Balefires

by David Drake

  "Carter!" shouted a big man at the bar of the taproom. "Just in time to buy us a round!" Then he saw Smith and blinked, and the dozen or so men of the company grew quieter than the hiss of the fire.

  "Friends, I don't bite," said Smith with a smile, "but I do drink and I will sleep. If I can come to an agreement with our host here, that is…" he added, beaming toward the barman.

  "Modell's the name," said the tall, knob-jointed local. Neither he nor the traveler offered to shake hands, but he returned the other's smile with a briefer, professional one of his own. "Let's see what you have to trade."

  The men at the bar made room as Smith ranged his small stock on the mahogany. First the traveler set out an LP record, still sealed in plastic. Modell's lips moved silently as his finger hovered a millimeter above the title. "What's a 'Cher'," he finally asked.

  "The lady's name," said Smith. "She pronounced it 'share'." Knowing grunts from the men around him chorused the explanation. "You've electricity here, I see. Perhaps there's a phonograph?"

  "Naw, and the power's not trained enough yet anyhow," said Modell regretfully. His eyes were full of the jacket photograph. "It heats the smelters, is all, and-"

  "Modell, you're supposed to be trading, not running your mouth," interrupted the Policeman. "Get on with it."

  "Well, if not the record, then-" Smith said.

  "I might make you an offer on the picture," one of the locals broke in.

  "I won't separate them, I'm afraid," Smith rejoined, "and I won't have the record where it can't be used properly. These may be more useful, though I can't guarantee them after the time they've been sitting and he laid a red and green box of. 30-30 cartridges on the wood.

  "The Chief keeps all the guns in Moseby besides these," spoke Carter, patting the plastic stock of his M16. "It'll stay that way. And there's a righteous plenty of ammunition for them already."

  "Fine, fine," said Smith, unperturbed, reaching again into his pack. He removed a plastic box which whirred until a tiny green hand reached out of the mechanism to shut itself off. It frightened the onlookers as much as Smith's own radiation scars had. The traveler thoughtfully hid the toy again in his pack before taking out his final item, a GI compass.

  "It always shows North, unless you're too close to iron," Smith said as he demonstrated. "You can turn the base to any number of degrees and take a sighting through the slot there… but I'll want more than a night's lodging for it."

  "Our tokens're good up and down the river," one of the locals suggested, ringing a small brass disk on the bar. It had been struck with a complex pattern of lightning bolts on one side and the number "50" on the other. "You can redeem 'em for iron ingots at dockside," he explained, thumbing toward the river. " 'Course, they discount 'em the farther away you get."

  "I don't follow rivers a great deal," the traveler lied with a smile. "Let's say that I get room and board-and all I care to drink-for a week…"

  The chaffering was good-natured and brief, concluding with three days' room and board, or-and here Smith nodded toward the stern-faced Carter-so much shorter a time as he actually stayed in the village. In addition, Smith would have all the provisions he requested for his journey and a round for the house now. When Modell took the traveler's hand, extended to seal the bargain, the whole room cheered. The demands for mugs of the sharp, potent beer drew the innkeeper when he would far rather have pored over his pre-Blast acquisition-marvelous, though of little enough use to him.

  Dealing over, Smith carried his mug to one of the stools before the fire. Sausages, dried vegetables, and a pair of lanterns hung from the roof joists. Deer and elk antlers were pegged to the pine paneling all around the room, and above the mantelpiece glowered the skull of a rat larger than a German shepherd.

  "I wonder that a man has the courage to walk alone out there," suggested a heavy-set local who tamped his pipe with the ball of his thumb, "what with the muties and all."

  Smith chuckled, swigged his beer, and gestured with the mug at the rat skull. "Like that, you mean? But that's old. The giant rats were nasty enough, I have no doubt; but they weren't any stronger than the wolves, and they were a good deal stupider. Maybe you'd find a colony now and again in ruins downwind of a Strike… but they'll not venture far into the light, and the ones that're left-not many-are nothing that a sling stone or arrow can't cure if needs be."He paused and smiled. "Besides, their meat's sweet enough. I'm told."

