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THE BURNING WORLD

by J.G. Ballard

Published by arrangement with the author's agent

BERKLEY MEDALLION EDITION, AUGUST, 1964

BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOKS are published by

Berkley Publishing Corporation

15 East 26th Street, New York, N. Y. 10010

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

PART I

1 The Draining Lake 7

2 The Coming of the Desert 21

3 The Fire Sermon 33

4 The Drowned Aquarium 44

5 The Burning Altar 60

6 Journey to the Coast 68

7 The Bitter Sea 78

PART II

8 Dune Limbo 93

9 The Stranded Neptune 106

10 The Sign of the Crab 113

PART III

11 The Illuminated River 122

12 The Smoke Fires 131

13 The Oasis 140

14 The White Lions 150

15 "Jours de Lenteur"

158

PART I

Chapter 1 -- The Draining Lake

At noon, when Dr. Charles Ransom moored his houseboat in the entrance to

the river, he saw Quilter, the idiot-son of the old woman who lived in the

ramshackle barge outside the yacht basin, standing on a spur of exposed rock

on the opposite bank and smiling at the dead birds floating in the water below

his feet. The reflection of his swollen head swam like a deformed nimbus among

the limp plumage. The caking mudbank was speckled with pieces of paper and

driftwood, and to Ransom the dreamfaced figure of Quilter resembled a demented

faun strewing himself with leaves as he mourned for the lost spirit of the

river.

Ransom secured the bow and stern lines to the jetty, deciding that the

comparison was perhaps less than apt. Although Quilter spent as much time

watching the river as Ransom or anyone else, his motives would be typically

perverse. The continued fall of the river, sustained through the spring and

summer drought, gave him a kind of warped pleasure, even if he and his mother

had been the first to suffer. Their derelict barge--an eccentric gift from

Quilter's protector, Richard Foster Lomax, the architect who was Ransom's

neighbor--had now taken on a thirty-degree list, and a further fall of even a

foot in the level of the water would split its hull like a desiccated pumpkin.

Shielding his eyes from the sunlight, Ransom surveyed the silent banks

of the river as they wound westwards to the city of Mount Royal five miles

away. He had spent the previous week alone on what was left of Lake Constant,

sailing the houseboat among the draining creeks and mudflats as he waited for

the evacuation of the city to end. After the closure of the hospital at Mount

Royal he had intended to leave for the coast, but at the last moment decided

to give himself a few final days on the lake before it vanished for good. Now

and then, between the humps of damp mud, he had seen the distant span of the

motorbridge across the river, the windows of thousands of cars and trucks

flashing like jeweled lances as they set off along the coast road to the

south.

Ransom postponed his return until all movement along the bridge had

ended. By this time the lake, once a clear stretch of open water thirty miles

in length, had subsided into a series of small pools and channels, separated

by the banks of draining mud. A few last fishing craft sailed forlornly among

them, their crews standing silently in the bows.

By contrast, something about the slow transformation exhilarated Ransom.

As the wide sheets of water contracted, first into shallow lagoons and then

into a maze of narrow creeks, the wet dunes of the lakebed seemed to emerge

from another dimension. On the last morning he woke to find the houseboat

beached at the end of a small cove. The slopes of mud, covered with the bodies

of dead birds and fish, stretched above him like the shores of a dream.

As he approached the entrance to the river, steering the houseboat among

the stranded yachts and fishing boats, the lakeside town of Larchmont was

deserted. Along the fishermen's quays the boathouses were empty, and the

drying fish hung in the shadows from the lines of hooks. A few refuse fires

smouldered in the waterfront gardens, their smoke drifting past the open

windows that swung in the warm air. Nothing moved in the streets. Ransom had

assumed that a few people would remain behind, waiting until the main exodus

to the coast was over, but Quilter's presence, like his ambiguous smile, in

some way seemed an obscure omen, one of the many irrational signs that had

revealed the real progress of the drought during the confusion of the past

months.

