Foreign Constellations

anything. Who wants to break his back for corn and cabbages? Food from the converter is better than most of what you get from the ground; they choose only the very finest models to make up tapes from. Why, they’ve got to the stage now where they can duplicate vintage wines. The experts say they’re more consistent than the original.”
“I wouldn’t know,” the policeman muttered. “Never tasted wine . . . Say, you didn’t finish telling me why Berendt committed suicide.”
“It could have been because of what his partners planned to do with the converter; could equally have been because he suddenly realised his idea was stupid from the start. By the time he got the machine working it was already far too late. We were set for our population crash, one of the classic two-thirds degree. No point in arguing with laws of nature.”
“Now wait a minute. Nature doesn’t always rule us. We’ve changed the face of nature for a start. First time we ploughed a field, wasn’t that going against nature?”
“If it was, it likely didn’t work. Things like that succeed when you’re working with nature, not against. Heard the news today?”
“Been on duty since dawn. No.”
“There’s civil war in Brazil. The people who accepted land grants in rain-forest areas and cleared them without realising that when you expose the ground it turns to a rock-hard crust which won’t grow anything: they lost patience and took out after the bastards who sold them this bill of goods. A grenade killed the provincial governor and his senior aide last night; today the country’s under martial law.” The pilot stabbed the air with his forefinger. “What happened to those Brazilian farms: that’s what I mean when I talk about going against nature. You have to coax her, never drive her. And we’re still animals for all our cleverness. Animals that outstrip their food supply suffer a population crash, and the rate is almost always two out of three. Rabbits. Lemmings. All kinds of animals. And us. And it’s such a horrible state to be reduced to . . . I remember in India, where they had fourteen famines in ninety years. As the famine increased, men abandoned towns and villages and wandered helplessly. It was easy to recognise their condition: eyes sunk deep in the head; lips pale and covered with slime; the skin hard, with the bones showing through; the belly nothing but a pouch hanging down empty; knuckles and kneecaps showing prominently. One would cry and howl for hunger, while another lay on the ground dying in misery. Wherever you went, you saw nothing but corpses.”
The policeman shivered, though the cabin was snug and wind-tight.
“And it was bad in Skibbereen, too. That’s Ireland. One village called South Reen seemed to be deserted when we went there with supplies of bread. So we looked in some of the houses—hovels, really. In the first, six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearances dead, were huddled in a corner on some filthy straw, their sole covering what seemed a ragged horse-cloth, and their wretched legs hanging about naked above the knees. I approached with horror, and found by a low moaning they were alive. They were in fever—four children, a woman, and what had once been a man . . .
“In another case my clothes were nearly torn off in my endeavours to escape from a throng of pestilence around, when my neck-cloth was seized from behind by a grip which compelled me to turn. I found myself grasped by a woman with an infant just bom in her arms, and the remains of a filthy sack across her loins—the sole covering of herself and babe. The same morning the police opened a house on the adjoining lands which was observed shut for many days, and two frozen corpses were found lying upon the mud floor, half devoured by the rats . . .
“A mother, herself in fever, was seen the same day to drag out the corpse of her child, a girl of about twelve, perfectly naked, and leave it half covered with stones. In another house within 500 yards of the cavalry station at Skibbereen the dispensary doctor found seven wretches lying, unable to move, under the same cloak—one had been dead many hours, but the others were unable to move themselves or the corpse.”
“Well, if it’s really a law of nature . . .” the policeman said, staring appalled at the pilot’s calm face.
“Oh, I believe in the law all right. It doesn’t say the two-thirds we’re going to lose can’t be the right two-thirds.” He gave a harsh laugh. “Starting with people who starve others out of megalomania and greed. They’d be no loss. This guy, this food chemist I’m nursemaiding: he’s like that. Reminds me a lot of John of Leyden. Real name was Bockelson but he preferred the short form. More like a king’s name, I guess.
“And that was how he saw himself. Somehow he conned a gang of people in Münster into setting up a fantasy kingdom with him and his sidekicks at the top. Well, the Empire wasn’t going to put up with that, so they set siege to the place and starved the defenders out. The self-styled king requisitioned all the food in the city and had all the horses killed. At all times the royal court ate well and had sufficient stocks of meat, corn, wine and beer for half a year. The rest were not so lucky. Every animal—dog, cat, mouse, rat, hedgehog—was killed and eaten and people began to consume grass and moss, old shoes and the whitewash on the walls, the bodies of the dead.”
“Whitewash?” the policeman said incredulously.
“Oh, sure. People have been known to eat dirt; haven’t you seen them? Even short of that, people put some funny things in their bellies. I remember on Guernsey they drank stuff made from parsnips and fruit leaves instead of tea. Smoked some peculiar things too. Made cigarettes out of