The Snail on the Slope Read online

  Then Nava silently emerged from the reeds. She crouched next to him and also began to eat, quickly and neatly. Her eyes were very wide.

  “It’s a good thing that we ate here,” she said finally. “Do you want to see what kind of lake it is? Because I want to see it one more time, but I’m scared to go alone. It’s that same lake Crookleg always talks about, I thought he was making it up, I did, or that he imagined it, and it turns out it was true, unless maybe I imagined it myself . . .”

  “Let’s go take a look,” Candide said.

  The lake turned out to be about fifty yards away. Candide and Nava followed the muddy ditch and pushed the reeds out of the way. There was a thick layer of white fog over the water. The water was warm, maybe even hot, but it was pure and clear. It smelled of food. The fog was slowly undulating to a regular beat, and in a minute, Candide felt his head spin. There was somebody in the fog. People. Lots of people. They were all naked and lying completely motionless on top of the water. The fog was rhythmically rising and falling, first revealing then hiding the yellowish-white bodies with their heads thrown back—the people weren’t swimming, they were lying on top of the water, like on a beach. Candide shuddered. “Let’s go,” he whispered, grabbing Nava’s hand and dragging her away. They climbed back up and came back to the trail.

  “They aren’t drowned,” said Nava. “Crookleg got it wrong, he did, they were just swimming here, then a hot spring hit, and they all got cooked . . . It’s very terrible, Silent Man,” she said after a pause. “I don’t even want to talk about it . . . And there are so many of them, a whole village’s worth . . .”

  They came to the fork and stopped.

  “Do we go uphill?” asked Nava.

  “Yes,” Candide said. “We go uphill.”

  They turned right and started to climb up the slope.

  “And they were all women,” said Nava. “Did you notice?”

  “Yes,” Candide said.

  “That’s the most terrible thing, that’s the thing I just can’t understand. Or maybe . . .” Nava looked at Candide. “Or maybe it’s the deadlings, they are the ones who drive them there. The deadlings probably drive them to this lake, then they cook them . . . Listen, Silent Man, why in the world did we leave the village? If we just sat tight in the village, we’d have never seen all this. We’d have thought that Crookleg made it all up, we’d have lived in peace, but no, you really had to go to the City . . . What did you have to go to the City for?”

  “I don’t know,” said Candide.

  8.

  CANDIDE

  They were lying in the bushes at the edge of the grove and watching the top of the hill through the leaves. The hill sloped gently, and it was bare except for a cloud of lilac fog that capped its peak. It was out in the open, a gusty wind was blowing and chasing gray clouds across the sky, and there was a drizzle of rain. The lilac fog was motionless, as if there were no wind at all. It was rather chilly, even cold, they had gotten soaked, they were shivering and cringing from the cold, their teeth were chattering, but they could no longer leave: there were three deadlings standing twenty yards away, as upright as statues, their black mouths wide open, and they were also watching the top of the hill with their empty eyes. The deadlings had gotten there about five minutes ago. Nava had sensed them and had been about to bolt, but Candide had clamped a hand over her mouth and pressed her into the grass. She was now a bit calmer: she was still shaking hard, but it was from the cold and not out of fear, and she was again watching the hill instead of the deadlings.

  There were strange, awe-inspiring tides rising and falling on and around the hill. Enormous swarms of flies would suddenly emerge from the forest with a deep, resonant hum, rush to the top of the hill, and disappear into the fog. The sides of the hill would come alive with columns of ants and spiders; hundreds of slug-amoebas would pour out of the bushes; clouds of colorful beetles and vast numbers of wasps and bees would race confidently through the rain. The wave would ascend to the top of the hill, get sucked into the lilac cloud, and disappear, and there would suddenly be silence. The hill would again become dead and bare, then some time would go by, there would again be a loud rumble, and it would all get expelled from the fog and swoop toward the forest. Only the slugs never came out, but in their place, the most bizarre and unexpected animals streamed down the sides of the hill: rolling hairpuffs, clumsy armeaters staggering along on their fragile legs, and also some creatures he’d never seen before—colorful, many-eyed, naked, and shiny, not obviously insect or mammal . . . And there would again be silence, and then everything would start all over again, and then again and again, at a terrifyingly intense tempo, with an apparently endless energy, which made it seem like this would continue forever, at the same tempo and with the same kind of energy . . . A young hippocetus once clambered out of the fog with a terrible roar, and a number of times, deadlings ran out and immediately rushed into the forest, leaving white trails of cooling steam behind them. And the motionless lilac cloud continued devouring and regurgitating, devouring and regurgitating, regularly and relentlessly, like a machine.