A hundred yards to his right, beyond the concrete pillars of the

motorbridge, was the fuel depot, the wooden piles of the wharf clearly visible

above the cracked mud. The floating pier had touched bottom, and the flotilla

of fishing boats usually moored against it had moved off into the center of

the channel. Normally, at late summer, the river would have been almost three

hundred feet wide, but it was now less than half this, an evil-smelling creek

that wound its way along the flat gutter of the banks. The caking mud was firm

enough to support a man's weight, and a series of gangways led down to the

water's edge from the riverside villas.

Next to the fuel depot was the yacht basin, with the Quilters' barge

moored against its boom. After signing the vessel over to them at the depot,

Lomax had added a single gallon of diesel oil in a quixotic gesture of

generosity, barely enough fuel for the couple to navigate the fifty yards to

the basin. Refused entry, they had taken up their mooring outside. Here Mrs.

Quilter sat all day on the hatchway, her faded red hair blown about her black

shawl, muttering at the people going down to the water's edge with their

buckets.

Ransom could see her now, beaked nose flashing to left and right like an

irritable parrot's, flicking at her dark face with an old Chinese fan,

indifferent to the heat and the river's stench. She had been sitting in the

same place when he set off in the houseboat, her ribald shouts egging on the

group of weekend mariners laying a line of cement-filled bags across the

entrance to the yacht basin. Even at flood barely enough water entered the

circular harbor to irrigate its narrow docks, and this had now leaked back

into the river, settling the smartly decked craft firmly into their own mud.

Deserted by their owners, the yachts were presided over by Mrs. Quilter's

witchlike presence.

Despite her grotesque appearance, and insane son, Ransom liked and

admired her. Often during the winter he crossed the rotting gangway into the

gloomy interior of the barge, where she lay in a huge feather mattress tied to

the chart table, wheezing painfully to herself. The single cabin, filled with

dusty brass lanterns, was a maze of filthy recesses veiled by old lace shawls.

After treating her from the flask of gin in his valise, Ransom would receive

in turn a rambling disquisition on the evils of the world at large, and then

be rowed back across the river in her son's leaking coracle, Quilter's great

eyes below the hydrocephalic forehead staring at him through the rain like

wild moons.

Rain!--At the recollection of what the term had once meant, Ransom

looked up at the brilliant sky. Unmasked by clouds or vapor, the sun hung over

his head like an inferno. The cracked fields and roads adjoining the river

were covered with the same unvarying light, a glazed motionless canopy that

embalmed everything in its heat.

Beside the jetty Ransom had staked a series of colored poles into the

water, but the rapid fall in the level was too obvious to need calculation. In

the previous three months the river had dropped some twenty feet. Ransom

estimated that it had shrunk to less than a quarter of its original volume. As

it sank into the center of the narrow gulley, it seemed to pull everything

toward it, and the two banks were like the faces of opposing cliffs. This was

helped by the inverted tents suspended from the chimneys of many of the

riverside houses. Originally designed as raintraps--though no rain had ever

fallen into them--the canvas envelopes had been transformed into a line of

aerial garbage scoops, the dust and litter raised like expiatory offerings to

the sun.

Ransom crossed the deck and stepped down into the steering well. He

waved to Quilter, who was watching him with a drifting smile. Behind him,

along the deserted wharfs, the bodies of the fish, hanging from their hooks in

the drying sheds, turned slowly in the air.

"Tell your mother to move the barge," Ransom called across the interval

of slack water. "The river is still falling."

Quilter ignored this, and with an ironic grin pointed to the blurred

white forms moving slowly below the surface.

"Clouds," he said.

"What?"

"Clouds," Quilter repeated. "Full of water, doctor."

