kroth:  the drop

4: the last ledge

For some reason we had stopped, and I heard a flat voice speaking. At first, I took little notice of the words. Even the fact that we had halted, and that the others looked grave, did not jostle me out of my private thoughts, which promenaded along general themes of guilt and responsibility and the likelihood of retribution, as if hoping to pick up merit points for honesty and cash them in for a pardon...
    One phrase pricked me into wakefulness. It was not loud or harsh – it was, on the contrary, so ludicrously bland and dull that it did the trick of exciting my attention, like a sudden announcement that there is “no cause for alarm”.
    “Recent events” – 
    It was Vic, daubing our crisis with grey tones. He was up to something. 
    “Recent events”, he droned, had carried us some miles East of the Wayline. We would do well (he asserted) to veer back to that line.
    The way he said it, gave me the odd certainty that he was being deliberately boring.
    “I agree,” seconded Rida. “Sound policy. Back to the Wayline!”
    “Tell me why,” requested Cora.
    “It’s so that we can then resume our original southward course at zero longitude.” Rida’s voice had exactly the same stuffy sound as Vic’s.
    Cora – blunt, as she often was – said, “But why bother? What does our precise longitude matter?”
    Rida pursed his lips and then delivered his judgement. 
    “Ours is, after all, a scientific expedition. A sample transect down the side of the planet. Without a doubt, if we are to keep the sampling consistent we should stick as regularly as possible to a straight plunge along the zero-line.”
    Heather added, “That’s best, yes. We shan’t always be able to keep to it, but the more we do, the better.”
    I murmured agreement. Now that I grasped the issue, my urge was to conform. Keep it quiet. No yells for freedom. Just veer off. Creep out of the guilt zone. 
    Cora, also, was now nodding gravely.
    “I understand,” she said, adopting the same stilted tone as the others.
    Yells and screams remained unvoiced; I sensed quiet eagerness all round, now that the last of us had definitely got the point. 
    “In that case,” said Vic, “since no objections have been raised, let us move.” 
    We set off, at a modified angle of descent, aimed at south-west of south. I kept my gladness silent: colossal relief at the decision, and (still more) at not having had to suggest it myself, left me content not to ask for further details. In any case, Vic’s real reason for proposing the course-change was one which he would not wish to admit out loud, if his concerns were the same as mine, and I was certain they were. We were indeed all tip-toeing around the same subject: weight-rolling is the taboo on the Slope of Kroth, and if you’ve become in any way associated with it, you want to bury it under miles of distance and stretches of time. Rida had voiced our scientific excuse, but as for what our move was really about – 
    As we quitted the area, I twisted my upper body whilst I clutched the holding-strap of Ydrad’s harness, so as to lean out as far as I could, unable to resist one last rearward gaze leftwards and down, to scan the Slope below Tokropol. Macabre curiosity had impelled me to seek what signs of havoc were actually visible along the path of destruction. 
    It was hard to be sure. Due to the steepness and the roughness of this region of moss-covered stone, irregularly knobbed with more jagged outcrops, it was not immediately obvious how far its smashed look was due to the newest rockfall. I could pick out some scraped streaks and “chipped” areas, but the signs were inconclusive. The real test would come lower, where the downward hurtling mass, or its secondary effects, had impacted a human settlement. As it was intended to do. But with any luck we would never see the evidence of that – it being precisely what we were now veering to avoid. The great thing would be to sidle past it… to creep in a detour, bypassing condemnation.
    I remembered a name: Plim. 
    That was the target, the ill-fated enemy of Tokropol. Oh how good it was not to be an inhabitant of Plim right now. 
    No way to tell them, no way to save them... 
    Anyway, it may well already have happened...
    Waste of time to search for words to say sorry...
    Meanwhile we were successfully distancing ourselves from the scene of the crime, as for some hours we continued our oblique descent, and I indulged in feelings of relief and thankfulness for each mile of westward deviation. I remained troubled, though. On this tipped landscape The Slant as usual protected me from physical vertigo, but moral vertigo – that, alas, was another matter. The Slant’s psychological cloak could hardly stretch to cover the guilt of my association (involuntary though it had been) with Narth Drong’s terrible deed and with my uncle’s part in it – his part in encouraging it, perhaps in making it possible. I remained haunted by the thought that things might have gone differently, the tyrant of Tokropol might have refrained from pulling the lever, had it not been for Vic’s evil suggestion that you can act and repent at the same time.

                                                   *

Cora presently said, “Any idea how far we’ve still got to go?”
    “Nearly there, I expect,” said Vic. 
    More minutes passed.
    “I think we should be there now,” Vic remarked. “But it’s... er... not obvious.”
    Heather said, “You can’t expect to see much. It has been a while since we passed a marked section along the Wayline.”
    I said, “Oh, yeah, the Line had rather petered out...”
    Vic said heartily, “Never mind. I agree, we have probably seen the last of... No we haven’t!” he contradicted himself in a tone of sudden uplift. “Look there!”
    Hardly more than the faintest dusty streak, it was nevertheless a sign.  Even as far down south as here, this route must be trodden now and then. Whether by animals or humans or both, it had been pounded into a visible path. “I calculate from this that Tokropol is about eight miles east of the Wayline,” Vic announced. He formally entered the fact, if it was a fact, in his journal. But the trail he had spotted so gleefully did not last more than about half a mile, after which we lost it completely, and a hunch told me that we had seen the last of it.
    “No matter,” Vic maintained. “I’m sure that we are back at longitude zero. And if not, then we can’t be far from it.”
    He was right, in a practical sense; nonetheless I think we all experienced a nudge of eerie regret. The loss of a visible Wayline was an unfortunate reminder of how far we had departed from the familiar conditions of our lives. It was yet another “goodbye”. It could lower our immunity to other misfortunes...
    Rubbish, said I to myself. If that mild twinge was the worst we had to endure, then we ought rather to rejoice in our luck, than make silly omens out of what ought to be no surprise. I told myself to “buck up”, toughen up, and give my attention wholly to the journey. You can only worry so much, you can only feel guilty so much, and then you get tired of it. I thought better thoughts, and then I thought no thoughts as at last I completely surrendered to the hypnotic downward spring-hop, spring-hop, of my ploon-buoyed descent of the universal Slope. 
    In this way, the gradient, which dominated all my reality, wiped out the anxieties which it had caused in the first place. Stuff happens and you can’t do anything about it. Slippages occur, weights roll, avalanches devastate, all as a natural outcome of the entirety of life...
    This peace of mind lasted about an hour. 
    Then we came to a brink at the end of a spur. 
    The precipice straight ahead meant that we had to detour. And as bad luck would have it, complications to our right – screes and cliffs which not even the decapods could negotiate – meant that we could not see a way round in that direction. So we would have to turn left. In other words, we must head back east.
    “Damnation,” muttered Vic Chandler.
    East – back onto the questionable road down from Tokropol. East – once more towards the hateful boulder’s path. The contentment which I had just regained, I must now relinquish. 
    Urgent question: When could we stop the detour? How soon would we be able to veer west again? We were headed towards Plim. I did not want that to be true, or even approximately true, but it was no use arguing with geography. Due east we went, for some miles, until, eventually, we found a way down.
    Even then, we could not go straight south. We had to head south-east. This was because, to our right and straight ahead, various further cliffs, gashes and deep-gouged corries, far more exaggerated than those we had met before, continued to complicate the terrain as far as the eye could see. They blocked the possibility of a return to the now-invisible Wayline and compelled us to veer further and further south-eastwards, in precisely the direction we most wished to avoid. 
    No alternative was mentioned, though I suppose if we had been willing to spare the time we could have given up trying to descend at all in this unpromising region: we could have gone due east for a vast enough distance to be sure of missing Plim. I would have been ashamed to suggest this. I preferred to keep my dread of Plimian retribution to myself. I thought: “If we do encounter the place, let Vic, if he can, look the survivors in the eye, if there are any; let him brazen it out.” As though his position was that of a manager who might have to deal with a few irate customers; nothing worse than that.
    My saner self knew that such thoughts were stupid even as I entertained them, but perhaps, in moments like these, some quirk or offshoot of The Slant did enable me to pretend that the crisis ahead of us would be small. 

