The Homeward Bounders by Jones Diana Wynne

Author:Jones, Diana Wynne [Jones, Diana Wynne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Young Adult, Science Fiction, Childrens, Adventure
ISBN: 9780062200808
Goodreads: 13425516
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Published: 1981-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

IX

I do think Helen and Joris might have stopped their joke after I got us off that city station too. I did know what I was doing, and I did it pretty well. It was a newish station, built of concrete, and small enough for there to be a man asking for tickets at the door marked WAY OUT. I marched boldly up to him and said they’d taken our tickets on the train, and he let us through. When we were outside in the station yard, I turned round to suggest to Helen and Joris that I’d taken enough of the Archangel now, and to come off it.

Almost overhead, very close, a canal went marching above the houses, and above the station, on a set of huge yellow arches.

My heart seemed to stop. Then it began banging away so hard that I could hear and feel nothing else. I seemed to have lost the lower half of me and be floating. For a moment, I could have sworn I was Home. The disappointment—I can’t tell you the thump the disappointment hit me with, as if I were really floating and then had fallen, when I looked round and saw that I couldn’t be Home. The place was full of machines buzzing about. In my world, people walked, or used carriages. The trains were different. People’s clothes were different. The buildings were different: taller than in my Home, and straight and boxlike, with lots of windows. And now I came to look at the canal arches, they were different too: not so high, and made of dirty yellow brick, in fancy patterns.

“What’s the matter?” Joris said. I must have looked peculiar.

“Nothing,” I said. “I reckon we ought to look for some lunch.”

I said it almost without thinking. Hope was beginning to build and roar in me again. You see, you often get sets of worlds that are very much alike—like the war set we’d just come through. In these sets, the language and the landscape and the climate and the shape of the cities can be almost identical, though the actual way people live is usually different, because that depends on the Them playing the world. But the nearer two worlds are in a set, the more alike they are. And I had only to look about to see that the shape of this city—the canal, the railway and the roads—was the same as the one I had been born in. And that meant I was really close to Home. It could even be next world on.

But first there were Helen and Joris to look after. I had to find them some lunch, and show them how to manage in a world like this. I took them to the shops—they were where the smart part of my city had been. And things didn’t go so well there. We all got confused in the traffic, and all the shops seemed to have people watching for robbers. We had no chance to get hold of food, even in a covered-over sort of market.

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