Extreme Difference (2 page)

The troughs were laid out in rows on stone ledges, close up to the towering rock walls of the extinct volcano, and away from the sparkling lake of sand which seemed to stretch out almost to the horizon.

Those who had placed their troughs in their appointed positions, then hurried back to bring out the rest of the plant containers, until the ledges around the tunnel opening looked like a neatly laid out small market garden.

Nan stood back, running his critical eye over the neat rows of troughs, indicating with a casual wave of his hand a slight adjustment here, an extra tilt there, until all were positioned exactly as he wanted them, according to some unspoken ritual which he alone seemed to understand.

There was little doubt that Nan was in overall control. Whether by election, skill, or age, he could not tell, but he was surprised, as Nan seemed to be a quiet gentle man, not the sort of person one would expect to hold a position of authority, especially in the prevailing circumstances.

The rising sun poured forth its hard brazen light, glistening off the high peaks on the massive volcano’s rim and turning the ice cold stone into flaming fingers of red and yellow.

Already the air had a slight touch of warmth about it as the reflected light from the shiny rocks above danced about on the barren sands, giving the momentary illusion of a large lake of shimmering water.

‘We’d best get back inside.’ said Nan softly, as though if he spoke any louder he would break the spell of the warmth to come, or awaken some unimaginable monster from its slumbers. ‘Kel, I think it’s your turn to guard, please be extra vigilant today.’

With that he turned, and herding his newly found recruit before him, went back into the tunnel followed unenthusiastically by the others, except for two who lingered outside for a few precious moments to savour the ever brightening and warming light.

‘We must give you a name.’ Nan began when the rest of the group had joined him. ‘Do you have a preference? Or would you like us to suggest a suitable name which you would like to be known as?’

‘I don’t know if I even had a name. I can’t remember anything much, except the biting cold of that bloody sand. I’m still spitting out bits of it now.’

Even thought his mouth was dry, he managed to eject a small globule of spittle to emphasize his point. It glistened and sparkled as it spun downwards in the flickering light of the gas lamps, to be quickly absorbed by the bone dry floor of the cave, leaving no trace of it ever having been there.

The utter silence which followed his little display made him wonder if he had inadvertently broken some important taboo, or even insulted the motley gathering.

The stillness was broken by Nan, insisting that a name be given to their visitor, explaining that without it he would not feel a real person, and would be of little use to the group.

‘Do we have any suggestions?’ Nan asked again, looking from one to another of the sullen assembly, but all just glared back at him, except Ben, who grinned.

‘I get the feeling that no one wants me here, so why don’t you just let me go. I’ll manage somehow. Perhaps there are others I can join.’

‘No!’ Nan was adamant. ‘We found you, and with us you will stay. The other groups are mostly a barbaric lot, and if they don’t like you, you could well finish up being eaten, or something worse. Come on, someone must have an idea.’

The silence dragged on painfully, with a few muttered comments and grunts from the ragged gathering, but nothing constructive or helpful was offered.

‘Alright. How about Sandy? That seems fitting, I landed in the bloody stuff, it went up my nose, in my mouth, and given enough time it probably would have found its way up the other end. I’ll settle for that.’

Nan looked around to see if there was any reaction to the suggestion, but apart from a few half hearted nods, the silence ensued as before.

‘That’s settled then. You will hence forth be known as Sandy. Now we can welcome you into our midst properly.’

Nan waved the others into some semblance of a line, and standing at its head alongside Sandy, beckoned the others forward one by one.

‘I’m Mop, welcome to our family, Sandy.’ She clutched his proffered hand in the customary manner, the now familiar rancid smell lingering on long after the others had done likewise, reluctantly going through their ritualised greeting. 

 When the official inauguration into the ‘family’ reached its somewhat pathetic conclusion, Sandy asked Nan to explain what the place was all about, and why he was here.

The others filed out of the cavern, no doubt going about their allotted business, or just getting out of the way of any other rituals Nan might suddenly feel inclined to implement.

