I looked around. Cynthia was up on Bronco and Bronco was dancing away from the fire out into the dark, not running yet, but staying limber and ready to run at a second’s notice.
The noise was almost upon us, shrieking and deafening and the very ground was howling. I leaped to one side and crouched to run and would have run, I suppose, except I did not know where to run, and in that instant I saw the great bulk of whatever it was up on the ridge above us, a huge dark mass that blotted out the stars. The trees were shaking wildly and crashing down to earth, overridden and smashed by the black mass that charged along the ridgetop, almost brushing the camp, and then going away, missing us, with the noise rapidly receding down the hollow. On the ridge above, the smashed-down trees still were groaning softly as they settled into rest.
I stood and listened as the noise moved away from us and in a little time it was entirely gone, but I still stood where I was, half-hypnotized by what had happened, not knowing what had happened, wondering what had happened. Elmer, I saw, was standing, as hypnotized as I.
I sat down limply by the fire, and Elmer turned around and walked back to the fire. Cynthia slid off Bronco.
“Elmer,” I said.
He shook his massive head. “It can’t be,” he mumbled, talking to himself rather than to me. “It would not still be there. It could not have lasted …”
“A war machine?” I asked.
He lifted his head and stared across the fire at me. “It’s crazy, Fletch,” he said.
I picked up wood and fed the fire. I put on a lot of wood. I felt an urgent need of fire. The flames crawled up the wood, catching fast.
Cynthia came over to the fire and sat down beside me. “The war machines,” said Elmer, still speaking to himself, “were built to fight. Against men, against cities, against enemy war machines. They’d fight to the very death, until the last effective ounce of energy was gone. They were not meant to last. They were not fashioned to survive. They knew that and we who built them knew it. Their only mission was destruction. We fashioned them for death, we sent them out to death …”
A voice speaking from the past of ten thousand years before, speaking of the old ethics and ambitions, of ancient blood striving, of primordial hate.
“The ones who were in them had no wish to live. They were already dead. They had a right to die and they postponed their dying …”
“Elmer, please,” said Cynthia. “The ones who were in them? Who was in them? I had never heard that anyone went in them. They had no crews. They were …”
“Miss,” said Elmer, “they were not all machine. Or at least ours were not all machine. There was a robot brain, but human brains as well. More than one human brain in the one I worked on. I never knew how many. Nor who they were, although we knew they were the still competent brains of competent men, perhaps the most competent of military men who were willing to continue living for a little longer to strike one final blow. Robot brain and human brain forming an alliance …”
“Unholy alliance,” Cynthia said.
Elmer shot a quick glance at her, then looked back at the fire. “I suppose you could say so, miss. You do not understand what happens in a war—a sort of sublime madness, an unholy hatred—that is twisted into an unreasoning sense of righteousness …”
“Let us quit all this,” I said. “It may have been no war machine. It may have been something else entirely.”
“What something else?” asked Cynthia.
“It’s been ten thousand years,” I said.
“I suppose so,” Cynthia said. “There could be a lot of other things.”
Elmer said nothing. He sat quietly. Someone shouted on the ridge above us and we all came to our feet. A light was bobbing up there somewhere and we heard the sound of bodies forcing their way through the swath of fallen trees.
Someone shouted again. “Ho, the fire!” he said. “Ho, yourself,” said Elmer. The light kept on bobbing.
“It’s a lantern,” Elmer said. “More than likely the men who were out hunting with the dogs.”
We continued to watch the lantern. There was no more shouting at us. Finally the lantern ceased its bobbing and moved down the hill toward us.
There were three of them, tall scarecrow men, grinning, their teeth shining in the flicker of our fire, guns across their shoulders, one carrying something on his back. Dogs frisked about them.
They stopped at the edge of the campfire circle, stood in silence for a moment, looking us over, taking us in. “Who be you?” one of them finally asked.
“Visitors,” said Elmer. “Travelers, strangers.”
