“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 feel. 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 “hoo-man.”
“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?” said 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 gunbutts 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 liquor.”
“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.
“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 coming off 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.
TO BE CONTINUED
Part Two of Three Parts. The forces of the Cemetery wanted the status quo to remain untouched, even though it meant that the Cemetery World would continue to be “haunted” by shades, ghouls and the shadowy census taker.
Synopsis
Ten thousand years before the story opens, the final war has been fought on Earth, the last stages of it being carried on by great war machines, with the brains of men fused into the machines and directing them. With the Earth poisoned and ruined, many of the survivors flee into space, seeking new homes among the stars. In time a corporation, Mother Earth, Inc., sets up a cemetery on Earth, operating high-powered public relations programs to convince people of the sentimental prestige of being interred on the planet where mankind first arose. A few people, descendants of the ne’er-do-wells who were left behind when the rest of the population went to the stars, still live on Earth, but Mother Earth seeks to create the impression there is nothing there but the Cemetery.
On the gentle world of Alden, Fletcher Carson is attempting to build a compositor, a machine-instrument which can take a theme and translate it into every known art form. He plans to take the compositor to Earth, but he runs out of money before he can finish it. He is approached by Elmer, an incredibly ancient robot, who had worked on the last of Earth’s war machines and who, because he was a skilled technician, was taken to the
stars by the humans. He has been a free robot for centuries and now wants to return to Earth. He becomes Carson’s partner, investing his life savings in the compositor, named Bronco.
Because they have no money left for a regular passage, Carson rides a funeral ship to Earth, taking Elmer and Bronco along as freight. Once on Earth, Carson quarrels with Maxwell Peter Bell, manager of Mother Earth, Inc., with Carson resisting being taken over by Mother Earth, which would like to use the composition he plans as publicity for the Cemetery. Carson meets Cynthia Lansing, a woman from Alden who carries with her a letter from Carson’s old friend, Dr. William Thorndyke (Thorney), an archaeologist at Alden University. Thorndyke is a leading authority on the Anachrons, a mysterious galactic people who have long since disappeared, but have left traces of their culture among the artifacts of many other races. The Anachrons are popularly thought of as galactic traders, but Thorndyke believes they were cultural observers seeking new cultural approaches to graft onto their own civilization.
In his letter, Thorndyke says that Cynthia will be taking regular passage to Earth and will arrive there ahead of Carson. He asks Carson to help her in her quest for a treasure which he believes an Anachron observer had collected on Earth. This belief is based on a letter she has found among old family papers, detailing a meeting of an ancestor of hers with a strange being who could have been an Anachron, bringing the choice part of his collection from Greece to hide in a location near the Ohio River. Carson is reluctant to become involved in treasure hunting, but takes Cynthia along with his expedition.
Once out of the Cemetery the party camps. When night has fallen, some great creature comes charging through the forest, smashing trees and making a great swath through the woods, barely missing the camp. Carson suspects it may be a war machine, although it seems unlikely such a machine would have survived for ten thousand years.
They are joined by a party of coon hunters from a backwoods settlement, who tell them the thing that smashed down the trees is the Ravener, a mythical being almost never seen. The coon hunters invite them to a hoedown in the settlement the following night.
Part 2
VIII
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 the 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 toolhouse, 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 have always 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 than man can remember back. 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 his 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?” I asked.
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 a title is and it is all 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 wil
l 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.
“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.”
The Complete Serials Page 125
