Out Of The Silent Planet (10 page)

He turned and spoke to one of the younger hrossa and presently, passed from hand to hand, there
came to him a little bowl. He held it close to the firelight and examined it. It was certainly
of gold, and Ransom realized the meaning of Devine's interest in Malacandra.

'Is there much of this thing?' he asked.

Yes, he was told, it was washed down in most of the rivers; but the best and most was among
the Pfifltriggi, and it was they who were skilled in it. Arbol hru, they called it
- Sun's blood. He looked at the bowl again. It was covered with fine etching. He saw pictures
of hrossa and of smaller, almost frog-like animals; and then, of sorns. He pointed to the
latter inquiringly.

'Seroni,' said the hrossa, confirming his suspicions. They live up almost on the harandra.
In the big caves. The frog-like animals - or tapir-headed frog-bodied animals - were pftfltriggi.
Ransom turned it over in his mind. On Malacandra, apparently, three distinct species had
reached rationality, and none of them had yet exterminated the other two. It concerned him
intensely to find out which was the real master.

'Which of the hnan rule?' he asked.

'Oyarsa rules,' was the reply.

'Is he hnau?'

This puzzled them a little. The seroni, they thought, would be better at that kind of question.
Perhaps Oyarsa was hnau, but a very different hnau. He had no death and no young.

'These Seroni know more than the hrossa?' asked Ransom.

This produced more a debate than an answer. What emerged finally was that the seroni or sorns
were perfectly helpless in a boat, and could not fish to save their lives, could hardly swim,
could make no poetry, and even when hrossa had made it for them could understand only the
inferior sorts; but they were admittedly good at finding out things about the stars and
understanding the darker utterances of Oyarsa and telling what happened in Malacandra long
ago - longer ago than anyone could remember.

'Ah - the intelligentsia,' thought Ransom. 'They must be the real rulers, however it is disguised.'

He tried to ask what would happen if the sorns used their wisdom to make the hrossa do things -
this was as far as he could get in his halting Malacandrian. The question did not sound nearly
so urgent in this form as it would have done if he had been able to say 'used their scientific
resources for the exploitation of their uncivilized neighbours.' But he might have spared his
pains. The mention of the sorns' inadequate appreciation of poetry had diverted the whole
conversation into literary channels. Of the heated, and apparently techincal, discussion which
followed he understood not a syllable.

Naturally his conversations with the hrossa did not all turn on Malacandra. He had to repay
them with information about Barth. He was hampered in this both by the humiliating discoveries
which he was constantly making of his own ignorance about his native planet, and partly by
his determination to conceal some of the truth. He did not want to tell them too much of our
human wars and industrialisms. He remembered how H. G. Wells's Cavor had met his end on the
Moon; also he felt shy. A sensation akin to that of physical nakedness came over him whenever
they questioned him too closely about men - the 'hmana' as they called them. Moreover, he was
determined not to let them know that he had been brought there to be given to the sorns; for
he was becoming daily more certain that these were the dominant species. What he did tell
them fired the imagination of the hrossa: they all began making poems about the strange
handra where the plants were hard like stone and the earth-weed green like rock and the
waters cold and salt, and hmana, lived out on top, on the harandra.

They were even more interested in what he had to tell them of the aquatic animal with snapping
jaws which he had fled from in their own world and even in their own handramit. It was a hnakra,
they all agreed. They were intensely excited. There had not been a hnakra in the valley for
many years. The youth of the hrossa got out their weapons primitive harpoons with points of
bone - and the very cubs began playing at hnakra-hunting in the shallows. Some of the mothers
showed signs of anxiety and wanted the cubs to be kept out of the water, but in general the
news of the hnakra seemed to be immensely popular. Hyoi set off at once to do something to his
boat and Ransom accompanied him. He wished to make himself useful, and was already beginning
to have some vague capacity with the primitive hrossian tools. They walked together to Hyoi's
creek, a stone's throw through the forest.