“What be you? You are not human.” He made it sound like “hooman.”
“I am a robot,” Elmer said. “I am a native of this place. I was forged on Earth.”
“Big doings,” said another one of them. “Night of big doings.”
“You know what it was?” asked Elmer.
“The Ravener,” said the first who had spoken. “Old stories told of it. Great-grandpappy, his father told him of it.”
“If it pass you by,” said the third one, “no need of fearing it. No man sees it twice in one lifetime. It comes again only after many years.”
“And you don’t know what it is?”
“It’s the Ravener,” as if that were all the explanation that was needed, as if no one should ask for more.
“We seen your fire,” said the first one. “We dropped by to say hello.”
“Come on in,” said Elmer.
They came on in and squatted by the fire, their gun butts rested on the ground, the barrels propped against their shoulders. The one who had been carrying something on his back threw his burden to the ground in front of him. “A coon,” said Elmer. “You had good hunting.” The dogs came in and flopped down on the ground panting. Their tails beat occasional polite tattoos.
The three sat in a row, grinning up at us. One of them said, “I am Luther and this is Zeke and the fellow at the end is Tom.” ‘
“I am pleased to know you all,” Elmer said, speaking as politely as he could. “My name is Elmer and the young lady is Cynthia and this gentleman is Fletcher.”
They bobbed their heads at us. “And what kind of animal is that you have?” asked Tom.
“His name is Bronco,” said Elmer. “He is an instrument.”
“I am glad,” said Bronco, “to meet up with you.” They stared at him.
“You must not mind any of us,” said Elmer. “We are all off-worlders.”
“Well, heck,” said Zeke, “it don’t make no difference. We just saw your fire and decided to come in.”
Luther reached into his hip pocket and pulled out a bottle. He flourished it in invitation.
Elmer shook his head. “I can’t drink,” he said. I stepped over and reached for the bottle. It was time I did my part; up till now Elmer had done all the talking.
“It’s right good stuff,” said Zeke. “Old Man Timothy, he was the one who made it. Great one with his squeezings.”
I pulled the cork and put the bottle to my lips. It damn near strangled me. I kept from coughing. The booze bounced when it hit my stomach. My legs felt rubbery.
They watched me closely, the grins held tightly in.
“It’s a man-size drink,” I told them. I took another slug and handed back the bottle.
“The lady?” Zeke asked.
“It is not for her,” I said.
They passed the bottle among themselves; I squatted down facing them. They passed the bottle back to me. I had another one. My head was getting a little fuzzy from the three quick drinks, but it was, I told myself, for the common good. There had to be one of us who talked their kind of language.
“Another one?” asked Tom.
“Not right away,” I said. “Later on, perhaps. I don’t want to drink all your likker.”
“I got another in reserve,” said Luther, patting a pocket.
Zeke pulled a knife from his belt, reached out and pulled the coon toward him.
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“Luther,” he said, “you get some green saplings for roasting. We got fresh meat and we got some booze and a good hot fire. Let’s make a night of it.”
I glanced over my shoulder at Cynthia. Her face was pale and drawn, her eyes watching in horror as Zeke’s knife slit neatly down the coon’s spread-out belly.
“Easy there,” I said.
She flashed a sick smile at me.
“Come morning,” said Tom, “we’ll go home. Easier to get through the down trees when it’s light. Big hoedown tomorrow night. Glad to have you with us. I take it you will come.”
“Of course we will,” said Cynthia.
I glanced toward Bronco. He was standing rigid, with all his sensors out.
Chapter 8
He had shown me the fields, with the shocked corn and the pumpkins golden in the sun; the garden, with a few of the vegetables still there, but most of them harvested; the hogs brought in from the woods, fat on acorns and penned for butchering; the cattle and the sheep knee-deep in the meadow grass; the smokehouse ready for the hams and the slabs of bacon; the iron house, in which was stored neatly sorted stacks of different kinds of salvaged metals; the hen house, the tool house, the smithy, and the barns, and now we sat, the two of us, perched on the top rail of a weathered fence.