                                                    *

Evening came, and we would have to stop somewhere.
    Right on cue, we found ourselves upon the approaches to a ledge.  From
the first glimpse, the sight of it imposed a subdued silence upon us.
    As we trod an oblique track down towards the western end of the mighty sill, our view of its length opened out into a run of uncounted miles, eastward from where we were: undoubtedly the ledge at last. From where we gazed, it widened and eventually disappeared into the gloom of dusk.
    I was so tired, physically and mentally, so worn down by my own fears and guilt that I did not feel it worth the effort to push against the silence in order to utter a word. If any of the others had showed a disposition to argue with fate, I might have given them some half-hearted support. However, nobody recoiled, or tried to suggest that we evade this spot.
    So we settled for the night, on the western end of Plim.

                                                   *

The fact that we woke next morning to find ourselves still alive and not arrested, changed my mood and made me realize how batty a lot of my thoughts had been. I smiled at my imaginings, and while I smiled I imagined them again: I pictured all sorts of unwelcome beings lurking among the pleats and folds of cliff which undulated away along the eastward perspective. To show them that I disbelieved in their existence, I sat with my back to them as I finished my breakfast.
    Then, while I munched my last biscuit, I heard, from Cora, such a short and dismissive a laugh, that it might have confirmed my new optimism.
    The creature that trotted into view, splay-legged and clumsy, was a lanky dog that bleared idiotically as it saw us.
    “This is absolutely crazy,” murmured Vic. “An airedale, down here, of all places – here, boy,” he called, standing up slowly. Before he could step forward, we heard sharper footsteps.
    This time a man, colourfully clad though silhouetted against the brighter morning light, lunged forward to collar the airedale. In doing so he fell to his knees, but he quickly recovered and smartly scrambled back onto his feet. 
    He beamed at us in wonder, while we noted him to be a short, stocky fellow, flamboyantly dressed in bright yellow boots, crimson trousers and green jacket. 
    “Hello, hello shonks,” said this dog-owner in a fruity upper-class accent completely at variance with the world I had come to know. It did not fit, and, because it did not fit, it clashed with my previous awe of Plim; it deadened all sense of menace; my worries shrank to a trivial dirge in my mind’s ear.
    “We’re shonks, yes,” agreed Vic, acknowledging this slang term for Toplanders. “Nice dog you have there.”
    “Animals are important to us. They give us warning of rockfall.” The man’s eyes flickered over us as he spoke. He probably caught no reaction from Vic’s poker face, but I dare say I probably gave my guilt away by wincing at rockfall. “I am John Seely Cumnor-Rae, of Plim.” 
    Vic introduced us by name.
    “Most pleased,” nodded Cumnor-Rae, “to meet no fewer than four rootless shonks,” and he shook his head and chuckled. “It has been a long time. Years. Decades.” 
    “Ah,” smiled Vic, “time-units from the Dream of Earth!”
    “So they are, so they are! Good old time-units – can’t beat ’em, I always say – remarkable, their persistence.”
    “Astronomically meaningless, though.”
    “Ah, but,” echoed Cumnor-Rae, eyes brimming with pleasure, “they fulfil a human need. And besides, ‘week’ was astronomically meaningless even on Earth.”
    Their smiles broadened: two educated, civilized men, two intellectuals delighting to fence with each other as they met in the depths of Slantland. 
    Rida prompted: “‘Decades’, you were saying. Decades since what?”
    “Since we absorbed a shonk population.”
    Frustration in me broke out.  “Not again!” I cried; “we’re not dust, to be hoovered up like this by one Slantland culture after another.  We already have a home, thank you.”  I saw Cumnor-Rae blink, I saw him hesitate to speak, apparently at a loss for a reaction to my blaze of protest, and this gave me time to feel aghast at what I had done.  Why couldn’t I make up my mind about what I was most afraid of?  Punishment by Plim or acceptance by Plim – 
    “Duncan here,” remarked Vic, “has bounced back from a low point yesterday.”
    “Indeed?”
    “Yes. Quite forcefully. Impetuous lad, at times. But what he says is true enough. We do have a home, up in Topland.”
    I was glad of Vic’s prompt support, but it occurred to me that Cumnor-Rae might not really believe in Topland, or, if he did, he might still not believe that anyone could have come the whole distance from there to here. This far south, the word shonk might simply refer to any wanderer between one latitude and another. 
    In other words – I wasn’t certain that Topland still possessed all that much cultural pull, down here. More likely the attitude was that anyone in his right mind ought to prefer making his home in Plim rather than in Topland...
    The Plimian’s next words strengthened this impression.
    “I have heard of quite a few shonks,” Cumnor-Rae replied, “who made good Plimians.” 
    “But this might not be Plim’s lucky day,” I shot back. Then, appalled once more at my big mouth, I squeezed my eyes shut and asked myself what had possessed me.
    The man merely laughed and said, “Don’t be too sure. Never judge a day until it is over. Meanwhile, please accept the hospitality of this ledge.” 
    We stood still, unable to meet his eye.
    “What’s wrong?” he asked.
    “Duncan,” said Vic slowly, “has already told you, I think.”
    “Nevertheless,” replied Cumnor-Rae, “the invitation stands.” It was extraordinary, the sense we all had, that nothing further need be said about how I had known that this was not Plim’s lucky day. My guilty knowledge had given our game away, and yet, in a short time, our new acquaintance was leading us merrily along into central Plim, while I helplessly reflected that we could have said “no thanks”. In theory we still could turn round and walk back the way we came, but we weren’t going to. Cumnor-Rae waved – I did not see to whom, but I knew from that moment that the news of our arrival was being relayed ahead of us.
    Meanwhile the clouds of hesitation cleared and I began to feel confoundedly good, as I’m sure we all did, judging by the wave of carefree chatter that swept us all along as we swung our arms and strode happily along towards our doom, and I guessed the reason: in contrast to our stilted, guilty speech of yesterday, when we were trying to evade our just deserts, now we were headed straight towards them. Crazy but understandable, the way in which springs of delight gushed forth from our newly satisfied consciences. We were fulfilling a deep aspect of our natures, our Krothan anti-avalanche natures, by giving ourselves up. Similarly, so I supposed, the friendliness of Cumnor-Rae, and of others who appeared from crevices and waved, stemmed from their approval of our decision to turn ourselves in, to confess, to take what was coming to us. For surely they all knew what we had done. They knew, even if we did not give ourselves away any further in so many words. The truth shone in our faces, or else it resounded in the timbre of our voices as we answered their greeting. And they knew that we knew that they knew. And so we were all happy, though I was far from happy at being happy. 
    The dog, too, trotted happily along with our group. Why an airdale? What was this ridiculous animal, so ill-adapted to a sloping environment, doing here? From the hiss of that question in my mind’s ear, a glance down-Slope distracted me, and a dark line of fuzz along the sagorizon, a dozen miles below, made me think: “Long time since I’ve seen a forest.” A surprise, that forest, but not impossible. The weight of trees, even on a sixty-degree slope, can be supported if the roots are deep and strong enough. But so what, why did my thoughts flit meaninglessly from one idea to another, were they becoming like those of the Tokropolians with their random dictionary words, or was I perhaps not as hopeless as all that, could I trust that pieces of a puzzle were on their way to coming together, so that eventually they might coalesce? I might unconsciously be building a structure of evidence; only, while I urged my brain to hurry, my will seemed to lag. All that I retained was a capacity for wishy-washy foreboding, of discontent at my content, and even that was diluted almost to naught when, around another cliff-fold, the ledge dramatically widened and we were among hundreds of brightly-dressed people busied on and between the thresholds of a honeycomb of caves. When they saw us they surged around us with such welcoming smiles that my last dregs of pessimism and mistrust were whited out. They bombarded us with questions till Cumnor-Rae raised his hand and bawled at them to step back and leave us a few yards of space.
    I thought back to the N’Skupurans. They had turned out to be good people – so what about this lot? Never mind. Don’t need to know – just go. Get out of here. If only we could get a move on, get a grip on ourselves; but the bright morning sunshine, and the breeze of friendliness, were as hard to resist as a cloggy nightmare –
    “Tell me,” muttered Vic in my ear, while Cumnor-Rae spoke to someone to fetch the headman, “why have you got that thunderous expression on your face?”
    Oh? Was I still capable of a thunderous expression? Maybe there was hope for me yet.
    “Sorry,” I gritted my teeth, “I’ll try to wipe it off.”
    “That’s not an answer. Better tell me. You’re the canary, I’m the miner...”
    “Oh, don’t worry, we’ll get out,” I mused, “ – I think. Provided we stay on the alert.” But will we? Not for the first time I deplored the fact that this expedition of ours had no proper leader. The situation called for action which I lacked the moral or legal authority to undertake. Perhaps, though, no leader could have done what was needed here. Beyond the whole issue of our guilty association with Glorious Glondeem, the danger I sensed was not standard. No word for our peril existed in the dictionary. It possessed the stealth of the unnamed.
    I chuckled, “Maybe, like when someone discovers a new beetle...”
    “Eh?” said Vic.
    “They’ll name this one after me. In Latin.”
    Rida, who had stepped close, frowned: “What are you talking about beetles for?”
    “He isn’t,” said Vic. “He’s talking about a new way of falling into the krunk. Aren’t you, Duncan?”
    “Yes, that is it,” I said.
    “Periculum Wemyssianum,” Vic grinned.
    I sighed. “Glad you think it’s funny...”
    “No, no, you’re a good canary.” 
    “Shush,” I said, for Cumnor-Rae was coming back to us.
    Vic however had the last word. He murmured, “We’ll make an effective team, Duncan, if you enact your role and I enact mine.”

