Read Online The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest by Peter Dickinson - Free Book Online Page B

they jostled for a view. They looked excited but not happy; disturbed, stricken, less than they had been. Paul still sat on his stool, gazing at what he had done, his mouth open but drawn sideways and down as he scratched rakingly at his jawbone. It took him ten seconds to notice Pibble; then he rolled the gray paper up into a cylinder and lunged with it across the desk. Pibble stepped forward and took the scroll as if he’d been receiving the freedom of some city. He returned to his table, sat down, and unrolled his trophy, a blaze of color, done with bright-inked felt pens. It was the wrong way up, so he turned the picture around.
    The huts were burning, with crazy, stylized flames. In front of them, the innocents were being massacred. All but two of the innocents were black, the murderers orange. In the foreground, the leader of the orange men watched with his hands in his pockets while two of his soldiers tightened a cord around the neck of a ginger-bearded European in Livingstone-style explorer’s kit—puttees, plus-twos, linen Norfolk jacket. A big floppy linen hat lay on the ground and beyond it another orange soldier clawed at the jodhpurs of a woman held supine for him by two of his fellows. Both scenes, uncomplicated by European dress, were echoed several times in the middle distance. Two laughing orange soldiers sprayed a group of running graybeards with their tommy guns. Another was walking stolidly toward the altar, a black baby dangling by the heels from either hand. The spaces between the scenes of action were scattered with an openwork pattern of black bodies, formalized but still agonized. You could see, from the shapes they lay in, that they were dead. Underneath the picture was written in capitals, “ IF YOU DO NOT KNOW THIS, YOU KNOW NOTHING OF US.”
    Pibble stared at the picture, a bit of him saying silently, “Um, yes, I see now”; another bit chilly with shock; and another bit saying, “It really is pretty good stuff by any standards—I wonder what it would fetch.” Then he stood up and took the picture back to Paul.
    â€œThank you.”
    â€œThank you.”
    Paul opened a drawer, took out a lighter, and flicked it into flame. The gray paper caught at a corner, and the frontier of flame began its invasion across the whole sheet. In the silence, Pibble could hear its tiny roaring. Paul walked to the window and threw the sash up. He held his burning horror out in the open air until the flames closed around his fist. When he let go, an updraft took the last fragment, still flaming, upward past the shorn sycamores and out of sight. Pibble remembered Eve.
    She was sitting on the sofa beside Robin, who was beginning to fidget. In a couple of minutes, Pibble realized, he’d think of some way of drawing attention to himself. Eve was as still as ever, except for the huge, slow breaths she was taking. Her face was bloodless, her soft lips blue. She might have been a medium in a trance.

IV
    G oodbye, Mummy. Goodbye, Daddy. Take care of yourselves and don’t do anything I wouldn’t like.”
    â€œDo be careful, darling.”
    Typical of Mummy to talk as if a month in the jungle with a brood of savages and a sick airman were an enterprise similar to crossing Princes Street. Eve looked hard at her parents, knowing how unobservant and untrustworthy her memory was. Not that she’d ever make a mistake about Daddy’s loopy clothes, but in a month she might easily get his face wrong. Very thin, with an absurdly goatlike straggle of ginger beard; the small nose peeling, as always; Wedgwood eyes set rather close, which, with the craning stoop of the scholar-priest, made him look as if he’d just mislaid his pince-nez. All that was easy. Eve tried to learn by rote the high curve of his cheekbones, with a little rubbery muscle just above them; his mouth soft and small. For the first time in her life, she paid attention to his ears, decided they were