Ah yes. Now these are the Wanderers who didn’t make it, back at their camp outside. At least they’ve all got something to eat now, and some new clothes and blankets. And the kids are up on the walls until all hours calling down questions to them.
“What town did you come from then?”
“How come you gave up so quickly?”
“How did you get that bandaged arm?”
Look at their moothai tucking into that pile of cabbages!
And here is Karl on the wall, look. He’s asking them questions about what it’s like on the plain. Now that the excitement of the run is over it’s all become a bit more real for him. He really wants some answers.
The Wanderers are telling him it’s absolutely brilliant, and how they have been into dozens of Motherhouses and been with scores of Mothers – and how they just didn’t really feel like it this time or they would have completed the run with ease. Formara’s nothing, apparently, compared to some of the towns they’ve been to. Formara is an absolute breeze.
But look at Karl’s face. What’s going on behind those narrowed eyes?
Does anyone need another drink? Lydia, could you do the honours?
Yes, now this is a few months later. A couple more groups of Wanderers have been and gone including one group that was judged too large to safely let inside the walls. And now it’s the ceremony which they call the Tukanza. The Division.
You can see this is the Motherhouse again, but the flags are black and white this time. And here are the pubescent boys and girls going in wearing their black and white Tukanza robes. We weren’t allowed inside, sadly, and people were rather vague about what went on. Actually I think the huthi honestly don’t know much about it. They don’t even seem to care. As far as they are concerned, the Tukanza is just a little quirk of the merthi and the manahi. Ordinary People have better things to do with their time!
Here are Karl and Kara going in. Don’t they look tense? And small too, under that great towering wall of the Motherhouse.
Kara told me later that at least she would be able to be with her mother now.
Here are some more kids going in. You can see their foster-parents anxiously wishing them luck. Then the door closes.
I waited outside. It’s a nice spot. This is the view over the plain. Even from the foot of the Motherhouse there’s a good view in several directions. It must be wonderful from the top. And look at the balloons from the bowava trees. The wet season has been and gone and the sky is starting to fill up with them. Wanderers, the Apiranians often call them, merthi, just like the men. Have I mentioned that already?
Yes, it is bleak out there on the plain. Bleak and windy and dry.
Now, here they are coming out again. Haven’t they changed? Kara has been told that in another month she’ll be moving in there. And when that happens, Karl and the other boys of his age will be turned out onto the plain with a mootha or two and some provisions, and an exhortation to respect all Mothers and never besmirch the reputation of Formara, though they are never ever to return there.
Look at the strain in their faces. The others are crowding around them trying to make a fuss of them but Karl and Kara are far, far away. Another month and they’ll have to say goodbye to each other and never meet again.
What’s this? Oh it’s that mouse on the gear wheel just before… (Why did you take that picture Lydia, for goodness sake?)
Now look at these balloons. It’s an Apiranian custom after the Tukanza. Bunnoo and Thrompin gathered them from a bowava tree (not an easy thing to do!) and they gave them to Karl and Kara to release them from the square in front of the Motherhouse.
Here they are look, Karl and Kara releasing them one by one, while all the others watch and cheer. Look at their balloons going up into the sky, to join all the others that are blowing past.
Look: a couple quite low and then three more – can you see them? – high, high up among the clouds.
More drinks anyone? Are you hungry? Would you like anything else to eat?
We’ve got some pictures from our trip to Pazzazza up in the Pleiades that we haven’t shown you.
Now that was something really special.
Piccadilly Circus
Clarissa Fall is heading for central London to see the lights, bumping along the potholed roads at five miles an hour in her electric invalid car, oblivious to the honking horns, the cars queuing behind her, the angry shouts. How many times has she been warned? How many times has she been humiliated? But she must see the lights.
“When I was a little girl there were still physical lights in Piccadilly Circus,” she’s telling everyone she can. “I remember my father taking me. They were the most wonderful thing I’d ever seen.”
She’d always been odd. There was that business when she cut holes in the wildlife fence to let the animals into the city. There were those young consensual tearaways she used to insist on bringing home. But things really started getting bad when her husband Terence died, leaving her alone in that big old house by the perimeter, that big fake chateau with its empty fountains and those icy lights that lit it up at night like Dracula’s castle. I suppose it was loneliness, though when Terence was alive he and Clarissa never seemed to do anything but fight.
“I am two hundred years old, you know,” she kept saying now. “I am the very last physical human being in London.”
Neither of these was true, of course, but she was certainly very old and it was certainly the case that she could go for days and even weeks without seeing another physical person. There really weren’t many of us left by now and most of us had congregated for mutual support in a couple of clusters in the South London suburbs. No one lived within five miles of Clarissa’s phoney chateau on the northern perimeter and no one was much inclined to go and see her. She’d always been histrionic, now she was downright crazy. What’s more – and most of us found this particularly unforgivable – she drew unwelcome attention onto us physicals, not only from the consensuals, who already dislike us and call us ‘Outsiders’ and ‘spooks’, but also from the hidden authorities in the Hub.
Her trouble was that she didn’t really feel at home in either world, physical or consensual. The stiff arthritic dignity of the physicals repelled her. She thought us stuffy and smug and she despised our assumption that our own experience was uniquely authentic and true.
“Would you rather the world itself ended than admit the possibility that there may be other kinds of life apart from ours?” she once demanded.
But really, although she always insisted to us that it wasn’t so, she was equally disgusted by the superficiality of the consensuals, their uncritical willingness to accept as real whatever the Hub chose to serve up, their lack of curiosity, their wilful ignorance of where they came from or what they really were. While she might criticise us physicals, she never seriously considered the possibility of giving up her own physical being and joining the consensuals with their constructed virtual bodies. And this meant that she would still always be an Outsider to them.
She may have felt at home with no one but she became a nuisance to everyone – physical and consensual – as a result of her forays into the city. At first she went on foot. Then, when she became too frail, she got hold of that little invalid car, a vehicle which the consensuals of North London would soon come to know and hate. Bumping slowly along the crumbling physical roads she would switch off her Field implant so as not to be deceived by the smooth virtual surface, but this meant that she couldn’t see or hear the consensual traffic going by either. She could see only the empty buildings and the cracked and pockmarked empty road. Consensual drivers just had to cope as best they could with her wanderings back and forth.