  Despite the ruddy fire, the other faces in the circle went pale. Smith's eyes registered the reaction while his mouth continued to smile."Now, travelers tell stories, you know," he said, "and there's an art to listening to them. There's little enough to joke about on the trail, so I have to do it here."

  His face went serious for a moment and he added, "But I'll tell you this and swear to the truth of it: when I was near what may have been Cleveland, I thought I'd caught a mouse rummaging in my pack. And when I fetched it out, it was no bigger than a mouse, and its legs were folded under it so it could hop and scurry the way a mouse can. But its head… there was a horn just there-" the traveler touched the tip of his nose-"and another littler one just behind it. I figure some zoo keeper before the Blast would have called me a liar if I'd told him what his rhinos would breed to, don't you think?"

  He drank deep. The company buzzed at the wonder and the easy fellowship of the man who had seen it.

  "Scottie meant the half-men, didn't you, Scottie?" said a bulky man whose moustache and the beard fringing his mouth were dark with beer. He mimed an extra head with his clenched fist. "Monsters like that in the Hot Lands."

  Smith's head bobbed sagely against the chorus of grim assent from the other men. "Sure, I know what you mean," he said. "Two-headed men? Girls with an extra pair of legs coming out of their bellies?"

  Sounds of horror and agreement.

  "You see," the traveler went on, "the Blast changed things… but you know as I do that it didn't change them to be easier for men. There've always been children born as… monsters, if you will. Maybe more born nowadays than there were before the Blast; but theywere born, and I've seen books that were old at the Blast that talk of them. And they don't live now, my friends. Life everywhere is too hard, and those poor innocents remind folk of the Blast; and who would remember that?"

  He looked around the room. The eyes that met his dropped swiftly. "There's been some born here in Moseby, haven't there?"Smith asked, his words thrusting like knifeblades and no doubt to them. "Where are they now?"

  The man they had called Scottie bit through the reed stem of his pipe. He spluttered and the front legs of his stool clacked on the puncheon floor.

  "Say, now, I'm not here to pry," Smith continued swiftly. "What you do is your own business. For my own part, I'd appreciate another mug of this excellent beer."

  Chairs scraped in agreement as all the men stood, stretched, and moved to the bar. Modell drew beer smoothly, chalking drinks on the board on the back wall-everyone but Smith was a local. The innkeeper even broached a new cask without noticeable delay. Several of the company went out the rear door and returned, lacing their trousers. There was a brief pause as everyone settled back around the fire. Then Scottie swallowed, scowled, and said belligerently, "All right, what about the Changlings?"

  "Pardon?" The traveler's eyes were friendly above the rim of his mug, but there was no comprehension in them.

  "Oh, come on!" the local said, flushing in embarrassment. "You know about the Changlings, everybody does. The Blast made them. They were men before, but now they glow blue and change their shapes and walk around like skeletons, all bones!" Scottie lowered his eyes and slurped his beer in the silence. At last he repeated, "Everybody knows."

  Gently, as if the suggestion did not appear as absurd to him as it suddenly did to everyone else in the room, Smith said, "I've seen some of the Strike Zones… I guess I've said that. There's nothing there, friend. The destruction is total, everything. It isn't likely that anything was created by the Blast."

&nb
sp; "The Blast changed things, we can all agree there," said Carter unexpectedly. Eyes turned toward the Policeman seated at one corner of the hearth."Random change," Carter continued to muse aloud. "That generally'll mean destruction, yes. But there was a lot of power in the bombs, and a lot of bombs. So much power that… who knows what they could have done?"

  Smith looked at the Policeman, raising his eyebrows. He nodded again."Power, yes. But thechance that the changes, cell by cell, atom by atom, would be… not destructive… That's a billion to one against, Mr. Carter."

  "Well, the books say there were billions of men in the world before the Blast," the Policeman said, spreading the fingers of his left hand, palm upward.

