LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER THREE

      I had got back to the cattle world by then. As soon as I arrived, I knew I was not going to be there long, and I would have been pleased, only by then I knew that the mining world came next.

      “Oh please!” I prayed out loud, but not to Them. “Please not that blistering-oath mining world again! Anywhere else, but not that!”

      The cattle country was bad enough. I never met the same people twice in it, of course. The earlier ones had moved off or died by the time I came round again. The ones I met were always agreeable, but they never did anything. It was the most boring place. I used to wonder if the Them playing it had gone to sleep on the job. Or maybe they were busy in a part of that world I never got to, and kept this bit just marking time. However it was, I was in for another session of dairy-farming, and I was almost glad it would only be a little one. Glad, that is, but for the mining horror that came next.

      It was only three days before I felt the Bounds call. I was surprised. I hadn’t known it would be that short. By that time I had gone quite a long way down south with a moving tribe I fell in with. They were going down to the sea, and I wanted to go too. I had still never seen the sea then, believe it or not. I was really annoyed to feel the tugging, and the yearning in my throat, start so soon.

      But I was an old hand by then. I thought I would bear it, stick it out for as long as possible, and put off the mining world for as long as I could. So I ground my teeth together and kept sitting on the horse they’d lent me and jogging away south.

      And suddenly the dragging and the yearning took hold of me from a different direction, almost from the way we were going. I was so confused I fell off the horse.

      While I was sitting on the grass with my hands over my head, waiting for the rest of the tribe to get by before I dared get up – you get kicked in the head if you try crawling about under a crowd of horses – the next part of the call started: the “Hurry, hurry, you’ll be late!” It’s always sooner and stronger if you get it from a new direction. It’s always stronger from a RANDOM Boundary too. I don’t know why. This was so strong that I found I couldn’t wait any longer. I got up and started running.

      They shouted after me of course. They’re scared of people going off on their own, even though nothing ever happens to them. But I took no notice and kept running, and they didn’t have a Mrs Chief with them – theirs was a sleepy girl who never bothered about anything – so they didn’t follow me. I stopped running when I was over the nearest hill and walked. I knew by then that the “Hurry, hurry!” was only meant to get me going. It didn’t mean much.

      It was just as well it didn’t mean much. It took me the rest of that day and all night to get there, and the funny coloured sun was two hours up before I saw the Boundary. This was a new one. It was marked by a ring of stones.

      I stared at it a little as I went down into the valley where it was. They were such big stones. I couldn’t imagine any hairy cattle herders having the energy to make it. Unless They had done it, of course. I stared again when I saw the new sign scrawled on the nearest huge stone, some way above my head.

      “I wonder what that means,” I said. But I had been a long time on the way and the call was getting almost too strong to bear. I stopped wondering and went into the circle.

      And – twitch – I was drowning in an ocean.

      Yes, I saw the sea after all – from inside. At least, I was inside for what seemed about five minutes, until I came screaming and drowning and kicking up to the surface, and coughing out streams of fierce salt water – only to have all my coughing undone the next moment by a huge great wave, which came and hit me slap in the face, and sent me under again. I came up again pretty fast. I didn’t care that nothing could stop a Homeward Bounder. I didn’t believe it. I was drowning.

      It isn’t true what they say about your life passing before you. You’re too busy. You’re at it full time, bashing at the water with your arms and screaming “Help!” to nothing and nobody. And too busy keeping afloat. I hadn’t the least idea how to swim. What I did was a sort of crazy jumping up and down, standing in the water, with miles more water down underneath me, bending and stretching like a mad frog, and it kept me up. It also turned me round in a circle. Every way was water, with sky at the end of it. Nothing in sight at all, except flaring sunlit water on one side and heaving grey water on the other.

      That had me really panicked. I jumped and screamed like a madman. And here was a funny thing – somebody seemed to be answering. Next moment, a sort of black cliff came sliding past me, and someone definitely shouted. Something that looked like a frayed rope splashed down in the sea in front of me. I dived on it with both hands, which sent me under again, even though I caught the rope. I was hauled up like that, yelling and sousing and shivering, and went bumping up the side of that sudden black cliff.

      It was like going up the side of a cheese-grater – all barnacles. I left quite a lot of skin on there, and a bit more being dragged over the top. I remember realising it was a boat and then looking at who’d rescued me. And I think I passed out. Certainly I remember nothing else until I was lying on a mildewy bed, under a damp blanket, and thinking, “This can’t be true! I can’t have been pulled out of the sea by a bunch of monkeys!” But that was what I seemed to have seen. I knew that, even with my eyes closed. I had seen skinny thin hairy arms and shaggy faces with bright monkey eyes, all jabbering at me. “It must be true,” I thought. “I must be in a world run by monkeys now.”

      At that point, someone seized my head and tried to suffocate me by pouring hellfire into my mouth. I did a lot more coughing. Then I gently opened one watery eye and took a look at the monkey who was doing it to me.

      This one was a man. That was some comfort, even though he was such a queer looking fellow. He had the remains of quite a large square face. I could see that, though a lot of it was covered by an immense black beard. Above the beard, his cheeks were so hollow that it looked as if he were sucking them in, and his eyes had gone right back into his head somehow, so that his eyebrows turned corners on top of them. His hair was as bad as his beard, like a rook’s nest. The rest of him looked more normal, because he was covered up to the chin in a huge navy-blue coat with patches of mould on it. But it probably only looked normal. The hand he stretched out – with a bottle in it to choke me with hellfire again – was like a skeleton’s.

      I jumped back from that bottle. “No thanks. I’m fine now.”

      He bared his teeth at me. He was smiling. “Ah, ve can onderstand von anodder!” That is a rough idea of the way he spoke. Now, I’ve been all over the place, and changed my accent a good twenty times, but I always speak English like a native. He didn’t. But at least I seemed to be in a world where someone spoke it.

      “Who

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