J. G. Ballard - The Burning World

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THE BURNING WORLD
by J.G. Ballard
COPYRIGHT 1964, by J.G. BALLARD
Published by arrangement with the author's agent
BERKLEY MEDALLION EDITION, AUGUST, 1964
BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOKS are published by
Berkley Publishing Corporation
15 East 26th Street, New York, N. Y. 10010
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
PART I1 The Draining Lake 7
2 The Coming of the Desert 21
3 The Fire Sermon 33
4 The Drowned Aquarium 44
5 The Burning Altar 60
6 Journey to the Coast 68
7 The Bitter Sea 78
PART II
8Dune Limbo 93
9The Stranded Neptune 106
10 The Sign of the Crab 113
PART III
11 The Illuminated River 122
12 The Smoke Fires 131
13 The Oasis 140
14 The White Lions 150
15 "Jours de Lenteur" 158
PART I
Chapter 1 -- The Draining Lake
At noon, when Dr. Charles Ransom moored his houseboat in the entrance to
the river, he saw Quilter, the idiot-son of the old woman who lived in the
ramshackle barge outside the yacht basin, standing on a spur of exposed rock
on the opposite bank and smiling at the dead birds floating in the water below
his feet. The reflection of his swollen head swam like a deformed nimbus among
the limp plumage. The caking mudbank was speckled with pieces of paper and
driftwood, and to Ransom the dreamfaced figure of Quilter resembled a demented
faun strewing himself with leaves as he mourned for the lost spirit of the
river.Ransom secured the bow and stern lines to the jetty, deciding that the
comparison was perhaps less than apt. Although Quilter spent as much time
watching the river as Ransom or anyone else, his motives would be typically
perverse. The continued fall of the river, sustained through the spring and
summer drought, gave him a kind of warped pleasure, even if he and his mother
had been the first to suffer. Their derelict barge--an eccentric gift from
Quilter's protector, Richard Foster Lomax, the architect who was Ransom's
neighbor--had now taken on a thirty-degree list, and a further fall of even a
foot in the level of the water would split its hull like a desiccated pumpkin.
Shielding his eyes from the sunlight, Ransom surveyed the silent banks
of the river as they wound westwards to the city of Mount Royal five miles
away. He had spent the previous week alone on what was left of Lake Constant,
sailing the houseboat among the draining creeks and mudflats as he waited for
the evacuation of the city to end. After the closure of the hospital at Mount
Royal he had intended to leave for the coast, but at the last moment decided
to give himself a few final days on the lake before it vanished for good. Now
and then, between the humps of damp mud, he had seen the distant span of the
motorbridge across the river, the windows of thousands of cars and trucks
flashing like jeweled lances as they set off along the coast road to the
south.Ransom postponed his return until all movement along the bridge had
ended. By this time the lake, once a clear stretch of open water thirty miles
in length, had subsided into a series of small pools and channels, separated
by the banks of draining mud. A few last fishing craft sailed forlornly among
them, their crews standing silently in the bows.
By contrast, something about the slow transformation exhilarated Ransom.
As the wide sheets of water contracted, first into shallow lagoons and then
into a maze of narrow creeks, the wet dunes of the lakebed seemed to emerge
from another dimension. On the last morning he woke to find the houseboat
beached at the end of a small cove. The slopes of mud, covered with the bodies
of dead birds and fish, stretched above him like the shores of a dream.
As he approached the entrance to the river, steering the houseboat among
the stranded yachts and fishing boats, the lakeside town of Larchmont was
deserted. Along the fishermen's quays the boathouses were empty, and the
drying fish hung in the shadows from the lines of hooks. A few refuse fires
smouldered in the waterfront gardens, their smoke drifting past the open
windows that swung in the warm air. Nothing moved in the streets. Ransom had
assumed that a few people would remain behind, waiting until the main exodus
to the coast was over, but Quilter's presence, like his ambiguous smile, in
some way seemed an obscure omen, one of the many irrational signs that had
revealed the real progress of the drought during the confusion of the past
months.
