A Heritage of Stars (24 page)

At the far end of the street stood a group of men, all facing in his direction. As he came up the street, one of them moved forward with a shuffle and a limp. He was old and stooped. He wore leather breeches and a cougar hide was tossed across one shoulder, fastened with thongs in front. His snow-white hair hung down to his shoulders. It looked as if it had been cut off square with a dull knife.

A few feet from him Cushing stopped. The old man looked at him out of ice-blue eyes.

“This way,” he said. “Follow me.”

He turned and shuffled up the street. Cushing slowed his pace to follow.

To him came the smell of cooking, laced by the stink of garbage that had been too long in the summer heat. At the doorways of some of the lodges stood picketed horses, perhaps the prize hunters or war horses of their owners. Dogs, slinking about, emitted yelps of terror when someone hurled a stick at them. The heat of the sun was oppressive, making warm the very dust that overlay the street. Over all of this rode the sense of approaching storm—the smell, the feel, the pressure, of brewing weather.

When the old man came up to the group of men, they parted to let him through, Cushing following. The mounted escort dropped away. Cushing did not look to either side to glimpse the faces of the men, but he knew that if he had looked, he would have seen the same hardness that had been on the faces of the horsemen.

They broke through the ranks of men and came into a circle, rimmed by the waiting men. Across the circle a man sat in a heavy chair over which a buffalo robe was thrown. The old man who had served as Cushing's guide moved off to one side and Cushing walked forward until he faced the man in the chair.

“I am Mad Wolf,” said the man, and having said that, said no more. Apparently he felt that anyone should know who he was once he had said his name.

He was a huge man, but not a brute. There was in his face a disquieting intelligence. He wore a thick black beard and his head was shaven. A vest of wolf skin, decorated by the tails of wolves, was open at the front, displaying a bronzed and heavily muscled torso. Hamlike hands grasped the chair arms on either side.

“My name is Thomas Cushing,” Cushing told him.

With a shock, Cushing saw that the scarecrow man who had been spokesman for the wardens stood beside the chair.

“You came from Thunder Butte,” rumbled Mad Wolf. “You are one of the party that used your magic tricks to get through the Trees. You have disturbed the Sleepers.”

“There are no Sleepers to disturb,” said Cushing. “Thunder Butte is the Place of Going to the Stars. There lies hope for the human race. I have come to ask for help.”

“How for help?”

“We need your sensitives.”

“Sensitives? Talk plainly, man. Tell me what you mean.”

“Your witches and warlocks. Your medicine men, if you have such. People who can talk with trees, who bring the buffalo, who can divine the weather. Those who throw carven bones to see into the future.”

Mad Wolf grunted. “And what would you do with those? We have very few of them. Why should we give the ones we have to you, who have disturbed the Sleepers?”

“I tell you there are no Sleepers. There were never any Sleepers.”

The warden spoke. “There was one other among them who told us this same thing. A tall woman with emptiness in her eyes and a terrible face. ‘You are wrong,' she told us, ‘there aren't any Sleepers.'”

“Where is this woman now,” Mad Wolf asked of Cushing, “with her empty eyes and her terrible face?”

“She stayed behind,” said Cushing. “She is on the butte.”

“Waking the Sleepers.…”

“Goddammit, don't you understand? I've told you, there are no Sleepers.”

“There was with you, as well, a man of metal, one once called a robot, a very ancient term that is seldom spoken now.”

“It was the metal man,” the warden said, “who killed the bear. This one who stands before us shot arrows, but it was the metal man who killed the bear, driving a lance into the chest.”

“That is true,” said Cushing. “My arrows did but little.”

“So you admit,” said Mad Wolf, “that there is a metal man.”

“That is true. He may be the last one left and he is a friend of mine.”

“A friend?”

Cushing nodded.

“Are you not aware,” asked Mad Wolf, “that a robot, if such it be, is an evil thing—a survival from that day when the world was held in thrall by monstrous machines? That it's against the law to harbor such a machine, let alone be a friend of one?”

