Stel looked across the room to where McCarty sat with two of the more vacant old ones, looking at them.
“Don’t notice,” said Fitzhugh. “She is likely to come over here. I don’t feel like a duel of words. I think, by the way, that McCarty has been in Ozar’s house, too. I am not sure, but she has said things that seem to me to indicate it. She certainly has ceased to believe that Ozar is divine. I think everyone has. There seems little point in it. Ozar has never functioned in our lives that I can remember—except as a big building and a word. We thought, so our records say, that we were alone in the world, and that made Ozar special, but now other groups are appearing. The Emeri, the Roti, the Commuters, now you. You are, you say, a what?”
“A Pelbar. And there are the Shumai, the Sentani, the Eastern Cities, and many others.”
“Yes. It would appear that many small groups survived the burning of the lands.”
“Who are the Commuters?”
“We have met only one—a young man who left them not all that long ago. Several season cycles. He was journeying east. He never said why. They are herders of cattle. He said that the land to the west is very dry— across these mountains.”
“Did he stay?”
“No. Only briefly. McCarty drove him off. He didn’t have much patience. Not like you.”
“Well, McCarty may still drive me off.”
“Perhaps. She needs you and knows it, though. She herself has slipped in the past two or three season cycles. Watch her, though.”
“Yet she certainly is better than the others.”
“McCarty is my sister. Yes, it is true. She set out with the others, but she became frightened down in the ruins of the ancients, hid, and ran home away from the others. Whatever poison they all absorbed, she got much less of. She resents the fact I am free of it. She even returned to the empty land long after her hair fell out, and gathered dust there and put it in my bed. But Scribner found it and threw it away. Her journey there hurt McCarty, but she didn’t care.”
McCarty now came across the room, setting her staff hard on the stone floor with each step. “What is this, a conspiracy?” she said, less as a question than a statement. “You are going away with Stel, aren’t you. And leave us. Leave me to take care of all these scarecrows. It won’t work, Fitz. We will get you first. We will ask the Roti to help. We will put you both in the stew.”
Stel and Fitzhugh simply stared at her. What was there to say? McCarty looked at them malevolently.
“McCarty,” said Fitzhugh abruptly. “I want to show Stel the room of records.”
“What? The room of records? Why? No stranger has ever seen it before.”
“We have never regarded it as sacred. And Stel has worked now for us faithfully for several moon cycles. He has never asked for anything.”
“He has certainly eaten. We will be fortunate to get through the winter with all he has eaten.”
“Well, McCarty,” Stel replied quietly, “I haven’t eaten much of your food for several weeks now. I have hunted my own, or snared it, and eaten from the woods. I got filled to the ears with beans and fish. Feans and bish. I see fins growing from your ears. Your mouth works like a carp. You flip your tail when you walk. Your eyes wave like a crayfish. You are barbed like a catfish. Right now your nose is as long as a gar’s.”
McCarty raised her staff. Then she lowered it. “Do what you want about the record room,” she muttered, and walked away.
Fitzhugh looked at Stel. “Huh,” she said. “Well, let’s go, then.” She brushed her hands, rose, and led Stel outside and across the field to a room set in the hill. Stel had always assumed it was merely for storage.
Fitzhugh had a small lamp, which she had lit at the kitchen fire. When they entered the dry darkness, she turned up the flame. Baskets of dried beans stood along the walls. At the rear of the room was another door, which opened into a smaller room, also very dry, lined with large cut stones. Along three walls was a stone shelf, on which Stel could see a number of objects and some stacks of paper, yellow and crumbling.
“Here is the list,” said Fitzhugh. “Be careful. It breaks if you touch it. This is where we have gotten our names. See? Here is mine. Fitzhugh, G. Seat 19-F.”
Stel looked at the ancient list, now browning, now faint. Yes, there was Fitzhugh. There McCarty. It was a long list, and, estimating quickly, he saw that it contained well over two hundred names. The heading was obscured, but he could make out: .. ger List: Flight 297.”
Puzzled, Stel looked at Fitzhugh. She smiled quizzically back. “And here is something none of us can read. It is not printed, but it is clearly writing. See?”
