Bold and methodical, the sounds in the brush came nearer. The woman kept looking at the wall of brush across the creek, in the direction of the sounds, meanwhile dressing herself rapidly in a single garment, that might once have been a man’s military surplus coverall. It was shapeless and faded but not noticeably dirty. From time to time she made shushing sounds and gestures at her little girl, and as soon as she had covered herself she quickly dressed the child in jeans and faded sweatshirt. The girl’s short, light braids came snapping through when the shirt was pulled over her head. Then on the opposite bank of the stream, near the crossing of rough stones, the sounds at last produced their maker.
He had a square tanned face not shaved for a day, with close-cut graying brown hair above it, and he looked to be in his early forties. The strong body swayed, drunk or stoned on something fierce, but then that face looked entirely too straight, too pillar-or-the-community, to sway with anything but alcohol. He was well-enough dressed, in slacks and sport shirt and light jacket that had no doubt been clean at the beginning of the day. Stuffed inside his half-zipped jacket, and in its pockets, there rode a lumpy cargo dully jangling with his movements. It must be beer cans he was carrying so, for in each big hand he held one more of them, empty, the golden circles of their ends marked with dark keyholes where their pull tabs had been taken.
There was nothing in his face to frighten the woman. He was startled and pleased to discover the woman and child and looked intently at them, but then his eyes moved quickly on, joyfully taking in the teepees and the planted field—fenced against deer with posts and string and fluttering rags—and the well-worn paths that made crossings of the clearing and loops around it but nowhere went out to the world.
In a slurred bass-baritone he cried out: “People! It’s beautiful, there’s people! In th’ middle of th’ bloody wilderness!”
The young woman turned away from him, as if looking for support. It was on the way. Several more people were approaching, gathering together as they progressed from the farther reaches of the large clearing. There were two more brown and barefoot children; another young woman, with her black hair loose and very long, wearing a man’s old shirt and jeans; a black man, with uncut hair bushing under a wide-brimmed hat, wearing tattered suit-coat over blue work shirt, nondescript trousers, brogans. The remaining man looked anglo and his long hair fell straight. He had a brown beard, bare feet, tight-shrunken jeans. Under a shawl patterned in zig-zags his upper body was bare. Symbols popular five years earlier, wrought in bright metal, hung from a chain against his chest. The men were both dusty and sweating as if they had just been working in the field.
Approaching and gathering in silence, the people of the clearing looked at their visitor with various shadings of distaste.
He, on the higher bank across the narrow water, was glad to see them all. “Lovely people. I’d offer all you folks a beer, several beers. But y’see all my tanks are empties.” He belched gently and laughed gently, and gently shook his jangling jacket.
The man with the shawl turned his back on the sight. But after pulling at his beard in silence for a moment he turned once more to face it.
Not perturbed by unhappy silence, the visitor announced: “My intention was, t’ distribute these beer cans throughout the length and breath of this pristine wilderness. But as its already occupied, by such a sturdy outpost of humanity, I see no need . . . hey, what you’ve got here is one of those communal things, I bet. I guess you’re hippies or grokkies or whatever. I’m not very up t’date on what th’ word is now. No offense.”
His only answer was in the way that they all looked at him, as if at a disaster already happened and nothing to be done about it.
He said: “I first read about places like this, God it must be twenty years ago, back in the sixties. I was a Boy Scout leader then, I thought tents were a lot of fun.” He swayed and dropped a can by accident, and had to catch a branch to save his balance. “Well, tents aren’t the worst thing there is, but cities are better. Walls and roofs and more walls and roofs, I like ’em all in neat rows. Noise and garbage. I’ve come to like noise and garbage.”
“If that’s your track,” the black man said, “it could be you should’ve stayed on it.”
