The Seeds of Time (25 page)

‘Humans have to live so precariously,' Hester went on. ‘If my arm or leg should be crushed I can have a new one in a few minutes, but a human would have agony for a long time, and not even a new limb at the end of it – just a faulty one, if he is lucky. That isn't as bad as it used to be because in designing us you learned how to make good arms and legs, much stronger and better than the old ones. People would be much more sensible to have a weak arm or leg replaced at once, but they don't seem to want to if they can possibly keep the old ones.'

‘You
mean they can be grafted on? I didn't know that,' Janet said. ‘I wish it were only arms or legs that's wrong with me. I don't think I would hesitate …' She sighed. ‘The doctor wasn't encouraging this morning, Hester. You heard what he said? I've been losing ground: must rest more. I don't believe he does expect me to get any stronger. He was just trying to cheer me up before … He had a funny sort of look after he'd examined me … But all he said was rest. What's the good of being alive if it's only rest – rest – rest … ? And there's poor George. What sort of a life is it for him, and he's so patient with me, so sweet … I'd rather anything than go on feebly like this. I'd sooner die …'

Janet went on talking, more to herself than to the patient Hester standing by. She talked herself into tears. Then, presently, she looked up.

‘Oh, Hester, if you were human I couldn't bear it; I think I'd hate you for being so strong and so well – but I don't, Hester. You're so kind and so patient when I'm silly, like this. I believe you'd cry with me to keep me company if you could.'

‘I would if I could,' the robot agreed. ‘My compassion-circuit –'

‘Oh,
no
!' Janet protested. ‘It can't be just that. You've a heart somewhere, Hester. You must have.'

‘I expect it is more reliable than a heart,' said Hester.

She stepped a little closer, stooped down, and lifted Janet up as if she weighed nothing at all.

‘You've tired yourself out, Janet, dear,' she told her. ‘I'll take you upstairs; you'll be able to sleep a little before he gets back.'

Janet could feel the robot's arms cold through her dress, but the coldness did not trouble her any more, she was aware only that they were strong, protecting arms around her. She said:

‘Oh, Hester, you are such a comfort, you
know
what I ought to do.' She paused, then she added miserably: ‘I know what he thinks – the doctor, I mean. I could see it. He just thinks I'm going to go on getting weaker and weaker until one day I'll fade away and die … I said I'd sooner die … but I wouldn't, Hester. I don't want to die …'

The robot rocked her a little, as if she were a child.

‘There, there, dear. It's not as bad as that – nothing like,' she told her. ‘You mustn't think about dying. And you mustn't cry any more, it's not good for you, you know. Besides, you don't want him to see you've been crying.'

‘I'll try not to,' agreed Janet obediently, as Hester carried her out of the room and up the stairs.

The hospital reception-robot looked up from the desk.

‘My wife,' George said, ‘I rang you up about an hour ago.'

The robot's face took on an impeccable expression of professional sympathy.

‘Yes, Mr Shand. I'm afraid it has been a shock for you, but as I told you, your house-robot did quite the right thing to send her here at once.'

‘I've tried to get on to her own doctor, but he's away,' George told her.

‘You don't need to worry about that, Mr Shand. She has been examined, and we have had all her records sent over from the hospital she was in before. The operation has been provisionally fixed for tomorrow, but of course we shall need your consent.'

George hesitated. ‘May I see the doctor in charge of her?'

‘He isn't in the hospital at the moment, I'm afraid.'

‘Is it – absolutely necessary?' George asked after a pause.

The robot looked at him steadily, and nodded.

‘She must have been growing steadily weaker for some months now,' she said.

George nodded.

‘The only alternative is that she will grow weaker still, and have more pain before the end,' she told him.

George stared at the wall blankly for some seconds.

‘I see,' he said bleakly.

He picked up a pen in a shaky hand and signed the form that she put before him. He gazed at it awhile without seeing it.

‘She'll – she'll have – a good chance?' he asked.

‘Yes,'
the robot told him. ‘There is never complete absence of risk, of course, but she has a better than seventy-per-cent likelihood of complete success.'

George sighed, and nodded.

‘I'd like to see her,' he said.

The robot pressed a bell-push.

‘You may
see
her,' she said. ‘But I must ask you not to disturb her. She's asleep now, and it's better for her not to be woken.'

George had to be satisfied with that, but he left the hospital feeling a little better for the sight of the quiet smile on Janet's lips as she slept.

The hospital called him at the office the following afternoon. They were reassuring. The operation appeared to have been a complete success. Everyone was quite confident of the outcome. There was no need to worry. The doctors were perfectly satisfied. No, it would not be wise to allow any visitors for a few days yet. But there was nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.