A hundred yards to his right, beyond the concrete pillars of the
motorbridge, was the fuel depot, the wooden piles of the wharf clearly visible
above the cracked mud. The floating pier had touched bottom, and the flotilla
of fishing boats usually moored against it had moved off into the center of
the channel. Normally, at late summer, the river would have been almost three
hundred feet wide, but it was now less than half this, an evil-smelling creek
that wound its way along the flat gutter of the banks. The caking mud was firm
enough to support a man's weight, and a series of gangways led down to the
water's edge from the riverside villas.
Next to the fuel depot was the yacht basin, with the Quilters' barge
moored against its boom. After signing the vessel over to them at the depot,
Lomax had added a single gallon of diesel oil in a quixotic gesture of
generosity, barely enough fuel for the couple to navigate the fifty yards to
the basin. Refused entry, they had taken up their mooring outside. Here Mrs.
Quilter sat all day on the hatchway, her faded red hair blown about her black
shawl, muttering at the people going down to the water's edge with their
buckets.
Ransom could see her now, beaked nose flashing to left and right like an
irritable parrot's, flicking at her dark face with an old Chinese fan,
indifferent to the heat and the river's stench. She had been sitting in the
same place when he set off in the houseboat, her ribald shouts egging on the
group of weekend mariners laying a line of cement-filled bags across the
entrance to the yacht basin. Even at flood barely enough water entered the
circular harbor to irrigate its narrow docks, and this had now leaked back
into the river, settling the smartly decked craft firmly into their own mud.
Deserted by their owners, the yachts were presided over by Mrs. Quilter's
witchlike presence.
Despite her grotesque appearance, and insane son, Ransom liked and
admired her. Often during the winter he crossed the rotting gangway into the
gloomy interior of the barge, where she lay in a huge feather mattress tied to
the chart table, wheezing painfully to herself. The single cabin, filled with
dusty brass lanterns, was a maze of filthy recesses veiled by old lace shawls.
After treating her from the flask of gin in his valise, Ransom would receive
in turn a rambling disquisition on the evils of the world at large, and then
be rowed back across the river in her son's leaking coracle, Quilter's great
eyes below the hydrocephalic forehead staring at him through the rain like
wild moons.
Rain!--At the recollection of what the term had once meant, Ransom
looked up at the brilliant sky. Unmasked by clouds or vapor, the sun hung over
his head like an inferno. The cracked fields and roads adjoining the river
were covered with the same unvarying light, a glazed motionless canopy that
embalmed everything in its heat.
Beside the jetty Ransom had staked a series of colored poles into the
water, but the rapid fall in the level was too obvious to need calculation. In
the previous three months the river had dropped some twenty feet. Ransom
estimated that it had shrunk to less than a quarter of its original volume. As
it sank into the center of the narrow gulley, it seemed to pull everything
toward it, and the two banks were like the faces of opposing cliffs. This was
helped by the inverted tents suspended from the chimneys of many of the
riverside houses. Originally designed as raintraps--though no rain had ever
fallen into them--the canvas envelopes had been transformed into a line of
aerial garbage scoops, the dust and litter raised like expiatory offerings to
the sun.
Ransom crossed the deck and stepped down into the steering well. He
waved to Quilter, who was watching him with a drifting smile. Behind him,
along the deserted wharfs, the bodies of the fish, hanging from their hooks in
the drying sheds, turned slowly in the air.
"Tell your mother to move the barge," Ransom called across the interval
of slack water. "The river is still falling."
Quilter ignored this, and with an ironic grin pointed to the blurred
white forms moving slowly below the surface.
"Clouds," he said.
"What?"
"Clouds," Quilter repeated. "Full of water, doctor."
Ransom stepped through the hatchway into the cabin of the houseboat,
shaking his head at Quilter's bizarre sense of humor. Despite his deformed
skull and Caliban-like appearance, there was nothing stupid or unintelligent
about Quilter. The dreamy ironic smile, at times almost affectionate in its
lingering glance, as if understanding Ransom's most intimate secrets, the
seamed skull with its curly russet hair and the inverted planes of the
faunlike face, in which the cheekbones had been moved back two or three
inches, leaving deep hollows below the droll eyes--all these and a streak of
unpredictable naiveté made Quilter a daunting figure. Most people wisely left
him alone, possibly because his unfailing method of dealing with them was to
pick unerringly on their weaknesses and blind spots and work away at these
like an inquisitor.