Ransom stepped through the hatchway into the cabin of the houseboat,

shaking his head at Quilter's bizarre sense of humor. Despite his deformed

skull and Caliban-like appearance, there was nothing stupid or unintelligent

about Quilter. The dreamy ironic smile, at times almost affectionate in its

lingering glance, as if understanding Ransom's most intimate secrets, the

seamed skull with its curly russet hair and the inverted planes of the

faunlike face, in which the cheekbones had been moved back two or three

inches, leaving deep hollows below the droll eyes--all these and a streak of

unpredictable naiveté made Quilter a daunting figure. Most people wisely left

him alone, possibly because his unfailing method of dealing with them was to

pick unerringly on their weaknesses and blind spots and work away at these

like an inquisitor.

It was this instinct for failure, Ransom decided as Quilter continued to

watch him from his vantage point above the dead birds, that probably formed

the tacit bond between the youth and himself. No doubt Quilter had quickly

sensed that Ransom's frequent visits to the houseboat and the solitary

weekends among the marshes along the southern shore of the lake marked a

reluctance to face up to certain failures in his life. But perhaps he also

realized the extent to which Ransom shared that sense of the community of the

river, the unseen links between the people living on the margins of the great

channel, which for Ransom had begun to take the place of his home and his work

at the hospital.

All summer Ransom had watched it shrinking, its countless associations

fading as it narrowed into a shallow creek. Above all Ransom was aware that

the role of the river in time had changed. Once it had played the part of an

immense fluid clock, the objects immersed in it taking up their positions like

the stations of the sun and planets. The continued lateral movements of the

river, to which Ransom had become more and more sensitive during his visits to

the houseboat, its rise and fall and the varying pressures on the hull, were

like the activity within some vast system of evolution, whose cumulative

forward flow was as irrelevant and without meaning as the apparent linear

motion of time itself. The real movements were those random and discontinuous

relationships between the objects within it, those of himself and the other

denizens of the river, Mrs. Quilter, her son, and the dead birds and fish.

With the death of the river so would vanish any contact between those

stranded on the drained floor. For the present the need to find some other

measure of their relationships would be concealed by the problems of their own

physical survival. Nonetheless, Ransom was certain that the absence of this

great universal moderator, which cast its bridges between all animate and

inanimate objects alike, would prove of crucial importance. Each of them would

soon literally be an island in an archipelago drained of time.

Removing his cotton jacket, Ransom sat down on the bench by the stern

window of the cabin. He decided to go ashore, but after a week on board the

houseboat he felt uneager to leave it and make all the social and mental

readjustments necessary, minimal though these would now be. He had let his

beard grow, but almost everyone had left Larchmont and there was little point

in shaving it off. Although the rim of black hair gave his thin face a gaunt

and Rimbaudesque look, he accepted this new _persona_ as part of the altered

perspectives of the river, and as a mark of his own isolation in the

houseboat.

He had seen the craft for sale the previous winter, while visiting a

patient in the yacht basin. With its pastel blue hull and raked windows it

looked totally un-nautical, but the functional design of the interior, and the

absence of all overlay of personality, made it a perfect retreat. To the

surprise of the other yachtsmen in the basin, Ransom towed the craft away and

moored it on the exposed bank below the motorbridge. The mooring was a poor

one with a nominal rent, the smells of the fish-quays drifting across the

water, but he was alone and the slip road nearby gave him quick access to

Larchmont and the hospital. The only hazards were the cigarette ends thrown

down from the cars crossing the bridge. At night he would sit back in the

steering well and watch the glowing parabolas extinguish themselves in the

water around him.

He had furnished the houseboat with far more care than he had given to

the home he shared with Judith, and its cabin was a repository of all the

talismans of his life. In the bookshelf were the anatomy texts he had used in

the dissecting room as a student, the pages stained with the formaIn that had

leaked like a bland washed blood from the mutilated cadavers on the

tables--perhaps somewhere among them the unknown face of his surgeon father.

On the desk was the limestone paperweight he had cut from a chalk cliff as a

child, the fossil shells embedded in its surface carrying a quantum of

Jurassic time across the millions of years to him. Behind it, like the ark of

his covenant, stood a diptych of photographs in a hinged blackwood frame. On

the left was a snapshot of himself at the age of four, before his parents'

divorce, sitting on a lawn with them. On the right, exorcising the terrors of

this memory, was a reproduction of a small painting by Tanguy, 'Jours de

Lenteur.' With its smooth pebble-like objects, drained of all associations,

suspended on a washed tidal floor, this painting above all others had helped

to isolate him from the tiresome repetitions of everyday life.

