Balefires

by David Drake

  Down the stairs into the street. The skull's pace was a deliberate walk, the certain leisure of the squad escorting the tumbril. Other movement joined Rigsbee; gentle rustlings from the ivy, a tremulous scraping of metal on masonry. Only a petrified night scene showed in the wash of scarlet light preceding him. Streetlights no longer poured their mercury blue in pools on the asphalt. A car was caught rigid in the middle of a turn, the tip of its driver's cigar dead and black. A dog skipped for the curb-one foot in the street and the other three in the air so that its brindled body hung at an impossible angle. House after high, old house, built close to the sidewalks with walled courts in back for privacy. Rigsbee followed his guide without turning his head to look for the things tittering just beyond his zone of vision.

  Newer houses, smaller but set back further. Rigsbee's monocentric mind had no idea how far he had walked. The skull halted at last, rotated tremblingly toward a brick-veneer residence. Rigsbee remained where he was, a hundred feet back in the middle of the street. His guide eased forward. The reflectors of the old Buick in the carport winked back in carmine brotherhood.

  The inside of the house showed as red light approached, flooded through the front window. A woman had pulled the drapes back in the instant before stasis. Now she stared unseeing at the glass, her hair rinsed black and the cover of the baby in her arms striped red on red.

  Shockingly loud in a universe that had only scufflings and scratching, a man's voice slashed out of the house, "Did you finally come, Rigsbee? I've been waiting for you."

  A moment's pause. The front door banged back, the screen squealed open. The man on the narrow porch was tall, his hair a brighter yellow than his mother's in any normal light. Now it was a crown of dull carbuncle burning over his anguished face.

  "Where are you, Rigsbee?" Trader called, taking a step out onto the gravel sidewalk, a step nearer the skull motionless in the air. "I know you're behind this. Your witch of a niece told me what you are.

  "Do you want me to say it? I killed her! You can send me to any Hell you please, but I killed Anita and I'm glad of it. I rid the world of her!"

  "She was my daughter, Harvey." Unlike Trader's harsh, desperate tones, Rigsbee's words were almost inaudible. His robes hung motionless, a frozen torrent of blood.

  Trader took three steps down the gravel. The ape skull blocked his path without moving. A curse twisted Trader's powerful face and he spat at the thing. It burst soundlessly into a ball of glowing vapor that slowly dissipated in the still air. The murky red light continued to flow about the two men after its apparent source was gone.

  "I wouldn't have anything to do with her," the younger man said tautly. "I told her Stella was plenty for me, even with the baby coming. But she couldn't take that, not your Anita, and she'd have me anyway. Up the ivy and in her window, Rigsbee, every night. And I couldn't go home in the mornings, then, and face Stella."

  Rigsbee closed his eyes, rubbed them as if he were tired. Trader continued to advance, narrowing the distance between them. The globe of light shrank with every step he took. Beyond it, gravel skittered impatiently.

  "I broke away when Kim was born," the tall man went on, his words as brittle as a coping saw on glass. He stretched his arms out in instinctive supplication. "She was… you can't imagine, Rigsbee! Hadn't she had enough? She'd proved she could take me away once, why did she have to-"

  For the first time, Rigsbee stared straight into the other's tortured eyes. His tone softer than a fledgling's down, the adept said, "Harvey, when you strangled Anita, you made this certain. You and I are as much a part of nature as the sun and stars are, and our courses are as fixed. You chose then the course for both of us, and there is no changing now.

  "Goodbye, Harvey." And Rigsbee raised his hand.

  The world brightened stunningly as if the sun had risen scarlet. Harvey lurched back in shock, seeing what came scrabbling toward him. He tried to run.

  A slender hand of wrought iron snatched his ankle. The railing from Rigsbee's house now scampered on the lawn, fifty separated manikins. Harvey screamed as his ankle crunched under the black fingers. Fifty faceless, pointed heads tossed in delight. They clanked as they minced toward their frenzied quarry, trembling as each new howl cut the air.

  Trader disappeared behind the living fence. The human noises ceased a moment later when something round and bloody pitched into the air.