“I had t’ visit th’ frontier,” the visitor said vaguely. Squinting past the people of the clearing, past their canvas teepees, his face for the first time showed unhappiness. “Now there’s your fields. Com, tomatoes . . .” He let go his branch and came across the creek, surprisingly quick and surefooted when he concentrated on the uneven stepping-stones. He studied the fields again. “All right. But how d’you work it? No real machines. You just play you’re friends with nature, and break your backs. Listen, I grew up on a farm. You need to rent or buy some good machinery, knock down half these goddam trees to make some room, and raise some real crops. And put up houses! Act as if you meant t’ stay on and inhabit the planet for a while. But wait a minute.” He tried to clear his head with shaking. “Sorry. You’re way out here so you can squat on some free land, right? You’ll do things right when you get some money in, isn’t that it?”
“We’re just not doing things right,” the shawled man said, in a remote monotone. “We should all get stoned on alcohol and run across the country leaving a trail of . . . garbage. Wait a minute.” His eyes sharpened, staring at the visitor, at whom he now leveled a bony forefinger. “I’ve seen you someplace, when I was on a trip to town. I saw you on television, right? Now are you a reporter?”
The blond girl, in a tiny voice that might have belonged to her daughter, put in softly: “I was thinking that I’d seen him, too.”
The man did not seem to care whether they had ever seen him or not. “I’m no reporter. I’m just saying—” And with that he abruptly fell silent, looking past the others to the west as if at something deeply disturbing. But when the others turned there was nothing to be noted in the west except the going of the sun. The shadow of a distant mountain was reaching out across the clearing where they stood.
Now the stranger’s voice contained a hint of panic. “I’ll never make it back before dark.” He took a staggering step and almost slid into the creek. “Must be two miles t’ where I left my car. Listen, good people, I call for sanctuary for the night. I’ll pay you for a place to bunk, inside a tent.”
The people of the clearing exchanged troubled glances among themselves. The shawled man told the visitor: “Just wait right where you are, one minute.” While the visitor waited the others went to stand in a little knot between the teepees. There the adults conferred.
The black man said: “Can’t let him go back right now.”
“Why?” the dark girl asked.
“As drunk as he is. Suppose he falls down a ravine, or just gets lost and dies?”
Others nodded with reluctant concern. The shawled man said: “Another point, if he’s lost and his car is found near here, then we’ll be found too. Swanned over, investigated. At best we’d have to move.”
They all looked at the visitor again. Leaning against a tree where they had left him, he seemed to be yearning after the setting sun.
“Then he can stay the night,” the black man said. No one evinced any objection, and together they walked back to their visitor. The black man made the offer: “If you make no trouble you can stay until morning. Leave your garbage in the trash-pit, down that way.”
The square-faced man pushed away from his tree with obvious relief. “Thank you, many thanks!” And, a minute later when he had come back from the garbage pit without his beer cans: “I said I’d pay my way. How’s forty bucks? That’s what a real motel would cost.”
The others felt a common impulse to refuse. But there were always things that needed buying, on the quick trips to town; there was always too little money in the common fund.
“No luggage, so I’ll pay in advance. Who am I paying?”
“Doesn’t matter,” said the shawled man. Then he reached to take the bills.
Insi
de the larger teepee everyone sat on canvas groundcloths around the little central fire, which kept out the chill of mountain nightfall, and steamed and bubbled the pots the women hung above it. The stranger had unzipped his jacket. They handed him coffee in a can. The alcohol seemed to be metabolizing out of him, and his hands were shaking just a bit. “Coming home,” he said to himself. “Coming home t’ find people who want to live like this.”
The black man made no pretence of not hearing. “Like I said, go back to the city if that’s your track. You going back, first thing in the morning. You ever come to bother us again, and we’ll tell your friends you lived with us three days.”
The visitor paid no attention. He had his own speech to make. “Listen, you people, don’t live like this. None of this crap about loving nature, you have no idea what she is. Oh sure, the green trees are nice, and the little squirrels. But you let them grow, not the other way round. Keep your nature, your wilderness, in a cage, an’ make damn well sure the bars are thick.” He filled his lungs with mountain air and wood-smoke tang. “That’s fine, good air t’ breathe. No one knows better’n me how fine that is. But can we trust nature to give us air? If we were smart we’d put all the good air in a big jar, and let out just a little at a time, as it was needed.”