                                                   *

I noticed, presently, that some way ahead of us the ledge ran past a large cave entrance, a seventy-foot darkness, and I guessed, partly from the expectant looks of other people, that something might hop out of it when we reached it. Sure enough, when the moment came, a skinny middle-aged man in grey jacket and trousers darted into view, bird-like, to jerk his head to and fro in the sunshine.  This character caught sight of us and then bounded towards us, waving; the crowd drew further aside, leaving us to him.  At the same time Cumnor-Rae, from our direction, hurried to meet him.
    I could sense nothing in particular to worry about while the two men put their heads together in whispered conference, nor when we shonks were then beckoned forward.  The grey-suited man bowed to us and introduced himself with colourless politeness, “I am headman Lem Bek. Welcome, northerners, to Plim.” He pointed back with his thumb. “We have readied an alcove for you.”
    Now, that was somewhat different.  I did not wish to go into that cave. To stand trial – yes, I was prepared for that; but... I glanced childishly around as though I hoped to spot a ladder into the sky, or some other magical exit into a place where no forebodings existed. 
    It was then that I beheld the terrible notch down on the sagorizon.
    At a point more or less due south of me, that kink in the forest told me, immediately, from its size and position, that what I was seeing was the destructive swath of Glorious Glondeem. So my imagination quickly supplemented the sight of it with close-ups of what must be there: vegetation splattered into a blanket of cinders, studded with torn stumps and wrenched roots, framed by the smoking edges of the hole punched through the forest by thousands of tons of rock at the speed of a racing car. I guessed, moreover, that the hole had been enlarged by fires surrounding the impact. Else it might not have been visible at this hazy distance. 
    Anyhow, the damage to the forest was one thing; of greater concern right now was its alignment with where I stood: for that told me my proximity to the impact area on Plim itself. I must be very close indeed to the zone of destruction here. 
    I turned my eyes quickly back towards the headman. Was that a knowing smile on his face?  Had the fellow detected my guilty glance? Granted, we “northerners” must be prepared to take our medicine soon. I could have wished, however, not to stand trial so close to the evidence... At the best of times, Slantland life must breed suspicion of anyone from further north, especially after a rockfall disaster, and now, unfortunately right after Glorious Glondeem had smashed its way through their realm, the Plimians had come across a group of wandering shonks, namely, our unfortunate selves; with timing as bad as that, and as close to the havoc as this, we didn’t stand a chance. 
    Oh well – justice wasn’t our responsibility. It was up to the Plimians to deal it out.
    Obediently we entered the cave. 
    Its depth was as wide and tall as its entrance, so that the breeze penetrated it easily; I was glad not to feel enclosed. Alcoves, in which hammocks were slung, pocked the walls, while the centre space was furnished with tables. Between alcoves the walls were holed with tunnels – more than a dozen of them – half-drawn curtains at their entrances. 
    Lem Bek, who really seemed an unimpressive little man, ushered us to the longest table. At the same time, a score or more people drifted in with us.  While they were taking their places on the hammocks and at other tables, I peered around in an attempt to estimate what, precisely, was being choreographed here. State trial, state execution or state funeral?  The hammock-sitters had notebooks on their laps, and pens poised.  The headman announced our names, and the sitters wrote them down.
    Vic joked, “Are they going to take the minutes?” 
    The headman replied, “You are about to give our chroniclers much to do.” Saying this, he smiled, but he was looking at me; at stupid Duncan Wemyss who had already blown the gaff more than once with his big mouth.  Not only fear, but deep self-doubt assailed me; I did not trust myself to be afraid of the right things.
    We sat, Lem Bek facing the cave entrance, the rest of us with our backs to it. 
    “Duncan,” said the headman, “tell all.”
    “Go on,” said Vic to me. “You might as well be our spokesman. Tell it like it was.”
    “Tell it,” said Cora. “Tell,” said Rida and Heather. Heather added, “Don’t worry, Duncan, whatever happens, we’re with you on this.”
    Plead guilty – and get a more lenient sentence. Something nicer, perhaps, than being politely torn limb from limb? The cave had filled up some more. A crowd of silent people, with grave-looking men forming a line to keep back the others, bulged inward through the entrance. At that moment a beautiful plan came to me.
    It was one of my clever ideas, by which I thought I saw how I might get us all off.
    My notion was that I could save myself and my friends by showing that I understood how this crisis must have developed, and how the government of Plim must have prepared for it. If they could be sufficiently impressed by my sudden view of living history, they might conclude that we shonks could not have acted irresponsibly after all. 
    I spoke:
    “I’ve just worked it out, Lem Bek. You and your people had known of the impending attack for ages, hadn’t you? And though you might have counter-attacked, instead you chose another way. A longer, easier way, without the bloodshed and danger which would have accompanied a war against Tokropol.
    “Instead of waging war, you altered the shape of your realm. You built inwards, widening your ledge into the cliff and cutting off the outer edge, so that Glorious Glondeem, when it fell, would miss Plim. That’s what’s happened, hasn’t it?  My, what a huge project it must have been.  A huge project – but so was Tokropol’s, and you had no choice but to work long-term at undermining their long-term plan.
    “Besides, it was a sensible choice, on your part, to allow your enemies to use up their energies for so long with a project which they thought would destroy you, but which, in reality – due to your counter-measures – would do you no harm.
    “For that’s true, isn’t it – you haven’t really suffered any harm?
    “Now as you must have guessed, we, recently, were in Tokropol. You might say it was we who – ah – triggered the descent of Glorious Glondeem. Well, we await your judgement. But remember, we only…”
    I got no further.
    Lem Bek’s shoulders had started to heave. He leaned forward as if racked by a cough. His mouth opened wider and wider until a yell of laughter tore out of him, and simultaneously his right arm shot up as if to yank on a bell-pull.
    It was the signal for a resounding cheer from the other Plimians in the cave. The cheer grew close to deafening and was taken up by those who had not been able to get in, who had been forced to wait outside.
    “That makes it official!” the headman cried above the tumult. “Write, chroniclers, the day and the time!”
    Then he leaned over and reached for my hand and gripped it. “You can’t imagine,” he said fervently, “what a relief it was, when the thing fell past us, to know that the long wait was over, that our calculations had proved true... If it really was you who made it happen when it did, you did us a whacking great favour, and don’t be surprised if you get swept off your feet by a grateful mob!”
    I nodded wordlessly, numb with understanding. 
    The question we now faced, was not how far we would be condemned, but how far we would share in the credit and the triumph. We soon found out that Lem Bek hadn’t exaggerated much about that. The rest of the morning passed in a social whirl. As we performed a diplomatic walkabout before lunch, showing ourselves to the enthusiastic people of Plim, my mood adjusted another notch away from mystery and towards jollification, though during occasional pauses for breath I reflected again on how wrong I had at first been, and then my wariness stirred in its sleep. Very infrequent moments, those were; not enough to identify the trouble ahead, any more than you, upon waking, might identify a hooded figure unexpectedly seated with folded hands by your bedside. The faint, patient message was: no, Duncan, you weren’t wrong to fear, you merely mistook the true object of your fear, but eventually you will learn, when it finally obtrudes so that even you cannot fail to recognize it.

