The Homeward Bounders. Diana Wynne Jones
to the other, almost on the spot. Stupid. I’ve learnt better since. But this was the first time, and, when there was light, I shouted out with joy. There was a green flat space among the green hills ahead, and someone had marked the space with a circle of wooden posts.
At that, I managed to trot and lumbered into the circle. Somewhere near the middle of it, the twitch took me sideways again.
You’ve probably guessed what happened. You can imagine how I felt anyway. It was dawn still, a lurid streaky dawn. The green ranges had gone, but there was no city – nothing like one. The bare lumpy landscape round me was heaped with what looked like piles of cinders, and each pile had its own dreary little hut standing beside it. I had no idea what they were – they were mines, actually. You weren’t a person in that new world if you didn’t have your own hole and keep digging coal or copper out of it. But I didn’t care what was going on. I was feeling the air, as I did before, and realising that this was yet another different world. And at the same time, I realised that I was due to stay here for rather a long time.
It was on this world that I began to understand that They hadn’t told me even half the rules. They had just told me the ones that interested Them. On this world I was starved and hit, and buried under a collapsed slag-heap. I’m not going to describe it. I hate it too much. I was there twice too, because what happened was that I got caught in a little ring of worlds and went all round the ring two times. At the time, I thought they were all the worlds there were – except for Home, which I never seemed to get to – and I thought of them as worlds, which they are not, not really.
They are separate universes, stacked in together like I saw the triangular rooms of Them before They sent me off. These universes all touch somewhere – and where they touch is the Boundary – but they don’t mix. Homeward Bounders seem to be the only people who can go from one universe to another. And we go by walking the Bounds until we come to a Boundary, when, if one of Them has finished his move, we get twitched into the Boundary in another Earth, in another universe. I only understood this properly when I got to the sixth world round, where the stars are all different.
I looked at those stars. “Jamie boy,” I said. “This is crazy.” Possibly I was a little crazy then, too, because Jamie answered me, and said, “They’re probably the stars in the Southern hemisphere – Australia and all that.” And I answered him. “It’s still crazy,” I said. “This world’s upside down then.”
It was upside down, in more ways than that. The Them that played it must have been right peculiar. But it was that which made me feel how separate and – well – universal each world was. And how thoroughly I was a discard, a reject, wandering through them all and being made to move on all the time. For a while after that, I went round seeing all worlds as nothing more than coloured lights on a wheel reflected on a wall. They are turning the wheel and lighting the lights, and all we get is the reflections, no more real than that. I still see it that way sometimes. But when you get into a new world, it’s as solid as grass and granite can make it, and the sky shuts you in just as if there was no way through. Then you nerve yourself up. Here comes the grind of finding out its ways and learning its language.
You wouldn’t believe how lonely you get.
But I was going to tell you about the rules that They didn’t tell me. I mentioned some of the trouble I had in the mining world. I had more in other worlds. And none of these things killed me. Some of them ought to have done, specially that slag-heap – I was under it for days. And that is the rule: call it Rule One. A random factor like me, walking the Bounds, has to go on. Nothing is allowed to stop him. He can starve, fall off a mile high temple, get buried, and still he goes on. The only way he can stop is to come Home.
People can’t interfere with a Homeward Bounder either. That may be part of Rule One, but I prefer to call it Rule Two. If you don’t believe people can’t interfere with me, find me and try it. You’ll soon see. I’ll tell you – on my fifth world, I had a little money for once. A whole gold piece, to be precise. I got an honest job in a tannery – and carried the smell right through to the next world with me too. On my day off, I was strolling in the market looking for my favourite cakes. They were a little like Christmas puddings with icing on – gorgeous! Next thing I knew, a boy about my own age had come up beside me, given me a chop-and, chop-and – it darned well hurt too – and run off with my gold piece. Naturally, I yelled and started to run after him. But he was under a waggon the next moment, dead as our neighbour’s little girl back Home. His hand with the gold piece in it was sticking out, just as if he was handing it back to me, but I hadn’t the heart to take it. I couldn’t. It felt like my fault, that waggon.
After a while, I told myself I was imagining that rule. That boy’s corpse could have had a bad effect on play, just as They said mine would have done. But I think that was one of the things They meant by the risk adding to the fun. I didn’t imagine that rule. The same sort of thing happened to me several times later on. The only one I didn’t feel bad about was a rotten Judge who was going to put me in prison for not being able to bribe him. The roof of the courthouse fell in on him.
Rule Three isn’t too good either. Time doesn’t act the same in any world. It sort of jerks about as you go from one to another. But time hardly acts at all on a Homeward Bounder. I began to see that rule on my second time round the circle of worlds. The second time I got to the upside down one, for instance, nearly ten years had gone by, but only eight or so when I got to the next one. I still don’t know how much of my own time I spent going round that lot, but I swear I was only a few days older. It seemed to me I had to be keeping the time of my own Home. But, as I told you, I still only seem about thirteen years old, and I’ve been on a hundred worlds since then.
By the time I had all this worked out, I was well on my second round of the circle. I had learnt I wasn’t going to get Home anything like as easily as I had thought. Sometimes I wondered if I was ever going to get there. I went round with an ache like a cold foot inside me over it. Nothing would warm that ache. I tried to warm it by remembering Home, and our courtyard and my family, in the tiniest detail. I remembered things I had not really noticed when they happened – silly things, like how particular our mother was over our boots. Boots cost a lot. Some of the kids in the court went without in summer, and couldn’t play football properly, but we never went without. If my mother had to cut up her old skirt to make Elsie a dress in order to afford them, we never went without boots. And I used to take that for granted. I’ve gone barefoot enough since, I can tell you.
And I remembered even the face Elsie used to make – she sort of pushed her nose down her face so that she looked like a camel – when Rob’s old boots were mended for her to wear. She never grumbled. She just made that face. I remember my father made a bit the same face when my mother wanted me to stay on at school. I swore to myself that I’d help him out in the shop when I did get Home. Or go grinding on at school, if that was what they decided. I’d do anything. Besides, after grinding away learning languages the way I’d done, school might almost seem lively.
I think remembering that way made the cold foot ache inside me worse, but I couldn’t stop. It made me hate Them worse too, but I didn’t mind that.
All this while, I’d never met a single other Homeward Bounder. I thought that was a rule too, that we weren’t supposed to. I reckoned that we were probably set off at regular intervals, so that we never overtook one another. I knew there were others, of course. After a bit, I learnt to pick up traces of them. We left signs for one another – like tramps and robbers do in some worlds – mostly at Boundaries.
It took me a long while to work the signs out, on my own. For one thing, the Boundaries varied so much, that I didn’t even notice the signs until I’d learnt to look for them. The ring of posts in the cattle-range world matched with a clump of trees in the fourth world, and with a dirty great temple in the seventh. In the mining world, there was nothing to mark the Boundary at all. Typical, that. I used to think that They had marked the Boundaries with these things, and I got out of them quick at first, until I noticed the sign carved on one of the trees. Somehow that made me feel that the people on the worlds must have marked the Boundaries. There was the same sign carved in the temple too. This sign meant GOOD PICKINGS. I earned good money in both worlds.