Читать книгу The Homeward Bounders - Diana Wynne Jones - Страница 9

The one of Them nearest me walked round behind me and shut the door. “Another random factor,” he said. He sounded annoyed. It was the way my mother would say, “Bother! We’ve got mice again.”

And the other one said, “We’d better deal with that before we go on then.” He said it the way my father would answer, “You’d better set traps again, my dear.”

“How?” asked the first one, coming back round me to the machines. “Can we afford a corpse at this stage? I do wish we could do without these randoms.”

“Oh but we can’t,” said the other. “We need them. Besides, the risk adds to the fun. I think we’d better discard this one to the Bounder circuits – but let’s get a read-out first on the effect of a corpse on play.”

“Right you are,” said the first one.

They both leant over the machines. I could see Them through the white sheets of reflected sky, looking at me carefully and then looking down to press another button. It was the way my mother kept looking at the colour of our curtains when she was choosing new wallpaper. After that, They turned their attention to another part of the machine and gazed at it, rather dubiously. Then They went down the room to look at that huge flickering table.

“Hm,” said the first one. “Play is quite delicately poised at the moment, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said the second. “If it was on your side, it would help bring your revolution closer, but I can’t afford any urban unrest for a couple of decades or more. I claim unfair hazard. Let’s discard. Agreed?”

The first one came back and stood looking into the machine in the intent way They did. “It would make good sense,” he said, “if we could go back over the family of this discard and scrub all memory of it.”

“Oh no,” said the other, moving up too. “It’s against the rules for a discard. The anchor, you know. The anchor.”

“But we can scrub with a corpse. Why don’t we?”

“Because I’ve already claimed unfair hazard. Come on. Make it a discard.”

“Yes, why not?” said the first one. “It’s not that important. What’s the rule? These days we have to check with the rest in case the Bounder circuits are overloaded, don’t we?”

As I sit here, it’s true! They said all that, talking about me just as if I was a wooden counter or a piece of card in a game. And I floated there and couldn’t do a thing about it. Next thing I knew, They were punching more buttons, round the end of the machines.

And the place opened up.

You know if you go to a barber’s shop with a lot of mirrors, how you can sit looking into one mirror and see through it into the mirror behind you, over and over again, until it goes all blurred with distance? Well, what happened was like that. Over and over again, and all blurred, there were suddenly triangular rooms all round. They were slotted in on both sides, and beyond and behind that, and underneath, down and down. They were piled up on top of us too. I looked, but it made me feel ill, seeing two of Them walking about up there, and others of Them above and beside that, all strolling over where They could see me. They all wore those cloaks, but They weren’t just reflections of the first two. They were all different from one another. That was about all I could tell. It was all so blurry and flickery, and the reflection of the canal arches went striding through the lot, as if that was the only real thing there.

“Your attention for a moment,” said one of Them who was with me. “We are about to make a discard. Can you confirm that there is still room on the Bounds?”

A distant voice said, “Computing.”

A nearer, hollower voice asked, “What’s the reason for the discard?”

The second one of my Them said, “We’ve had an intrusion by a random factor, entailing the usual danger of feedback into the native world here. I’ve claimed unfair hazard against reinsertion as a corpse.”

“That seems adequate,” said the hollow voice.

Almost at once, the distant voice said, “The Bounds have space for four more discards. Repeat, four more only. Is the reason good enough?”

There was a little murmuring. For a moment, I thought I was going to end up as a corpse. I still didn’t know what I was in for, you see. Then the murmur grew – with an air of surprise to it, as if They were wondering what They were being asked for. “Reason sufficient. Sufficient reason,” came rumbling from all round, above and underneath.

“Then I must caution you,” said the hollow voice. “Rule seventy-two thousand now comes into play. The final three discards must only be made with extreme caution and at the most pressing need.”

With that, They all faded away, into the reflection of the sky again, and left just my two.

The second one came sweeping towards me. The first was standing with his hand ready on a handle of some kind. The second one spoke to me, slowly and carefully, as if I was an idiot. “You are now a discard,” he said. “We have no further use for you in play. You are free to walk the Bounds as you please, but it will be against the rules for you to enter play in any world. To ensure you keep this rule, you will be transferred to another field of play every time a move ends in the field where you are. The rules also state that you are allowed to return Home if you can. If you succeed in returning Home, then you may enter play again in the normal manner.”