Several crude benches were scattered about the cavern, mostly up against the walls, but apart from two, which were obviously made from some kind of metal, the material used for the others remained unidentifiable.

‘Please sit down Sandy, and I’ll do my best to answer any questions you have, although you may be disappointed in my lack of knowledge of this place.’ Nan had now assumed a much more relaxed attitude towards him, and almost seemed like any other normal human being, except he had difficulty in trying to recall anyone in particular.

‘What the hell is this place?’ asked Sandy, the words stumbling over themselves in his eagerness to get them out.

‘It is where we live, and have done so for a very long time, long before I came here. Stories are handed down from the elders to those who take their place upon the elder’s death. I am an elder, and I try to keep the stories as true as possible when retelling them, but it is thought that some have embellished the history of this place to suit their own ends.’

‘That doesn't surprise me one bit, but what
is
this place?’ Sandy asked impatiently. ‘Where is it, and what does it consist of?’

‘It was created for us by some higher power, and we are created to populate it. Some people claim to be able to recall things from a past existence, but I think that’s heresy, and there’s no proof that we have existed before the creation. I think it’s just imagination on their part, and not healthy.’

‘First I’ll tell you what we know about the physical world, and then about the different types of people who live here.’

Sandy opened his mouth to speak, but Nan raised his hand to silence any interruption of his narration.

‘Imagine a large shallow bowl, where the smooth rim has been cut into a series of ragged points, and then plaster the inside with a two or three centimetre layer of mud or some such material, taking it right up to the top of the points. Now half fill the bowl with fine sand, and where the sand meets the mud layer, make some small holes to represent caves.

‘That is basically what our world looks like, except that it is very much bigger, in fact it is nearly sixty kilometres across, as far as we can tell. The sun is very fierce, and during the day the sand gets so hot that if you were to walk on it, you would burn your feet very badly.

‘At night the temperature drops to below freezing, and even a quick venture out onto the sands would result in severe frostbite. This leaves a short time in the early morning and evening when we can safely venture out into this inhospitable world, and we have to be careful about that.

The growing bins are taken out in the early morning as soon as the frost has disappeared, and brought back in before the sun climbs over the mountain rim to bathe the sands in direct sunlight. The same thing happens again in the evening, once the sun has dropped below the high rim of the mountains, the bins are brought out again to utilize the softer reflected light from the shiny peaks, and returned to the caves just before the cold cycle begins.

We have to do this to enable us to produce enough food to live on. There are other sources of food, as you will see, but green plants along with their fruits and berries, are essential for our well being.’

‘The caves and tunnels are part natural, and part man made. Over many generations, extensions have been made to some of the caves to house our artefacts and growing bins, and connecting tunnels have been laboriously hacked from the rock to make access a little easier. Some of the tunnels go very deep into the body of the mountain, and so it is believed, those who enter them never return.

‘The sand itself is not so innocent as it might at first appear. There are creatures who live in it, and are not adverse to sampling human flesh if they can get their teeth into it. I have never seen them, but I did know someone who was taken by them. All that was left was a small blood stain on the sand to mark where the incident had happened, and no one has seen any trace of him since.

‘The only time you can safely walk on the sand is when it is frozen, or very hot from the sun, and then you must protect your feet with wrappings. We assume the creatures can’t tolerate the extremes of temperature, and go down to a lower level.’ Here Nan paused to see if Sandy was absorbing what was said, which gave him the chance to ask, ‘What’s on the other side of these mountains, as you call them? And why do you stay here if it’s so inhospitable?’

‘As far as we know, there’s no way through the mountains. We can’t climb over the top, it’s too high, and the rock gets more shiny and slippery the higher you climb. In the past, there have been several attempts to see what’s on the other side, but no one has ever found out.

‘There may be nothing on the other side anyway, so we would be no better off even if we could get there. It would seem that here is where we are meant to be, so there’s little point in trying to go anywhere else, not that there’s anywhere else to go, as far as we can tell.’