                                                   *

After the third or fourth family had invited us in for a drink, Vic remarked that the experience had points in common with that of wandering around the streets of a small Scottish town during Hogmanay.  (“That’s as may be,” I replied, “but the languages are more varied here.”)  It was sheer bliss for a while, as my senses and pulse were adjusted down to the casual beat of a stroller who has no need to bet his life on anything. The way it took me, I found it comforting to act the role of observer, or reporter; it was a way of pretending that some day I really might get back to Topland. I found I could, for instance, amuse myself here in Plim with making guesses and inquiries regarding names, tongues, cultural origins. A lot of the words I heard I did not recognize at all, which was hardly surprising if one held to the theory that remote southern cultures were descended from a variety of ancient scientific expeditions into Slantland. However, everyone whom I spoke to did know English as a second language at least. (Indeed the veneer of English had seemed to get thicker the further south I had journeyed. That might seem strange, but no more fantastic than the astonishing destiny which had led the Australian continent on Earth to become, of all possible things, an English-speaking country.) Then there were the metal objects, tools and ornaments of a high standard, which showed that Plim was technologically much more advanced than Tokropol.
    Then it was lunch with the headman, with us as guests of honour.
    Lem Bek’s acclamation earlier on, and the applause and the welcome accorded us by the entire population, had cleared the air, so that I knew for certain that the whole business of Glorious Glondeem was finished, and what was revealed in its place was the larger doom to which as yet I could give no name. This remaining shadow bided its time. Only gradually did it encroach upon my mood. Most of us can recognize the skeleton of a tyrannosaur, if it is properly mounted in a museum, but if that same skeleton were moving about and you had to observe it by means of X-ray vision from inside the belly of the living monster, you might take longer to name it... might even take longer to see it... and likewise with the voice of my residual anxiety. The truth was all around me but it was semi-transparently involved with other things and it spoke only in an undertone, too deep and pervasive to be definitely heard – not one of Fate’s noisy crises, nothing so personal as guilt for having unleashed a crashing boulder.
    ‘Lunch’ was a banquet spun out for hours, merging into a lazy succession of ledge-parties. We wandered out and in, not bothering to keep together the whole of the time, in our new and irresistible sense of security.
    At one point, Vic and I were back at Lem Bek’s table, and we sat companionably opposite the headman, sipping our creamy liqueurs, when I indicated the sign that stood amongst the fruit bowls: WELCOME TO THE BEST GOOD CHEER IN YEYLD.
    “In my northern homeland,” I remarked, “’Yeyld’ wasn’t a word I often heard employed.”
    “Down here,” said Lem Bek wryly, “it’s in general use. What do you expect? We don’t really want to call ourselves Slantlanders, though that’s what we are. More comfortable to refer to ourselves as inhabitants of Yeyld, which after all is true, Yeyld being the entire northern hemisphere of Kroth. Sounds much more civilized. Puts us on a par with Toplanders,” he finished.
    Noting his tone of sardonic dissatisfaction, I asked: “And what would you most like to be?”
    Lem Bek shrugged.
    I was about to concede that mine had been a vague, useless question, but before I could phrase my admission, Vic told him:
    “Duncan here has quite precise memories of Earth. And so have I. We know Earth history.”
    “Ah! You have precise minds!” and Lem Bek raised a finger. “And you are, I guess, oneiros. Valuable, that.”
    Vic and I looked at each other. I guessed the same thought occurred to both of us. Were we likely to be pressured to stay, because of our value as records of the Dream of Earth?
    Lem Bek did not pursue the idea. He merely added, airily, “As for me, when I use a phrase, I use it for the good of the sound. We did that on Earth, too, didn’t we?” he mused, his speech beginning to be slurred.
    I got up and drifted from the table. My mind felt far from ‘precise’, whatever the headman might say, but then, it’s not unusual for conversations at a party to be somewhat disjointed.
    I strolled into the next cave along the ledge, and idled amongst the celebrants there, until I chanced to see that Cumnor-Rae, who had been telling some jolly tale, broke away from his group and came towards me with a characteristically Plimian bounce in his step. He was holding a teapot in one hand and a cup and saucer in the other. “Try this!” he said, and poured. I took the cup, thanked him, sipped, and said, “Good!” – though it wasn’t tea, it was hot wine. He asked, “Enjoying the party?” I was slow to answer. Rummaging in my mind for an honest reply, I found the word “fragmentation”. That, thought I, was the key. My brain buzzed: There’s no physical link between the disparate tribes of Yeyld, no practical transportation between the isolated human roosting places on the colossal world-sized cliff, and so the only quality they possess in common is the fading memory of the Dream of Earth, which survives in splintered fragments, with enough cultural confusion to supply an academy-full of mainstream novelists with material for the whole of their working lives. My lips moved and for an awful moment I feared I had said out loud: “The trouble with you people, is that I do not find you at all interesting.” What a disastrously crass thing that would have been to say, but fortunately I had merely thought it. At least, I fervently hoped so. Gaping krunk. I’d prefer to fight another Battle of Neydio, or face an invasion from Hudgung.
         Yeyld doth Hudgung
         Overlie;
         Yet Hudgung conquereth
         By and by.
    Other, spoken words, ringing just then in my ears, scared me some more. Cumnor-Rae had left me alone with my drink, but just before he went he had said:
    “I know what’s happening to you.”
    I took a step after him, to collar him, but then I decided against it. The less said the better. It could be vital not to underestimate Cumnor-Rae.
    It became noticeable around then, that the crowd was thickening at the inner end of the cave, where some nucleus of activity or debate grew as I watched.
    I drained my cup, put it down and walked some paces closer but not so as actually to join the group, for my aim was to figure it out but stay free of it. Then came a stroke of luck: I spotted Cora leaving the group. I caught her eye. She came up to me and said, “It’s a theatre group. They’re allocating parts. They tried to get me to join in, but acting’s not in my line.”
    “Uh.” My eyes slewed to a different object. 
    Cora said, “Yes, there’s Heather, and it looks as though she hasn’t said no.”
    “What is it – a historical drama? Like the one at N’Skupur?”
    “Apparently not. From what I gather, the current cycle of Plimian plays is based on a fictional woman detective, Nicki Sparmiento. She’s all the rage, it seems.”
    I watched Heather, my gorgeous Heather who of course wasn’t really mine in any reasonable sense of the word, as she made enquiries, and overcame hesitations, and gradually got drawn in.
    Some of my attention was presently claimed back by Cora, who still stood beside me, and resumed speech: 
    “Look out, here comes that Cumnor-Rae... is he trying to recruit Vic?”
    My uncle strolled beside the bumptious Plimian when they came abreast of us and I heard the latter say, “...suitable for many parts. You should reconsider. Nothing gives stronger cement for our community.”
    Vic ceased his stride, greeted Cora and me, and replied suavely to Cumnor-Rae: “How often have we heard it said that the appeal of the detective story is that it reduces the problem of evil to the puzzle of evil, so as to reassure us with a simplified view of life... I wish you luck, sincerely I do, in your aim to produce a sanitised stage version of the Dream of Earth.”
    “The fading dream of Earth,” corrected Cumnor-Rae. “It is many months now since the Awakening. The pictures grow ever dimmer in our minds. The names become little more than names. We can still play around with them, still paint or dress or scent them whichever way we choose, but to retrieve a bit of their own flavour we could do with an infusion of expertise... otherwise, is it our fault if the vision is ‘sanitised’, as you call it?”
    I said coldly, “Looks like you’ve got your infusion.” I was watching Heather. She looked stressed, her jawline tense. She now appeared to be arguing with a whole committee who surrounded her. It happened then that I saw her features afresh. I ‘saw through’ the uniform greyness of Krothan skin, so that my thoughts travelled for a moment back to Earth and I realized that I would have known her for a West Indian girl if I had met her in my old life... I stared more intently. It looked as though she had broken free. She emerged from the group, and they did not try to pursue her; but I did. 
    As she headed out of the cave she slowed her walk as though she wanted me to catch up. I hoped that was the case; I quicked my step. I took her arm; I had never touched her before. She let us link arms, which made me proud, so proud… We stepped out onto the ledge.
    It was not too crowded. I felt free to speak my mind. Most urgently, I began by asking:
    “Did you sign on any dotted lines?”
    “I said I would think about it.”
    “About...”
    “Playing the part of Nicki Sparmiento.”
    “Wow! The leading part. The heroine.”
    “Yes, and I could do it; I’ve acted before, back in N’Skupur.”
    “I bet you have.”
    “But then we got into a bit of an argument,” she went on, “because, well, the part of Nelda Denton, the villain, is actually much more interesting, in my view. That’s the one I wanted to be. And you know what? The producer vetoed the idea because... I’m a shonk.”
    “I don’t get it. You are not allowed to be a villain because you are an immigrant from a different latitude...?” I looked up as if trying to get inspiration from Heaven. “No, sorry, I don’t get it,” I repeated.
    “Oh, well,” she sighed, “I let myself get irritated, that’s what I most regret... being ratty.”
    I gave her arm a squeeze, which was body language for, You’re very far from being any sort of a rat.
    She became happy to stroll peacefully with me along the ledge, and prepared, perhaps, to dismiss from her mind the little episode that had mortified her, but for me the peace was overshadowed, for the more I thought about this role-allocation business, the less I liked it.
    The first chance I got, I would check my suspicion with the fellow mostly likely to know his way around Krothan ethnology... but first I would finish my walk with Heather.
    Arm in arm, we continued for a few minutes along the ledge; there was nowhere else to go. We couldn’t really go up or down-Slope: we had left our ploons tied to our mounts, and without those weight-reducing balloons we were practically confined to the ledge. Still, that gave us quite a bit of scope for a good long walk. As the ledge followed the gentle folds of the Slope, and through wider spaces deliberately hewn from the rock with the efforts of ages, the people we passed often looked in our direction but did not stare; for the time being, they let us be.
    The silence between Heather and me had a weight to it. A lot of it was a weight of happiness, which was a bit much for me.
    “Sorry to be so quiet,” said Heather all of a sudden.
    “That’s all right! I realize you’re trying to work it all out.”
    She chuckled, a trifle sadly. “I tell you what, Duncan,” she murmured, “I will give this one a go... I’ll agree to play their insipid heroine... but I’ll give it all I’ve got, I’ll put such life into it, I’ll really show them what I can do, and then, sooner or later, they’ll see I can be trusted with something more challenging, and finally I shall get that part of the murderess.” 
    We came to a stop. To my surprise, we had at last actually reached the end of the ledge: it narrowed to a sudden point, beyond which was nothing but the sixty-degree Slope that faced the dizzying emptiness. 
    So we turned, and in the midst of our turn we had to face directly South for a moment.
    Heather’s eyes flashed up at me and she ended with, “I like to finish what I’ve started.”
    I understood well enough that the Plimians had her on the hook.
    I stared out and down into the void.
    “I too,” I said.
    “You mean…?”
    “I’ll put it more strongly: I have to finish what I’ve started.”
    She didn’t argue.