On the way, where the path was single and Ransom was following Hyoi, they passed a little
she-hross, not much more than a cub. She spoke as they passed, but not to them: her eyes
were on a spot about two yards away.

'Who do you speak to, Hrikki?' said Ransom.

'To the eldil.'

'Where?'

'Did you not see him?'

'I saw nothing.'

'There! There!' she cried suddenly. 'Ah! He is gone. Did you not see him?'

'I saw no one.

'Hyoi,' said the cub, 'the hman cannot see the eldil!'

But Hyoi, continuing steadily on his way, was already out of earshot, and had apparently
noticed nothing. Ransome concluded that Hrikki was 'pretending' like the young of his own
species. In a few moments he rejoined his companion.

THEY WORKED hard at Hyoi's boat till noon and then spread themselves on the weed close to
the warmth of the creek, and began their midday meal. The war-like nature of their preparations
suggested many questions to Ransom. He knew no word for war, but he managed to make Hyoi
understand what he wanted to know. Did seroni and hrossa and pftfltriggi ever go out like
this, with weapons, against each other?

'What for?' asked Hyoi.

It was difficult to explain. 'If both wanted one thing and neither would give it,' said
Ransom, 'would the other at last come with force? Would they say, give it or we kill you?'

'What sort of thing?'

'Well - food, perhaps.'

'If the other hnau wanted food, why should we not give it to them? We often do.'

'But how if we had not enough for ourselves?'

'But Maleldil will not stop the plants growing.'

'Hyoi, if you had more and more young, would Maleldil broaden the handramit and make
enough plants for them all?'

'The seroni know that sort of thing. But why should we have more young?'

Ransom found this difficult. At last he said:

'Is the begetting of young not a pleasure among the hrossa?'

'A very great one, Hman. This is what we call love.'

'If a thing is a pleasure, a hman wants it again. He might want the pleasure more often than
the number of young that could be fed.'

It took Hyoi a long time to get the point.

'You mean,' he said slowly, 'that he might do it not only in one or two years
of his life but again?'

'Yes.'

'But why? Would he want his dinner all day or want to sleep after he had slept? I do
not understand.'

'But a dinner comes every day. This love, you say, comes only once while the hross lives?'

'But it takes his whole life. When he is young he has to look for his mate; and then he has
to court her; then he hegets young; then he rears them; then he remembers all this, and
boils it inside him and makes it into poems and wisdom.'

'But the pleasure he must be content only to remember?'

'That is like saying "My food I must be content only to eat."'

'I do not understand.'

'A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hman, as if the
pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing. The seroni could say
it better than I say it now. Not better than I could say it in a poem. What you call
remembering is the last part of the pleasure, as the 'crah' is the last part of a poem.
When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing
something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when
I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then - that is
the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in your world.
Do they not teach you this?'

'Perhaps some of them do,' said Ransom. 'But even in a poem does a hross never long to hear
one splendid line over again?'

Hyoi's reply unfortunately turned on one of those points in their language which Ransom had
not mastered. There were two verbs which both, as far as he could see, meant to long or yearn;
but the hrossa drew sharp distinction, even an opposition, between them. Hyoi seemed to him
merely to be saying that everyone would long for it (wondelone) but no one in his senses
could long for it (hluntheline).

'And indeed,' he continued, 'the poem is a good example. For the most splendid line becomes
fully splendid only by means of all the lines after it; if you went back to it you would
find it less splendid than you thought. You would kill it. I mean in a good poem.'

'But in a bent poem, Hyoi?'

'A bent poem is not listened to, Hman.'

'And how of love in a bent life?'

'How could the life of a hnau be bent?'

'Do you say, Hyoi, that there are no bent hrossa?'

