As I’ve said, I intended to tell Brad and Callie about the dead man, but I wasn’t eager to do it. At the end of the canyon, the stone sloped up at a gentle incline, gentle enough so I could scramble up it, and after I had done this, I walked along the rim of the canyon wall until I could see the glow of our fire. I sat down, my feet dangling, and went with my thoughts, which were none of them of the happy variety. I still didn’t know what course to follow, but the more I studied on it, the more I wanted to find out what had killed the man in the bubble car. It was a fool’s mission. Yet I could not let go of the idea; my hold on it seemed unnaturally tenacious, as if it were something I’d waited all my life to pursue. At last I wore out on thinking and just sat there stargazing, watching a thin smoke rise from our fire.
I’m not sure when I first noticed that some of the stars were moving; I believe I registered the fact long before I began to be alarmed by it. There were three stars involved, and instead of falling or arcing across the sky, as would have been the case with meteors, they were darting in straight lines, hovering, then darting off again. What eventually alarmed me was that I realized they were coming closer, that they were following the line of the hills. And what put the fear of God into me was when one of them began to glow a pale green and from it a beam of emerald brilliance lanced down to touch the slopes and I heard a distant rumble. At that I jumped to my feet and raced along the main rim of the canyon, fear a cold knot in my groin, shouting to Brad and Callie, who peered up at me in confusion.
‘Get the horses!’ I yelled. ‘Bring ’em on up here! Now!’
They exchanged concerned glances.
‘What’s the matter?’ Brad called out.
I looked out across the flats; the three stars were getting very close.
‘Now!’ I shouted. ‘Hurry, damn it! Trouble’s comin’!’
That got them moving.
By the time they reached me with the horses, I could see that the three stars weren’t shaped like stars at all, but like the spearpoints the apes used: curved cylinders with the blunt tip at one end, thirty or forty feet long, with a slightly convex underside. I couldn’t make out any details, but I had no desire to stick around and observe. I swung onto my horse, reined it in, and said to Bradley and Callie, ‘’Member that cave we spotted up top?’
‘What are they?’ asked Callie, staring at the three stars.
‘We’ll find out later,’ I said. ‘Come on! Head for the cave!’
It was a wild ride we had, plunging up the dark slope, with the horses sliding on gravel, nearly losing their footing, but at length we made it to the cave. The entrance was just wide enough for the horses, but it widened out inside and looked to extend pretty far back into the hill. We hobbled the horses deep in the cave, and then crept back to the entrance and lay flat. A couple of hundred feet below, those three glowing things were hovering over the canyon we had just vacated. It was an eerie thing to see, the way they drifted back and forth with an unsteady, vibrating motion, as if lighter than air and being trembled by an updraft. They were bigger than I’d judged, more like sixty feet long, and the white light appeared to be flowing across their surfaces—metal surfaces, I supposed—and was full of iridescent glimmers. The light was hard to look at close up; it made your eye want to slide off it. They made a high-pitched, quivering noise, something like a flute, but reedier. That sound wriggled into my spine and raised gooseflesh on my arms.
I was more frightened than I’d been in all my life. I shivered like a horse that has scented fire and stared with my eyes strained wide until I was poured so full of that strange glittering white light, all my thoughts were drowned. Then I yanked at Callie and Brad, and hauled them after me into the cave. We scuttled back deep into the darkness and sat down. The horses snorted and shifted about; their noises gave me comfort. Brad asked what we were going to do, and I said, what did he want to do? Throw rocks at the damn things? We’d just sit tight, I said, until our company had departed. I could barely see him, even though he was a couple of feet away, but talking to him stiffened my spine some. Yet with half my mind I was praying for the things outside just to go away and leave us be. I could still hear their weird fluting, and I saw a faint white glow from the cave mouth.
Callie asked again what I thought they were. I said I reckoned they must be some sort of machines.
‘I can see that,’ she said, exasperated. ‘But who you figger’s flyin’ ’em?’
I hadn’t really had time to think about that until then, but still, it struck me as particularly stupid on my part that I hadn’t already come up with the answer to her question.
‘The Captains,’ I said. ‘Has to be them. Couldn’t nobody else make a machine like that.’