                                                    *

“It’s called Lat-G,” grunted Vic, hunched over a mug of what the Plimians referred to as coffee. “Surprised you haven’t heard of it.”
    I sat with my back to the wall of one of the “coffee-caves”, the cafeterias of Plim. Nobody occupied the adjacent tables, though the further ones, near the entrance, were full, with a dozen clients in hunting garb, crossbows at rest beside their chairs.
    Mid-morning sunlight gilded the cave entrance. The second day since our arrival in this settlement; time enough to have learned what sort of place it was, and the nature of its obsession. On the other hand perhaps I did not need to find out. Any moment now, I expected to be out in that sunlight, on the way to escape. Meanwhile, if Vic was offering knowledge, I’d take it...
    “Lat-G?” I sucked in my breath and hazarded, “Lat for Latitude...”
    “Latitudinal Guilt. Equivalent to post-racist guilt back on dear old Earth.”
    Despite my high-fidelity Earth memories it took me some seconds to dredge up the meaning of “racism”: the doctrine, or belief, that some races are genetically superior (whatever that may mean) to others.
    Among the almost uniformly grey-skinned people of Kroth it was hard to visualise what colour prejudice used to mean in my former world. Admittedly, skin colour on Kroth does vary slightly, darkening gradually the further south you go, but the effect is minor compared with Earth differences. Moreover, this slight variation cuts across racial categories of feature. For the Krothans, the important differences are cultural, not racial, as I had learned by now, having passed through several cultural zones – which were defined above all by latitude, by degree of Slope, the overriding reality of Kroth.
    “You see it now, don’t you?” said Vic. 
    “You mean: they’re so anxious to show they’re not prejudiced against shonks, that Heather can’t possibly be allowed to play a baddy.”
    “That’s it. Remember those murder mysteries, those crime serials on TV back on Earth?” I nodded; we had watched quite a few of them together. Vic went on, “And you know the coloured population of Britain is about 5 per cent. So in order to be fair, the BBC ought to have ensured that 5 per cent of the villains in these shows were coloured. But can you imagine the good old Beeb allowing a West Indian, for instance, to turn out to be the person who dunnit?”
    “No, now that you mention it, I can’t.”
    “Well, what Heather’s come up against is that sort of thing.”
    “Why pick on her?” I asked. “We’re all five of us shonks – oh.”
    Vic nodded, “You do see it, don’t you. Heather bears the brunt of it, for two reasons. First, she’s the one who’s keen on amateur dramatics. Second, there’s bound to be the, er, reverberation, between Kroth the ‘ground state’ and Earth the higher reality-level built up from it… I mean to say, you’d expect echoes, wouldn’t you? Altered echoes, naturally, but the same old swings, between bias and reverse bias. Politically correct taboos transposed from one key to another. West Indian there, shonk here...”
    “Heavy stuff.” I blew out my cheeks noisily.
    “Quite, and all the heavier, insofar as after the guilt comes come further guilt, at...”
    “Don’t tell me: guilt at having made a too-obvious display of guilt.”
    “You got it in one.”
    “Yes, well,” I sighed, “I foresee great possibilities for life in Plim. And the inhabitants are welcome to it all, as far as I’m concerned. Splendid folk and all that, but...”
    “Too heavy for you,” smiled Vic. He half-turned in his chair, to keep an eye on the entrance to the cave. “Here comes a weighty one now.”
    The dog – Cumnor-Rae’s airdale – appeared at the cave entrance, stopped, panted, blinked at us and then padded across the threshold.
    As it approached us Vic went into dog-friendly mode and said, “Here, boy!”
    I, however, scowled. Hearing the voice of its owner – “Come on, Leibnitz, eh, where’ve you got to now, you dumb mutt...” – I got myself in readiness, I prepared my little stroke, my personal rebellion against the dominant power in Plim: the power of... Heck, I still had no name for it! I must obtain a name for it. 
    Cumnor-Rae strode into view, looked in and said, “So that’s where you are, you evolutionary mistake! – Sorry about this, folks; he knows perfectly well he’s not allowed in the coffee cave... Down, Leibnitz, down boy!” for the creature had suddenly put its paws on Vic’s lap and was staring soulfully into Vic’s face. Under other circumstances I might have found this amusing.
    On this occasion I spoke out, bitingly:
    “Why is this here thing a dog? Because it’s not a cat.”
    Vic turned me a look as though he thought I was nuts.
    Cumnor-Rae walked to our table and looked down at me. “Do you know, that’s quite well put.”
    “Well, you know,” I smiled, “it does illustrate the terrible truth, that a thing is itself and not something else. Dog is not cat. The alternatives of life.”
    To leave Vic behind in a debate like this, is not something I can expect to achieve more than once in a century. Showing rare bafflement, his gaze wobbled between the Plimian and myself.
    “Absolutely,” said Cumnor-Rae, and sat down at our table. “Dog or cat, indeed, the splits, the forks, the alternatives of life.”
    “Look, what is this,” expostulated Vic, “a Parisian Left Bank café or something?”
    “Material for the next play,” I explained. “On-and-on-able stuff.”
    And that was it. That was the word I had found. On-and-onable. I had had to invent it, whereas I should have preferred one ‘off the shelf’, but the main thing was I now had it ready to hand.
    On-and-onable, mainstream stuff.
    Hey, that was it.
    Mainstream.
    “Crumbs and krunk,” said Vic, “at this rate, by the time we’re through, we’ll have supplied this place with enough material for a Federal Writers’ Project, eh, Duncan?” 
    Oops, thought I, maybe you’re catching on a bit too fast, Uncle. For while my mind had been fizzing forward, Lem Bek had slipped onto a chair at our table.
    “That’s his brand of humour,” I explained to the Plimians. “Back on Earth, he used ‘Federal Writer’s Project’ as hyperbole for any job with a sizeable word-count.” I turned back to Vic. “You have excited Mr Headman.”
    Lem Bek, eyes sparkling, gave a delighted little nod. “Quite so, he has. You are bringing us your own New Deal.” And then he must have seen my brows contract. “You appear moved, young man.”
    “Why should he be moved?” asked Vic, and protested, “This is all going a bit too fast for me. The dog and cat stuff, in particular...”
    “He knows,” I said, and jerked my head at Cumnor-Rae.
    Vic interposed, “Well, actually, some people do own both a dog and a cat...”
    “So what?” I said. “Just stir that in with the rest, and make the mixture even more on-and-on-able. Look at them – they know.”
    I could indeed tell, from the Plimians’ look of instant comprehension, that they knew that I had nailed them and their culture. I had summed up the truth of Plim, which was that its people, stuck on their patch of extreme Slope, had to roost and chew, chew and regurgitate, re-mix and re-chew the same limited cultural portfolio, forever. 
    Maybe they had some distant longitudinal trade contacts, East-West, but by and large they were stuck with themselves. They had to go on and on with on-and-onable “but on the other hand” stuff for ever and ever and ever.
    They had to suck the maximum juice out of every arguable thing, and that meant never going for glory, never being lost in wonder, for glory and wonder, being unanswerable, shut the tap of controversy. 
    I continued, “In this set-up, if I just say dog not cat, so as to imply you can’t have everything, a Plimian can probably make a whole cycle of plays out of it.”
    Cumnor-Rae retorted, “May you profit by the thought! And that reminds me, while we’re on the subject of ‘you can’t have everything’ – I’d just come to tell you gentlemen that one of the things you can’t have, if you continue your journey, is Heather Cranfield.”
    “What do you mean?” I demanded, wholly reduced, in that instant, to a wish that I might sling all my new wisdom into the garbage if only that might nullify what this person was about to say. 
    “She has decided to stay with us.” He looked hard at me. “Sorry, Mr Wemyss. But of course you are welcome to stay likewise.”
    I sighed, “I suppose I knew she would stay. It would have taken a psychological miracle for her to have decided otherwise.” And when no miracle occurs, the icy lump of that disappointment is rock-heavy and dull. “I knew she would stay,” I repeated, “but I must go.”
    “But why?” asked the sensible Plimian. “Why must you go?” 
    “For the same reason,” I said, “that the chicken crossed the road. Make a cycle of plays out of that, if you like. – Come on, Uncle,” I added, rising. “Let’s swim out of this mainstream. Where are Cora and Rida?”
    “Your companions,” interjected Cumnor-Rae, “are already at the stables, I think. Packing to go.”