I looked up at him. He was a grey blurred figure behind a sheet of white reflected sky. So was the other one, and he was just about to pull down the lever. “Hey! Wait a minute!” I said. “What’s all this? What are these rules? Who made them?”

Both of Them stared at me. They looked like you would if your breakfast egg had suddenly piped up and said, “Don’t eat me!”

“You’ve no right to send me off without any explanation, like this!” I said.

He pulled the lever while I was saying it. You might whack your egg on top with your spoon the same way. The sideways twitch came while I was saying “explanation”. As I said “like this!” I was somewhere else entirely.

And I mean somewhere else. It’s hard to explain just how different it was. I was standing out in the open, just as I’d half thought that I was out in the open under the canal arches before, only this was real, solid and real. There was green grass going up and down over hills in all directions. Across the valley in front of me, there was a group of black and white animals, eating the grass. I thought they were cows, probably. I’d never seen a live cow till then. Beyond that, going up against the sunset, was a spire of smoke. And that was all. The place was empty otherwise, except for me. I turned right round to make sure, and it was the truth.

That was shock enough, if you were a city boy like me. It was a horrible feeling. I wanted to crouch down and get my eyes to the top of my head somehow, like a frog, so that I could see all round me at once. But there was more to it than that. The air in that place was soft and mild. It smelt different and it felt different. It weighed on you in a different way, sort of sluggishly. The grass didn’t look quite right, and even the sun, setting down over the hill where the spire of smoke was, was not like the sun I was used to. It was making the sunset the wrong colour.

While I was turning round the second time, it came to me that the slanting dip in the valley just behind me was the same shape as Their triangular park, where the statue was.

Then I looked very carefully over the rest of the green slopes. Yes. The valley in front was where the smart part of the city should be, and the railway, and the hill beside me, and the one where the sun was setting, were the two hills the canal went between on its arches. The slope on the other side of me was going up to where our courtyard should have been. But the city had gone.

“I hate Them!” I screamed out. Because I knew then, without having to think it out, that I was on another world. This world seemed to have the same shape as mine, but it was different in every other way. And I didn’t know how to get back to mine.

For a while, I stood there and yelled every cussword I knew at Them, and I knew quite a few, even then. Then I set off to walk to that line of smoke going up into the sunset. There must be a house there, I thought. There’s no point starving. And, as I walked, I thought over very carefully what They had said.

They had talked of Bounds and Bounder circuits and discards and random factors and rules. I could see those were words in an enormous serious game. And I was a random factor, so They had discarded me, but there were still rules for that. And these rules said—The one who spoke to me at the end might have talked as if I was an idiot, but the way he had done it was rather like a policeman talks to someone he’s arresting: “Everything you say can be taken down and may be used in evidence.” They had told me the rules, and those said I could get Home if I could manage it. Well I would. I might be a discard on the Bounder circuits, but I was a Homeward Bounder, and They had better not forget it! I was going to get Home and spite Them. Then They had better watch out!

By this time, I had got near the cows. Cows are always bigger than you expect, and their horns are sharp. They have this upsetting way of stopping eating when you come up, and staring. I stopped and stared back. I was scared. I didn’t even dare turn round and go back, in case they came galloping up behind me and pronged me on those horns like toast on a toasting fork. Heaven knows what I would have done, if some men had not come galloping up just then to round up the cows. They were hairy, dirty men, dressed in cowhide, and their horses were as bad. They all stared at me, men, horses and cows, and one of those men was the image of the printer who owned the printing press in the courtyard up the road from ours.

That made me feel much better. I didn’t think he was the printer – and he wasn’t of course – but I got on with the printer, and I thought I could get on with this copy of him too. “Hello,” I said. “You don’t happen to want a boy for odd jobs, do you?”

He grinned, a big hairy split in his beard. And he answered. And here was another blow. It was gabble. I could not understand one word. They spoke quite a different language to mine.

“Oh mother!” I wailed. “I’ll get Them for this, if it’s the last thing I do!”