It was this instinct for failure, Ransom decided as Quilter continued to
watch him from his vantage point above the dead birds, that probably formed
the tacit bond between the youth and himself. No doubt Quilter had quickly
sensed that Ransom's frequent visits to the houseboat and the solitary
weekends among the marshes along the southern shore of the lake marked a
reluctance to face up to certain failures in his life. But perhaps he also
realized the extent to which Ransom shared that sense of the community of the
river, the unseen links between the people living on the margins of the great
channel, which for Ransom had begun to take the place of his home and his work
at the hospital.
All summer Ransom had watched it shrinking, its countless associations
fading as it narrowed into a shallow creek. Above all Ransom was aware that
the role of the river in time had changed. Once it had played the part of an
immense fluid clock, the objects immersed in it taking up their positions like
the stations of the sun and planets. The continued lateral movements of the
river, to which Ransom had become more and more sensitive during his visits to
the houseboat, its rise and fall and the varying pressures on the hull, were
like the activity within some vast system of evolution, whose cumulative
forward flow was as irrelevant and without meaning as the apparent linear
motion of time itself. The real movements were those random and discontinuous
relationships between the objects within it, those of himself and the other
denizens of the river, Mrs. Quilter, her son, and the dead birds and fish.
With the death of the river so would vanish any contact between those
stranded on the drained floor. For the present the need to find some other
measure of their relationships would be concealed by the problems of their own
physical survival. Nonetheless, Ransom was certain that the absence of this
great universal moderator, which cast its bridges between all animate and
inanimate objects alike, would prove of crucial importance. Each of them would
soon literally be an island in an archipelago drained of time.
Removing his cotton jacket, Ransom sat down on the bench by the stern
window of the cabin. He decided to go ashore, but after a week on board the
houseboat he felt uneager to leave it and make all the social and mental
readjustments necessary, minimal though these would now be. He had let his
beard grow, but almost everyone had left Larchmont and there was little point
in shaving it off. Although the rim of black hair gave his thin face a gaunt
and Rimbaudesque look, he accepted this new _persona_ as part of the altered
perspectives of the river, and as a mark of his own isolation in the
houseboat.
He had seen the craft for sale the previous winter, while visiting a
patient in the yacht basin. With its pastel blue hull and raked windows it
looked totally un-nautical, but the functional design of the interior, and the
absence of all overlay of personality, made it a perfect retreat. To the
surprise of the other yachtsmen in the basin, Ransom towed the craft away and
moored it on the exposed bank below the motorbridge. The mooring was a poor
one with a nominal rent, the smells of the fish-quays drifting across the
water, but he was alone and the slip road nearby gave him quick access to
Larchmont and the hospital. The only hazards were the cigarette ends thrown
down from the cars crossing the bridge. At night he would sit back in the
steering well and watch the glowing parabolas extinguish themselves in the
water around him.
He had furnished the houseboat with far more care than he had given to
the home he shared with Judith, and its cabin was a repository of all the
talismans of his life. In the bookshelf were the anatomy texts he had used in
the dissecting room as a student, the pages stained with the formaIn that had
leaked like a bland washed blood from the mutilated cadavers on the
tables--perhaps somewhere among them the unknown face of his surgeon father.
On the desk was the limestone paperweight he had cut from a chalk cliff as a
child, the fossil shells embedded in its surface carrying a quantum of
Jurassic time across the millions of years to him. Behind it, like the ark of
his covenant, stood a diptych of photographs in a hinged blackwood frame. On
the left was a snapshot of himself at the age of four, before his parents'
divorce, sitting on a lawn with them. On the right, exorcising the terrors of
this memory, was a reproduction of a small painting by Tanguy, 'Jours de
Lenteur.' With its smooth pebble-like objects, drained of all associations,
suspended on a washed tidal floor, this painting above all others had helped
to isolate him from the tiresome repetitions of everyday life.
All these mementos he had smuggled under Judith's nose from their house
during the previous months, setting up a small zone of inner reality for
himself. Looking around him at the contents of the cabin, Ransom realized that
the houseboat was as much a capsule designed to protect him against the
pressures and vacuums of time as the steel shell of an astronaut's vehicle
protected the pilot from the vagaries of space. Here his unconscious memories
of childhood and the past had been isolated, and quantized, like the fragments
of archaic minerals sealed behind glass cases in museums of geology.