“It is script. Yes. I can read this. I think. Let me see.” The two very gingerly spread out the long sheet with holes punched evenly along its two sides. There was a printed heading, reading, “Schedule of Other Commercial Flights Approaching KC/14:30 -|— 30. 8/17.” There followed a list of numbers and letters. Below this in faint blue was a handwritten paragraph:
As we came across Mo. whole landscape took fire. Many spots, then several large bursts, prob. nuke. All KC burning. Contn. w. to go beyond, but fire endless.
No radio contact. Air full of meteors. Went on. Over Colo. Still fire. Fuel nearly out. Denver all burning. Colo. Spr. nuked. Trying to ride over. Must land anywhere. Dear God, the world is ending.
Capt. Baron Jackson Stel read it silently several times, slowly making it all out. Then he read it to Fitzhugh, who had been standing patiently, watching Stel’s narrowed eyes flick across the lines.
“What does it mean?”
“Most I don’t understand. What we thought. Ozar is a conveyance for flying. While it was flying everything caught fire. Finally it had to come down, and it came down here.”
“It seems hard to believe.”
The two fell silent for a time. Stel read the paragraph again, aloud.
“I have always wondered what it said,” Fitzhugh mused.
“Are you glad to know?”
“One must always face the truth. Isn’t that so?”
Stel paused. “Yes, I guess so,” he eventually replied.
The two stood a long moment, then Fitzhugh said, “We can come back and see the other things some other time. Come. Let’s go tell McCarty what the message said.”
But when they got to the outside door, it was shut, and Fitzhugh found she could not move it. She sighed. “McCarty has locked us in.”
Stel put his shoulder against the door, but it was solid, thick wood and didn’t move. Taking the lamp from Fitzhugh, he scanned all around the door. It was set in a rock wall, with a rock lintel and a thick wood frame. Inside, the room was all stoned, not arched, as the Pelbar would have made it, but slanted inward and capped with wide, flat stones notched to fit the walls. Stel took out his knife and probed the frame on the hinge side. Dry rot had softened it. He knew that this, like all Ozar hinges, would be wood, resinous wood fitted with a round pin outside. But the frame was softer. Soon he had cut around the mortise for the hinges, and with a shove toppled the door outward.
Someone had pried one of the large rocks from the retaining wall by the door over in front of the entrance, then wedged it with several sticks. Stel lifted the rock back into place and tossed the sticks aside. “That one is heavy,” he said. “If it was McCarty, she must have had help.”
“That could be. She could tell them anything. She is capable of it. She always was, but now that they are old, she sometimes makes fools of them just to be amused.” Stel mused as they walked. He would just as soon leave now, but they had come to need him. In fact, they had needed someone like him for a long time. It would be easy to stay there were it not for McCarty. And she had influence and a following among the old ones, too. Resentment of Fitzhugh’s normality was not limited to McCarty. It just reached a peak there. Yet there was great appreciation of Fitzhugh, too, and this McCarty resented. A general mindlessness drifted through this small society, too, which shifted their thinking like light summer wind
s.
McCarty must have known that she couldn’t keep them in the storeroom. She must have been harassing them. Her care for her own prosperity seemed to struggle against her desire for centrality and importance. She showed the quick reversals of small storms, like a succession of Crick-etmonth thundershowers.
As a result of the visit to the room of records, Stel quietly resolved to find a way into the house of Ozar. He would do it at night, repeatedly if necessary, to satisfy himself about what it all was. He would not even tell Fitzhugh, though he didn’t really think she would care.
“Fitz, I think I would like to move my gear out of the terminal and sleep somewhere else,” Stel said. “If there is hostility toward me, that might help lessen it. Besides, it is airless in there.”
“I hope this isn’t a step toward your leaving. I fear it. Sooner or later, you will have had enough.”
Stel didn’t reply. As they entered the terminal, they could hear a commotion at the far end of the main room. “What is it, Foerster?” Fitzhugh asked.
“Cohen has died. He just came in, brushing dirt from his hands, began to breathe hard, and died.”
“He will add to the stew,” another remarked, imitating McCarty’s voice.