George rang up each day just before he left, in the hope that he would be allowed a visit. The hospital was kindly and heartening, but adamant about visits. And then, on the fifth day, they suddenly told him she had left on her way home. George was staggered: he had been prepared to find it a matter of weeks. He dashed out, bought a bunch of roses, and left half a dozen traffic regulations in fragments behind him.

‘Where is she?' he demanded of Hester as she opened the door.

‘She's in bed. I thought it might be better if –' Hester began, but he lost the rest of the sentence as he bounded up the stairs.

Janet was lying in the bed. Only her head was visible, cut off by the line of the sheet and a bandage round her neck. George put the flowers down on the bedside table. He stooped over Janet and kissed her gently. She looked up at him from anxious eyes.

‘Oh, George dear. Has she told you?'

‘Has who told me what?' he asked, sitting down on the side of the bed.

‘Hester.
She said she would. Oh, George, I didn't mean it, at least I don't think I meant it … She sent me, George. I was so weak and wretched. I wanted to be strong. I don't think I really understood. Hester said –'

‘Take it easy, darling. Take it easy,' George suggested with a smile. ‘What on earth's all this about?'

He felt under the bedclothes and found her hand.

‘But, George –' she began. He interrupted her.

‘I say, darling, your hand's dreadfully cold. It's almost like –' His fingers slid further up her arm. His eyes widened at her, incredulously. He jumped up suddenly from the bed and flung back the covers. He put his hand on the thin nightdress, over her heart – and then snatched it away as if he had been stung.

‘God! –
NO!
–' he said, staring at her.

‘But George. George, darling –' said Janet's head on the pillows.

‘NO! –
NO!
' cried George, almost in a shriek.

He turned and ran blindly from the room.

In the darkness on the landing he missed the top step of the stairs, and went headlong down the whole flight.

Hester found him lying in a huddle in the hall. She bent down and gently explored the damage. The extent of it, and the fragility of the frame that had suffered it disturbed her compassion-circuit very greatly. She did not try to move him, but went to the telephone and dialled.

‘Emergency?' she asked, and gave the name and address. ‘Yes, at once,' she told them. ‘There may not be a lot of time. Several compound fractures, and I think his back is broken, poor man. No. There appears to be no damage to his head. Yes, much better. He'd be crippled for life, even if he did get over it … Yes, better send the form of consent with the ambulance so that it can be signed at once … Oh, yes, that'll be quite all right. His wife will sign it.'

Not Miss Fray. Not Felicity Fray.

Let others jerk awake to an alarm, scramble from bed, scrub away the clinging patina of sleep with a face-flannel, hunt out the day's clothes, watch the percolator impatiently, urge the toast to pop up more quickly. Let them chew briskly, swallow gulpily, and hurry, arms and legs reciprocating briskly, on their ways. Let these automata, with batteries regenerated, respond with spry efficiency to the insistent eye of the new day's sun, and let them greet the morning with resolution in heel and toe, a high-tensile gleam in the eye, and set off to make their new deals, new conquests …

But not Felicity Fray.

For today is part of yesterday. And yesterday and today are parts of being alive. And being alive is not just an affair of the days going clonk-clonk-clonk like the pendulum of a grandfather clock: being alive is something continuous, that does not repeat; something that one should be aware of all the time, sleeping and waking …

It may not last much longer.

There is no savour in hurry; so Miss Fray did not hurry; she did not jerk or bounce into the beginning of her day. About dawn she started to drift from dream through half-dream to day-dream, and lay unmoving, listening to the birds, watching the sky lighten, becoming aware of the day as it became aware of itself.

For more than an hour she lay hovering this and that side of the misty edge of sleep. Sometimes the sounds in her ears were real birds singing, sometimes they were remembered voices speaking. She enjoyed them both, smiling in her half-sleep.

By the time the day began to win her certainly from the night
the birds were almost silent. They had done with the greeting, and started on the business of looking for food. She was quite abruptly aware that the world was noiseless.

There was an alarming feeling of unreality. She held her breath to listen for some reassuring sound. Supposing it had all stopped, now? – As it might do one day.

Perhaps, even at this moment, there were in some parts of the world great columns of smoke writhing upwards in Medusan coils, swelling out at the top into cerebral convolutions that pulsed with a kind of sub-life, marking the beginning of the silence that meant the end of everything.

For years now, when she was off her guard, those pillars of smoke had been likely to start up in her mind. She hated and feared them. They were the triumphant symbol of Science.