  The light began to fade. Before long there was only a dull glow surrounding Rigsbee. Then the full moon came out and traffic moved again.

  ***

  Dawn rained on the city. Rigsbee's empty house brightened slowly in the wan gray. A spatter of droplets whipped the shingles, followed by a pale drizzle that flowed over the eaves and splashed to the ground in sheets. The spidery pentacles of the railing blackened under the impacts of the rain, and the gutters ran red.

  Men Like Us

  In 1979 I had the start of a writing career going. I'd sold a fantasy novel (The Dragon Lord) and an SF short-story collection (Hammer's Slammers), plus quite a lot of short fiction about equally divided between fantasy and SF. In all, I had around 200,000 words in print when I stopped to think about it.

  Which I mostly didn't. I was a full-time attorney and I had no intention of changing that-though I did before another year was out. (My life appears to conform to the evolutionary model of punctuated equilibrium.)

  I'd sold stories to Jim Baen when he was editor of Galaxy magazine. When he became the SF editor of Ace Books he bought Hammer's Slammers and also started a paperback magazine, Destinies, which paid excellent rates. Over the years (and through various title changes). Destinies published a lot of my best short fiction.

  I wrote "Men Like Us," which I thought was the best thing I'd written to date, and sent it to Jim. Jim thought it was the best thing I'd written also, and instantly rejected it on the grounds that it supported a political philosophy with which he violently disagreed.

  Well, that was fair: it was his magazine, after all. I sent the story to Omni, the slick-paper SF/fact magazine, where Ben Bova (who'd taken a number of my stories as editor of Analog) bought and published it. My wife and I used the $800 to vacation in New Orleans, where I got to know John Brunner (who had Ballantine Books hire me as his tech editor on the historical novel he was writing for them) and fired silenced submachine guns in the swamps across Lake Pontchartrain.

  "Men Like Us" was the only story I sold to Omni and just about the only one that I sent there. My head wasn't normally in places that fit Omni's editorial policies, whereas Jim Baen and I usually meshed very well (partly because we'd knocked so many pieces off one another over the years). This one time, though…

  The story itself owes something to a novella by Poul Anderson, "UN-Man." In his early days, Poul's fiction could often be described as proselytizing for world government. Poul had an abrupt shift in philosophy during the 1950s, so that his later work frequently shows a libertarian bent. (In almost all cases, the story values remain strong; I'm talking about fiction with philosophical underpinnings, not propaganda screeds.)

  Poul's later work has sparked a number of stories from me; "UN-Man," however, was early… which may have something to do with the reactions both of Omni and of Jim Baen to my story.

  I was born only weeks after the first atomic bomb, and I grew up through the depths of the Cold War when nuclear war seemed more probable than not. I still think "Men Like Us" is one of the best short stories I've written; and it's the one that always scares me when I reread it.

  There was a toad crucified against them at the head of the pass. Decades of cooking in the blue haze from the east had left it withered but incorruptible. It remained, even now that the haze was only a memory. The three travelers squatted down before the talisman and stared back at it.

  "The village can't be far from here," Smith said at last. "I'll go down tomorrow."

  Ssu-ma shrugged and argued, "Why waste time? We can all go down together."

  "Time we've got," said Kozinski,
playing absently with his ribs as he eyed the toad."A lot of the stories we've been told come from ignorance, from fear. There may be no more truth to this one than to many of the others. We have a duty, but we have a duty as well not to disrupt needlessly. We'll wait for you and watch."

  Smith chuckled wryly. "What sort of men would there be in the world," he said, "if it weren't for men like us?"

  All three of them laughed, but no one bothered to finish their old joke.

  The trail was steep and narrow. The stream was now bubbling twenty feet below, but in springtime it would fill its sharp gorge with a torrent as cold as the snows that spawned it. Coming down the valley, Smith had a good view of Moseby when he had eased around the last facet of rock above the town. It sprawled in the angle of the creek and the river into which the creek plunged. In a niche across the creek from the houses was a broad stone building, lighted by slit windows at second-story level. Its only entrance was an armored door. The building could have been a prison or a fortress were it not for the power lines running from it, mostly to the smelter at the riverside. A plume of vapor overhung its slate roof.