“I will dig a grave in the morning,” said Stel.
“No need. It will keep you from the beans,” said another, laughing.
“The beans are fine. You can do the beans. I will tie a hoe blade to your foot. You are thin as a handle. Then you will work by merely shuffling about. Now if you will all move aside, Fitz and I will take care of Cohen.”
Cohen was as light as a sack of dry leaves. Stel lifted the thin figure, which smelled like wet grass, and left the building, taking Cohen to the small shed where they left Harlow before burial. Fitzhugh followed with the lamp. As Cohen lay on a table, Stel remarked, “I guess rock-moving was too much for Cohen.”
“We don’t know that.”
“No. There is the dirt on the hands.”
“It is just dirt.”
“Yes. Well, you are now down to twenty-five. Where was McCarty?”
“I don’t know. She is given to disappearing. I will go and calm the people. Be sure and lock this shed. Here.” Fitzhugh gave Stel the wooden rod, curved to the hole that would enable its user to push the latch rod aside. Then she turned and said, over her shoulder, “We will return to the room of records sometime. We will do it in daylight and take several others. Now I must get back to the people.”
Stel watched her go, sure she was upset, but not sure why. He gathered his things from the small room he had been given in the terminal. Then he walked across the field in the dark toward a rock shelter he had seen from the field. As he walked, he was sure he saw a momentary light coming from next to the house of Ozar. Then there was nothing. Stel stood awhile, looking, but nothing more showed. Then he continued in the moonlight to his new outpost on the hill.
9
The next night Stel played his flute for the Ozar, while they all sat in the terminal hall. The first hint of late-summer chill had dropped on the plateau, and a small fire on the open hearth made him think of Pelbarigan. For the most part the Ozar sat, somewhat blankly, but some would absently shuffle out for a drink, or for no reason. Fitzhugh was spinning, as usual, until she needed to beat more fibers, and so stopped rather than intruding another sound. McCarty was not there.
Stel ended with a long hymn to Aven, Governor of all the earth and sky, whose beauty surpasses all earthly things, whose justice and perfection can be glimpsed slightly only in one’s purest moments, when Her absolute flawlessness gleams like a hundred stars on a clear night. He was moved, himself, both by the thought of this transcendence and by his memory of the great chapel at Pelbarigan with its high ceiling, its balconies, its choir singing on winter evenings, their breaths steaming up in the light of the lamps. Ahroe would be one of them this winter, he thought. Her head would be bent to the music, perhaps sadder than she had been last year, when she could look across to him among the flutists, her smile flashing as she thought of their togetherness after the music.
Before he knew it, he had been silent for some time, and the hall was all but deserted. Only three of the old ones stayed by the fire, staring at it. Fitzhugh had begun beating fibers again, and had Taglio helping her, tapping automatically at the strands of tough fiber stretched over the soft-surfaced log.
On his way out, Stel said, “Fitz, somehow the wood I have been gathering for winter is diminishing. Not seriously, but noticeably.”
“Yes, I know.”
“You know? I thought that was a separate supply.”
“It is. McCarty has taken it somewhere. A little at a time.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I haven’t time to watch her. It is her wood, too. We will find it.”
“Well, good night.”
“Good night, Stel. Your music has called up too many memories. It is different from what ours was. But the effect is the same. It hurts the heart. You must have experienced some great sadness. Why did you leave your people?”
“Someday I may tell you. Good night.”
Stel left hurriedly and set out across the field between the rows of drying beans. He had found for himself five sleeping places, and chose a new one each night. Why was not clear to him. He had a vague presentiment. With the sense of secrecy typical of the Pelbar before the great peace, he had hidden his gear each day. Tonight he went for it to the hill behind the house of Ozar, and as he retrieved it, he again saw the tiny light from the odd building, vague and flickering, on the side away from the terminal.
Coming closer, he could see that a log, now largely rotten, had been rolled aside, and the light came from inside. Stooping in, Stel saw a dim figure beside the great bulk of Ozar, bent over, placing wood against the base of a large wooden pillar. He slipped in, moved around to the other side of the structure, there seeing other small piles around other pillars.