In fact, the hairy herdsmen were nice to me. I was lucky in a way. Some Homeward Bounders have to begin much harder than I did. Allowing for language problems, my start wasn’t at all bad. They helped me up on the horse behind the printer, and they rode off with me and the cows to where they lived. And they lived in tents – a set of large smelly leather tents with the hair still on them in patches. The line of smoke was from the sort of bonfire they used for cooking on.

I felt I could stand that. I told myself it was an adventure. But I couldn’t stand their Chief. She was a great huge wobbly woman with a voice like a train whistle. She was always scolding. She scolded the men for bringing me and me for coming, and me for speaking gibberish and wearing peculiar clothes, and the fire for burning and the sun for setting. Or I think she did. It took me days to understand the first word of their lingo.

I’ve got used to learning languages since. You get a system. But this one was a real shocker anyhow – they had sixteen words for cow and if you got the wrong one, they fell about laughing – and I think I wasn’t trying properly. I wasn’t expecting to be there that long. I was going Home. And it didn’t help that Mrs Chief decided to give me language lessons herself. She had the idea that if she scolded loud enough I would have to understand by sheer noise-power. We used to sit cross-legged facing one another, her scolding away at top shriek, and me nodding and smiling.

“That’s right,” I would say, nodding intelligently, “Yell away, you old squish-bag.”

At this, she would be pleased, because I seemed to be trying, and scream louder than ever. And I would smile.

“And you smell too,” I would say. “Worse than any of your cows.”

Well, it kept me sane. And it gave her an interest in life. It was pretty boring, life on the cattle-range. The only excitement they had was if a bull got nasty, or another tribe of herders went by on the horizon. All the same, I had to keep telling myself very firmly, “This is not so bad. It could be worse. It’s not a bad life.” That kept me sane too.

After six weeks or so, I had the hang of the language. I could sit on a horse without finding myself sitting on the ground the next second, and I could help round up cows. I was learning how to make leather rope and tan leather and weave hurdles, and a dozen other useful things. But I never learnt how to milk a cow. That was sacred. Only women were allowed to do that. And at this stage, they took down their tents and moved on to find better grass. They never reckoned to stay in one place much over a month.

I was riding along with them, helping keep the cattle together, when, about midday, I had the most peculiar sensation. It was like being pulled, strongly and remorselessly, sideways from the way we were going. With it, came a worse feeling – from inside me. It was a terrible yearning and a longing. My throat hurt with it. And it was like an itch too. I wanted to get inside my head and scratch. Both feelings were so strong that I had to turn my horse the way they pulled me, and as soon as I had, I felt better – as if I was now doing the right thing. And, no sooner was I trotting away in that direction, than I was full of excitement. I was going Home. I was sure of it. This was how you were moved along the Bounds. I had been right to think I was only going to be a short time in this world.

(That was about the only thing I was right about, as it happened. You nearly always get a feeling, when you first come into a world, how long you’re going to have to stay there. I’ve only ever known myself wrong once. And that time was twice as long as I thought. I think one of Them must have changed his mind about his move.)

On this first occasion, Mrs Chief sent two hairy riders after me and they rounded me up just like a cow.

“What do you think you’re doing, going off on your own like that?” she screamed at me. “Suppose you meet an enemy!”

“First I heard you had any enemies,” I said sulkily. The pulling and the yearning were terrible.

She made me ride in the middle of the girls after that, and wouldn’t listen to anything I said. I’ve learnt to hold my tongue when the Bounds call now. It saves trouble. Then, I had to wait till night came, and it was agony. I felt pulled out of shape by the pull and sick with the longing – really sick: I couldn’t eat supper. Waste of a good beef steak. Worse still, I was all along haunted by the idea I was going to be too late. I was going to miss my chance of getting Home. I had to get to some particular place in order to move to other worlds, and I wasn’t going to get there in time.