  Crookleg said that the City stands on a hill. Maybe this is the City—maybe this is what they call the City. Yes, this is probably the City. But what does it mean? What is it for? And this strange tumult . . . I expected something like this . . . Nonsense, I didn’t expect anything like this. I had only thought about the masters, and where are they here? Candide looked over at the deadlings. Maybe I was wrong, thought Candide. Maybe they are actually the masters. I’m probably always wrong. I’ve completely forgotten how to think in this place. If any thoughts ever do occur to me, then it immediately turns out that I’m incapable of connecting them . . .

  Not a single slug has emerged from the fog. Question: why hasn’t a single slug emerged from the fog? . . . No, that’s the wrong question. First things first. What I’m looking for is the source of rational activity . . . Wrong, wrong again. I’m not the least bit interested in the source of rational activity. I’m just looking for someone who can help me get home. Someone who can help me cross seven hundred miles of forest. Someone who would at least tell me which way to go . . . The deadlings must have masters—I’m looking for those masters. I’m looking for the source of rational activity.

  He cheered up a bit: that sounded relatively coherent. Let’s start at the beginning. We’ll think it all through, slowly and carefully. Now is not the time to hurry; now is the time to think things through, slowly and carefully. The deadlings must have masters, because the deadlings aren’t people, and the deadlings aren’t animals. Therefore, someone must have made the deadlings. If they aren’t people . . . Actually, why aren’t they people? He rubbed his forehead. I’ve already worked this out. It was a long time ago, back in the village. In fact, I’ve worked it out twice, because the first time I forgot the solution, and this time I’ve forgotten the proof . . .

  He shook his head as hard as he could, and Nava very softly shushed him. He quieted down and lay still for a while, burying his face in the wet grass.

  I’ve already proven why they aren’t animals . . . The high temperature . . . Nonsense, that’s not it . . . He suddenly came to the horrifying realization that he didn’t even remember what deadlings looked like. All he could remember were their burning hot bodies and the sharp pain in his hands. He turned his head and looked at the deadlings. Well, then. I shouldn’t be thinking, I shouldn’t even be allowed to think, right when I’m supposed to be thinking harder than ever. Time to eat; I’ve already heard that story, Nava; we’re leaving the day after tomorrow, that’s about all I’m good for. But I did leave! And I’m here! And now I’m going to see the City. Whatever the City may be. My brain has become overgrown with forest. I don’t understand a thing . . .

  Got it. I was going to the City so they’d explain everything to me: the Surpassment, the deadlings, the Big Soil Loosening, the lakes full of drowned people. It turned out that none of it was true, it was all lies, it was all wrong, you can�
��t trust anyone . . . I was hoping that if I got to the City, they’d tell me how to get back to my people, since the old man always says the City knows all. And there’s no way it wouldn’t know about our biological research station, about the Administration. Even Crookleg constantly goes on about the Devil’s Cliffs and flying villages . . . But how can a lilac cloud explain anything? How awful it would be if it turned out that the lilac cloud is master here. Why am I saying it would be awful? It is awful! It does suggest itself, Silent Man: the lilac fog is master everywhere here, remember? And it’s not really fog at all . . .

