J. Ballard - The Drought

"Charles, what is it?" Lomax stood back. His eyes, above the short hooked nose, were as sharp as ever. "Don't you remember me?" He chortled to himself, happy to prepare the way for his own retort. "Or is that the trouble-you _do_ remember me!"

Tittering to himself, he led Ransom through the pavilion into a small court at the rear, where an ornamental garden decorated with glass and chromium blooms had been laid out around the remains of a fountain.

"Well, Charles, what's going on? You've brought water with you?" He pressed Ransom into a chair, his hand holding Ransom's arm like a claw. "God knows I've waited long enough."

Ransom disengaged the arm. "I'm afraid you'll have to go on waiting, Richard. It must sound like a bad joke after all these years, but one of the reasons we came here from the coast was to look for water."

"What?" Lomax swung on his heel. "What on earth are you talking about? You must be out of your mind. There isn't a drop of water for a hundred miles!" With sudden irritation he drove his little fists together. "What have you been doing about it?"

"We haven't been doing anything," Ransom said quietly. "It's been all we could manage just to distill enough water to keep alive."

Lomax nodded, controlling himself. "I daresay. Frankly, Charles, you do look a mess. You should have stayed with me. But this drought-they said it would end in ten years. I thought that was why you came!"

On this last word, Lomax's voice rose angrily again, reverberating off the tinsel walls.

"Richard, for heaven's sake…" Ransom tried to pacify him. "You're all obsessed by the subject of water. There seems plenty around. As soon as I arrived I walked straight into a large reservoir."

"That?" Lomax waved a ruffed hand at him, his white woman's face like a powdered mask. Mopping his brow with a soft hand, he noticed his bald pate, then quickly pulled a small peruke from his pocket and slipped it onto his scalp. "That water, Charles, don't you understand-that's all there is left! For ten years I've kept them going, and now that this confounded drought won't end they're turning on me!"

Lomax pulled up another chair. "Charles, the position I'm in is impossible. Quilter is insane, have you seen him, striding about on those stilts?… He's out to destroy me, I know it!"

Cautiously, Ransom said: "He did give me a message- something about drowning, if I remember. There's not much danger of that here?"

"Oh no?" Lomax snapped his fingers. "Drowning-after all I've done for him! If it hadn't been for me they would have died within a week."

He subsided into the chair. Surrounded by all the chromium and tinsel, he looked like a stranded carnival fish, encrusted with pearls and pieces of shell.

"Where did you find all this water?" Ransom asked.

"Here and there, Charles." Lomax gestured vaguely. "I happened to know about one or two old reservoirs, forgotten for years under car parks and football fields, small ones no one ever thought of, but a hell of a lot of water in them all the same. I showed Quilter where it was, and he and the others piped it in here."

"And that lake is the last? But why should Quilter blame you? Surely they're grateful-"

"They're _not_ grateful! You obviously don't understand how their minds work. Look what Quilter's done to my poor Miranda. And those diseased cretinous children! Think what they'll be like if they're allowed to grow up. _Three_ Quilters! Sometimes I think the Almighty brought this drought just to make sure they die of thirst."

"Why don't you pack up and leave?"

"I can't! Don't you realize I'm a prisoner here? That terrible one-armed man Whitman is everywhere with his mad animals. I warn you, don't wander about on your Own too much. And there are a couple of lions around somewhere."

Ransom stood up. "What shall I tell Quilter then?"

Lomax whipped off his wig and slipped it into one of his pockets. "Tell them to go! I'm tired of playing Father Neptune. This is _my_ water, I found it and I'm going to drink it!" With a smirk, he added: "But I'll share it with you, Charles, of course."

"Thank you, Richard, but I think I need to be on my own at present."

"Very well, dear boy." Lomax gazed at him coolly, the smirk on his face puffing out his powdered cheeks. "Don't expect any water, though. Sooner or later it's going to run out, perhaps sooner rather than later."

"I daresay." Ransom gazed down at Lomax, realizing how far he had decayed during the previous ten years. The serpent in this dusty Eden, he was now trying to grasp back his apple, and preserve intact, if only for a few weeks, the world before the drought. By contrast, for Ransom the long journey up the river had been an expedition into his own future, into a world of volitional time where the images of the past were reflected free of the demands of memory and nostalgia, free of the pressures even of thirst and hunger.

"Charles, wait!" As Ransom reached the entrance to the pavilion, Lomax hurried after him. "Don't leave yet, you're the only one I can trust!" Lomax plucked at his sleeve. His voice sank to a plaintive whisper. "They'll kill me, Charles, or turn me into a beast. Look what he's done to Miranda."

Ransom shook his head. "I don't agree, Richard," he said. "I think she's beautiful."

Lomax gazed after him, appalled. Ransom set off across the sand. Watching him in the distance from a dune above the swimming pool, the last smoke of the signal fire rising beside him, was the stilted figure of Quilter, the swan's head wavering against the evening sky.

For the next week Ransom remained with Quilter and Miranda, watching the disintegration of Richard Lomax. Ransom decided that as soon as possible he would continue his journey across the drained lake, but at night he could hear the sounds of the lions baying among the white dunes. The tall figure of Jonas would move along the lakeside road through the darkness, calling in his deep voice to the lions, which grumbled back at him. Their survival, confirming the fisher-captain's obsession with a lost river or lake, convinced Ransom that as soon as he had recovered he should carry on his search.

During the day he sat in the shade of the ruined loggia beside the swimming pool. In the morning he went off toward the city with Whitman and Quilter to forage for food. At intervals among the dunes, deep shafts had been sunk into the basements. They would slide down them and crawl among the old freezer plant, mining out a few cans from the annealed sand. Most of them had perished, and the rancid contents were flung to the dogs or left among the rubble, where the few birds pecked at them. Ransom was not surprised to find that Quilter's food stores consisted of barely a -day's supplies, nor that Quilter was becoming progressively less interested in replenishing them. He seemed to accept that the coming end of the water in the reservoir would commit him finally to the desert, and that the drained river would now take him on its own terms.

Quilter built a small hutch for his mother in the entrance hall of the house, and she retired here in the evenings after spending the day with Miranda and the children.

Ransom slept in one of the wrecked cars near the pool. Whitman lived in the next vehicle, but after Ransom's arrival he moved off with his dogs and took up residence inside a drained fountain fifty yards from Lomax's pavilion. Keeping to himself, he resented Ransom's approaches.

Quilter, however, spent much of his time wandering around the edges of the pool, apparently trying to form some sort of relationship with Ransom, though unable to find a point of contact. Sometimes he would sit down in the dust a few feet from Ransom, letting the children climb over his shoulders, pulling at his furs and swan's cap.