly into the muck-pile. ‘It’s the same all round. Slackness, laxness, nobody caring beyond a bit of lip-service. You can see it everywhere nowadays. But God is not mocked. Bringing Tribulation down on us again, they are: a season like this is the start. I’m glad I’m an old man and not likely to see the fall of it. But it’s coming, you mark my words.
‘Government regulations made by a lot of snivelling, weak-hearted, weak-witted babblers in the East. That’s what the trouble is. A lot of namby-pamby politicians, and churchmen who ought to know better, too; men who’ve never lived in unstable country, don’t know anything about it, very likely never seen a mutant in their lives, and they sit there whittling away year after year at the laws of God, reckoning they know better. No wonder we get seasons like this sent as a warning, but do they read the warning and heed it, do they -?’ He spat again.
‘ How do they think the south-west was made safe and civilized for God’s people? How do they think the mutants were kept under, and the Purity standards set up? It wasn’t by fiddling little fines that a man could pay once a week and not notice. It was by honouring the law, and punishing anybody who transgressed it so that they knew they were punished.
‘When my father was a young man a woman who bore a child that wasn’t in the image was whipped for it. If she bore three out of the image she was uncertified, outlawed, and sold. It made them careful about their purity and their prayers. My father reckoned there was a lot less trouble with mutants on account of it, and when there were any, they were burnt, like other deviations.’
‘Burnt!’ I exclaimed.
He looked at me. ‘ Isn’t that the way to cleanse deviations?’ he demanded fiercely.
‘Yes,’ I admitted, ‘with crops and stock, but -‘
‘The other kind is the worst,’ he snapped, ‘it is the Devil mocking the true image. Of course they should be burnt like they used to be. But what happened? The sentimentalists in Rigo who never have to deal with them themselves said: “Even though they aren’t human, they look nearly human, therefore extermination looks like murder, or execution, and that troubles some people’s minds.” So, because a few wishy-washy minds did not have enough resolution and faith, there were new laws about near-human deviations. They mustn’t be cleansed, they must be allowed to live, or die naturally. They must be outlawed and driven into the Fringes, or, if they are infants, simply exposed there to take their chance – and that is supposed to be more merciful. At least the Government has the sense to understand that they mustn’t be allowed to breed, and sees to it that they shan’t – though I’d be willing to bet there’s a party against that, too. And what happens? You get more Fringes dwellers, and that means you get more and bigger raids and lose time and money holding them back – all lost because of a namby-pamby dodging of the main issue. What sort of thinking is it to say “Accursed is the Mutant,” and then treat him like a half-brother?’
‘ But a mutant isn’t responsible for -‘ I began.
‘”Isn’t responsible,”‘ sneered the old man. ‘Is a tiger-cat responsible for being a tiger-cat? But you kill it. You can’t afford to have it around loose. Repentances says to keep pure the stock of the Lord by fire, but that’s not good enough for the bloody Government now.
‘Give me the old days when a man was allowed to do his duty and keep the place clean. Heading right for another dose of Tribulation we are now.’ He went on muttering, looking like an ancient and wrathful prophet of doom.
‘All these concealments – and they’ll try again for want of a proper lesson; women who’ve given birth to a Blasphemy just going to church and saying how sorry they are and they’ll try not to do it again; Angus Morton’s great-horses still around, an “officially approved” mockery of the Purity Laws; a damned inspector who just wants to hold his job and not offend them in Rigo – and then people wonder why we get tribulated seasons …’ He went on grumbling and spitting with disgust, a venomously puritanical old man. .. .