The Homeward Bounders (14 page)

Helen said, “I
hate
this world! How long have we got to be here?”

“Quite a while,” I said glumly. “It feels like a couple of months.”

“Why's that?” said Joris.

I explained to him about the Bounds calling whenever one of
Them
playing the world you were in finished a move, and how you always knew roughly when it was due.

“Yes, I realize,” he said. “That's how
They
transfer us to stop us entering play. But we can surely go back to the Boundary now and try for a better world if we want.”

“Can we?” I said. I didn't think it was possible.

“Why not?” asked Helen. “We don't have to keep
Their
rules.”

“No—” said Joris. “I meant I don't think it
is
a rule.
They
didn't tell me I couldn't use the Boundaries any time I wanted.
They
said ‘You are free to walk the Bounds' as if I
could
. We can use Boundaries any time in my world.”

“Provided you approach along a Bound, I suppose,” said Helen. “Yes, why not? That's the nature of a traverse.”

Really, Helen and Joris knew so much about the Bounds that they made me feel quite ignorant. “But how do we know which is a Bound without the call?” I objected. “This Boundary wasn't marked at all.”

“Oh, as to that,” Joris said—he always said that when he was about to produce something from under his white leather jerkin—“as to that, I've got an instrument here that will tell us.”

“What about bringing out a white rabbit or so, while you're at it?” I said. It was meant to sound grumpy, but I'm not sure that it did. All of a sudden, hope was roaring in my ears. If this was true, I could go anywhere I wanted. I could zip across world after world, like Joris's demon, and end up at Home. Now. Soon. Today!

Joris saw the joke and laughed. That was the trouble with Joris. He was nice. You ended up liking him, whatever you did. Even when you wanted to shake him till his head fell off.

We set off at once, before the war could come back. When we scrambled out of the hole, blinking, there seemed to be nothing anywhere but mud and litter. The bushes had gone, and most of the grass. It was all wheeltracks and raw holes and things thrown about. One of the thrown things was a half-opened mud-brown bag with packets of soldiers' rations tumbling out of it. I scooped that up while Joris was casting about with his little clocklike instrument to find the line of the Bound. After that, I hung on to Joris's baggy white sleeve, and Helen hung on to my red one. We didn't want to lose one another.

“Found it!” said Joris. The needle on his little clock swung and quivered. We walked where it pointed, in a cluster, treading on one another's heels, until we came to a muddy place that looked no different from the rest of the battlefield, where the needle began to swirl round and round. “Boundary,” said Joris. We stumbled on a step or so.

There is not even a twitch if you do it of your own free will. You are just there. And it was lucky it happened to be raining in that next world. Otherwise we wouldn't have noticed the difference. It was another battlefield, just the same, mud, wheel-tracks, litter and all. I picked up another bag of food there, but it was pretty soggy. Guns clapped away in the distance.

“I'm not staying here,” Helen said.

It took us a whole hour to find a reasonable world, where we could even sit down and eat. Most of that time was taken up with walking out into war-spoilt countrysides in order to find the Bound line, so that we could move on again. For, as Joris explained to me, not being demons, we couldn't go straight from world to world. The Boundaries would only work for us if we came to them along the Bounds. So we had to trudge off into each desolate landscape we came to, until Joris's instrument told us we had come to a Bound. Then we followed it back to the Boundary and moved on.

We seemed to have hit a kind of war-sequence. There were about eight worlds, and every single one of them had obviously just had a war. We thought the
Them
playing them must have had a competition to see which could produce the nastiest war. I was going to give the prize to the
Them
responsible for the ruined city we found about fifth world along. It had only been done about a week before, and there were still corpses. But that was before we came to the eighth world. That took the prize. It was a desert—a desert made of bits of broken brick and ash, mostly, with every so often a place where other things had been melted into sort of glassy smears, with trickles at the edges. There didn't seem to be a thing alive there.

As soon as we got there, Joris's clock-thing began to click. It sounded like someone saying “Tut-tut, tut-tut.” I thought it had the right idea. Joris jumped at the sound and turned the clock over. Another needle was flicking there, a flick to every
tut
. Joris hurriedly compared it with another clock-thing he wore on his wrist. “I don't like this,” he said. “This place is full of demon beams, but there aren't any demons.”

Helen hooked her hair behind her ears to look first at the tut-tutting needle, then at the spread of crumbled brick and glassy smears. She knew about it. I told you the kind of world she came from. “We call them death rays,” she said. “Or radiation. You can make them with weapons. We must get out of here quick. How bad is it?”

“Quite bad,” said Joris. “We can only take about five minutes.”

We raced round in a circle, stumbling and crunching in the rubble, frantic to find the Bound. It only took us half a minute, but it seemed hours. As we crunched along in a line, all hanging on to one another, Joris panted out that these beams or rays or whatever gave ordinary people a nasty lingering death. Being Homeward Bounders, we'd have been lingering for a mighty long time. I was really scared.

That was the only world in which Joris didn't talk about Konstam all the time. As soon as we got to the next world, he began again. “Konstam never lets me go near any demon beams. He makes me go back and wait as soon as they register. I'd no idea you didn't feel anything. Konstam didn't tell me.”

I had stopped listening by then. As soon as I heard the word
Konstam
, I switched my ears off. I heard Helen's answer. “No, you don't feel a thing. They just go through you. The Hands of Uquar thought my gift might be due to them.” Then Joris was on about Konstam again, and my ears were off.

I stood and had a private shudder. This world we were in now was green and almost natural. There were buzzings and hummings and chirpings, and some deep droning in the distance. A white butterfly flittered by in front of my face. It wasn't the cleanest air I'd ever breathed, but I took deep breaths of it. I was fairly sure it wasn't lethal. And I realized that the worst thing about that desert world had been the silence. The complete, dead silence. You never get silence like that in a world where anything lives.