All these mementos he had smuggled under Judith's nose from their house

during the previous months, setting up a small zone of inner reality for

himself. Looking around him at the contents of the cabin, Ransom realized that

the houseboat was as much a capsule designed to protect him against the

pressures and vacuums of time as the steel shell of an astronaut's vehicle

protected the pilot from the vagaries of space. Here his unconscious memories

of childhood and the past had been isolated, and quantized, like the fragments

of archaic minerals sealed behind glass cases in museums of geology.

A siren hooted warningly. An old river steamer, white canvas awnings

flared trimly over the rows of empty seats, approached the central passage

between the main pylons of the bridge. Captain Tulloch, a thin bottle-nosed

old buff, sat above the helmsman on the roof of the wheel-house, staring

myopically down the narrowing channel. With its shallow draught, the steamer

could glide over submerged banks barely two feet below the surface. Ransom

suspected that Tulloch was now half-blind, and that his pointless passages in

the empty steamer, which once carried sightseers across the lake, would go on

until the craft ran immovably aground on a mudbank.

As the steamer passed, Quilter stepped down into the water, and with an

agile leap swung himself on to the handrail, feet in one of the scuppers.

"Whoa, there! Full ahead!" The steamer rocked slightly, and Captain

Tulloch hopped from his perch with a cry. He seized a boathook and hobbled

down the deck toward Quilter, who grimaced at him from his handhold on the

stern rail. Bellowing at the youth, who scuttled like a chimpanzee on its

bars, Tulloch rattled the boathook up and down between the rails. They passed

below the bridge and approached the Quilters' barge. Mrs. Quilter, still

fanning herself, sat up and hurled a series of vigorous epithets at the

Captain. Ignoring her, Tulloch drove Quilter forward along the rail, lunging

at him like a perspiring pikeman. The helmsman swung the steamer hard by the

barge, trying to rock it from its mooring. As it passed, Mrs. Quilter reached

forward and jerked loose the line of the coracle. It bounced off the bows of

the steamer, then raced like a frantic wheel between the hulls. Quilter leapt

nimbly into it from the rail and was safely spread-eagled on the barge's deck

as Captain Tulloch swung the boathook at his head, knocking Mrs. Quilter's fan

into the water from her hand.

The hot sunlight spangled in the steamer's wake as Mrs. Quilter's

laughter faded across it. Settling itself, the river stirred slowly, now and

then breaking into oily swells. Its white banks were beginning to crack like

dry cement, and the shadows of the dead trees formed brittle ciphers on the

slopes.

Overhead a car moved along the deserted motorbridge, heading towards the

coast. Ransom left the cabin and went out on to the jetty to inspect his

raingauge. He had installed it three months earlier, but so far the cylinder

had collected nothing except a few inches of dust and fragments of dried leaf.

As he emptied the cylinder, a woman in a white beachrobe made her way

down the bank fifty yards from him. She walked with the slow unhurried step of

someone who has recovered from a long malady and feels that all the time in

the world lies before her. The crumbling surface of the bank rose around her

like clouds of bone-meal. She looked down with preoccupied eyes at the thin

stream of water. For a moment, as she lifted her head to the sky, her solitary

figure seemed to Ransom like the specter of the renascent dust.

Her strong face turned its level gaze upon Ransom, as if unsurprised to

find him standing on the bed of the empty river. Although he had not seen her

for some weeks, Ransom, conversely, knew that she would be among the last

people to remain in the abandoned town. Since the death of her father, the

former curator of the zoo at Mount Royal, Catherine Austen had lived alone in

the house by the river. Often Ransom saw her walking along the bank in the

evening, her long red hair reflected in the liquid colors of the water at

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