“What are you so fearful of?” the blond young woman asked. She seemed really worried for him. “There are only a few bits of wilderness, of real nature, left in the world. Are they going to destroy you?”
The man stared at her intently, but did not seem able to comprehend what she had said. “Yeah, keep a few bits of nature in cages,” he replied at last. “Keep trees behind big fences, t’show we’re strong enough to do so. Otherwise drive the wilderness out, this is our place here, our place.”
“Our place? You think your forty bucks bought you a share?” The shawled man was getting angry fast. “You didn’t put down that much money, mister, to become a partner here. You don’t have that much.”
“Listen, it is our place!” The visitor started a fist-pounding gesture that midway lost itself in weariness. He thought things over briefly, then started up again. “I do have money. Fair amount. I’ll finance some things for you. Not that I want to move in, I’ll go and never come back. But I want you t’ do right with this land.” The shawled man said now: “We didn’t ask you in to give a lecture. If you weren’t so drunk I’d throw you out.”
“Well I’m not drunk, grokkie, not that drunk. I could’ve found my car. Jus’ because it’s dark outside doesn’t mean I can’t . . . be outside. I could go outside right now. The real reason I stayed was to get you people straightened out, make you see where your lives are all wrong.” From the square face the words came loudly and righteously; the profaning of the teepee promised to go on and on.
From somewhere the shawled man pulled out the forty dollars in now-crumpled bills, and threw them. “Get the hell out of my sight. Go over to the other tent and sleep it off.”
The visitor’s voice stopped, and his square certainty failed. He started slowly to pick up the money, and then he let it lie. He looked round at all the faces, and then jumped up and put his hands to his head and ran outside. The others followed in a rapid straggle, calling out confusedly to him and to one another.
After the firelight, darkness struck the eyes like a blow. Full night, clear and moonless, had come to swallow up the land. The stranger had run out under the stars, then stopped after a few strides, looking up. The others gathered around him, talking at cross-purposes while he paid no heed. Eyes quickly began to become accustomed to the dark.
The black man took the visitor by the arm, and pointed forcefully. “Look there, that’s the lights of Oakland in the sky, that glow you see. Now I’m gonna walk you to your car, and then you drive—”
“To hell with Oakland.” It was a changed voice, harder and soberer but somehow more remote. His arms that had been half lifted were going down slowly to his sides. His face was still turned up. “I didn’t want to be out at night, in the open . . . but it’s all right. There’s the Dipper, tipped to spill . . . follow the handle south, there’s Arcturus. There’s Bo-oh-teez, Libra, Virgo. Sirius, that blue-white spike, I thought once that it was coming after me, it’s on the other side of the sun this season. Canopus, that we like to lock our sensors on, it’s somewhere underfoot, you never see it this far north. Yeah, Mars, there’s the pock-marked bastard now, coming on to opposition. I really don’t mind looking any more. You can see much from our little place under all the air.”
In her little voice the blond girl said: “I know now who you are . . .”
He was standing straight, his head thrown back. “The star-clouds, God, in Sagittarius. Stars like snowflakes in a blizzard. They look like they’re frozen stiff, not moving. Flying around at hundreds of miles a second, and so far apart, so far away from us, that you can’t see them move. From our place here or Mars, you see them from the exact same angle. So far away. They were there for me to look at, the whole time out and back.”
“. . . the astronaut. The one who was alone for two years after the accident. Alone all the way to Mars and back.”
His straightness was that of a statue, standing for a billion years and keeping on even terms of stubbornness, so far, with stars.
“Nature,” he said. “Wilderness. My God, all wilderness.”