‘Why’d they be chasin’ us?’ Brad asked.
‘We don’t know they are,’ said Callie. ‘They could just be after doin’ their own business.’
‘Then why’d we run?’
I realized I hadn’t told them about the dead man, and I decided that now wasn’t the time—it would be too much bad news all at once.
‘We did right to run,’ I said. ‘Believe me, we did right.’
‘’Sides,’ said Callie, ‘we don’t know for absolute sure it’s the Captains. I mean what your pa says makes good sense, but we don’t know for sure.’
We were silent for a bit and finally Brad said, ‘You think Mama run into them things?’
I gave a sigh that in the enclosed space of the cave seemed as loud as one of the horses blowing out its breath. ‘I was watchin’ ’em for a long time ’fore I hollered,’ I said. ‘From the way they’re patrollin’ the hills, I figger that’s possible.’
There followed another silence, and then he said. ‘Maybe after they gone, maybe we should try trackin’ ’em.’
I was about to say that we’d be doing good just to get shut of them, when the cave mouth was filled with an emerald flash, and I was flung back head over heels, and the next thing I knew I was lying in pitch darkness with dirt and stone chips in my mouth, and my ears ringing. Some time later I felt Brad’s hands on my chest, heard him say, ‘Dad?’ Then I heard the horses whinnying, their hooves clattering as they tried to break free of their hobbles. I wanted to sit up but was too woozy.
‘Callie,’ I said.
‘She’s gone to see if there’s a way out.’
‘Wha…’ I broke off and spat dirt.
‘The entrance is blocked. Must be a ton of rock come down over it.’
‘Shit!’ I said, touching the back of my head; there was a lump coming. Patches of shiny blackness swam before my eyes. ‘The horses awright?’
‘Just scared.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Me too.’
I sat up cautiously, groped for Brad, found his shoulder and gave it a squeeze. I couldn’t think; I was so numb that I only felt the first trickles of fear. It was as if the explosion was still taking place in my skull, a dark cloud of smoke and splintered rock boiling up and whirling away the last of my good sense.
Seconds later Callie’s voice called from a distance, telling us to come ahead, she’d found something.
Still dizzy, I let Brad take the lead, going in a crouch deeper into the hill, and after a minute I saw stars and a ragged oval of blue-dark sky.
Callie’s voice came again, issuing from beyond the opening. ‘See it?’
‘Almost there!’ I told her.
The opening was set about six feet up in the wall, not too high and easily wide enough for a man to pass through, but no horse was ever going to leave the cave that way. Without the horses, I thought, we might as well have died in the explosion. However, when I pulled myself out into the chill air beside Callie and saw what she had found, I forgot all about our plight.
On this side of the hill, too, the hardpan flowed off toward the horizon. But there was one distinct difference. Below us, its rim no more than a few hundred yards from the base of the hill, lay a large crater, roughly circular and perhaps a mile in diameter, like a bowl brimfu
l of golden light. Light so brilliant it obscured all but the deepest cuts and bulges in the crater’s rock walls. It resembled a glowing golden sore on a cracked, stretched-tight hide. The three flying machines were flitting back and forth above it with the agitation of mites swarming above a dead squirrel, and as we watched they descended into the crater, vanishing beneath the rim. After they had gone out of view, none of us moved or said a thing. I can’t speak for Brad or Callie, but for my part, though I’d already had my basic notion of how the world worked shaken considerably, the sight of the crater completely shattered all my old conceptions. Maybe it was simply the size of the thing that affected me…The size and the upward pour of light. Maybe all the little wrong bits that had come before had had the irritating effect of putting a few sand grains in my boots, and now this, this immense wrongness, had scraped the skin off my soles and left me unable to walk or do anything other than reckon with shock and bewilderment. Even a half-hour earlier, I might—if asked—have given a fair approximation of where I stood. With my son and my lover, six days out on the Flats from Edgeville, I would have said. In the heart of the wasteland where once the old world flourished, countless centuries after the disaster that ended it. I would have thought this a fine answer, and I would have been certain of my place and purpose. Now I felt I was in the company of strangers, in the midst of a great darkness with light below, a barren place of unrelieved abstraction that offered no clue as to its nature. Perhaps the depth of my reaction seems unreasonable. After all, we had long supposed that the Captains must have flying machines, and though I had never seen one, I shouldn’t have been so thoroughly disconcerted by the sight. And I had seen craters before, albeit never one this big. But it was as if all the tidy structures of my life had been abolished, all rules of logic broken, and I could not come up with a new picture of the world that would fit inside my head. I realize now that this breakdown had been a long time coming, that what had provoked it had been working on me for days; but at the time it seemed sudden, catastrophic, totally disorienting.