                                                    *

Given that the Plimians divide their time into two principal activities, so that either they are hunting for food or they are occupied with the composition, performance, enjoyment, assessment and study of plays, the best time for travellers to leave without any fuss is at this hour of change-over. 
    Moreover, even if your aim is not to escape, it’s worth noting, out of interest, that if you can catch them at the hour when the hunters swap shifts with the dramatists, you can see all of Plim.
    But don’t tell them that; after all, you’re supposed never to be able to see all of Plim. It’s supposed to offer infinite riches of experience, endless scope for interplay and analysis, and it’s not at all the right thing to say that they’re just a tribe stuck on a ledge.
    The folk with the crossbows by their chairs (I realized as I brushed past them) were returned from the hunt earlier than most, relaxing before they did anything else; now different folk surged in, to fire questions such as, “See any deemoblat or fomken spoor?”
    When we emerged onto the main ledge, more Plimians were pouring out of their caves. On our way to our quarters we overheard many other inquiries concerning the current movements of varieties of forest game. 
    The headman appeared as we rounded a curve of the ledge, and looked as if he might say something.
    Vic pressed past him, saying suavely, “Good luck with the deemoblats.” He added under his breath to me, “Hope they have some Hemingways to chronicle the hunt.” 
    We weren’t hindered or stopped, we were hardly even noticed, on our return to our overnight quarters. Cora and Rida had prepared all four mounts for immediate departure. Our ploons were ready to strap on. Without further ado we donned our buoyancy packs and stepped over the rim of the ledge. 
    Farewell, flatness.  Once more onto terrain so savagely tilted, as to make our journey seem almost a spacewalk. Perforce, our minds clicked back into total mental reliance on The Slant.
    We seemed part of a mass-migration. Some dozens of yards off on either side, parallel to our descent, flocked the closest of many other ploon-buoyed figures. They were plunging in the same way as we were towards the distant forest, accompanied by pack-beasts of a species related to ours though half the size.
    Rida said to Vic, “Any sign of trouble?”
    Vic shrugged. “Why should anyone try to stop us? They have what they wanted: one of our number.”
    “Poor Heather.  We were afraid,” said Cora warmly to me, “that it might have been you.”
    Truly it might have been. In good Plimian-dramatist fashion I chewed on that thought as we hopped down-Slope beside our humping steeds. “I would have been a bigger catch for the Plimians than Heather could possibly be, and that’s not a boast,” I remarked. “So would you, Cora, and you, Uncle Vic. As for you, Rida – maybe not; you’re not an Earth-dreamer, are you?”
    He smiled, “No. But still, I’d have much to offer playwrights.”
    “So you would, Rida.” Swaying a bit drunkenly under my balloon-supports I repetitively maundered on, sucking the theme of the theme-suckers, “After all, like us all, you came all the way down here from Topland; so much travel, so many stories. So we’d all have fitted the bill better than Heather. All of us had weightier baggage of experience than she had.  Memories, viewpoints, chewy grist for the mill... yet poor old Heather was appently still good enough for the eager-beaver dramatists of Plim.  Jolly content they must be, with the sop we’ve thrown them.”
    “It was her decision,” said Vic quietly.
    My self-pitying voice died down as I indeed realized how lucky I, personally, had been. Again, as in N’Skupur, it had been close. Luck, melancholy luck. And never had it been needed as much as here, where lurked the greatest of all dangers to our science-fictional lives, which might have turned mainstream at Plim.

