John Wyndham - The Chrysalids

All these were easy to love — too easy: anyone must love them.

They needed her defences: the crust of independence and indifference: the air of practical, decisive reliability; the unroused interest, the aloof manner. The qualities were not intended to endear, and at times they could hurt; but one who had seen the how and why of them could admire them, if only as a triumph of art over nature.

But now it was the under-Rosalind calling gently, forlornly, all armour thrown aside, the heart naked.

And again there are no words.

Words exist that can, used by a poet, achieve a dim monochrome of the body’s love, but beyond that they fail clumsily.

My love flowed out to her, hers back to me. Mine stroked and soothed. Hers caressed. The distance — and the difference — between us dwindled and vanished. We could meet, mingle, and blend. Neither one of us existed any more; for a time there was a single being that was both. There was escape from the solitary cell; a brief symbiosis, sharing all the world….

No one else knew the hidden Rosalind. Even Michael and the rest caught only glimpses of her. They did not know at what cost the overt Rosalind had been wrought. None of them knew my dear, tender Rosalind longing for escape, gentleness, and love; grown afraid now of what she had built for her own protection; yet more afraid still, of facing life without it.

Duration is nothing. Perhaps it was only for an instant we were together again. The importance of a point is in its existence; it has no dimensions.

Then we were apart, and I was becoming aware of mundane things: a dim grey sky; considerable discomfort; and, presently, Michael, anxiously inquiring what had happened to me. With an effort I raked my wits together.

‘I don’t know — something hit me,’ I told him, ‘but I think I’m all right now — except that my head aches, and I’m damned uncomfortable.’

It was only as I replied that I perceived why I was so uncomfortable — that I was still in the pannier, but sort of folded into it, and the pannier itself was still in motion.

Michael did not find that very informative. He applied to Rosalind.

‘They jumped down on us from overhanging branches. Four or five of them. One landed right on top of David,’ she explained.

‘They?’ asked Michael.

‘Fringes people,’ she told him.

I was relieved. It had occurred to me that we might have been outflanked by the others. I was on the point of asking what was happening now when Michael inquired:

‘Was it you they fired at last night?’

I admitted that we had been fired at, but there might have been other firing for all I knew.

‘No. Only one lot,’ he told us with disappointment. ‘I hoped they’d made a mistake and were on a false trail. We’ve all been called together. They think it’s too risky to come farther into the Fringes in small groups. We’re supposed to be assembled to move off in four hours or so from now. Round about a hundred they reckon. They’ve decided that if we do meet any Fringes people and give them a good hiding it’ll save trouble later on, anyway. You’d better get rid of those great-horses — you’ll never cover your trail while you have them.’

‘A bit late for that advice,’ Rosalind told him. ‘I’m in a pannier on the first horse with my thumbs tied together, and David’s in a pannier on the second.’

‘Where’s Petra?’ asked Michael anxiously.

‘Oh, she’s all right. She’s in the other pannier of this horse, fraternizing with the man in charge.’

‘What happened, exactly?’ Michael demanded.

‘Well, first they dropped on us, and then a lot more came out of the trees and steadied up the horses. They made us get down and lifted David down. Then when they’d talked and argued for a bit, they decided to get rid of us. So they loaded us into the panniers again, like this, and put a man on each horse and sent us on — the same way we’d been going.’

‘Farther into the Fringes, that is?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, at least that’s the best direction,’ Michael commented. ‘What’s the attitude? Threatening?’

‘Oh, no. They’re just being careful we don’t run off. They seemed to have some idea who we were, but weren’t quite sure what to do with us. They argued a bit over that, but they were much more interested in the great-horses really, I think. The man on this horse seems to be quite harmless. He’s talking to Petra with an odd sort of earnestness — I’m not sure he isn’t a little simple.’

‘Can you find out what they’re intending to do with you?’

‘I did ask, but I don’t think he knows. He’s just been told to take us somewhere.’

‘Well—’ Michael seemed at a loss for once. ‘Well, I suppose all we can do is wait and see — but it’ll do no harm to let him know we’ll be coming after you.’

He left it at that for the moment.

I struggled and wriggled round. With some difficulty I managed to get on to my feet and stand up in the swaying basket. The man in the other pannier looked round at me quite amiably.

‘Whoa, there!’ he said to the great-horse, and reined in. He unslung a leather bottle from his shoulder, and swung it across to me on the strap. I uncorked it, drank gratefully, and swung it back to him. We went on.

I was able to see our surroundings now. It was broken country, no longer thick forest, though well-wooded, and even a first look at it assured me that my father had been right about normality being mocked in these parts. I could scarcely identify a single tree with certainty. There were familiar trunks supporting the wrong shape of tree: familiar types of branches growing out of the wrong kind of bark, and bearing the wrong kind of leaves. For a while our view to the left was cut off by a fantastically-woven fence of immense bramble trunks with spines as big as shovels. In another place a stretch of ground looked like a dried-out river-bed full of large boulders, but the boulders turned out to be globular fungi set as close together as they could grow. There were trees with trunks too soft to stand upright, so that they looped over and grew along the ground. Here and there were patches of miniature trees, shrunk and gnarled, and looking centuries old.

I glanced surreptitiously again at the man in the other pannier. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with him except that he looked very dirty, as were his ragged clothes and crumpled hat. He caught my eye on him.

‘Never been in the Fringes before, boy?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I told him. ‘Is it all like this?’

He grinned, and shook his head.

‘None of it’s like any other part. That’s why the Fringes is the Fringes; pretty near nothing grows true to stock here, yet.’

‘Yet—?’ I repeated.

‘Sure. It’ll settle down, though, in time. Wild Country was Fringes once, but it’s steadier now; likely the parts you come from were Wild Country once, but they’ve settled down more. God’s little game of patience I reckon it is, but He certainly takes His time over it.’

‘God?’ I said doubtfully. ‘They’ve always taught us that it’s the Devil that rules in the Fringes.’

He shook his head.

‘That’s what they tell you over there. ‘Tisn’t so, boy. It’s your parts where the old Devil’s hanging on and looking after his own. Arrogant, they are. The true image, and all that…. Want to be like the Old People. Tribulation hasn’t taught ‘em a thing….

‘The Old People thought they were the tops, too. Had ideals, they did; knew just how the world ought to be run. All they had to do was get it fixed up comfortable, and keep it that way; then everybody’d be fine, on account of their ideas being a lot more civilized than God’s.’