It was Callie who broke the silence, saying we had to go down to the crater, we had no other choice. I am not clear how I responded; I recall saying something about the horses, about how even if we went down, we’d have to come back and shoot them, we couldn’t leave them to die of thirst. There was a little more conversation, but I cannot recall it. Eventually we began picking our way down the slope, glancing up now and again to see that the crater had swelled and grown brighter, a vast golden pit into which we were preparing to descend.
We were, I’d estimate, about fifty feet from the base of the hill when a woman’s voice hailed us from the darkness and ordered us to drop our rifles. I was so bewildered and startled, I obeyed without hesitation. I guess it seemed right given the circumstance that voices should issue from the dark and command us. I heard footsteps crunching nearby, caught sight of shadowy figures moving toward us through the rocks. Lots of them. Maybe thirty, maybe more. They assembled about us, some gaining detail against the nimbus of light shining up from the crater behind them, yet most of them remaining shadows, looking evil as crows in their slouch hats and long coats.
‘Just who are you people?’ asked another voice, this one a man’s, deeper than the woman’s, but softer and oddly familiar.
We gave our names, said we were from Edgeville.
‘Bob Hillyard,’ said the voice musingly. ‘I’ll be damned.’
‘That’s his boy with him,’ said someone else. ‘And that girl there works for ol’ Fornoff.’
‘Just who in creation are you?’ I asked, not wanting to let on how intimidated I was—I knew we had fallen in with Bad Men. I should have felt more afraid than I did, but I was still so confused, so daunted by the overall situation, the threat these men presented did not seem of moment.
‘You know some of us,’ said still another voice. ‘Leastways, I bet you know me.’
A match flared, caught on a twist of something in one of the figure’s hands, and as he moved nearer, holding a torch so that it shone up onto his face, making ghoulish shadows under the eyes, I saw it was Clay Fornoff. Heavier; chin covered with pale stubble; wearier-looking. But still with that petulant sneer stamped onto his face.
‘Wasn’t for this man here, I’d never have taken the ride,’ he said.
‘’Spect you owe him one, don’tcha, Clay?’ said somebody.
‘You know I didn’t have no choice,’ I told him.
‘Don’t matter,’ he said. ‘Turns out you did me a favour. But you didn’t have that in mind, didja now? You was just runnin’ me off to die.’
A huge shadow moved up beside Clay and nudged him aside.
‘You got a score to settle,’ he said to Clay in that soft voice, ‘deal with it later.’ He moved full into the light of the torch, and I saw what I’d begun to suspect seconds before: it was Wall. A monstrous slab of a man with owl-tufted brows, a shaggy greying beard, thick lips and a bulging forehead, his face as expressionless as an idol’s. A waterfall of dark hair spilled from under his hat to his shoulders.
‘Goddamn, Bob,’ he said to me. ‘Man shoots as poorly as you got no business this far out on the flats.’
I’d always admired Wall, and that his most salient memory of me was my poor shooting eye made me feel stupid and childlike. Kind of like being dressed down by your boyhood hero.
‘Ain’t like I wanna be here,’ I said. ‘Just had somethin’ needed doin’.’
Wall studied Callie and Brad, who were gawping at him, apparently overwhelmed by the sight of this enormous man.
‘Feelin’ confused, are ye?’ he said with mild good humour, as if he were talking to children. ‘Seem like even simple things like right and left ain’t what they used to be?’
That struck me as odd, that he would offer such an accurate analysis of my mental condition and do it so casually, as if how I felt was something usual, something any fool could have predicted.
‘What the hell you know about it?’ I asked him.