“It wasn't that way,” said Cushing. “Back there, before the Collapse, I mean. The machines didn't use us; we used the machines. We tied our lives to them. The fault was ours, not theirs.”

“You place yourself against the legends of the past?”

“I do,” said Cushing, “because I have read the History.”

Perhaps, he thought, it was not wise to argue so with this man sitting in the chair, to contradict so directly all that he had said. But it would be worse, he sensed, to buckle in to him. It would not do to show a weakness. There still might be reason here. Mad Wolf still might be willing, once the initial sparring had been done, to listen to the truth.

“The History?” asked Mad Wolf, speaking far too softly. “What is this history that you speak of?”

“A history written by a man named Wilson, a thousand years ago. It's at a university.…”

“The university on the bank of the Mississippi? That is where you came from—a sniveling, cowardly egghead hoeing his potato patch and huddling behind a wall? You come walking in here, as if you had a right, wanting what you call our sensitives.…”

“And that's not all,” said Cushing, forcing himself to speak as brashly as he could. “I want your blacksmiths and your spear- and arrow-makers. And I want the brain cases that you have.”

“Ah, so,” said Mad Wolf, still speaking softly. “This is all you want. You're sure there's nothing else?”

There was a secret amusement, a sly amusement, on the faces of the men who circled them. These men know their chief, knew the ways of him.

“That is all I'll need,” said Cushing. “Given these things, it will be possible to find a better way of life.”

“What is wrong with the way we live?” asked Mad Wolf. “What is bad about it? We have food to fill our bellies; we have far lands to roam in. We do not have to work. It is told that in the old days all men had to work. They woke and ate their breakfasts so they could get to work. They labored all the day and then went home again and tumbled early into bed so they could get up early to return to work. They had no time to call their own. For all this, they were no better off than we are. For all their labor, they got only food and sleep. This we get, and much more, and do not have to work for it. You have come from that egghead fort of yours to change all this, to go back to the olden ways, where we will labor dawn to dusk, working out our guts. You would wake the Sleepers, an event we have stationed guards all these centuries to guard against, so they cannot come ravening from the butte.…”

“I have told you there are no Sleepers,” Cushing said. “Can't you take my word for that? Up there on the butte is knowledge that men have gathered from the stars. Knowledge that will help us, not to regain the old days, which were bad, but to find a new way.”

It was no use, he knew. They did not believe him. He had been mistaken. There was no reason here. They would never believe him.

“The man is mad,” the warden said.

“Yes, he truly is,” said Mad Wolf. “We have wasted time on him.”

Someone who had come up behind him seized Cushing, almost gently, but when he lunged to get away, hard hands closed upon him, forced his arms behind him and held him helpless.

“You have sinned,” Mad Wolf told him. “You have sinned most grievously.” To the men who had their hands on Cushing, he said, “Tie him to the post.”

The men who had stood in the circle now were breaking up, wandering away, and as they left, Cushing saw the post which until now had been hidden by their massed bodies. It stood no more than five feet high, fashioned from a new-cut tree, perhaps a cottonwood, with the bark peeled from it.

Without a word the men who held him forced him to the post, pulled his arms behind the post and tied them there, the thongs positioned in deep notches on either side of the post so he could not slide them free. Then, still without a word, they walked away.

He was not alone, however, for the gangs of small boys still were on the prowl.

He saw that he was in what appeared to be the center of the encampment. The larger space where the post was planted was the hub of a number of streets that ran between the lodges.

A clod of dirt went humming past his head, another hit him in the chest. The gang of boys ran down the street, howling at their bravado.

For the first time, Cushing noticed that the sun had gone and the landscape darkened. An unnatural silence encompassed everything. A great black cloud, almost purple in its darkness, boiled out of the west. The first broken forerunners of the cloud, racing eastward, had covered the sun. Thunder rumbled far off, and above the butte a great bolt of lightning lanced across the heavy blackness of the cloud.

Somewhere in one of the lodges, he told himself, the principal men of the tribe, among them Mad Wolf and the warden, were deciding what was to be done with him. He had no illusions, no matter the form their decision took, what the end result would be. He pulled against the thongs, testing them. They were tight; there was no give in them.