  The traveler's scarred left hand mirrored the Policeman's."It's a wide world," he said, "as you must know and I surely do." He drank, smiled again, and said, "You're familiar with bombs it would seem, friend. I've heard talk in my travels that there was a stockpile of bombs in the mountains around here. Do you know that story?"

  Carter looked at Smith with an expression that was terrible in its stillness. "Modell," he said in the silence, "it's time to throw another log on the fire." He paused; the innkeeper scurried to do as directed. "And it's time," the Policeman continued, "to talk of other things than the Blast. What sort of game do you find in the Hot Lands, for instance?"

  "Well, I snare more than I knock on the head with my sling," Smith began easily, and the room relaxed a little.

  They talked and drank late into the night. Smith told of gnarly woods and following miles of trails worn no higher than a hog's shoulder. The locals replied with tales of their farms in the river bottoms, managed for them by hirelings, and the wealth they drew from shares in the smelter's profits. Few of them actually did any of the heavy, dangerous work of steel production themselves. Moseby was a feudal state, but its basis was the powerplant rather than land.

  When Carter finally left, only Scottie and another local remaining in company with Smith and Modell, the talk grew looser. Finally Scottie wheezed, "They drift in here to Moseby, up the river and down-you're the first across the mountains, boy, I'll tell the world. We put 'em to work in the fields or the smelter, or they crew the barges for us. But they're not Moseby, they're not of the Assembly. It'sus who've got the power, under the Chief and the Police, that is. We keep the Light and the-"

  Modell touched the line of Scottie's jaw, silencing him. Scottie's surprise bloomed into awakened fright. "You've had enough tonight, old man," the innkeeper said. "Pook, you too. Time for you both to get home, and for me to get to bed."

  "And me," Smith agreed-Modell had already brought out blankets and opened a side bench into a cot."Though first I'll take a leak and, say, a walk to settle my head. If you leave the door on the latch?"

  Modell nodded dourly. "You've been listening to that fool Howes and his talk of the girls across the Assembly. Him with a wife and six children, too! Well, don't try to bring one back here with you. They should know better, but if one didn't, it'd be the worse for both of you." The innkeeper blew out one of the lamps and moved toward the other.

  Smith urinated in the open ditch behind the building, letting his eyes readjust to the moonglow. Then he began to walk along the sewer with a deceptive purposelessness. In the shadow of the house nearest the creek he paused, eying the nodding guards across the gorge. The traveler took off his boots. He ducked into the ditch and used its cover to crawl down onto the creek bank.

  The rock was steep, but it was limestone and weathered into irregularity enough for Smith's practiced digits to grip. Smoothly but without haste, the traveler slipped along below the line of sight of the guards at the powerplant. When he reached the bridge trestles he paused again, breathing carefully. His hands examined the nearest of the handsawn oak timbers, tracing it from where it butted into the rock to where it crossed another beam halfway to the stringers. Smith swung onto the trestle and began to negotiate the gorge like an ant in a clump of heavy grass.

  Any sounds the traveler might have made were hidden by the creek. Its clatterings beneath echoed in a backdrop one could not easily talk over. That itself was a danger for Smith when he reached the far end of the bridge and would have listened to the guards' conversation before going on. Carefully, because a crook in the gorge threw most of the spray onto the rocks on this side, Smith edged left toward the west corner of the building. The wall there was built almost to the rim of the gorge. Smith's clothing matched the color of the wet stone so that his outline was at least blurred for a potential watcher from the village; but lack of alertness on the guards' part was his real defense.

  Smith raised his head. Both guards were nodding in their chairs, crossbows leaning against the doorposts beside them. The traveler swung lithely up. A step later he was hugging the greater concealment of the powerplant's west wall. The stone hummed.

  The building was as massive a construction as anything Smith had seen created after the Blast. The walls were drystone, using the natural layering of limestone and their two-foot thickness to attain an adequate seal without mortar. Their weathered seams made it easy for one of Smith's strength and condition to mount the fifteen feet of blank wall to the lighted slits just below the roof. The interior was much as the traveler had expected it to be, much as he had seen it before here and there across the face of the world.