A siren hooted warningly. An old river steamer, white canvas awnings
flared trimly over the rows of empty seats, approached the central passage
between the main pylons of the bridge. Captain Tulloch, a thin bottle-nosed
old buff, sat above the helmsman on the roof of the wheel-house, staring
myopically down the narrowing channel. With its shallow draught, the steamer
could glide over submerged banks barely two feet below the surface. Ransom
suspected that Tulloch was now half-blind, and that his pointless passages in
the empty steamer, which once carried sightseers across the lake, would go on
until the craft ran immovably aground on a mudbank.
As the steamer passed, Quilter stepped down into the water, and with an
agile leap swung himself on to the handrail, feet in one of the scuppers.
"Whoa, there! Full ahead!" The steamer rocked slightly, and Captain
Tulloch hopped from his perch with a cry. He seized a boathook and hobbled
down the deck toward Quilter, who grimaced at him from his handhold on the
stern rail. Bellowing at the youth, who scuttled like a chimpanzee on its
bars, Tulloch rattled the boathook up and down between the rails. They passed
below the bridge and approached the Quilters' barge. Mrs. Quilter, still
fanning herself, sat up and hurled a series of vigorous epithets at the
Captain. Ignoring her, Tulloch drove Quilter forward along the rail, lunging
at him like a perspiring pikeman. The helmsman swung the steamer hard by the
barge, trying to rock it from its mooring. As it passed, Mrs. Quilter reached
forward and jerked loose the line of the coracle. It bounced off the bows of
the steamer, then raced like a frantic wheel between the hulls. Quilter leapt
nimbly into it from the rail and was safely spread-eagled on the barge's deck
as Captain Tulloch swung the boathook at his head, knocking Mrs. Quilter's fan
into the water from her hand.
The hot sunlight spangled in the steamer's wake as Mrs. Quilter's
laughter faded across it. Settling itself, the river stirred slowly, now and
then breaking into oily swells. Its white banks were beginning to crack like
dry cement, and the shadows of the dead trees formed brittle ciphers on the
slopes.
Overhead a car moved along the deserted motorbridge, heading towards the
coast. Ransom left the cabin and went out on to the jetty to inspect his
raingauge. He had installed it three months earlier, but so far the cylinder
had collected nothing except a few inches of dust and fragments of dried leaf.
As he emptied the cylinder, a woman in a white beachrobe made her way
down the bank fifty yards from him. She walked with the slow unhurried step of
someone who has recovered from a long malady and feels that all the time in
the world lies before her. The crumbling surface of the bank rose around her
like clouds of bone-meal. She looked down with preoccupied eyes at the thin
stream of water. For a moment, as she lifted her head to the sky, her solitary
figure seemed to Ransom like the specter of the renascent dust.
Her strong face turned its level gaze upon Ransom, as if unsurprised to
find him standing on the bed of the empty river. Although he had not seen her
for some weeks, Ransom, conversely, knew that she would be among the last
people to remain in the abandoned town. Since the death of her father, the
former curator of the zoo at Mount Royal, Catherine Austen had lived alone in
the house by the river. Often Ransom saw her walking along the bank in the
evening, her long red hair reflected in the liquid colors of the water at
sunset. Sometimes he waved to her as he sailed past in the houseboat, but she
never bothered to reply.
She knelt down by the water's edge, frowning at the dead fish and birds
that drifted past. She stood up and walked across to Ransom's jetty.
She pointed to an old bucket hanging from the wooden housing of the
raingauge. "May I borrow that?"
Ransom handed it to her, then watched as she tried to fill it from the
edge of the gangway. "Haven't you any water left?"
"A little to drink. It's so hot, I wanted to bathe." She lifted the
bucket from the water, then decanted the dark fluid carefully into the river.
The inside of the bucket was cloaked by a black oily veil. Without turning her
head, she said: "I thought you'd gone, doctor. With everyone else, to the
coast."