“How long,” I asked him, “have you been here—not you, of course, but the people in this hollow?”
He turned his wrinkled old patriarch face toward me, the mild blue eyes, the beard like so much white silk hanging on his chest. “That’s a foolish question to ask of one,” he said. “We always have been here. Little clusters of us living all up and down the valley. A few living alone, but not many of them; we mostly live together; a few families that have stuck together farther back than man can remember. Some move away, of course; find a better place, or what they think is a better place. There are not many of us; there never have been many of us. Some women do not bear; many of the youngsters do not live. It is said that there is an ancient sickness in us. I do not know. There are many things said, old tales from the past, but one cannot tell if they are true or not.”
He planted his heels more firmly on the second rail, rested his arms across his knees. His hands were twisted with age. The knuckles stood out like lumps, the fingers stiffly bent. The veins along the backs of his hands stood out in a blue prominence that was startling.
“You get along with the Cemetery people?” Tasked.
He considered for a moment before he answered; he was the kind of man, I thought, who always considered well before he answered. “Mostly,” he finally said. “Over the years they have crept closer to us, taking over land that, when I was a boy, was wild. Couple of times I’ve gone and talked to that there fellow…” He groped for the name.
“Bell,” I said, “Maxwell Peter Bell.”
“That’s the one,” he said. “I go and talk with him, for all the good it does. He is smooth as oil. He smiles … but there is nothing behind the smile. He is sure; he is big and powerful and we are small and weak. You are crowding us again, I tell him, you are moving in on us and there is no need, there is a lot of other land that you can use, a lot of empty land that no one else is using. And he says but you aren’t using it and I tell him that we need it, we need it even if we put no plow or hoes to it, we need the land for elbowroom, we’ve always had a lot of elbowroom, we feel crowded if it isn’t there, we feel smothered. And then he says but you have no title to it and I ask him what is a title and he tries to tell me what title is and it all is foolishness. I ask him does he have title to it and he never answers. You come from out there somewhere, mister, maybe you can tell me does he have title to it.”
“I doubt it very much,” I said.
“We get along all right with them, I guess,” he said. “Some of us work for Cemetery every now and then, digging graves, mowing grass, pruning trees and bushes, trimming around the headstones. There’s a lot of work to keeping a burying ground looking trim and neat. They use us just now and then, extra hands when the work gets ahead of them. We could work a whole lot more, I guess, if we wanted to, but what’s the use of working? We got all we want; there’s not much they can offer for our work. Some fancy cloth, at times, but we have all the cloth we need from sheep, enough to cover nakedness, enough to keep us warm. Some fancy likker, but we got all the moonshine that we need and I’m not sure it isn’t better than Cemetery likker. Moonshine, if you know your business, has authority and it’s got a funny kind of taste a man gets partial to. Pots and pans, of course, but how many pots and pans does a woman need?
“It isn’t that we are lazy and no account,” he said. “We keep right busy. We farm and fish and hunt. We go out to mine old metal. There are a lot of places, most of them a right long piece from here, where there are mounds that have metal in them. We use it to make our tools and shooting irons. Traders come in from the west or south every now and then to trade their powder and lead for our meal and wool and moonshine—other things, of course, but mostly lead and powder.”
He stopped talking and we sat close together, on the top rail, in the mellow sunshine. The trees were flaming bonfires frozen into immobility; the fields were tawny, dotted with cornshocks, spotted by the gold of scattered pumpkins. Down the hill from us, at the smithy, someone was hammering and a curl of smoke trailed up from the forge. Smoke, too, streamed up from the chimneys of the closest houses. A door slammed and I saw Cynthia had come out. She was wearing an apron and carried a pan. She went out into the yard and emptied the contents of the pan into a barrel that was standing there. I waved at her and she waved at me, then went back into the house, the door slamming behind her.