  Six huge electric motors were ranked below him. They were being used as generators, driven by a complex pattern of shafts and broad leather belts. Only one of them was turning at the moment. When the smelters were working at full capacity and called in turn for the maximum output of the plant, the room would be a bedlam of machines and their attendants. Now a man and a woman, scarcely less somnolent than the guards outside, were sufficient. The light of the naphtha lanterns illuminating the chamber may have exaggerated the attendants' pallor, but they certainly saw less of the sun than the villagers across the stream did. It was hard to believe that control of this apparatus was left to slaves; yet it was even more unlikely that free men who knew what they were doing would be willing to enter the chamber below.

  In the center of the north wall, built against the living rock of the mountainside, was the reactor.

  Its genesis was evident, for the black hulls of ten fusion bombs were ranged along the partition wall to the east. Smith, his head framed in the narrow window, licked his lips when he saw the bombs. They would no longer be weapons; the plutonium of their fission cores would have decayed beyond the capacity to form critical mass when compacted. But those cores, taken from their cocoons of lithium hydride and the inner baths of deuterium, could still fuel a reactor.

  The latter was an ugly mass of stone blocks, overshadowed by a mantis-like derrick. Steam from the reactor drove the pistons of a crude engine. Unlike the pre-Blast electric motors, the steam engine had been manufactured for its present purpose. Inefficient, it leaked vapor through seams and rope gaskets-but the power to create steam from water was practically inexhaustible on the scale required here.

  Manufacturing skill and not theoretical knowledge had frequently been the brake on human progress: da Vinci could design a workable aircraft, but no one for four hundred years could build an engine to drive it. Nuclear power technology was so simple, given the refined fuel and expendable humans to work it, that an age which could not manufacture smokeless powder could nonetheless build a fission plant. All it would have taken was a weapons stockpile and a technician or two from Oak Ridge, vacationing in the mountains at the time of the Blast.

  It was what Smith had come to learn.

  There was a new sound in the night. A score or more of men were thudding across the bridge to the powerplant. Smith ducked his head beneath the sill of the window. As he did so, the siren on the roof hooted ferally. Knowing that there was no escape downward if he had been seen, the traveler slipped sideways and began to clamber up between a pair of the windows. As his fingers touched the edge of the slates, a voice from below shouted, "There he is!"

  Smith gathered h
imself to swing onto the gently sloped roof; something tapped his knuckles. He looked up. The muzzle of Carter's M16 stared back at him. The Policeman smiled over the sights. "I saw something block one of the plant windows," the local man said. "Thought it might be worth waking the guards for. Now, 'friend', you just climb down easy to where the people are waiting, or me and the boys here won't wait for the ceremony."

  The pair of guards flanking Carter had faces as tense as their cocked crossbows. Smith shook his head ruefully and descended into the waiting manacles.

  The siren gave three long cries as the guards marched Smith back across the bridge. Citizens, warned by the initial signal, began walking out of their houses; the men armed, the women bleak as gray steel. They drifted toward the shrouded platform across the long axis of the Assembly from the bridge. None of the citizens seemed to want to be the first to reach the common destination. They dawdled in pairs and trios, turning aside as Smith and his captors passed through them.

  The Chief and the remaining Policemen had hurried up the steps to what was clearly a covered altar by the time Smith reached it. Cords fluttered as the canvas roof was gathered within the screen of hoardings built on a base of stone blocks. Something mechanical purred and paused. Sparks hissed about the powerline strung to the platform along a line of low posts on the western edge of the Assembly.

  "On up," Carter said, smiling. He tweaked Smith's manacles toward the steps. The guards were taking position at the base of the altar, facing out toward the Assembly. Despite the siren calls, there was no sign of life or movement from the smelter and its associated buildings. Their blank walls were no more than a physical reminder of the grip the freeholders of Moseby held on the minds and lives of those who would work in their village. The business tonight was no business of a bargee or a factory hand.