Ransom shook his head. "I spent the week sailing on the lake." He
pointed to the glistening mudflats that stretched away beyond the entrance to
the river. "You'll be able to walk across it soon. Are you going to stay on
here?""Perhaps." She watched a fishing boat enter the river and approach them,
its motor beating slowly. Two men stood in the bows, scanning the deserted
wharfs. A crude black awning covered the stern of the boat, where three more
men sat around the tiller, their pinched faces looking across the water at
Ransom and Catherine Austen. The craft's empty nets lay amidships, but the
sides of the boat had been ornamented in a way unusual for the fishermen of
the river. A large carp, slit down its belly, had been fastened to each of the
rowlocks, and then turned outwards to face the water. The silver bodies of the
six fish stood upright on both sides of the boat like sentinels. Ransom
assumed that the boat and its crew came from one of the settlements among the
marshes, and that with the drought and the end of the lake the small colonies
were being drawn toward the river and Mount Royal.
Yet the significance of the mounted fish eluded him. Most of the
fishermen from the marshes lived close to nature, and the carp were probably
some kind of rudimentary totem, expressing the fishermen's faith in their own
existence.
With a smile, Catherine Austen touched his arm. "Did you see their
faces, doctor? They think you're to blame."
"For the lake?" Ransom shrugged. "I dare say." He watched the boat
disappear below the bridge. "Poor devils, I hope they find better catches at
sea." Catherine shook her head. "They won't leave here, doctor. Can't you see?
What do you think the fish mean on the sides of the boat?" She strolled to the
end of the jetty, the white robe sweeping from her hips to the dusty boards.
"It's an interesting period, don't you agree? Nothing moves, but so much is
happening."
"Too much. There's barely enough time to hunt for water."
"Don't be prosaic. Water is the least of our problems." She added: "I
take it you'll also be here, doctor?"
"Why do you say that?" Ransom turned to look up at a truck towing a
large trailer across the bridge. "As a matter of fact, I intend to leave in a
day or two."
"Really?" Catherine gazed out at the exposed lakebed. "It's almost dry,"
she said reflectively. "Do you feel, doctor, that everything is being drained
and washed away, all the memories and the stale sentiments?"
For some reason this question, with its peculiar ironic emphasis,
surprised Ransom. He looked down at the hard eyes that watched his own. "Do I
take that as a warning? Perhaps I should change my mooring?"
"Not at all, doctor," Catherine said blandly. "I need you here." She
handed him the bucket. "Have you got any water to spare?"
Ransom slipped his hands into the pockets of his trousers. The endless
obsession with water during the previous months had forged powerful reflexes.
"I haven't. Or is that an appeal to sentiment?"
Catherine waited, and then shrugged and turned away. Fastening her robe,
she bent down and filled the bucket.
Ransom went over and took her arm. He pointed to the slip road leading
down from the embankment. Directly below the bridge the trailer had parked,
and the families of four or five adults and half a dozen children were setting
up a small camp. Two of the men carried a chemical closet out of the trailer.
Followed by the children, they walked down the bank, sinking up to their knees
in the white dust. When they reached the water they emptied the closet and
carefully washed it out.
"For God's sake. . . !" Catherine Austen searched the sky. "Doctor,
people are filthy."
Ransom took the half-filled bucket from her and lowered it into the
water. Catherine watched it glide away on the oily current, her face pale and
expressionless. Professor Austen's wife, a noted zoologist in her own right,
had died in Africa while Catherine was a child, and Ransom suspected the
daughter's eccentricities were less a sign of innate character than of
loneliness and vulnerability. Watching her, Ransom reflected that however
isolated a man might be, women at least remained his companions, but an
isolated woman was isolated absolutely.
Gathering her robe around her, Catherine began to make her way up the
bank. "Wait," Ransom called. "I'll lend you some water." With forced humor, he
added: "You can repay me when the pressure comes on again."
He guided her on board the houseboat and went off into the galley. The
tank in the roof contained little more than twenty-five gallons, laboriously
filled from jerricans he had taken down to the river in his car. The public
water supplies, a pathetic trickle all summer, had finally been discontinued
three weeks earlier, and since then he had been unable to make good the
constant drain on the tank.
He half-filled a can of water and carried it into the cabin. Catherine
Austen was strolling up and down, inspecting his books and curios.