The old man saw me looking at the barrel. “Swill barrel,” he said. “We dump potato peelings and sour milk and cabbage leaves into it, all the stuff out of the kitchen we don’t need. We feed it to the hogs. Don’t tell me you never saw a swill barrel.”
“I never knew until right now,” I said, “there was such a thing.” »“I misbelieve,” the old man said, “that I rightly caught the place you came from and what you might be doing there.”
I told him about Alden and tried to explain what our purpose was. I’m not sure he understood.
He waved toward the barnyard where Bronco had been planted a good part of the day. “You mean that there contraption works for you.”
“Very hard,” I said, “and most intelligently. It is a sensitive. It is soaking in the idea of the barn and haystack, of the pigeons on the roof, the calves running in their pens, the horses standing in the sun. It will give us what we need to make music and …”
“Music? You mean like fiddle music?”
“Yes,” I said. “It could be fiddle music.”
He shook his head, half in confusion, half in disbelief.
“There is one thing I have been wanting to ask you,” I said. “About this thing the hunters call the Ravener.”
“I don’t rightly know,” he said, “if I can tell you much of it. It got to be called the Ravener and I’ve often wondered why that was. It never ravens any that I’ve heard of. Only danger would be if you were right spang in its path. It doesn’t show up often. Mostly far away and no one knowing of it until after it is gone. Last night was the first time it ever came within shouting distance of us. No one I ever heard of ever went to look for it or to track it down. There are some things better left alone.”
He hadn’t told me all he could, I knew, and I had a hunch that he was not about to, but I tried him, anyhow.
“But there must be stories. Perhaps stories from the olden time. Have you ever heard it might be a war machine?”
He looked at me, startled and afraid. “What machine?” ‘ he asked. “What war?”
“You mean that you don’t know,” I asked, “about the war that destroyed Earth? About how the people went away?”
He didn’t answer directly, but from what he said I knew he didn’t know—the history of the planet had been lost in the mists of centuries.
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br /> “There are many stories,” he said, “and many of them true and perhaps others of them false. And no man in his right mind will hunt too closely into them. There is the census-taker, the one who counts the ghosts, and I thought that he was only another story until the day I met him. And there’s the story of the immortal man and him I’ve never met, although there are folks who claim they have. There is magic and there is sorcery, but in this place we have neither one of them and we have no wish to. We live a good life and we want it to stay that way and we pay little attention to all the stories that we hear.”
“But there must be books,” I said.
“Once there might have been,” he told me. “I have heard of them, but I’ve never seen one. I don’t know anyone who has. We have none here; I think we never had. Exactly, can you tell me, what are books?”
I tried to tell him and although I am sure he did not entirely understand, he seemed somewhat wonder-struck. And to mask his lack of understanding, he carefully changed the subject.
“Your machine down there,” he said, “will be at the hoe-down? It will watch and listen?”
“Indeed it will,” I said. “It is kind of you to have us.”
“There’ll be a lot of people, from all up and down the hollow. They’ll begin showing up as soon as the sun is set. There’ll be music and dancing and big tables will be set with many things to eat. Do you, on your Alden, have gatherings such as this?”
“If not exactly hoedowns,” I said, “other events that are very similar.”
We went on sitting and I got to thinking that it had been a good day. We had tramped the, fields and had husked some ears out of one of the cornshocks so the old man could show me what fine corn they raised; we had leaned our arms on the pigpen fence and watched the grunting porkers, nosing through the rubble on the feeding floor for a morsel they had missed; we had stood around and watched a man work the forge until a plow blade was glowing red, then take it out with tongs and place it on an anvil, with the sparks flying when he hammered it; we had strolled through the coolness of the barn and listened to the pigeons cooing in the loft above; we had talked lazily, as unhurried men will talk, and it had all been very good.
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