THE WHITE BULL
Fred Saberhagen, whose science fiction has been popular for more than a decade, here turns his hand to a reexamination of the legends of Crete and—
HE WAS UP on the high ridge, watching the gulls ride in from over the bright sea on their motionless wings, to be borne upward as if by magic, effortlessly, when the sundazzled landscape began to rise beneath them. Thus he was probably one of the first to sight the black-sailed ship coming in to port.
Standing, he raised a calloused hand to brush aside his grizzled hair and shade his eyes. The vessel had the look of the craft that usually came from Athens. But those sails . . .
He picked up and threw over his shoulder the cloak with which he had padded rock into a comfortable chair. It was time he came down from the high ridge anyway. King Minos and some of Minos’ servitors were shrewd, and perhaps it would be wiser not to watch the birds too openly or too long.
When he had picked his way down, the harbor surrounded him with its noise and activity, its usual busy mixture of naval ships and cargo vessels, unloading and being worked on and taking on new cargo. On Execution Dock the sun-dried carcasses of pirates, looking like poor statues, shriveled atop tall poles in the bright sun. On the wharf where the black-sailed ship now moored, a small crowd had gathered and a dispute of some kind was going on. A bright-painted wagon, pulled by two white horses, had come down as scheduled from the House of the Double Axe to meet the Athenian ship, but none of the wagon’s intended riders were getting into it as yet.
They stood on the wharf, fourteen youths and maids in a more or less compact group, wearing good clothes that seemed to have been deliberately torn and dirtied. Their faces were smeared with soot and ashes as if for mourning, and most of them looked somewhat the worse for wine. They were arguing with a couple of minor officials of the House, who had come down with the wagon and a small honor guard of soldiery. It was not the argument that drew the man from the high ridge ever closer, however, but the sight of one who stood in the front of the Athenian group, half a head taller than anyone around him . . .
He pushed his way in through the little crowd, a gray middle-aged man with the heavy hands of an artisan and wearing heavy gold and silver ornaments on his fine white loincloth. A soldier looked round resentfully as a hard hand pushed on his shoulder, then closed his mouth and stepped aside.
“Prince Theseus.” The old workman’s hands went out in a gesture of deferential greeting. “I rejoice that the gods have brought you safe again before my eyes. How goes it with your royal father?”
The tall young man swung his eyes around and brought them rather slowly into focus. Some of th
e sullen anger left his begrimed face. “Daedalus.” A nod gave back unforced respect, became almost a bow as the strong body threatened to overbalance. “King Aegeus does well enough.”
“I saw the black sails, Prince, and feared they might bear news of tragedy.”
“All m’family in Athens are healthy as war horses, Daedalus. Or were when we sailed. The mourning is for ourselves. For our approaching . . .” Theseus groped hopelessly for a word.
“Immolation,” cheerfully supplied one of the other young men in ashes.
“That’s it.” The Prince smiled faintly. “So you may tell these officers that we wear what we please to our own welcome.” His dulled black eyes roamed up the stair-steps of the harbor town’s white houses and warehouses and whorehouses, to an outlying flank of the House of the Double Axe which was just visible amid a grove of cedars at the top of the first ridge. “Where is the school?”
“Not far beyond the portion of the House you see. Say an hours walk.” Daedalus observed the younger man with sympathy. “So, you find the prospect of a student’s life in Crete not much to your liking.” Around them the other branches of the argument between Cretan officials and newcomers had ceased; all were attending to the dialogue.
“Four years, Daedalus.” The princely cheeks, one whitened with an old sword-scar, puffed out in a winey belch. “Four god-blasted years.”
“I know.” Daedalus’ face wrinkled briefly with shared pain. He almost put out a hand to take the other’s arm; a little too familiar, here in public. “Prince Theseus, will you walk with me? King Minos will want to see you promptly, I expect.”
“I bear him greetings from m’father.”
“Of course. Meanwhile the officers here will help your shipmates on their way to find their quarters.”
Short Fiction Complete Page 109