"You're well prepared, doctor," she commented. "I see you have your own
little world here. Everything outside must seem very remote." She took the can
and turned to leave. "I'll give it back to you. I'm sure you'll need it."
Ransom caught her elbow. "Forget the water. Please. I'd hate you to
think I'm smug, of all things. If I am well prepared it's just that. . ." He
searched for a phrase. ". . . I've always thought of the whole of life as a
kind of disaster area."
She watched him with a critical eye. "Perhaps, but I think you've missed
my point, doctor."
She walked slowly up the bank, and without looking back disappeared
toward her villa.
Below the bridge, in the shadow of the pylons, the trailer families sat
around a huge garbage fire, their faces blazing like voodoo cultists in the
serpentlike flames. Down on the water the solitary figure of Quilter watched
them from his coracle, leaning on his pole among the dead fish like a
waterborne shepherd's boy resting among his sleeping flock. As Ransom returned
to the houseboat Quilter bent down and scooped a handful of the brackish water
to his mouth, drank quickly, and then punted himself away below the bridge
with his awkward grace.
Ransom prepared a light meal for himself, then spent the next half an
hour sealing the hatchways and windows.
As he knelt down by the starboard window in the cabin something flashed
past outside, and a sharp voice broke through the silence.
"Doctor! Quickly!"
A long wooden skiff, propelled by a tall sunburnt youth, naked except
for a pair of faded cotton shorts, swung up and bumped against the houseboat,
materializing like a specter out of the canopy of reflected light that lay
over the black mirror of the water.
Ransom went up on deck and found the youth, Philip Jordan, fastening the
skiff fore and aft to the rail.
"Philip, what on earth--?" Ransom peered down into the narrow craft.
What appeared to be a large nest of wet mattress floc, covered with oil and
cotton waste, lay in a parcel of damp newspaper.
Suddenly a snakelike head lifted from the nest and wavered uncertainly
at Ransom.
Startled, Ransom shouted: "Philip, tip it back into the water! What is
it--an eel?"
"A swan, doctor!" Philip Jordan crouched down in the stern of the skiff,
smoothing the clotted head and neck feathers. "It's suffocating in all this
oil." He looked up at Ransom, a hint of embarrassment in his wild eyes. "I
caught it out on the dunes and took it down to the river. I thought it would
swim. Can you save it, doctor?"
"I'll try." Ransom stepped over the rail into the skiff, knelt down by
the bird, and searched its mouth and eyes. Too exhausted to move its head
again, the huge bird stared up at him with its glazed orbs. The oil had matted
the feathers into a heavy carapace, and choked its mouth and respiratory
passages.
Ransom stood up, shaking his head doubtfully. "Philip, spread its wings
out. I'll get some solvent from the cabin, and we'll see if we can clean it
up." "Right, doctor!"
Philip Jordan, foster child of the river and its last presiding Ariel,
lifted the bird in his arms and unfurled its huge limp wings, letting their
tips fall into the water. Ransom had known him for several years, and had
watched him grow from a child of twelve or thirteen into a tall, longboned
youth with the quick eyes and nervous grace of an aboriginal.
Five years earlier, when Ransom had hired a cabin cruiser and spent his
first solitary weekends out on the lake, rebuilding his own world from scratch
from the materials of water, wind, and sunlight, Philip Jordan had been the
only person he could incorporate into this new continuum. One night, as he sat
in the well of his craft moored to a deserted quay among the marshes, reading
under a lantern, he heard a splash of water and saw a slim brown-faced boy
paddle a homemade dinghy out of the warm darkness. Circumspectly leaving a few
feet of open water between them, the boy made no reply to Ransom's questions,
but watched the doctor with his wide eyes, paddle lightly touching the water.
He wore a faded khaki shirt and trousers, the sunbleached remnants of what
seemed to be an old scout uniform. To Ransom he was part waif and part
water-elf.
Finally, after several long pauses in which Ransom resumed his reading
and the boy moved twenty yards away, his blade slipping in the liquid silver
of the nightwater, he had come in again and produced from between his feet a
small brown owl. Raising it in his childlike hands, he had shown it to
Ransom--or more probably, the doctor guessed, had shown Ransom to the owl, the
tutelary deity of his water-world--and then vanished among the reeds on the
dark surface of the lake.