McCarty was leaving. Stel didn’t move. She crawled through the small hole, then pushed back the log, plunging Stel into total darkness. Feeling his way around the great curved cool hull of Ozar, Stel groped along the wall, pushing the logs until he had the right one. He gently moved it aside and wriggled through the hole. McCarty, he could see, was walking back to the terminal in the moonlight, her thin figure high among the bean rows.
Stel watched until the moon passed over three pine tops, then took his own small lamp from his gear and reentered the hole, pulling the log shut behind him. Lighting the lamp, he walked down the curved side of Ozar. Yes, there was the name, dimly maroon, flaked and fading. Torn from one side of Ozar’s body, a thin, flat structure canted up against the hill. Stel sat on it. It was of a whitish metal, gigantic, made of plates fastened together with hundreds of small nails burnished flat to the surface. Windows in a high line receded into the shadow, and Stel slid over the flat structure and on back to the jagged end of Ozar, beyond the R. Twisted metal and wires protruded like vines. Climbing carefully up, he entered a long hall, with seats on either side, now just metal frames.
Ozar smelled of darkness and decay. A variety of tools and structures that Stel had never imagined lay strewn across the floor. Peeling from the wall was a cream substance that wasn’t metal, nor was it wood. Stel broke a fragment of it off in his hand. It was brittle, but had a slight bend. It had not corroded. Scattered here and there were pearly-white drinking glasses, thin and fragile, and small bottles. Stel also saw wrinkled metal trays like those in the room of records. Ahead, where Ozar narrowed, stood the door Fitzhugh had mentioned, with the faded printing: no admittance. Stel’s hand hesitated, but he took hold of the handle and pulled. The door grated open. Several small animals scurried by him in the dark, so jolting him that he almost dropped his lamp. He slipped inside and pulled the door shut behind him, then reopened it because of the close smell.
Stel shuddered as he saw the two skeletons, now quite scattered but still in their chairs. The one on the left leaned aga
inst the left wall, its head almost turned over. The dirt that had poured in the window half filled its skull. The one on the right leaned forward against straps. Its skull lay on the floor. In the silence, Stel peered at the disks Fitzhugh had mentioned. Each had labels, and arcs of numbers. Small knobs protruded in rows. In front of each skeleton a staff and a portion of a wheel slanted up from the floor.
As he stared, and grew dizzy with the strangeness of it all, Stel heard a slight sound. He covered his light, fearing to blow it out. A dim light from outside flared through the window of Ozar. Stel rose slowly and peered out. Several figures were entering the hole in the logs. At first Stel thought they were Ozar, but then he realized their naked heads were those of the Roti. He heard a voice say softly, “Yci, nu matte kudasy por das Diu nezumi iro. U1 coom a tha oka. Tyn nu ga hym. Uhm, zym, nachtanali, nu ga hym.” The others started up the soft chant again, but the leader quickly put a finger across a couple of mouths, stopping them. Stel saw with some relief that one had an arm bound to his body. So he hadn’t killed that man with the rocks.
But now what would he do? He shrank down between the two skeletons. Something pricked his palm. He jerked it up away, then, feeling, came up with a small object backed by a thin shaft like a needle. He felt it with his hands for a while, then put it in his pocket. He could hear the voices outside. Eventually they began to move around inside the building. Some were obviously agitated and fearful. Stel shrouded his lamp even more carefully. As he grew more and more used to the dim light, he saw a dark coat hung up on one wall. He touched it. The sleeve came off. But the cloth, though stiff, seemed quite sturdy.
Stel heard voices inside Ozar. Fortunately, he had pushed the door shut when he first heard them. But he knew it wouldn’t hold if the Roti wanted to get in. At this point he wasn’t even sure that they knew he was inside. The voices grew closer. Stel could hear the Roti shuffling through things inside Ozar. Was there dust? Did he leave tracks in the dust? He took out his short-sword. Then he put his hand on something made of wire. His fingers traced it out. It was like a Pelbar clothes hanger. Quickly he took the coat, took the needle thing from his pocket, and pinned the sleeve back on.
Paul O Williams - [Pelbar Cycle 02] Page 8