The Seeds of Time by John Wyndham Read Free Book Online Page B

he asked.
    The light was growing poor. He covered the fire with a stone and began to pack up his tools. Annika said:
    ‘Why don’t you stay here with us, Earthman? It’s time for you to rest.’
    He looked up at her in astonishment, and started to shake his head automatically, without consideration. He had planted it in his mind that he was a wanderer, and he had no wish to examine the strength of the setting. But Annika went on:
    ‘You could help a lot here,’ she said. ‘You find things easy that are difficult for us. You are strong – with the strength of two of our men.’ She looked beyond the ruin at the neat small fields. ‘This is a good place. With your help it could be better. There could be more fields and more stock. You like us, don’t you?’
    He sat looking into the twilight, so still that an inquisitive bannikuk climbed up to explore his pocket. He brushed the little creature away.
    ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’ve always liked coming here, but …’
    ‘But what, Earthman?’
    ‘That’s just it – “Earthman”. I don’t belong here with you. I don’t belong anywhere. So I just keep visiting, and moving on.’
    ‘You could belong here – if you would. If Earth were re-created now, it would be stranger to you than Mars.’
    That
he could not believe. He shook his head.
    ‘You feel it would be disloyal to think that – but I fancy it is true, nevertheless,’ Annika said.
    ‘It can’t be.’ He shook his head again. ‘Anyway, what does it matter?’
    ‘It matters this much,’ Annika told him, ‘that you are on the verge of finding out that life is not something which can be stopped just because you don’t like it. You are not apart from life: you are a part of it.’
    ‘What has all that to do with it?’ Bert asked.
    ‘Just that mere existence is not enough. One exists by barter. One lives by giving – and taking.’
    ‘I see,’ said Bert, but doubtfully.
    ‘I don’t think you do – yet. But it would be better for you to, and better for us, if you were to stay. And there is Zaylo.’
    ‘Zaylo?’ Bert repeated, wonderingly.
III
    Zaylo came to the bank while he was repairing the wheel the next morning. She settled down a few feet away on the slope, and sat with her chin on her knees watching. He looked up and their eyes met. Something entirely unexpected happened to Bert. Yesterday he had seen her as a child grown up, today it was different. There was a pain in his chest and a hammering, the skin on his temples felt oddly tight, his hand trembled so that he almost dropped the bar he was holding. He leaned back against the wheel, staring at her but unable to speak. A long time seemed to pass before he could say anything, and the words sounded clumsy in his own ears.
    What they talked about he could never afterwards remember. He could only recall the sight of her. Her expression, the depth of her dark eyes, the gentle movements of her mouth, the way the sun shone on her skin as though there were a mist over polished copper, the lovely line of her breasts, the slim feet in the sand
beneath the brightly patterned skirt. There were a host of things he had never noticed before; the modelling of her ears, the way her hair grew, and the ingenuity of coils which could be held firmly on top of her head by the three silver pins, the slenderness of her hands and fingers, the pearled translucence of her teeth, and on through a catalogue of wonders hitherto incredibly unobserved.
    It was a day of which Bert recalled very little else but that there seemed to be sections of him being torn slowly and painfully apart, yet still so close that sometimes he looked out from one section, and sometimes from the other. He would see himself in his boat, sliding along the endless canals in the sunlight with vastnesses of desert stretching out on either side, sitting out the sudden dust-storms in his small cabin where the throat-drying sand managed still to penetrate every ingenuity, and then going on as