Science was, perhaps, wonderful, but, for Miss Fray, it was a wonder of the left hand. Science was the enemy of the world that lived and breathed; it was a crystalline formation on the harsh naked rock of brain, mindless, insensitive, barren, yet actively a threat, an alien threat that she feared as un-understandingly as an animal fears fire. Science, the great antibiotic.

So Felicity listened unhappily.

A bird called, and was answered.

That was not enough.

She went on listening for more reassurance.

In the farmyard several fields away, a tractor coughed, stuttered, and then ran more steadily, warming up.

She relaxed, relieved to be sure that the world was still alive. Then she faintly frowned her ungrateful contempt for the tractor, and pushed it out of her consciousness.

It, too, was a manifestation of Science, and unwelcome.

She withdrew among her thoughts. She resurrected stored moments and magical glimpses, and remembered golden words. She landscaped her own Arcady which knew no Science.

The tractor throbbed more briskly as it trundled out of the
yard, the sound of it diminished to a purr as it crossed the fields, unheard by Felicity.

There was plenty of time. Enough to take the field-path way to school, and not to hurry over it.

The sun was climbing, a medallion pinned on a deepening blue cloak. Later on, the day would be hot, but now it was fresh, with a touch like a cool, white-fingered hand. Refractile gems still trembled on the leaves and stalks.

Beads from the shaken grass ran down her legs, showered on the white canvas shoes, fell like kisses on her feet.

Cows, coming out from the sheds with their udders relieved, but still slow and patient, stared at her with incurious curiosity, and then turned away to tear the grass, and munch in thoughtless rumination.

A lark, high up, trilled to mislead her from its nest.

A young blackbird, looking puffy and overfed, eyed her cautiously from the hedge.

A light draught of summer wind blew through her cotton frock, caressing her with cobweb fingers.

Then there was a muttering in the sky; then a roaring that rumbled back and forth in the vault; then a shrieking over her head, a battering at the ears and the senses, not to be shut out. The present assaulting her, bawling unignorably, frighteningly through its jet-mouths; Science on the wing.

Felicity put her hands to her ears and rocked her head. The outrage hurtled close above, sound-waves clashing together, buffeting, and reeling back.

It passed, and she uncovered her ears again. With tears in her eyes she shook her fist at the fleeing shriek of the jets and all they represented, while the air still shuddered about her.

The cows continued to graze.

How comfortable to be a cow. Neither expecting nor regretting; having no sense of guilt, nor need for it. Making no distinctions between the desirable and undesirable works of
men; able to flick them, like the flies, aside with the swish of a tow-ended tail.

The shriek and the rumble died in the distance. The shattered scene began to re-integrate behind it, still for a while bloom-brushed and bruised, but slowly healing.

One day there would be too much bruising; too much to recover from.

‘Imitations of mortality,' said Miss Fray, to herself. ‘So many little deaths before the big one. How silly I am to suffer. Why should I feel all these pangs of guilt for other people? I am not responsible for this – I am not even much afraid, for myself. Why do I have to be so hurt by fear for all and everything?'

A thrush sang in the spinney beyond the hedge.

She paused to listen.

Unguent, sweet notes.

She walked on, becoming aware again of the silk-fringed zephyrs on her cheeks, the sun on her arms, the dew on her feet.

As Felicity opened the door the hive-murmur beyond sank into silence.

The rows of pink-cheeked faces framed in long hair, short hair, plaits, some of it morning-tidy, some of it already waywardly awry, were all turned towards her. The bright eyes were all fixed on her face.

‘Good morning, Miss Fray,' they all said, in unison, and silence fell as completely as before.

She could feel the suppressed expectation in the air as they watched her. There was something she must respond to. She looked for it. Her glance went round the familiar room until it reached her desk. There it stopped, where a small glass vase held a single flower.

The rows of eyes switched from her to the desk, and then back again.

She walked slowly across and sat down in her chair, her gaze never leaving the flower.

It
was something she had never seen before; she was quite unable to classify it, and she looked at it for a long time.

It was more complex than the simpler field flowers, yet not sophisticated. The colours were clear, but not primaries. The shape was comely, but without garden-bred formality. The ground-colour of the petals was a pale pink, flushing a little at the over-rolled edges, paling to cream further back. Then there was the flush-colour again, powder-stippled at first, then reticulated, then solid as it narrowed into the trumpet, but split by white spurs of the centre veins. There was just a suggestion of orchis about it, perhaps, but it was no kind of orchis she had ever seen, alive or pictured. The petal curves were sweet natural roundings, like limbs, or water cascading, or saplings bent in the wind. The texture was depthlessly soft.