                                                   *

The forest, as we drew closer, resolved itself into mingled pine and broad-leaved trees, with drooping branches and very tall, tapering trunks, spaced wide enough apart that they promised to make the going easy. On the brink of this shady realm, we could see no reason to hesitate; certainly the Plimian hunters were going straight in – though now they were over a furlong to either side of us, for they had gradually fanned out during the descent. With hardly any undergrowth to obstruct us, and trees’ branches which began thirty feet up or more, we would not even have to shorten the strings on our buoyancy bladders for fear of them getting tangled. Yet we paused before taking the solemn step forward.
    “Well, here we are,” announced Vic, “at what they call the Nasnoon Walaf, if I’ve heard correctly. The name, I suspect, survives from some defunct local language.”
    “I wonder what the ‘deemoblats’ might be,” mused Rida.
    “Good eating for hungry Plimians,” shrugged Cora.
    Moved by my own kind of hunger, I took the lead. I gave a little tug to Ydrad, whose bulk rather overflowed the path; this did not matter, as I did not need to walk right beside the creature – I could accompany it along a parallel track in the network that criss-crossed the forest floor. 
    So we took to zig-zagging down into the Nasnoon Walaf.
    I felt a certain nostalgic attraction for this place, because its enclosed prospect made it just possible to imagine that I was on a tree-clad mountain on Earth. After all, a patch of forest on a sixty-degree Alpine slope was not beyond belief. Feasting my eyes on the diminishing trunks I could pretend that Kroth with its literal flanks was an outrageous dream; that when I emerged into the open once more I would see, perhaps far off but definite, level ground at the foot of the Slope. Of course, I knew that would not happen, for this Slope had no “foot” but on the contrary ended in an endless fall; but the opportunity for magical illusion ought to be enjoyed while it lasted.  And perhaps I was not the only one who felt this way. Behind me, I heard Vic quote lingeringly:
    “Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.”
    Cora said, “Quite a turn of phrase you got there.”
    “Thank you, but,” added Vic modestly, “I couldn’t have done it without the help of John Keats.” His banter didn’t fool me; I could tell he was as awed as I, as we descended further into the green-lit depths. 
    One spectacular effect of the sixty-degree tilt was that there was no need to crane our necks to view the high branches: the terrific gradient meant that if you merely looked levelly straight south, you found yourself gazing towards tree-tops. When we did this, we sometimes caught sight of animals, the size of chimpanzees but in form closer to squirrels, leaping from branch to branch. I expect they were like nothing on Earth, but I couldn’t be sure: there was so much about Earth that I had never learned, so much mystery and novelty that I would have expected to see if I had explored Asia or Africa or South America. So this strangeness of the deemoblats (or whatever they were) did not quite spoil the illusion that this could be a terrestrial forest.
    Of course I never came close to real deception. Of course I knew it was only a pretence which must end when, inescapably, I must come out the forest’s other side and see no valley-bottom but just the relentless plunging Slope. Yet temporary illusion helped me. Mighty, planetary nostalgia put more recent grief into perspective. 
    A band of hunters of which she might be one, came briefly within view. I trained my binoculars on the group, and as I tried to hold the glasses steady I thought to glimpse her features.  Heather darling, my heart called, and I almost actually convinced myself that she had gazed in my direction for a moment while they descended past us.  But there was no suspenseful thought in me, nothing on the lines of “will Heather change her mind at the last moment?” – and no “will I change my mind” either.
    My companions and I are doing something too big to fit into a mainstream life. We’re off to find the edge of the world.
    Cora, who had her binoculars out too, said, “It makes me mad that she did not even say goodbye.”
    “Don’t say that,” I pleaded; “let’s not make it personal, eh? And anyhow, we didn’t say goodbye to her, either.”
    Rida said, “And silence can be a respectful message.”
    I meanwhile struggled in an effort to see deeper into Heather’s motives. “Remember that she cast doubt on the Slant; maybe she felt it was about to cease to work for her; that it would snap if she strained it any more. In which case she’d need to drop out of the journey, and make what home she can in this district.” 
    “True enough, I dare say,” said Cora.
    “On the other hand,” I began...and then I said, “Oh, hell.”
    “Federal Writers’ Project,” laughed Vic (Cora and Rida looked blank).
    “No, no, I’m not going down that road,” I said. “But you know what? Heather decided not to accompany us any further because she is not sufficiently nuts. She simply wasn’t crazy enough.”
    Vic looked into my face closely, to see if my own resolution wobbled likewise. “After-effects of Plim,” he diagnosed.
    “Maybe,” I said.
    But then it all hit me with hugely convincing force.
    The stupid things people do! The lives thrown away for the silly bright daubs and tinkly tunes of ambition! The pretenders to thrones, the Conradins and Warbecks, the Man in the Iron Mask who was offered the chance of freedom and swapped it for the extremely low-probability chance of supplanting King Louis; the obscurer folk who suffered torture as well as execution for the sake of the mere excitement of riding on the coat-tails of someone trying to grab a crown... all those old tales, and now look at us, Vic and Cora and Rida and me, tipping ourselves towards the void, for what? Glory? Good question, eh?
    What was Vic saying now? – I tried to concentrate – it was dry, boring stuff, on the lines of, we ought to push on and let the Plimian episode recede behind us. Hours had passed, we were still in the Nasnoon Walaf, and Vic thought I was still mooning about Heather.
    “Her decision to stop,” I interrupted him, “hasn’t upset me like you think, it wasn’t a personal rejection; you misunderstood me if you think I was taking it that way. It’s more a matter of... a warning.”
    “A warning from someone who knows even less than we do?”
    “Oh, very well, you’ve made your point.” 
    Light increased down-Slope, full daylight seeping through the thinning ranks of trees as we at last approached the forest’s further edge. 
    Minutes later we descended through the actual boundary, and we were out in the open once more. 
    A great sense of an end and a beginning, of a curtain of finality dropped behind us, cleared my mind. I sensed the great gulf which must separate Heather’s kind of destiny from mine. As we stared into the southern blue, and eyed the crinkled, scrubby sagorizon, I found the words I had not found before, and my companions had the tolerance to hear me out.
    “You know that Federal Writers’ Project...” I began.
    “Yes,” said Vic (and for the benefit of Rida and Cora, he added, “New Deal agency – subsidizing writers”).
    “Well, it must have been a great idea,” I went on. “Pure gain. Gain for the authors, who could benefit from being hired to write. Gain for readers ever since then, who can appreciate the guidebooks the authors wrote, illuminating the America of that period in that unique way. But suppose the F.W.P. had been differently run. Suppose, in order to obtain the paper to print the guidebooks, it had insisted that fiction magazines be pulped, so that more guidebooks meant fewer stories? Do you see what I’m getting at?
    “No,” said Cora.
    Rida said: “You are making a point about the Plimian plays?”
    “But their plays are all stories,” said Cora. “So, using your analogy, what are the guide-books?”
    “No, no,” I said, “their plays are the guidebooks, just guides to society.”
    Vic wore one of his knowing smiles.
    “Whereas we, the science-fictioneers,” he said, “are the real stories. So, Duncan, old lad, that’s why you just turned down your last chance to be mainstream.”
    “I think I’ve said before,” I remarked, “that I’d rather bite off more than I can chew, than be forever chewing more than I’d bitten off.”
    Cora said with a wry face, “Better boggled than bored.”
    Rida had his arms round her. “We all had it in us to be a great hit in Plim – but instead we have decided in favour of adventure. All right?”
    “All right,” she agreed.

                                                    *

On a steepening Slope, you cannot avoid the law: “descent brings adventure”. It cannot be avoided even if one faces no other enemy than the gradient itself. During the next fifty days, the next thousand miles, the surface we trod became less and less like ground and more and more like wall as its tilt increased from sixty to seventy-five degrees, a one-way increase with no reversal, accentuating the experience which no one on Earth, or anywhere in Earth’s universe, can ever have: to look down and see blue sky. Down, really down, into an empty blue, our eyes, followed by our stumbling belief, were drawn, not quite straight down, not just yet, we still had surface to tread, but tilted so far that we were compelled already to imagine ourselves at the point where (after another thousand miles) the infinite gulf would be open directly beneath us. Then indeed would ‘ground’ be vertical cliff. Then, life would be reduced to a clinging to that cliff. Cling, or else let go and fall forever. Fall breathing and alive, not into that outer space where your familiar Earth floated, but, instead, down, down, down into an airy blue where death would not come from asphyxiation; death would come, instead, from never-ending time in which to starve... 
    Already, bodies did fall past us. Goats or sheep that had lost their footing or died naturally, toppled routinely down the flank of the world. Human remains were rarer, but at least once I saw something suggestive of a human body, abraded to a stringy mass of floppy bones and tendons and dried blood that bounced and spun out of sight. Probably it didn’t get very far beyond my range of vision before it wedged itself somewhere, yet my imagination could not help but anticipate that in still lower latitudes, a few weeks later on, people who made the big mistake could look forward to a much longer fall before friction wore their remains to a nubbin; and eventually (again and again my thoughts returned to this), eventually that point would come at which, when you slipped, nothing would stop you. 
    It may seem morbid, this concentration on the gravitational threat. Actually, it was a good sign, as good as a continuing heartbeat. It ment that I was in working order: I could conceive of a fall to infinity without suffering an attack of terror. Yes. Slant switched on, fully operative!
    Otherwise I would be gibbering.

                                                   *

During the previous thousand miles of our descent, during that increase from sixty degrees towards seventy-five, the territory we crossed had been mostly wild. It continued that way, with minor exceptions. Very occasionally we came across lonely communities of “cliff-men” who lived perched on the lips of caves which holed the almost upright face of the world. These natives of nether Slantland had lovingly altered tiny patches of their environment. Some of them had built steps – the gradient was too extreme, in my opinion, for very useful steps, but they may have had artistic or cultural significance. Once we saw a party of rock-chippers actually on the job. They were attacking the Slope with metal tools, and we greeted them with raised hand. A few of that bunch greeted us in turn, though most of them shrank back as we descended past them in our gliding lopes.
    When we had gone a bit further, I did a double-take and said, “Hey, those folk were chipping the Wayline. Could that be it, do you think?”
    “Could be,” said Rida seriously.
    “You never know,” said Vic with a kind of determined lightness, and then firmed his mouth and looked away. 
    I got the message: drop the question. In earlier weeks we might have felt inclined to stop and find out about the Wayline-chippers. But after our experiences at Tokropol and Plim, we shouldn’t even discuss it. Experience had taught us that the cultural brews in the steeper niches were to be avoided. 
    Cora, further away in line, had gleaned what our conversation was about and she called out, “We don’t need to know.”
    Vic summed up, “To hob-nob with them would risk swapping our cosmopolitan Slant for a local one. Gets us stuck. Not worth it.” 
    I found that I agreed. Quietly my impulse to argue died away. Investigation, at the risk of adaptation, was a mug’s game.
    Yes, it’s all very well to say, “Adapt or die”, but, mentally, if you leave yourself wide open along the way down to Udrem, you may adapt and die, your identity out-argued by native varieties of common-sense, which can get powerfully peculiar in an extreme environment.
    And so it became clear that Plim had been, for us, the last ledge – our last cultural halt in Slantland.
    I thought back to Heather’s involvement with the drama group at Plim. “Hey, something clicked just then!” I said.
    Rida darted a puzzled look round about, but Vic put him right: “He means in his head.” 
    “I mean,” I explained, “I found the word I’ve been looking for, for the whatsits that swirl around Plim. The word is issue. Heather sank into an issue.” 
    “An ‘ishoo’?” smiled Vic, and when I looked blank he said, “Sorry, before your time – a politician, Tony Benn, a leftie but –” (a cautious glance around) “capable of thought, who won some respect from people of different views because of his fondness for the ishoos.”
    Cora heard him, despite his lowered voice, and said, “Well, forget about all that. We won’t find any of them where we’re going.”
    Indeed not. I gazed down towards the bottomless unknown, in mingled awe, fear and a kind of cleansing relief that never again need we grub around in a mainstream ishoo.

