Ballard, J G - The Burning World

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Berkley Publishing Corporation

15 East 26th Street, New York, N. Y. 10010

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

PART I

1 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

8 Dune Limbo 93

9 The 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

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

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.

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

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

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 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

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

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.

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.

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BerkleyPublishingCorporation15East26thStreet,NewYork,N.Y.10010PrintedintheUnitedStatesofAmericaCONTENTSPARTI1TheDrainingLake72TheComingoftheDesert213TheFireSermon334TheDrownedAquarium445TheBurningAltar606JourneytotheCoast687TheBitterSea78PARTII8DuneLimbo939TheStrandedNeptune10610TheSignoftheCrab113P...

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Ballard, J G - The Burning World

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