He appeared again after a lapse of one or two nights, and this time
accepted the remains of a cold chicken from Ransom. At last he replied to some
of Ransom's questions, speaking in a small gruff voice. He would only answer
questions about the owl, the river, and his boat. Ransom assumed he belonged
to one of the families living in a colony of beached houseboats further along
the lake.
He saw the boy on and off over the next year. He would share a meal with
Ransom in the well of the houseboat, and even help him to sail the craft back
to the entrance to the river. Here he always left Ransom, reluctant to leave
the open water of the lake. Friend of the waterbirds, he seemed able to tame
swans and wild geese, and knew every cove and nest in the banks. He was still
shy of telling Ransom where he lived, and invariably referred to himself by
his surname, the first clue that he had escaped from some institution and was
living in the wild. His strange changes of costume--he would suddenly appear
in a man's overcoat or an odd pair of old shoes three sizes too big--confirmed
this. During the winters he was often close to starvation, going off alone
like an animal to eat the food Ransom gave him.
At these times Ransom wondered whether to report him to the vagrancy
authorities, frightened that after a cold weekend he might find the boy's dead
body following the fish downstream. But something dissuaded him, partly his
own increasing influence over the boy--he lent him paper and crayons, and
helped him to read--and partly his fascination at the spectacle of this
juvenile Robinson Crusoe of the waterways creating his own world out of the
scraps and refuse of the twentieth century.
Fortunately, as he grew older the hazards of Philip Jordan's existence
diminished, and from this starveling Crusoe scavenging for every nail and
fishhook he turned into a wily young Ulysses of the waterfront. His face
lengthened and narrowed, the sharp nose and arrowlike cheekbones giving him an
alert, resourceful appearance. He carried out various jobs for Captain Tulloch
and the yachtsmen in the basin, which made him less dependent on hunting and
fish-trapping. Yet many enigmas still surrounded him. Whether these would
finally be revealed with the imminent death of the river remained to be seen.
Ransom collected a bottle of turpentine and some cotton waste from a
locker in the galley. Perhaps his selfishness in not reporting the youth years
earlier might make Philip now pay a terrible price. Although he had managed to
eke out an existence for several years, the river was no more a natural
environment than a handful of pebbles and waterweed in an aquarium. Its
extinction would leave Philip Jordan with a repertory of skills as useful as
those of a stranded fish. To date his only enemy had been a fairly pliable
nature. Man, on the other hand, had left him alone. Although Philip was not a
thief--yet from where had come those mysterious "gifts"--clasp knives, a
cigarette lighter, even an old goldplated watch--he had learned the arts of
petty pilfering, and one day soon, if no- rain fell, he would be shot down for
it like a dog.
"Come on, doctor!" Philip Jordan beckoned him through the hatchway and
helped him over the rail. The swan lay inertly with wings outstretched, its
plumage glistening with oil in the sunlight.
"Easy, Philip." Ransom knelt down and began to clean the swan's bill.
The bird roused faintly, more in response to the manual pressure than in
recovery. To Ransom it seemed nearly dead, smothered in the great weight of
oil. Impatiently, Philip Jordan shouted: "Doctor, that's no good! I'll take
it down to the galley and soak off the oil." He lifted the great bird in his
arms, the wings like a black drooping cross.
Ransom shook his head. "No, Philip, I'm sorry. It's too big a job."
"What?" Philip cocked an ear at him, struggling with the swan's flopping
head. "What's the matter?"
"I can't spare the water. The bird's almost dead," Ransom said firmly.
"That's wrong, doctor!" Philip steadied himself in the skiff, the bird
sliding in a helpless sprawl out of his black gleaming arms. "I know
swans--they come back when they're nearly dead." He released the bird and let
it flop between his feet. "Look, all I need is one bucket and some soap."
Involuntarily, Ransom glanced up at Catherine Austen's villa. In
addition to the water tank in the roof, there was a second tank containing two
hundred gallons in the pontoon of the houseboat. Some inner caution had
prevented him from revealing its existence to Philip Jordan, for which he now
despised himself.