It was quite dark when at last I got the chance to slip away. It was a bit cloudy and there was no moon – some worlds don’t have moons: others have anything up to three – but that didn’t matter to me. The Bounds called so strongly that I knew exactly which way to head. I went that way at a run. I ran all through the warm moisty night. I was drowned in sweat and panting like someone sawing wood. In the end, I was falling down every few yards, getting up again, and staggering on. I was so scared I’d be too late. By the time the sun rose, I think I was simply going from one foot to the other, almost on the spot. Stupid. I’ve learnt better since. But this was the first time, and, when there was light, I shouted out with joy. There was a green flat space among the green hills ahead, and someone had marked the space with a circle of wooden posts.

At that, I managed to trot and lumbered into the circle. Somewhere near the middle of it, the twitch took me sideways again.

You’ve probably guessed what happened. You can imagine how I felt anyway. It was dawn still, a lurid streaky dawn. The green ranges had gone, but there was no city – nothing like one. The bare lumpy landscape round me was heaped with what looked like piles of cinders, and each pile had its own dreary little hut standing beside it. I had no idea what they were – they were mines, actually. You weren’t a person in that new world if you didn’t have your own hole and keep digging coal or copper out of it. But I didn’t care what was going on. I was feeling the air, as I did before, and realising that this was yet another different world. And at the same time, I realised that I was due to stay here for rather a long time.

It was on this world that I began to understand that They hadn’t told me even half the rules. They had just told me the ones that interested Them. On this world I was starved and hit, and buried under a collapsed slag-heap. I’m not going to describe it. I hate it too much. I was there twice too, because what happened was that I got caught in a little ring of worlds and went all round the ring two times. At the time, I thought they were all the worlds there were – except for Home, which I never seemed to get to – and I thought of them as worlds, which they are not, not really.

They are separate universes, stacked in together like I saw the triangular rooms of Them before They sent me off. These universes all touch somewhere – and where they touch is the Boundary – but they don’t mix. Homeward Bounders seem to be the only people who can go from one universe to another. And we go by walking the Bounds until we come to a Boundary, when, if one of Them has finished his move, we get twitched into the Boundary in another Earth, in another universe. I only understood this properly when I got to the sixth world round, where the stars are all different.

I looked at those stars. “Jamie boy,” I said. “This is crazy.” Possibly I was a little crazy then, too, because Jamie answered me, and said, “They’re probably the stars in the Southern hemisphere – Australia and all that.” And I answered him. “It’s still crazy,” I said. “This world’s upside down then.”

It was upside down, in more ways than that. The Them that played it must have been right peculiar. But it was that which made me feel how separate and – well – universal each world was. And how thoroughly I was a discard, a reject, wandering through them all and being made to move on all the time. For a while after that, I went round seeing all worlds as nothing more than coloured lights on a wheel reflected on a wall. They are turning the wheel and lighting the lights, and all we get is the reflections, no more real than that. I still see it that way sometimes. But when you get into a new world, it’s as solid as grass and granite can make it, and the sky shuts you in just as if there was no way through. Then you nerve yourself up. Here comes the grind of finding out its ways and learning its language.

You wouldn’t believe how lonely you get.

But I was going to tell you about the rules that They didn’t tell me. I mentioned some of the trouble I had in the mining world. I had more in other worlds. And none of these things killed me. Some of them ought to have done, specially that slag-heap – I was under it for days. And that is the rule: call it Rule One. A random factor like me, walking the Bounds, has to go on. Nothing is allowed to stop him. He can starve, fall off a mile high temple, get buried, and still he goes on. The only way he can stop is to come Home.

People can’t interfere with a Homeward Bounder either. That may be part of Rule One, but I prefer to call it Rule Two. If you don’t believe people can’t interfere with me, find me and try it. You’ll soon see. I’ll tell you – on my fifth world, I had a little money for once. A whole gold piece, to be precise. I got an honest job in a tannery – and carried the smell right through to the next world with me too. On my day off, I was strolling in the market looking for my favourite cakes. They were a little like Christmas puddings with icing on – gorgeous! Next thing I knew, a boy about my own age had come up beside me, given me a chop-and, chop-and – it darned well hurt too – and run off with my gold piece. Naturally, I yelled and started to run after him. But he was under a waggon the next moment, dead as our neighbour’s little girl back Home. His hand with the gold piece in it was sticking out, just as if he was handing it back to me, but I hadn’t the heart to take it. I couldn’t. It felt like my fault, that waggon.

