Perelandra (Space Trilogy 2)
Page 35He must have slept again, for the next scene that he remembers was in daylight. The Un-man was still visible ahead, and the shoal of fishes was still spread out between it and him. The birds had abandoned the chase. And now at last a full and prosaic sense of his position descended upon him. It is a curious flaw in the reason, to judge from Ransom's experience, ;; that when a man comes to a strange planet he at first quite forgets its size. That whole world is so small in comparison with '' his journey through space that he forgets the distances within it: any two places in Mars, or in Venus, appear to him like places in the same town. But now, as Ransom looked round once more and saw nothing in every direction but golden sky and tumbling waves, the full absurdity of this delusion was j borne in upon him. Even if there were continents in Perelandra, he might well be divided from the nearest of them by the breadth of the Pacific or more. But he had no reason to suppose that there were any. He had no reason to suppose that even the floating islands were very numerous, or that they were equally distributed over the surface of the planet. Even if their loose archipelago spread over a thousand square miles, what would that be but a negligible freckling in a landless ocean that rolled for ever round a globe not much smaller than the World of Men? Soon his fish would be tired. Already, h fancied, it was not swimming at its original speed. The Unman would doubtless torture its mount to swim till it died. But he could not do that. As he was thinking of these things and staring ahead, he saw something that turned his heart cold. One of the other fish deliberately turned out of line, spurted a little column of foam, dived, and reappeared some yards away,, apparently drifting. In a few minutes it was out of sight. It had had enough.
And now the experiences of the past day and night began to make a direct assault upon his faith. The solitude of the seas and, still more, the experiences which had followed his taste of the seaweed, had insinuated a doubt as to whether this world in any real sense belonged to those who called themselves its King and Queen. How could it be made for them when most of it, in fact, was uninhabitable by them? Was not the very idea naive and anthropomorphic in the highest degree? As for the great prohibition, on which so much had seemed to hang - was it really so important? What did these roarers with the yellow foam, and these strange people who lived in them, care whether two little creatures, now far away, lived or did not live on one particular rock? The parallelism between the scenes he had lately witnessed and those recorded in the Book of Genesis, and which had hitherto given him the feeling of knowing by experience what other men only believe, now began to shrink in importance. Need it prove anything more than that similar irrational taboos had accompanied the dawn of reason in two different worlds? It was all very well to talk of Maleldil: but where was Maleldil now? If thus illimitable ocean said anything, it said something very different. Like all solitudes it was, indeed, haunted: but not by an anthropomorphic Deity, rather by the wholly inscrutable to which man and his life remained eternally irrelevant. And beyond this ocean was space itself. In vain did Ransom try to remember that he had been in 'space' and found it Heaven, tingling with a fullness of life for which infinity itself was not one cubic inch too large. All that seemed like a dream. That opposite mode of thought which he had often mocked and called in mockery The Empirical Bogey, came surging into his mind - the great myth of our century with its gases and galaxies, its light years and evolutions, its nightmare perspectives of simple arithmetic in which everything that can possibly hold significance for the mind becomes the mere by-product of essential disorder. Always till now he had belittled it, had treated with a certain disdain its flat superlatives, its clownish amazement that different things should be of different sizes, its glib munificence of ciphers. Even now, his reason was not quite subdued, though his heart would not listen to his reason. Part of him still knew that the size of a thing is the least important characteristic, that the material universe derived from the comparing and mythopoeic power within him that very majesty before which he was now asked to abase himself, and that mere numbers could not overawe us unless we lent them, from our own resources, that awfulness which they themselves could no more supply than a banker's ledger. But this knowledge remained an abstraction. Mere bigness and loneliness overbore him.
These thoughts must have taken several hours and absorbed all his attention. He was aroused by what he least expected the sound of a human voice. Emerging from his reverie he saw that all the fishes had deserted him. His own was swimming feebly: and there a few yards away, no longer fleeing him but: moving slowly towards him, was the Un-man. It sat hugging itself, its eyes almost shut up with bruises, its flesh the colour of liver, its leg apparently broken, its mouth twisted with pain.
"Ransom," it said feebly.
Ransom held his tongue. He was not going to encourage it to start that game again.
"Ransom," it said again in a broken voice, "for God's sake speak to me."
He glanced at it in surprise. Tears were on its cheeks. "Ransom, don't cold-shoulder me," it said. "Tell me what has happened. What have they done to us? You - you're " bleeding. My leg's broken ... " its voice died away in whimper.
"Who are you?" he asked sharply.
"Where did you learn Aramaic?" asked Ransom, keeping his eyes on the other.
"Aramaic?" said Weston's voice. "I don't know what you' talking about. It's not much of a game to make fun of a dying man."
"But are you really Weston?" said Ransom, for he began to think that Weston had actually come back.
"Who else should I be?" came the answer, with a burst of weak temper, on the verge of tears.
"Where have you been?" asked Ransom.
Weston - if it was Weston - shuddered. "Where are we now?" he asked presently.
"In Perelandra - Venus, you know," answered Ransom. "Have you found the space-ship?" asked Weston.
"You mean we're trapped?" said Weston, almost in scream. Ransom said nothing and the other bowed his head and cried like a baby.
"Come," said Ransom at last, "there's no good taking it like that. Hang it all, you'd not be much better off if you were on Earth. You remember they're having a war there. The Germans may be bombing London to bits at this moment!" Then seeing the creature still crying, he added, "Buck up, Weston. It's only death, all said and done. We should have to die some day, you know. We shan't lack water, and hunger - without thirst - isn't too bad. As for drowning - well, a bayonet wound, or cancer, would be worse."
"You mean to say you're going to leave me," said Weston. "I can't, even if I wanted to," said Ransom. "Don't you see I'm in the same position as yourself?"
"You'll promise not to go off and leave me in the lurch?" said Weston.
"All right, I'll promise if you like. Where could I go to?" Weston looked very slowly all round and then urged his fish little nearer to Ransom's.
"Where is ... it?" he asked in a whisper. "You know," and he made meaningless gestures.
"I might ask you the same question," said Ransom.
Weston once more looked all round him uneasily. "It's all true, you know," he said at last. "What's all true?" said Ransom.
Suddenly Weston turned on him with a snarl of rage. "It's all very well for you," he said. "Drowning doesn't hurt and death is bound to come anyway, and all that nonsense. What do you know about death? It's all true, I tell you."
"What are you talking about?"
"I've been stuffing myself up with a lot of nonsense all my life," said Weston. "Trying to persuade myself that it matters what happens to the human race ... trying to believe that anything you can do will make the universe bearable. It's all rot, do you see?"