Hyoi reflected. 'I have heard,' he said at last, 'of something like what you mean. It is
said that sometimes here and there a cub at a certain age gets strange twists in him. I have
heard of one that wanted to eat earth; there might, perhaps, be somewhere a hross likewise
that wanted to have the years of love prolonged. I have not heard of it, but it might be.
I have heard of something stranger. There is a poem about a hross who lived long ago, in
another handramit, who saw things all made two - two suns in the sky, two heads on a neck;
and last of all they say that he fell into such a frenzy that he desired two mates. I do
not ask you to believe it, but that is the story: that he loved two hressni.'

Ransom pondered this. Here, unless Hyoi was deceiving him, was a species naturally continent,
naturally monogamous. And yet, was it so strange? Some animals, he knew, had regular breeding
seasons; and if nature could perform the miracle of turning the sexual impulse outward at all,
why could she not go further and fix it, not morally but instinctively, to a single object?
He even remembered dimly having heard that some terrestrial animals, some of the 'lower'
animals, were naturally monogamous. Among the hrossa, anyway, it was obvious that unlimited
breeding and promiscuity were as rare as the rarest perversions. At last it dawned upon him
that it was not they, but his own species, that were the puzzle. That the hrossa should have
such instincts was mildly surprising; but how came it that the instincts of the hrossa so
closely resembled the unattained ideals of that far-divided species Man whose instincts were
so deplorably different? What was the history of Man? But Hyoi was speaking again.

'Undoubtedly,' he said. 'Maleldil made us so. How could there ever be enough to eat if everyone
had twenty young? And how could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying
for one day or one year to come back - if we did not know that every day in a life fills the
whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?'

'All the same,' said Ransom, unconsciously nettled on behalf of his own world, 'Maleldil
has let in the hnahra.'

'Oh, but that is so different. I long to kill this hnakra as he also longs to kill me. I
hope that my ship will be the first and I first in my ship with my straight spear when the
black jaws snap. And if he kills me, my people will mourn and my brothers will desire still
more to kill him. But they will not wish that there were no hneraki; nor do I. How can I
make you understand, when you do not understand the poets? The hnakra is our enemy, but he
is also our beloved. We feel in our hearts his joy as he looks down from the mountain of
water in the north where he was born; we leap with him when he jumps the falls; and when
winter comes, and the lake smokes higher than our heads, it is with his eyes that we see
it and know that his roaming time is come. We hang images of him in our houses, and the
sign of all the hrossa is a hnakra. In him the spirit of the valley lives; and our young
play at being hneraki as soon as they can splash in the shallows.'

'And then he kills them?'

'Not often them. The hrossa would be bent hrossa if they let him get so near. Long before
he had come down so far we should have sought him out. No, Hman, it is not a few deaths
roving the world around him that make a hnau miserable. It is a bent hnau that would blacken
the world. And I say also this. I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water
so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes. I will tell you a day in
my life that has shaped me; such a day as comes only once, like love, or serving Oyarsa in
Meldilorn. Then I was young, not much more than a cub, when I went far, far up the handramit
to the land where stars shine at midday and even water is cold. A great waterfall I climbed.
I stood on the shore of Balki the pool, which is the place of most awe in all worlds. The
walls of it go up for ever and ever and huge and holy images are cut in them, the work of
old times. There is the fall called the Mountain of Water. Because I have stood there alone,
Maleldil and I, for even Oyarsa sent me no word, my heart has been higher, my song deeper,
all my days. But do you think it would have been so unless I had known that in Balki
hneraki dwelled? There I drank life because death was in the pool. That was the best of
drinks save one.

'What one?' asked Ransom.

'Death itself in the day I drink it and go to Maleldil.'

Shortly after that they rose and resumed their work. The sun was declining as they came back
through the wood. It occurred to Ransom to ask Hyoi a question.

'Hyoi,' he said, 'it comes into my head that when I first saw you and before you saw me,
you were already speaking. That was how I knew that you were hnau, for otherwise I should
have thought you a beast, and run away. But who were you speaking to?'