After a while, I told myself I was imagining that rule. That boy’s corpse could have had a bad effect on play, just as They said mine would have done. But I think that was one of the things They meant by the risk adding to the fun. I didn’t imagine that rule. The same sort of thing happened to me several times later on. The only one I didn’t feel bad about was a rotten Judge who was going to put me in prison for not being able to bribe him. The roof of the courthouse fell in on him.

Rule Three isn’t too good either. Time doesn’t act the same in any world. It sort of jerks about as you go from one to another. But time hardly acts at all on a Homeward Bounder. I began to see that rule on my second time round the circle of worlds. The second time I got to the upside down one, for instance, nearly ten years had gone by, but only eight or so when I got to the next one. I still don’t know how much of my own time I spent going round that lot, but I swear I was only a few days older. It seemed to me I had to be keeping the time of my own Home. But, as I told you, I still only seem about thirteen years old, and I’ve been on a hundred worlds since then.

By the time I had all this worked out, I was well on my second round of the circle. I had learnt I wasn’t going to get Home anything like as easily as I had thought. Sometimes I wondered if I was ever going to get there. I went round with an ache like a cold foot inside me over it. Nothing would warm that ache. I tried to warm it by remembering Home, and our courtyard and my family, in the tiniest detail. I remembered things I had not really noticed when they happened – silly things, like how particular our mother was over our boots. Boots cost a lot. Some of the kids in the court went without in summer, and couldn’t play football properly, but we never went without. If my mother had to cut up her old skirt to make Elsie a dress in order to afford them, we never went without boots. And I used to take that for granted. I’ve gone barefoot enough since, I can tell you.

And I remembered even the face Elsie used to make – she sort of pushed her nose down her face so that she looked like a camel – when Rob’s old boots were mended for her to wear. She never grumbled. She just made that face. I remember my father made a bit the same face when my mother wanted me to stay on at school. I swore to myself that I’d help him out in the shop when I did get Home. Or go grinding on at school, if that was what they decided. I’d do anything. Besides, after grinding away learning languages the way I’d done, school might almost seem lively.

I think remembering that way made the cold foot ache inside me worse, but I couldn’t stop. It made me hate Them worse too, but I didn’t mind that.

All this while, I’d never met a single other Homeward Bounder. I thought that was a rule too, that we weren’t supposed to. I reckoned that we were probably set off at regular intervals, so that we never overtook one another. I knew there were others, of course. After a bit, I learnt to pick up traces of them. We left signs for one another – like tramps and robbers do in some worlds – mostly at Boundaries.

It took me a long while to work the signs out, on my own. For one thing, the Boundaries varied so much, that I didn’t even notice the signs until I’d learnt to look for them. The ring of posts in the cattle-range world matched with a clump of trees in the fourth world, and with a dirty great temple in the seventh. In the mining world, there was nothing to mark the Boundary at all. Typical, that. I used to think that They had marked the Boundaries with these things, and I got out of them quick at first, until I noticed the sign carved on one of the trees. Somehow that made me feel that the people on the worlds must have marked the Boundaries. There was the same sign carved in the temple too. This sign meant GOOD PICKINGS. I earned good money in both worlds.

Then, by the time I was going round the whole collection another time, I was beginning to get the hang of the Bounds too, as well as the signs and the Boundaries. Bounds led into the Boundary from three different directions, so you could come up by another route and still go through the Boundary, but from another side. I saw more signs that way.

But a funny thing was that the ordinary people in the worlds seemed to know the Bounds were there, as well as the Boundaries. They never walked the Bounds of course – they never felt the call – but they must have felt something. In some worlds there were towns and villages all along a Bound. In the seventh world, they thought the Bounds were sacred. I came out of the Boundary temple to see a whole line of temples stretching away into the distance, just like my cousin Marie’s wedding cake, one tall white wedding cake to every hilltop.

Anyway, I was going to say there were other signs on the other two sides of the Boundaries when I came to look. I picked up a good many that way. Then came one I’d never seen before. I’ve seen it quite a lot since. It means RANDOM and I’m usually glad to see it. That was how I got out of that wretched ring of worlds and met a few other Homeward Bounders at last.