                                                *

It was as outsiders, then, that we appreciated the rare flights of steps we saw carved out of the Wayline. We recorded in our expedition’s log, but made no move to investigate, the apparent fact that the zero line of longitude appeared to have recovered its significance for natives of this extreme southern latitude. Spiritual significance, it might be, or economic, or else purely an artistic labour of love. Mysteries on a par with Stonehenge, the Easter Island statues or the Nazca Lines, were possibly being sculpted before our eyes – but the structures were of no use to us. Higher up the world, they would have been of practical value, but down here our boots needed no step on which to alight as they touched ground between one hopping leap and the next. With extra ploons reducing our weight by 80-85 per cent, we loped too lightly and too fast to care much about the shape of the terrain. 
    Likewise our giant inchworm-decapods humped along at speed, with a reckless ease that flowed past most obstacles, though (unlike us) the creatures never needed support by balloons, for they were bred to this type of country. Their feet had gradually changed shape with the increase in Slope, growing into combination claws and suction-cups to grip the tilted ground. All ten limbs were now used, including the front two small ones.
    Apart from the artificial steps which we passed now and then, we came across some areas of cultivated slope even in this close-to-vertical land. Fantastically terraced orchards of shrub, or more shaggy stretches of monoculture, almost like fields of unkempt moss, we passed without touching – we were careful not to touch. We did not need to rob anybody’s orchard; wild plants and small game served our needs. Cora and Rida were good pistol shots. We coped. 
    We even coped with the ever-present knowledge that this tolerable situation could not last. In a steady mood, of complete acceptance of what lay ahead, we leaned into it at twenty miles a day, incapable of doubts. Our descent was a settled issue. For the time being, it had become a way of life. We were so bound up with our sense of self as explorers, that there really was no point even in thinking about retreat.
    Inertia, therefore, slid us into that twenty-miles-a-day groove, steadily closer to Udrem. I can speak for myself, anyway: I was clear-headed enough but not fully “with it”. The Slant kept me on its peculiar mental autopilot. I suppose we were all the same in this. We hardly conversed. We took each other’s company for granted, with a deep familial trust and yet a lack of mutual concern. Stripped-down emotions, sufficiently akin to how most of us go through life anyway, prevented me from being suspicious of our somewhat zombie-like behaviour.
    This “zombie period” lasted until the day when we noticed that all four of our decapods were making odd twitching motions with their heads. 
    Vic broke the silence with a practical comment.
    “It’s the packs. We must adjust them.” 
    The gradient, now well over seventy-five degrees, was so extreme that our luggage was slipping towards the creatures’ necks. No wonder that we could see signs of distress in their movements. We halted and unpacked extra straps to bind the loads with more care. I was in a shivery sweat as I worked at this, for I had caught the ‘bump’ inside me as The Slant clicked to another setting. We must bid goodbye to the last shred of a claim that we were on a “slope” in the normal sense at all. It was time to admit, openly, that we were climbing down a wall. A wall with nothing beneath.
    This forced me to wake up. I had to speak out loud, to say something good, to link our crazy selves with duty and honour, to make it worthwhile. I uttered a name that had not passed my lips for a long while.
    “I wonder, I wonder, about Elaine and the other prisoners; where are they now; what has happened to them…”
    Vic replied, “The prisoners? It’s way too late for the prisoners; we’ll never find them now, and even if we did, what could we do for them? But we can reconnoitre Udrem. Yes, that’s what we must do. We can bring back information that may help prevent other prisoners being taken in the future.”
    “Bring back?” I murmured. 
    The North towered impossible in my mind. The planetary wall at my back – did I really imagine I could return home by climbing that? Was it seriously possible to hope that we would ever get home?
    Vic gestured at something that sprouted out from the surface of Yeyld a few yards off. It was a tuft of flame-red buoyancy plants, beautiful to look at as they tossed in the wind, and they inspired me to reflect upon their aptness and power. I then blinked and took in a larger chunk of vertical scenery and saw that below and to either side of us the world’s cliff was daubed with both red and yellow areas extending for a huge distance, a blaze of colour wide as a prairie, which finally merged into an orange haze.
    Plenty of ploons...
    We actually might get back home! It would be no problem to increase our supply of the buoyancy bladders; such a great number of these plants possessed them, that we could affix extra ones to our packs to such a degree that we’d be able to climb with scarcely more effort than the trouble of moving our limbs. 
    Given time and given the will, and assuming that we survived our mission first – 
    I shook my head. 
    “Bring back information, you said, Uncle.”
    “Yes. Fulfil our mission, then go home.”
    I repeated, “Bring back info... from an enemy that is probably numbered in the millions?”
    “They won’t be expecting us,” Vic asserted, a bit grumpily, as though he thought me a spoil-sport for shifting our thoughts to the Gonomong.
    Cora had overheard again. “We’ll do it,” she broke in. “Won’t we, Rida?”
    The lean scientist said, “It is too early to imagine the details, but yes, we shall plan it near the time.”

                                                *

...Forward some more weeks, and the surface of the world is now as close as makes no difference from vertical. Our descent has been much slowed, for, light as we are, we have to take considerable care lest we drift sideways with the wind, snag our balloon-strings and perhaps snap them, with results we do not care to think about. So like Earthly rock-climbers, every single moment we must make sure that we have something to hold. No more moonwalk-style hopping.
    One method we adopt for our descent, distantly akin to normal mountaineering, is to turn our tummies towards planet Kroth and grasp one tuft of vegetation after another as we make our way down the endless precipice which the ground has become. The other, faster option is to go back to using the decapods. Like we did in the days when we were “strap-hanging”, we descend alongside the creatures, holding onto them, but now a better term would be “strap-dangling”, as the world is now so steep that we simply hang from their flanks as they “inch” (or rather yard) downwards. Whenever the in-out, in-out pendulous swaying above the void threatens to nauseate us, we go back to our much slower “mountaineering”.
    Neither of these methods of locomotion is as relaxed and dreamy as the old “moonwalk” style. My thoughts become grimmer as every minute we sink closer to the Gonomong realm.
    We haven’t seen the enemy for months, but our holiday from the topic is now over. Questions escape from our mouths and bounce back and forth in discussion and get swallowed again and re-chewed, as much as the Plimians ever chewed over any theme in their plays, but with this difference between us and the Plimians, that we intend to get somewhere... we’re not just shuffling ‘ishoos’...

                                                  *

It happened during a period when we were “mountaineering” downwards, that I noticed, in the dim distance below my boots, some few dozen flying dots, very slow, wheeling in the blue.
    Hours later they were identifiable as enormous birds, condors or larger, and my memory darted back to the airborne Gonomong troops who had outflanked us on the Vallum, that day half a year ago, an age ago it seemed, when we almost lost the Battle of Neydio. I listened and began to imagine that I could hear the birds’ ice-sharp cries. 
    But the sight made no difference. We continued our downward climb at the same speed as before. 
    During our rest intervals we aimed our binoculars and once or twice I was fleetingly successful in catching a winged shape in my field of view. I thought that they might indeed be the same kind of birds as those I had seen in the battle. 
    Some of them might even be the very same individual man-carrying birds which the enemy had used against us on that day. I saw no reason why all or even most of them need have been killed in the battle, nor had I seen them afterwards, so why should they not have simply escaped control and flown back down to their homeland?
    I next became aware that a thin, faint, grey-blue line had become visible in the hazy void below my boots.
    I cleared my throat and thought about what to say, but Rida beat me to it.
    “Halt!” he shouted.
    Vic and Cora ceased in the middle of some futile exchange of remarks about what precautions we ought to take at this stage. A hush fell, as we all became aware that the enemy’s habitat had at last come in sight. 
    Meanwhile my ears unmistakably picked up the distant inhuman cries, the independence of those wheeling birds. They were free, and we could be free, too, free to take the opportunity we weren’t going to take.
    Free to go back. 
    During those precious moments of choice we halted, we pondered the thin smudge which lined the sagorizon – at the limit of vision – which we knew must be the dark belt that girds Kroth’s waist: the equatorial jungle of Udrem.
    Then we went on down.

>>  5: Udrem