Christopher Priest - The Space Machine

When we were ready, she said: “I will take your arm. We do not know who these people are, so it would be wise not to give the wrong impression. If we behave with confidence, we will be treated correctly.”

“And what about that?” I said, indicating her corset, all too evident between the handles of her bag. “Now is the time to discard it. If we wish to appear as if we have been enjoying an afternoon stroll, that will make it clear we have not.”

Amelia frowned, evidently undecided. At last she picked it and placed it on the soil, so that it leaned against one of the pillars of the tower.

“I’ll leave it here for the moment,” she said. “I can soon find it again when we have spoken to the people.”

She came back to me, took my arm and together we walked sedately towards the nearest of the people. Once again the clear air had deceived our eyes, and we soon saw that the weeds were farther away than we had imagined. I glanced back just once, and saw that the platform at the top of the tower was still rotating to and fro.

Walking towards the people—none of whom had yet noticed us—I saw something that rather alarmed me. As I wasn’t sure I said something about it to Amelia, but as we came closer there was no mistaking it: most of the people—and there were both men and women—were almost completely unclothed.

I stopped at once, and turned away.

“I had better go forward alone,” I said. “Please wait here.”

Amelia, who had turned with me, for I had grasped her arm, stared over her shoulder at the people.

“I am not as coy as you,” she said. “From what are you trying to protect me?”

“They are not decent,” I said, very embarrassed. “I will speak to them on my own.”

“For Heaven’s sake, Edward!” Amelia cried in exasperation. “We are about to starve to death, and you smother me with modesty!”

She let go of my arm, and strode off alone. I followed immediately, my face burning with my embarrassment. Amelia headed directly for the nearest group: about two dozen men and women who were hacking at the scarlet weeds with long bladed knives.

“You!” she cried, venting her anger with me on the nearest man. “Do you speak English?”

The man turned sharply and faced her. For an instant he looked at her in surprise—and in that moment I saw that he was very tall, that his skin was burned a reddish colour, and that he was wearing nothing more than a stained loincloth—and then prostrated himself before her. In the same instant, the other people around him dropped their knives and threw themselves face down on the ground.

Amelia glanced at me, and I saw that the imperious manner had gone as quickly as it had been assumed. She looked frightened, and I went and stood by her side.

“What’s the matter?” she said to me in a whisper. “What have I done?”

I said: “You probably scared the wits out of them.”

“Excuse me,” Amelia said to, the people, in a much gentler voice. “Does any one of you speak English? We are very hungry, and need shelter for the night.”

There was no response.

“Try another language,” I said.

“Excusez-moi, parlez-vous français?” Amelia said. There was still no response, so she added: “¿Habla usted Español?” She tried German, and then Italian. “It’s no good,” she said to me in the end. “They don’t understand.” I went over to the man whom Amelia had first addressed, and squatted down beside him. He raised his face and looked at me, and his eyes seemed haunted with terror.

“Stand up,” I said, accompanying the words with suitable hand-gestures. “Come on, old chap… on your feet.”

I put out a hand to assist him, and he stared back at me. After a moment he climbed slowly to his feet and stood before me, his head hanging.

“We aren’t going to hurt you,” I said, putting as much sympathy into my words as possible, but they had no effect on him. “What are you doing here?”

With this I looked at the weed-bank in a significant way. His response was immediate: he turned to the others, shouted something incomprehensible at them, then reached down and snatched up his knife.

At this I took a step back, thinking that we were about to be attacked, but I could not have been more wrong. The other people clambered up quickly, took their knives and continued with the work we had interrupted, hacking and slashing at the vegetation like men possessed.

Amelia said quietly: “Edward, these are just peasants. They have mistaken us for overseers.”

“Then we must find out who their real supervisors are!”

We stood and watched the peasants for a minute or so longer.

The men were cutting the larger stems, and chopping them into more manageable lengths of about twelve feet The women worked behind them, stripping the main stems of branches; and separating fruit or seed-pods as they found them. The stems were then thrown to one side, the leaves or fruit to another. With every slash of the knife quantities of sap issued forth, and trickled from the plants already cut. The area of soil directly in front of the weed-bank was flooded with the spilled sap, and the peasants were working in mud up to twelve inches deep.

Amelia and I walked on, carefully maintaining a distance from the peasants and walking on soil that was dry. Here we saw that the spilled sap was not wasted; as it oozed down from where the peasants were working it eventually trickled into a wooden trough that had been placed in the soil, and flowed along in a relatively liquid state, accumulating all the way.

“Did you recognize the language?” I said.

“They spoke too quickly. A guttural tongue. Perhaps it was Russian.”

“But not Tibetan,” I said, and Amelia frowned at me.

“I based that guess on the nature of the terrain, and our evident altitude,” she said. “I think it is pointless continuing to speculate about our location until we find someone in authority.”

As we moved along the weed-bank we came across more and more of the peasants, all of whom seemed to be working without supervison. Their conditions of work were atrocious, as in the more crowded areas the spilled sap created large swamps, and some of the poor wretches were standing in muddy liquid above their waists. As Amelia observed, and I could not help but agree, there was much room for reform here.

We walked for about half a mile until we reached a point where the wooden trough came to a confluence with three others, which flowed from different parts of the weed-bank. Here the sap was ducted into a large pool, from which it was pumped by several women using a crude, hand-operated device into a subsidiary system of irrigation channels. From where we were standing we could see that these flowed alongside and through a large area of cultivated land. On the far side of this stood two more of the metal towers.

Further along we saw that the peasants were cutting the weed on the slant, so that as we had been walking parallel to their workings we eventually found what it was that lay beyond the bank of weeds. It was a water-course, some three hundred yards wide. Its natural width was only exposed by the cropping of weeds, for when we looked to the north, in the direction from which we had walked, we saw that the weeds so choked the waterway that in places it was entirely blocked. The total width of the weed-bank was nearly a mile, and as the opposite side of the waterway was similarly overgrown, and with another crowd of peasants cutting back the weed; we realized that if they intended to clear the entire length of the waterway by hacking manually through the weeds then the peasants were confronted with a task that would take them many generations to accomplish.

Amelia and I walked beside the water, soon leaving the peasants behind. The ground was uneven and pitted, presumably because of the roots of the weeds which had once grown here, and the water was dark-coloured and undisturbed by ripples. Whether it was a river or a canal was difficult to say; the water was flowing, but so slowly that the movement was barely perceptible, and the banks were irregular. This seemed to indicate that it was a natural watercourse, but its very straightness belied this assumption.