Felicity leaned closer, gazing into the velvet throat. Little crescent-shaped stamens faintly dusted with pollen trembled on green, hair-like stalks. She caught the scent of it. A little sweetness, a little sharpness, a little earthiness, blended with a subtlety to make a perfumer's art vulgar and banal.

She breathed in the scent again, and looked into the flower hypnotized, unable to take her eyes from it, loving it in its brave delicacy with a sweet, longing compassion.

She had forgotten the room, the eyes that watched her, everything but the flower itself.

A fidgeting somewhere brought her back. She lifted her head, and looked unhurriedly along the rows of faces.

‘Thank you,' she said. ‘It's a beautiful flower. What is it?'

Seemingly, no one knew.

‘Who brought it?' Felicity asked them.

A small, golden-headed child in the middle of the second row pinked a little.

‘I did, Miss Fray.'

‘And you don't know what it is, Marielle?'

‘No, Miss Fray, I just found it, and I thought it was pretty, and I thought you'd like it,' she explained, a trifle anxiously.

Felicity
looked back to the flower again.

‘I do like it, Marielle. It's lovely. It was very kind of you to think of bringing it for me.'

She loitered over the flower a few seconds more, then moved the vase decisively to the left of the desk. With an effort she turned her eyes away from it, back to the rows of faces.

‘One day,' she said, ‘I'll read you some William Blake – “To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower …” But now we must get on, we've wasted too much time already. I want you to copy out what I write on the board, in your best handwriting.'

She picked up the chalk and thought for a moment, looking at the flower. Then she went over to the blackboard, and wrote:

‘Their colours and their forms were then to me an appetite; a feeling and a love …'

‘Marielle. Just a moment,' Felicity said.

The child paused and turned back as the others streamed out of the room.

‘Thank you very much for bringing it. Was it the only one?' Felicity asked her.

‘Oh, no, Miss Fray. There were three or four clumps of them.'

‘Where, Marielle? I'd like to get a root of it, if I can.'

‘On Mr Hawkes's farm. In the top corner of the big field, where the aeroplane crashed,' the child told her.

‘Where the aeroplane crashed,' Felicity repeated.

‘Yes, Miss Fray.'

Felicity sat down slowly, staring at the flower. The child waited, and shifted from one foot to the other.

‘Please, may I go now, Miss Fray?'

‘Yes,' said Felicity, without looking up. ‘Yes, of course.'

Feet scuttered out of the room.

Felicity went on looking at the flower.

‘Where the aeroplane crashed.' That had been almost a year ago – on a summer's evening when all the world was quietening
and settling down for the night. ‘Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, and all the air a solemn stillness holds.' Then the aeroplane, wheeling its droning flight, destroying the peace. It was a silver-paper cross up in the sky where the sunlight was still bright. Unusually, Felicity looked up. She tried to ignore the noise and her prejudices, for the craft had, undeniably, a silver-moth beauty of its own. She watched it turn, the sunset glistering the undersides of the wings as it tilted. Then, suddenly, amid the silver there had been a flash of rose-red fire, and the silver moth ceased to exist. Pieces of glittering foil were spreading apart and falling. The largest piece trailed smoke above it, like a black funeral plume.

A great crack slapped at her ears.

The pieces twisted and flashed in the sky as they came, some fast, some slower. The biggest of all seemed to be falling straight towards her. Perhaps she screamed. She threw herself on the ground, arms clutched over her head and ears, willing to sink herself into the earth itself.

There were interminable second-fractions of waiting while the silver wreckage came hurtling down from the sky, and Felicity and all the world about her held their breath.

The solid ground bounced under her; then came the crash, and the shrieking of metal.

Felicity looked up, biting fearfully on her hand.

She saw the silver body, a crumpled fish-shape, less than a hundred yards away, and in that moment petals of flame blossomed round it.

Something else fell close by.

She cringed close to the earth again.

Something in the main body blew up. Bits of metal whirred like pheasants over her, and plopped around.

Presently she risked raising her head again. The wreck was a cone of flame with black smoke above. She could feel the warmth on her face. She did not dare to stand up lest something else should explode and send jagged metal fragments slicing into her.

She had been still there, clinging to the earth and crying, when the crash-parties arrived and found her.

Shock, they had said, shock and fright. They had treated her for that, and then sent her home.

She had cried for the destruction, for the fire and smoke, the noise and confusion of it; and, too, for the people who had died in it, for the wanton futility of it, for the harsh, mindless, silliness of a world that did these things and kept on doing them and would keep on doing them until the last two sub-critical masses were brought together for the last time.