It had been insane, of course, this gamble of his—that men still might listen to reason. He realized, with a faint, ironic amusement, that he'd not been given a chance to explain what it was all about. His conversation with Mad Wolf had been in generalities. The failure of his attempt, he knew, hung on the concept of the Sleepers, a myth repeated so many times over so long a time that it had taken on the guise of gospel. Yet, yesterday, when he had talked it over with the others, he had been convinced that if his arguments were properly presented, there was better than an even chance they would be listened to. It was his years at the university, he told himself, that had betrayed him. A man who dwelled in a place of sanity was ill-equipped to deal with reality, a reality that still was colored by Collapse fanaticism.

He wondered, with a quaint sense of unreality, what would happen now. None of those still on the butte was equipped to carry forward the work, even to attempt to begin to form the organization of an elite corps that over the years could wrest the secrets from the data banks. Rollo was canceled out; as a robot he had no chance at all. Through Meg, for all her ability, ran a streak of timidity that would make her helpless. Ezra and Elayne were simply ineffectual.

Andy, he thought, half-grinning to himself. If Andy could only talk, he would be the best bet of them all.

Heavy peals of thunder were rippling in the west, and above the crest of Thunder Butte the lightning ran like a nest of nervous snakes. Heat and mugginess clamped down hard against the land. The huge cloud of purple blackness kept on boiling higher into the sky.

People were coming out of the lodges now—women and children and a few men. The hooting boys threw more clods and stones at him, but their aims were poor. One small pebble, however, hit him on the jaw and left a paralyzing numbness. Down the street he could see, still far out on the prairie, the guards driving a herd of horses toward the camp.

Watching the horses, he saw them break into a run, thundering toward the camp, with the guards frantically quirting their mounts in an endeavor to head them off or slow them down. Something had spooked the herd—that was quite evident. A sizzling lightning bolt, perhaps, or a nearby crack of thunder.

At the far edge of the camp someone shouted in alarm and the shout was picked up by others, the frightened shouts ringing through the camp between the pealing of the thunder. People were piling in panic out of the lodges, filling the street, running and screaming, instinctively reacting to the terror of the shouting.

Then he saw it, far off—the flicker of the lights, the zany sparkle of many Shivering Snakes against the blackness of the sky, riding before the approaching storm, sweeping toward the camp. He caught his breath and strained against the thongs. The Snakes, he asked himself, what were those crazy Snakes about?

But it was not, he saw, as the Snakes swept closer, the Snakes alone. Andy ran at the head of them, mane and tail flowing in the wind, his feet blurred with the speed of his running, while beside him raced the pale glimmer that was Rollo, and behind them and to each side of them, the dark blobs of a great horde of Followers, seen in the darkness only by virtue of the Snakes that spun in dizzy circles about each of them, illuminating them, picking out the wolflike shape of them. And behind the pack, the bouncing, bobbing spheres that were the Team, straining to keep up.

At the edge of the camp the frightened horse herd came plunging down the street, rearing madly, screaming in their terror, careening into lodges that came tumbling down. People were running madly and without seeming purpose, screaming mouths open like wide
O
's in the center of their faces. Not only women and children but men as well, running as if the hounds of hell were snapping at their heels.

As the horses came at him, Cushing hunkered low against the post. A lashing hoof grazed a shoulder as a screaming horse reared and swerved to go around him. Another crashed into a lodge and fell, bringing the lodge down with him, collapsed, tangled amid the leather and the poles, kicking and striking with its forefeet in an effort to get free. Out from under the fallen lodge crawled a man, clawing to pull himself along until he was able to get on his legs and run. A lightning flash, for a moment, lined his face, lighting it so it could be recognized. It was Mad Wolf.

Then Rollo was beside Cushing, knife in hand, slashing at the thongs. The camp was deserted now except for a few people still trapped beneath the fallen lodges, howling like gut-shot dogs as they fought their way to freedom. All about, the Shivering Snakes swirled in loops of fire and the Followers were dancing, with Andy capering in their midst.