"Philip, I'm sorry." He gestured at the sky. "The drought may well go on
for another two or three months, perhaps forever. There's got to be an order
of priorities."
"There is, doctor!" His face stiff, Philip Jordan seized his aft line
and jerked it loose. "All right, I'll find some water. This river still has
plenty in it."
Ransom watched him as he paddled off, his strong arms sweeping the skiff
in deep surges through the water. Standing in the stern with his legs astride,
his back bending, the outstretched wings of the dying bird dipping into the
water from the bows, he reminded Ransom of some landlocked mariner and his
stricken albatross, deserted by the sea.
Chapter 2 -- The Coming of the Desert
In the sunlight the white carcasses of the fish hung from their hooks in
the drying sheds, rotating slowly in the warm air. The boathouses were
deserted, and the untended fishing craft were beached side by side in the
shallows, their nets dragged across the dust. Below the last of the wharfs a
huge quantity of smaller fish had been tipped out on to the bank, and the
slope was covered with the putrefying silver bodies.
Turning his face from the stench, Ransom looked up at the quay. In the
shadows at the back of the boathouse two silent faces watched him, their eyes
hidden below the peaks of their caps. All the other fishermen had gone, but
these two seemed content to sit there unmovingly, separated from the draining
river by the dusty boat across their knees.
Ransom stepped through the fish, his feet sliding on their jellied
skins. Fifty yards ahead he found an old dinghy on the bank that would save
him the effort of crossing the motorbridge. Pushing off, he reached the
opposite shore without needing to paddle, and then retraced his steps along
the north bank toward Larchmont.
The image of the fishermen, sitting with their boat like two widows over
a coffin, remained in his mind. Across the surface of the lake the pools of
evaporating water stirred in the sunlight. Along its southern margins, where
the open water had given way before the drought to the creeks and marshes of
Philip Jordan's water-world, the channels of damper mud lay among the white
beaches like gray fingers. The tall columns and gantries of an experimental
distillation unit operated by the municipal authorities rose above the dunes.
At intervals along the shore the dark plumes of reed fires lifted into the
tinted blue sky from the deserted settlements, like the calligraphic signals
of some primitive desert folk.
At the outskirts of Larchmont, Ransom climbed the bank and left the
river, crossing an empty waterfront garden to the road behind. Unwashed by the
rain, the streets were covered with dust and scraps of paper, the sidewalks
strewn with garbage. Tarpaulins had been draped over the swimming pools, and
the tattered squares lay about on the ground like ruined tents. The trim lawns
shaded by. willows and plane trees, the avenues of miniature palms and
rhododendrons had all vanished, leaving a clutter of ramshackle gardens.
Already Larchmont was a desert town, built on an isthmus of sand between a
drained lake and a forgotten river, sustained only by a few meager water
holes.Two or three months beforehand, many of the residents had built wooden
towers in their gardens, some of them thirty or forty feet high, equipped with
small observation platforms from which they had an uninterrupted view of the
southern horizon. From this quadrant alone were any clouds expected to appear,
generated from moisture evaporated off the surface of the sea. As he made his
way down Columbia Drive, Ransom looked up at the towers, but none were
occupied. Most of his neighbors had left to join the exodus to the coast.
Halfway down Columbia Drive a passing car swerved in front of Ransom,
forcing him on to the sidewalk. It stopped twenty yards ahead. The driver
opened his door and hailed him.
"Ransom, is that you? Do you want a lift?"
Ransom crossed the road, recognizing the burly, grayhaired man in a
clerical collar--the Reverend Howard Johnstone, minister of the Presbyterian
Church at Larchmont.
Johnstone opened the door and moved a heavy shotgun along the seat,
摘要：

THEBURNINGWORLDbyJ.G.BallardCOPYRIGHT1964,byJ.G.BALLARDPublishedbyarrangementwiththeauthor'sagentBERKLEYMEDALLIONEDITION,AUGUST,1964BERKLEYMEDALLIONBOOKSarepublishedbyBerkleyPublishingCorporation15East26thStreet,NewYork,N.Y.10010PrintedintheUnitedStatesofAmericaCONTENTSPARTI1TheDrainingLake72TheComi...

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