‘Oh, come on, you can’t have a sand bowl ringed with a mountain chain, and nothing on the other side of it,’ Sandy interjected quickly, ‘there’s got to be some land, or something on the other side. Anyway, where did you get the idea that you’re meant to be here, who said so?’

‘It has always been so. We arrive on the sands, and are taken into whichever group gets to us first.’ Nan’s face hardened, and he continued in a defensive tone. ‘None of us has a memory of being anywhere before, so we must be created here, by some superior force or being. We are the servants of that greater force, here for a purpose, it is intended we remain here to do whatever the greater force wants’

‘What a load of crap,’ Sandy exploded, ‘you’ve been here too long, and you’re beginning to believe your own myths.

‘Just think about it, you arrive here with a usable language which you all understand, you grow food, make things, you know how to organize yourselves into working groups, and you really think some benign being created you and filled your heads with all this information and abilities just to watch you running around like a lot of scruffy bloody hermits living in caves? You’ve got to be joking, or seriously off your heads.’

Nan’s face darkened thunderously, and drawing himself up to his full height, he pointed a long shaking finger at Sandy.

‘You’ve been here a few hours, and you have the gall to make fun of us and the purpose we’ve been created for. How dare you!’ He spat out angrily, his mouth continued to flap open and shut silently, having run out of words to say.

‘All right,’ Sandy replied, ‘think about this, where did you get the concept of ‘a few hours’ from? I don’t see any clocks here, so that idea must have come from somewhere else.’

Slowly Nan’s anger subsided, and he looked confused for a moment, opening his mouth several times to speak, but closing it again as he rethought what he wanted to say.

‘Come on,’ said Sandy, ‘what do you know of time? How long is an hour, or for that matter, a day? How many hours in a day?’

‘Twent.....twentyeight,’ stuttered Nan, ‘but how do I know that? I don’t know what a clock is, do you?’

‘Yes, of course,’ began Sandy, and then found he was unable to recall it. A look of confusion spread over his face.

‘I’m sure I did know, but for the moment it eludes me.’

The two men stood staring at each other for some moments, neither wanting to be the first to speak in case they were unable to find the right words, and later have to explain their meanings.

Nan slumped down on his bench, all the spark had gone out of him, and he was a mere shadow of the man he had been only a few moments earlier. He raised his hands twice, and then dropped them back into his lap in resignation, this stranger had shattered his cosy concept of life by asking a couple of questions, what would he do if the stranger tore down the whole structure of their existence with a few more questions? He felt it was quite possible.

‘I’m sorry to have shaken you out of what you have taken for granted for so long, but you can surely see, just because you have accepted it, it doesn’t make it a fact, and only by looking at actual facts can we make accurate judgements. Anyway, how do you think you got here?’

‘The same way you did, from the Great Light, that’s how we all get here.’ Nan brightened up a little, he was back on familiar ground, talking about things he felt were real to him, things he could identify with.

‘The Great Light comes down to the sands just before dawn, creates us, and drops us onto the sand. Sometimes, pieces of old broken machinery are left behind, also packets of seeds, cord, cloth, all manner of things are left for us to make things with. They are gifts from the Great Light. Those are facts, they actually happen, ask anyone here.’ Nan was looking his old self again, assertive, confident, and in control.

‘OK, how do you know about ‘broken machinery’? How do you know it’s broken in the first place? How do you know what to do with seeds? Who told you what to do with these things?’ Sandy knew he was being unkind to press the point home so hard, but he wanted answers which made sense, and he was determined to get them at all costs.

The confused look came over Nan’s face again as he desperately tried to recall the meaning of the items Sandy had mentioned, but there was nothing to recall, just an emptiness, and it made him feel dizzy to look at it.

‘Now do you see what I mean?’ Having got the thin end of the wedge of doubt neatly in place, Sandy was intent in hammering it firmly home.