  So that’s what it is, that’s why people have been herded into the bush and into the swamps like animals, why they’ve been drowned in lakes; they were too weak, they didn’t get it, and even if someone did get it, they couldn’t do anything to stop it . . . Before I’d been herded, back when I was home, someone gave some very convincing proofs that contact between humanoid and nonhumanoid intelligences is impossible. Yes, it’s impossible. Of course it’s impossible. And now there’s no one to tell me how to get home . . . Contact between me and humans is also impossible, and I can prove it. Maybe I’ll figure out how to see the Devil’s Cliffs—it’s said that you can see them sometimes, if you climb the right tree in the right season, but you first you need to find the right tree, a proper, normal tree. One that doesn’t jump. And that doesn’t push you away. And that doesn’t try to poke you in the eye. And in any case, there doesn’t exist a tree that would allow me to see the biological research station . . . The biological research station? . . . The bi-o-log-i-cal re-search sta-tion . . . He forgot what a biological research station was.

  The forest began to hum, buzz, crackle, and sputter again, and vast numbers of flies and ants again rushed toward the lilac dome. One swarm passed over their heads, strewing the bushes with barely twitching weak insects and motionless dead ones, all of them banged up in the crush. Candide got an unpleasant burning feeling in his arm and glanced down. His elbow was partially buried in the loose soil, and delicate filaments of mycelium had twined themselves around it. Candide rubbed them away indifferently with the palm of his hand. The Devil’s Cliffs are just a mirage, he thought. They don’t exist. Since they tell stories about the Devil’s Cliffs, that means it’s all lies, that they don’t exist, and now I don’t even know what I actually came here for . . .

  He heard familiar fearsome snorting from the side. Candide turned his head. A full-grown hippocetus was staring dully at the hill, standing simultaneously behind seven different trees. One of the deadlings suddenly sprang to life, turned inside out, and took a few steps toward the hippocetus. There was more snorting, trees creaked, and the hippocetus went away. Even the hippocetuses are afraid of deadlings, thought Candide. Who isn’t afraid of them? How do I find the ones who aren’t afraid? . . . Flies are roaring. How silly, how absurd. Flies are roaring. Bees are roaring . . .

  “It’s my mom!” Nava suddenly whispered. “My mom is coming . . .”

  She had gotten up onto all fours and was looking over her shoulder. Her face expressed utter astonishment and disbelief. And Candide saw three women come out of the forest and head to the foot of the hill without noticing the deadlings.

  “Mom!” Nava screeched in a voice not her own, leaped over Candide, and bolted away to intercept them. Then Candide also jumped up, and it felt to him as if the deadlings were very close, as if he could feel the heat of their bodies.

  There are three of them, he thought. Three . . . One would be plenty. He was watching the deadlings. I’m done for, he thought. What a silly way to die. What did those biddies have to show up here for? Damn women, they always screw things up.

  The deadlings closed their mouths, and their heads were slowly rotating to follow Nava. Then they all stepped forward at the same time, and Candide forced himself to leap out of the bushes toward them.

  “Get back!” he yelled at the women, without turning around. “Go away! Deadlings!”

  The deadlings were huge, broad shouldered, brand new—there wasn’t a single scratch on them, not even a hangnail. Their impossibly long arms touched the grass. Without taking his eyes off them, Candide stopped and blocked their path. The deadlings were looking over his head, moving confidently and deliberately toward him, while he backed up, retreated, continuing to delay the inevitable beginning and the inevitable end, fighting nervous nausea, unable to bring himself to stop. Nava was screaming behind his back: “Mom! It’s me. Mom, over here!” Silly women, why don’t they run? Are they petrified with fear? . . . Stop, he told himself, stop right now! He couldn’t make himself stop. Nava is behind you, he thought. And those three idiots. Fat, sleepy, careless idiots . . . And Nava . . . What are they to me, anyway? he thought. Crookleg would have long since decamped on his one good leg, never mind Big Fist. Whereas I have to stop. It’s not fair. But I have to stop. Stop this instant! . . . He couldn’t make himself stop, and he despised himself for it, and he praised himself for it, and he hated himself for it, and he kept backing up.

  The deadlings were the ones who stopped. They stopped instantly, as though responding to a command. The one walking in front froze with its foot in the air, then slowly, as if indecisively, lowered it to the ground. Candide, continuing to back up, glanced over his shoulder. Nava was hanging on a woman’s neck, her legs were thrashing in the air, and the woman seemed to be smiling and patting her on the back. The other two women stood calmly nearby, watching them. They weren’t looking at the deadlings or at the hill. They weren’t even looking at Candide—a strange, unshaven man who might be a thief . . . Meanwhile, the deadlings were standing very still, like ancient, primitive statues, as if they’d become rooted to the ground, as if there were no women left in the forest for them to grab and haul off wherever they’d been ordered to, and pillars of steam were rising from beneath their feet, like smoke from a sacrificial fire.