‘Hits ever’body the same,’ he said. ‘The conditionin’ starts breakin’ down ’bout five days out. Time a man gets this far, he’s usually got more questions in him than answers. Y’see’—he coughed, spat up a hocker and aimed it off to his right—‘it ain’t only doctorin’ you get at the hospitals. The Captains condition you to be happy with your lot. It’s sorta like hypnotizin’ ye. Takes a mighty strong reason for a man to break down the conditionin’. Seems powerful emotion’s ’bout the only cure.’ He cocked his head, gave me a searching look. ‘What brings ye here?’
‘My wife Kiri,’ I said, still trying to absorb what he had told us. ‘She lost a duel and come out here to die.’
‘Kiri,’ said Wall. ‘I remember her. She was a good fighter.’
Bradley piped up. ‘We figger she’s down in that hole.’
Wall’s eyes flicked toward him. ‘She might be at that.’
From the cautious flatness of his tone, I had the impression that if Kiri was down in the crater, it wasn’t likely we were going to see her again.
‘I don’t get it,’ I said, and began talking fast to blot out the pictures I was conjuring of Kiri’s fate. ‘What the hell’s goin’ on? What’re the Captains doin’ by givin’ us this here conditionin’? How come…’
‘Slow down there, man,’ Wall said, and put a hand on my shoulder; I was shocked into silence by the weight and solidity of it. ‘I ain’t got time just now to be givin’ a history lesson. Truth is, I don’t know if I got much to teach ye, anyway. Far as we can prove, things’re ’bout the way the Captains say they was. Though I got a suspicion that the folks who survived the bad time wasn’t given a choice ’bout how they wanted to live, they was just put where the Captains wanted ’em and conditioned to accept it. But there’s a coupla things different for certain sure. One is, they ain’t our friends, they just playin’ with us, tormentin’ us. Hell, might be they could kill us all in a flash, they had a mind. But even if that’s so, it’d ruin their game. So o
ur job is to be dangerous for ’em, kill a few here and there, give ’em trouble. They enjoy that kinda trouble. Our aim is to get strong without ’em realizin’ it, so the day’ll come when we’re strong enough to finish ’em. And that day ain’t far off. But you got time to learn all ’bout that. What you need to unnerstan’ is’—he spat again—‘you’re Bad Men now. You may not unnerstan’ it this minute, but ye can’t go back now your conditionin’s broke. Ain’t nothin’ for ye back there. Your life is here now, and you gotta make the best of it. That means you’re with us in ever’thing we do. We make a raid for supplies on Edgeville, you’re part of it. There ain’t no middle ground.’
‘If things is like you say,’ Callie asked, ‘whyn’t you just tell it to the people back in Edgeville or Windbroken…Or wherever?’
‘Someday maybe we will. But the way things is now, buncha Bad Men waltz into town and start goin’ on ’bout how the Captains is enemies of mankind…Shit! How do you think that’d set? Think they’d believe us? Naw, you gotta ride out way past gone onto the flats ’fore you can hear the truth when it’s told ye. But after you take that ride, you don’t need to hear it more’n once.’ He sucked on a tooth, making a smacking noise. ‘Anyways, there’s plenty of Bad Men ain’t been brought into the fold. That’s somepin’ we need to take care of first, ’fore we go bringin’ the word to Edgeville.’
We stood there wrapped in the weighty stuff of all he had said. The desolation his words implied had slotted into a ready-made place inside my brain—it seemed something I had always known. But the fact that I was now a Bad Man, that was almost impossible to believe. The longer I had to digest what Wall had told us, the less like a Bad Man I felt. I had the sense we were stranded at the bottom of an empty well, and far above, invisible against the black circle of sky, strange, cruel faces were peering down at us, deciding which ones to pluck up and gut. I felt more abandoned than afraid: I could not have felt more so had I woken up to find myself naked and alone in the middle of nowhere. If it had been left to me I would have sat down there on a rock and stayed sitting until I had gotten a better handle on how things were, but Bradley grabbed my arm and said, ‘We gotta go down there. We gotta find Mama.’
Barnacle Bill The Spacer and Other Stories Page 17