  One of the pair of guards at the door of the powerplant was morosely surveying the opposite side of the gorge for want of anything better to do. He was the first to notice Smith. His jaw dropped. The traveler waved to him. The guard blurted something to his companion and threw a switch beside the door.

  What happened then frightened Smith as he thought nothing in the world could frighten him again: an air-raid siren on the roof of the powerplant sounded, rising into a wail that shook echoes from the gorge. Men and women darted into the streets, some of them armed; but Smith did not see the people, these people, and he did not fear anything they could do to him.

  Then the traveler's mind was back in the present, a smile on his face and nothing in his hands but an oak staff worn by the miles of earth and rock it had butted against. He continued down into the village, past the fences and latrines of the nearest of the houses. Men with crossbows met him there, but they did not touch him, only motioned the traveler onward. The rest of the townsfolk gathered in an open area in the center of the town. It separated the detached houses on the east side from the row of flimsier structures built along the river. The latter obviously served as barracks, taverns, and brothels for bargees and smelter workers. The row buildings had no windows facing east, and even their latrines must have been dug on the river side. A few people joined the crowd from them and from the smelter itself, but only a few.

  "That's close enough," said the foremost of those awaiting the traveler. The local was a big man with a pink scalp. It shone through the long wisps of white hair which he brushed carefully back over it. His jacket and trousers were of wool dyed blue so that it nearly matched the shirt of ancient polyester he wore over it. "Where have you come from?"

  "Just about everywhere, one time or another," Smith answered with an engaging grin. "Dubuque, originally, but that was a long time ago."

  "Don't play games with the Chief," hissed a somewhat younger man with a cruel face and a similar uniform. "You came over the mountains; andnobody comes from the Hot Lands."

  Chief of Police, Smith marveled as he connected the title and the shirts now worn as regalia. Aloud he said, "When's the last time anybody from here walked over the mountains? Ever?"

  Bearded faces went hard. The traveler continued, "A hundred years ago, two hundred, it was too hot for you to go anywhere that side of the hills… but not now. Now-maybe I'll never sire children of my own, but I never needed that, I needed to see the world. And I have done that, friends."

  "Strip him," the Chief said flatly.

  Smith did not wait for the grim-looking men to force him. He shrugged off his pack and handed it to the nearest of the guards armed with crossbows and hand-forged swords. He said, "Gently with it, friend. There's some of it that's fragile, and I need it to trade for room and board the next while." He began to unhook his leather vest.

  Six of the men besides the Chief wore the remnants of police uniforms over their jackets. They were all older, not lean warriors like the crossbowmen-but they carried firearms. Five of them had M16 rifles. The anodized finish of the receivers had been polished down to the aluminum by ages of diligent ignorance. The sixth man had a disposable rocket launcher, certain proof that the villagers here had at some time looted an army base-or a guard room.

  "Just a boy from the Midwest," Smith continued pleasantly, pulling out the tails of his woolen shirt. "I wanted to see New York City, can you believe that? But we'll none of us live forever, will we?"

  He laid the shirt, folded from habit, on his vest and began unlacing his boots of caribou leather. "There's a crater there now, and the waves still glow blue if there's even an overcast to dim the sun. Your skin prickles."

  The traveler grinned."You won't go there, and I won't go there again; but I've seen it, where the observation deck of the World Trade Towers was the closest mortal man got to heaven with his feet on man's earth… "

  "We've heard the stories," the Chief grunted. He carried a stainless-steel revolver in a holster of more recent vintage.

  "Trousers?" Smith asked, cocking an eyebrow at the women in dull-colored dresses.

  The Chief nodded curtly."When a man comes from the Hot Lands, he has no secrets from us," he said. "Any of us."

  "Well, I might do the same in your case," the traveler agreed, tugging loose the laces closing the woolen trousers, "but I can tell you there's little enough truth to the rumors of what walks the wastelands." He pulled the garment down and stepped out of it.