  Then Candide turned around and walked toward the women. No, he plodded rather than walked, no longer believing his eyes, his ears, or his thoughts. An aching, tangled mass pulsed beneath his skull, and his whole body hurt from the strain of his brush with death.

  “Run,” he said from afar. “Run away before it’s too late, what are you waiting for?” He was already aware that this was gibberish, but the inertia of duty carried him along, and he kept muttering mechanically, “There are deadlings here, run, I’ll slow them down . . .”

  They paid no attention to him. It wasn’t that they didn’t hear him or see him—a young woman who was at most two years older than Nava, her legs still thin and coltish, looked him over and gave him a very friendly smile—but he didn’t matter to them at all; it was as if he were a big stray dog, the kind that roam all over for no particular reason and are happy to hang around people for hours, waiting for God knows what.

  “Why aren’t you running away?” Candide said quietly. He no longer expected an answer, and he didn’t get one.

  “Tsk, tsk, tsk . . .” the third woman was saying, laughing and shaking her head. She was pregnant. “Who would have thought it? Would you have thought it?” she asked the younger one. “I wouldn’t have either. My dear,” she said to Nava’s mother, “and how was it? Did he pant a lot? Or did he just writhe and sweat like a pig?”

  “You’re wrong,” said the young woman. “He was gorgeous, wasn’t he? He was fresh as the dawn, and he smelled like flowers . . .”

  “Like a lily,” the pregnant one echoed. “His aroma made your head spin, and the touch of his paws sent shivers up your spine . . . Did you have time to say ‘Oh!’?”

  The young woman tittered. Nava’s mother was smiling reluctantly. They were well fed, healthy, strangely clean, as if they had just bathed—they really had just bathed: the short hair on all of their heads was wet, and their baggy yellow clothes clung to their wet bodies. Nava’s mother was the shortest and seemed to be the oldest. Nava was hugging her around the waist and pressing her face into her mother’s chest.

  “Shows what you know,” said Nava’s mo
ther with forced disdain. “You don’t know a thing about it. Just a pair of ignoramuses, you two.”

  “That’s all right,” the pregnant woman said instantly. “How could we know about it? That’s why we’re asking you . . . Tell us, please—what was the root of love like?”

  “Was it bitter?” asked the young woman, and tittered again.

  “Exactly!” said the pregnant one. “The fruit is rather sweet, if unwashed . . .”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll wash it,” said Nava’s mother. “Do you know if they’ve cleaned the Spider Pool? Or will we have to carry her into the valley?”

  “The root was bitter,” the pregnant woman told the younger one. “She doesn’t like to think about it. How odd—and they say it’s unforgettable! Listen, my dear, don’t you dream about him?”

  “It’s not funny,” said Nava’s mother. “It’s nauseating.”

  “Are we trying to be funny?” said the pregnant one, wide-eyed. “We’re merely curious.”

  “What a fascinating story,” said the young woman, flashing her teeth. “Do tell us more . . .”

  Candide listened eagerly, trying to discover the hidden meaning of this conversation, but he couldn’t understand a thing. He just saw that the two women were making fun of Nava’s mother, that they had gotten under her skin, that she was trying to hide it or change the subject, and that she wasn’t having any luck. Nava had lifted her head and was closely watching the conversation, shifting her gaze between the participants.

  “You’d think that you were born in the lake,” Nava’s mother said to the pregnant woman with now frank irritation.

  “Of course not,” she said. “But I never had the opportunity to become so broadly educated, and my daughter”—she patted her stomach—“will be born in the lake. That’s the difference.”

  “Why don’t you leave my mom alone, you fat hag?” Nava said suddenly. “Take a look at yourself, the state of you, before you pester people! Just you wait, I’ll tell my husband, he’ll take a stick to your fat ass, then you’ll leave us alone! . . .”