I took a look around. It was a nice warm day in this world, with a pale blue sky and fluffy white clouds about in it. We were in a big field full of little separate vegetable gardens. Each garden grew the same sort of things, over and over, in a different order, so that wherever you looked you saw rows of big bluish cabbages, sets of sticks covered with red bean-flowers and piercing green lines of lettuces. Every garden had a messy little hut at one end of it. At first I thought it must be a very poor world if people lived in that kind of hut, but when I looked closely, I saw the huts were all empty. There didn't seem to be a soul about in the gardens.

“We can sit down and have a bite to eat here,” I said. I was interrupting what Joris was saying about Konstam, but if you didn't do that you never got to talk at all. Helen and I interrupted Joris all the time by then.

“I'd like a lettuce,” Helen said.

“Yes, and I can see radishes,” I said.

It wasn't quite fair, I suppose. But we both knew by then that, because of being a slave, Joris would think it his duty to go off and pinch people's vegetables for us. And he did. Helen and I sat on a patch of grass by one of the huts, sorting out the good food in my mud-brown bags from the packets that were soggy or trodden-on, and watched Joris, clean and white and dutiful, searching along the earthy rows and diligently pulling up radishes.

“I suppose he'll notice he's not a slave any longer in the end,” I said.

“Not for a hundred years, at the rate he's going,” Helen said. “If he talks about ten-foot-tall Konstam much more, I shall bite him. I shan't be able to help it.”

“It's not just the talk,” I said. “It's the way Konstam can do no ill that gets up my nose. It can't be true. Nobody could be that tall, that brave, that strong, that considerate and all the rest of it!” While I said that, a picture came into my head, of him chained to his rock. He
was
pretty well ten foot tall, and I rather thought he was most of the other things Joris said Konstam was as well. I wished I hadn't thought of him. It upset me every time I did.

“Ah, but you see,” Helen said, “Konstam is the Great God.”

“I once met—” I began. But Joris came dutifully back just then, looking as though, if he'd had a tail, he'd have been wagging it. He had a handsome hearty lettuce, a bundle of spring onions, radishes, and some little pink carrots. So, once again, I didn't tell Helen about him on his rock. And lucky I didn't. “Those look good!” I said to Joris. You felt he needed praising like a dog. Joris beamed when I said it, and that annoyed me into saying meanly, “Nothing but the best for the young master and mistress, eh?”

A very hurt, pale, freckly look came over Joris's face. He laid the vegetables carefully down by the other food and said, “I'm not your slave. I'm Konstam's.”

“I know that, you fool!” I said. I felt terrible. “Can't you get it through your head that you're not even that any longer?”

“Yes,” said Joris.

“Then—” I said.

“But I've made up my mind never to forget all Konstam did for me,” said Joris.

What can you say to that? I tried to make up for it while we were eating by listening to Joris talking about Konstam, instead of shutting my ears down. It seemed the least I could do. Helen shut her hair down and collected caterpillars. I don't think she listened. Joris was on about Konstam's family now, the Khans.

The Khans were a huge family—clan, more like—and they were all devoted to demon hunting in one way or another. They were so rich that they owned an entire big valley with farms, factories, an airfield, schools and libraries, all run by Khans, for Khans. They made all the equipment Joris carried, and more, in that valley. They were very machine-minded, the Khans, far more than my Home and even more than Helen's. They owned a lot of flying machines so that the demon hunters could get to the demons quickly. While Joris talked, a silver flying machine went booming over our heads in that world, and I asked him if the Khans' fliers were the same. I love fliers. I've always wanted to go in one. Joris glanced up at it—his mind was miles away, in his own world—and said no, his were rather different. And he went straight on to how only the best of the Khans actually hunted demons. The others stayed in the valley and invented new and better equipment.

I think the Khans were pretty good to Joris. They don't seem to have treated him like a slave. And I think this was true, because Joris didn't say it. With Joris, you always had to notice the things he
didn't
say. In the same way, I got the idea that Konstam probably
did
treat Joris like a slave. The Chief Khan seems to have been pretty angry with Konstam for buying Joris. She didn't hold with slaves. The Chief Khan was a lady. It must have been about the only thing Joris's Khans had in common with my first cattle people—they had a Mrs. Chief. This Mrs. Chief was called Elsa Khan and Joris was terrified of her. It took me a while to sort out about her, though, because there was another Elsa Khan too, who was the same age as Joris—I think she was the Chief Khan's granddaughter. Joris thought the world of this small Elsa. He didn't say so of course, but it was obvious. In the most respectful possible way, naturally.

It was over these Elsas that I began to see why Joris's talk made me not want to listen. My sister's name was Elsie. Elsie was nothing like Elsa Khan. Elsie had ginger hair. According to Joris, his Elsa had black hair and brown skin, like Helen's. He said several times, respectfully, that Helen looked like a Khan. Helen said nothing and went on collecting caterpillars. I said nothing, but the cold foot ache grew inside me. It was just the name. But before long, Joris had only to mention the name Khan, or Konstam, to make me feel really sick inside for Home.

I was quite glad when Helen interrupted Joris. “That last world with the rays,” she said. “Do you think
They
killed off all the people because
They
'd got tired of playing?”

“No,” I said. “
They
'll have left a few to start a new game with. I've been on a world where
They
were just starting again after a flood.”

“I hate
Them
,” Helen said.

“Yes, but don't go on about it,” I said, and I got up. Joris had set Helen off too, I could tell. Her version of my cold foot was vicious hate of
Them
. It seemed to be best to get moving to take all our minds off Home.