  Smith's body was wiry, the muscles tight and thickly covered by hair. If he was unusual at all, it was in that he had been circumcised, no longer a common operation in a world that had better uses for a surgeon's time. Then a woman noticed Smith's left palm, never hidden but somehow never clearly seen until that moment. She screamed and pointed. Others leveled their weapons, buzzing as a hive does when a bear nears it.

  Very carefully, his face as blank as the leather of his pack, Smith held his left hand toward the crowd and spread his fingers. Ridges of gnarled flesh stood out as if they had been paraffin refrozen a moment after being liquefied."Yes, I burned it," the traveler said evenly, "getting too close to something the-something the Blast was too close to. And it'll never heal, no… but it hasn't gotten worse, either, and that was years ago. It's not the sort of world where I could complain to have lost so little, hey?"

  "Put it down," the Chief said abruptly. Then, to the guard who was searching the pack, "Weapons?"

  "Only this," the guard said, holding up a sling and a dozen dense pebbles fitted to its leather pocket.

  "There's a little folding knife in my pants pocket," Smith volunteered. "I use it to skin the rabbits I take."

  "Then put your clothes on," the Chief ordered, and the crowd's breath eased. "You can stay at the inn, since you've truck enough to pay for it-" he nodded toward the careful pile the guard had made of Smith's trading goods- "and perhaps you can find girls on Front Street to service you as well. There's none of that east of the Assembly here, I warn you. Before you do anything else, though, you talk to me and the boys in private at the Station."

  The traveler nodded and began dressing without embarrassment.

  The Police and their guards escorted Smith silently, acting as if they were still uncertain of his status. Their destination was a two-story building of native stone. It had probably been the Town Hall before the Blast. It was now the Chief's residence as well as the headquarters of the government. Despite that, the building was far less comfortable than many of the newer structures which had been designed to be heated by stoves and lighted by lamps and windows. In an office whose plywood paneling had been carefully preserved-despite its shoddy gloominess-the governing oligarchs of the town questioned Smith.

  They were probing and businesslike. Smith answered honestly and as fully as he could. Weapons caches? Looted by survivors or rotted in the intervening centuries. Food d
epots? A myth, seeded by memories of supermarkets and brought to flower in the decades of famine and cold which slew ten times as many folk as the Blast had slain directly. Scrap metal for the furnaces? By the millions of tons, but there would be no way to transport if across the mountains… and besides, metals were often hot even at this remove from the Blast.

  "All right," said the Chief at last, shutting the handbook of waxed boards on which he had been making notes. The room had become chilly about the time they had to light the sooty naphtha lamp."If we think of more during the night, we can ask in the morning." His eyes narrowed. "How long are you expecting to stay?"

  Smith shrugged. "A few days. I just like to… wander. I really don't have any desire to do anything else."He raised his pack by the straps and added, "Can one of you direct me to your inn?"

  Carter, the youngest of the six Policemen, stood. He was a blocky man with black hair and a pepper and salt beard. He had conducted much of the questioning himself."I'll take him," he said. Unlike his colleagues, he carried a heavy fighting knife in addition to his automatic rifle. He held the door for Smith.

  The night sky was patchy. When the sliver moon was clear, there was more light outside than the bud of naphtha gave within. The pall of steam above the powerplant bulged and waned like the mantle of an octopus. Tiny azure sparks traced the power lines across the bridge and down into the smelter.

  Smith thumbed at the plant. "They made light from electricity, you know? Before the Blast. You ever try that?"

  His guide looked at him sharply. "Not like they did. Things glow, but they burn up when we can't keep all the air away from 'em. But you'd be smarter not to ask questions, boy. And maybe you'd be smarter to leave here a little sooner than you planned. Not to be unfriendly, but if you talk to us, you'll talk to others. And we don't much care for talk about Moseby. It has a way of spreading where it shouldn't."

  The Policeman turned through an open gate and up a graveled pathway. Rosy light leaked around the shutters of a large building on the edge of the Assembly. Sound and warm air bloomed into the night when he opened the door. In the mild weather, the anteroom door was open within.