John Brunner - To Conquer Chaos

“But I did sometimes have visions of the barrenland just being the way it is, with a few people in it here and there. I think I might have got caught up with these after Nestamay’s father came to Lagwich and was taken for a devil. I’d had all the kid’s grandiose dreams of becoming a famous thing -killer like Waygan the hornman, the father of the present one. It was probably with the idea of killing devils instead of things that I thought about the barrenland at all. I kept at it on and off for a year or two, and then lost interest.

“It wasn’t till I realised Nestamay reminded me of something that the memory came back. I didn’t recognise her at once for two reasons, I guess: first, I was trying to recall a person, and in fact it was my soap-carving I was thinking of, and second, she’s changed.”

“Family resemblance is still more likely.”

“No! She’s changed. As though-oh, like growing up. In fact, that’s precisely it! My soap-carving looked like Nestamay as she would have been when she was a little girl, in spite of my trying to make it look like Idris nowadays. What’s more-” He checked with a strangled sound, and then resumed in a near-shout of frantic excitement.

“I’ve got it! That was why I stopped bothering about visions of the barrenland! It was because in them I saw ordinary people instead of the fearsome devils I was after, to kill! I didn’t care about little girls and folk who looked like just anybody!”

He dropped his voice again to an awe-hushed whisper, and finished, “Yanderman, I feel I’m beginning to remember all sorts of crazy things!”

“A sensation that you’ve been here before? That you’ve seen this place already?”

“Exactly!” Conrad was almost bouncing with excitement.

“It’s an illusion,” Yanderman said, the words almost stifled by a healthy yawn. “It’s very common. It generally passes off in an hour or two at longest.”

“But-!”

“Conrad, life begins here very early in the morning,” Yanderman interrupted. “I think we ought to go to sleep, or when they show us over the Station in the morning we won’t understand anything we see.”

“It’s not an illusion,” muttered Conrad obstinately. But Yanderman didn’t answer, except by rolling over noisily on his make-shift bed and yawning again even louder.

Twelve hours later Conrad sat moodily in the hot sun, a piece of unsalvaged scrap of indeterminate purpose serving as a stool, and tossed pebbles from hand to hand.

It wasn’t that he had meant to be rude to Nestamay, he explained furiously to himself. It was just-

Well, over there, for example: Yanderman talking intently to Maxall, being fluent and knowledgeable about things of which he had no direct experience, making a tremendous impression on the old man as he had already done on Keefe, Egrin and all the others. It wasn’t fair. The clues and hints he was drawing on were taken from him, Conrad, the one with the gift of seeing into the past-and Conrad himself couldn’t make use of them.

Yanderman’s explanation of why not was very convincing. It was perfectly true that his visions had always had a dreamlike quality which rendered them difficult to recapture. But being right on that score didn’t make him right on everything!

With a rebellious expression Conrad flung his pebbles into a patch of dust.

Why should his feeling of having seen all this before be a mere illusion? Yanderman was willing enough to accept that his visions of the barrenland before it was barren corresponded to a past reality; wasn’t there room in a span of four and a half centuries for a whole lot of true visions? The more he thought about it, the more Conrad came to the conclusion that he really had visualised parts of this area around the so-called Station in the brief period following the arrival of the “devil”-Nestamay’s father-at Lagwich. He hadn’t been interested in things like that for long. Other visions, those in which he dreamed of a prosperous and fertile landscape populated by marvellous people with astonishing powers, offered a more attractive contrast to the boredom and depression of reality.

The haunting, disquieting sensation of almost remembering had come and gone during the whole of this morning. Every now and again it had become acute-when Maxall was showing them the device which maintained their clothing, for example, and again when he showed off the solar power accumulators and the heatbeams which had drained them yesterday.

It was terrifying, Conrad reflected in passing, how narrow a margin these people had between survival and extinction. A single thing as big and dangerous as yesterday’s not only did extensive damage-a working party had been busy since dawn assessing the result of its blind passage to the outside from its point of emergence in the dome-but also wasted their stored power so that everything depending on it failed. Today was bright and sunny, so the recharging would proceed quickly. But on an overcast day it would be fearful, having to wait and watch the power supplies creep back to a useful level, knowing that at any moment the alarm might signal a vicious monster and the heatbeams were temporarily out of service-

Wait a second.

Conrad turned and stared towards the broken whaleback of the gigantic dome. He didn’t know much about the storage or use of this hard-to-conceive energy; in Lagwich, things like cornmills and looms were driven by inefficient single-cylinder steam-engines, but that was about the most advanced machinery he had ever come in direct contact with. Nonetheless, out of the mist of half-memory which this place evoked in his mind a few vague concepts were beginning to emerge.

It seemed logical that if everything else which still operated here at the Station, like the clothing machine, the ovens, and the heatbeams, required a supply of power, then the mysterious, capricious entity supposed to be screened by the dome and the impenetrable jungle of alien vegetation would require power also. Where was it coming from? Presumably, from the same source-the solar accumulators. The … the production … no, the transport of things from their own worlds (Conrad was struggling now) must involve effort of some sort. Was this a fact he had recalled from a scene in one of his visions, or a simple exercise in deduction? He couldn’t decide, but there was a feeling of rightness about the idea.

He glanced round, half-intending to go at once to Yanderman and put the suggestion to him. But Yanderman and Maxall, lost in discussion, were strolling away from him and around the curve of the dome.

Conrad hesitated. Then he made up his mind. Until last night’s conversation with Yanderman he had been half-afraid of the offhand manner in which the older man could put him in touch, as it were, with his incomprehensible visions. He had assumed there was something almost magical about the crystal ball Yanderman employed. But if it was true that the tip of a finger would have served equally well, and if it was also true that sitting relaxed and staring fixedly at a mere pebble on the ground was a path into trance, why should he not attempt it himself? Not this time as a simple escape from boredom and misery, but with a deliberate purpose: to recapture the elusive visions now plaguing him with the sensation of having been here before.

Conrad took a deep breath. He shifted his position on his uncomfortable perch and looked along the vast curve of the dome, trying to get straight in his mind what aspects seemed most familiar. He had only one incontestable point of recollection so far: the resemblance between Nestamay and his little carving. Was there anything else which struck him?

The dome itself? He couldn’t be sure. And its most remarkable single feature-the tangle of unhealthy-looking vegetation spreading over the nearby ground and swarming up through gashes in the roof-had been so imprinted on his mind yesterday when the pitiable Jasper had emerged from it as a condemned victim that there was little point in trying to separate direct experience from apparent memory.