And more opallike sparkles occurred, and more, and more, and slowly they drifted forward, and he knew that his gun was worthless.
There came a terrible pain within his head and white flashes destroying his seeing. When it cleared, there were thousands of rats all about him and he moved without thinking.
He pulled the bulb from his ammo belt, withdrew the pin, and hurled the bulb into their midst.
For three pulsebeats nothing happened, except that they continued their advance.
Then there came a blinding solar-corona blaze, which did not diminish but persisted for many minutes. White phosphorus. He followed it with napalm. He chuckled as they burned and screamed and clawed at one another. At least, something within him was chuckling, some part of him. The rats fell back and there came another pain within his head. There was an especially violent throbbing in the vicinity of his left temple.
Do not do that again, please. I did not realize You to be such a thing as You are.
“I damned well will do it, if you try what you tried again.”
I will not. I will bring forth of rats for You to eat. Of the young, fat ones. Only deliver us from Your wrath.
“Very well.”
How many of rats do You desire?
“Six should do it.”
They will be of the very best and plumpest.
They were brought before him, and he beheaded them, cleaned them, and roasted them over the sterno stove he carried in his pack.
Would You care for more of rats? I can give You all that You desire.
“No, I need no more,” he said.
Are You certain? Perhaps six more?
“These have been sufficient, for now,” he said.
You will remain until the storm stops?
“Yes,” he said.
Then You will go away?
“Yes,” he said.
Come back to me one day, please. I will always have more rats for You to eat. I wish to have You come back.
… And deliver us from Your wrath, oh thing You name in Your pain as Carl Lufteufel.
“Perhaps,” he said, smiling.
SEVEN
Aboard his cart, Tibor McMasters rode in style, with a flourish; pulled by the faithful cow, the cart rattled and bounced on, and miles of weedy pasture passed by, flat country with stalks rising, both tough and dry: this had become arid land, not fit for crops any longer. As he rolled forward, Tibor exulted; he had finally begun his Pilg and it would be a success; he knew it would.
He did not especially fear cutpurses and highwaymen, partly because no one bothered with the highways … he could rationalize this fear away, telling himself that since no traffic passed this way, how could there be highwaymen?
“O friends!” he declared aloud, translating into English the opening words of Schiller’s An die Freude. “Not these tones! On the contrary, let us sing of—” He paused, having forgotten the rest. God damn it, he said fiercely to himself, baffled by the tricks of his own mind.
The sun blazed down, hot as minnows skimming in the metallic surf, the tidal rise and fall of reality. He coughed, spat, and continued on.
Over everything, the sensual proximity of decay. Even the wild weeds possessed it, this abandonment. No one cared; no one did anything. O Freunde, he thought. Nicht diese Töne. Sondern …
What if there were highwaymen invisible now, due to mutation? No; impossible. He clung to that. Noted, preserved, and maintained that. He did not have to fear men: only the wilderness threatened him. In particular he feared the real possibility of a rupture in the road. A few wide ruts and—his cart would not travel on. He could well die amid boulders. Not the best death, he reflected. And yet, not one of the worst.
The broken limbs of trees blocked the road ahead. He slowed down, squinted in the patterned sunlight, trying to make out what it was.
Trees, he decided. Felled at the start of the war. No one has removed them.
In his cart he coasted up to the first tree. A trail of rough pebbles and dirt led off to one side, skirting the fallen trees; the trail, on the far side, led back to the road. If he had been on foot, or riding a bicycle … but instead he rested on a large cart, much too cumbersome to navigate the trail.
“God damn it,” he said.
He stopped his cart, listened to the dull whistle of wind sighing through the broken trees. No human voices. Somewhere far off, something barked, perhaps a dog, or if not that, then a large bird. Squawk, squawk, the sounds came. He spat over the side of his cart and once more surveyed the trail.
Maybe I can make it, he said to himself.
But suppose his cart got stuck?
Gripping the tiller of the cart, he jogged forward, and rumbled off the weed-cracked road and onto the dirt trail. His wheels spun anxiously, a high-pitched whirring sound, and clouds of brown dust whistled up in a dry geyser into the sky.
The cart had become stuck.
He did not get very far, he realized. But, all at once, he felt savage, almost nauseated, fear. A sour taste rose up within him, and his chest and arms burned red with humiliation. Stuck so soon: it humiliated him. Suppose someone saw him, here, caught in the dirt by the side of the collapsing road? They would jeer, he thought. At me. And go on. But—more likely they would assist me, he thought. I mean, it would be unreasonable to jeer. After all, have I become cynical about mankind? They’d help, of course. And yet his ears still burned with shame. To distract himself from his plight he got out a much-creased, oil-soaked Richfield map, and consulted it with an idea that he might find something of use.
He located himself on the map. Hardly a drop in the bucket, he discovered. I’ve only gone say thirty or thirty-five miles.
And yet this constituted a different world from the one he knew at Charlottesville. Another world only thirty miles away … perhaps one of a thousand dissimilar universes wheeling through sidereal time and space. Here and there on the map: names that once meant something. Now it had become a lunar map, with craters: vast potholes scooped out of the earth, down to bedrock. Almost below the soil level, where basalt flourished.
He flicked his whip at the cow, threw the mode-selector into reverse, and, gritting his teeth, rocked back and forth between forward one and reverse; the cart seethed as if on a wilderness of open sea.
The smell of burning oil, the clouds of dust raised … that was all. He groaned, and let up on the throttle. And here am I going to die, a part of his brain declared, and, instantly, he jeered—jeered at himself and his broken plight. He did not need anyone else; he could heap ridicule on himself single-handedly.
He clicked on his emergency bullhorn. Powered by the huge wet-cell battery of the cart, the bullhorn wheezed: his breath augmented. And now his voice.
“Now h-h-hear this!” he declared, and, from all around him, his voice amplified. “I am Tibor McMasters, on an official Pilg for the Servants of Wrath, Incorporated. I’m stuck. Could you give me a hand?” He shut off the bullhorn, listened. Only the lisping of the wind in the tall weeds to his right. And, everywhere, the flat orange luminosity of the sun.
A voice. He heard it. Clearly.
“Help me!” he called into the bullhorn. “I’ll pay you in metal. Okay? Is that okay?” Again he listened. And heard, this time, the scamper of many voices, very shrill, like screams. The noise echoed, blended with the hushed quiver of the weeds.
He got out his binoculars, gazed around him. Nothing but barren countryside, spread out ugly and bleak. Great red spots that hadn’t yet been overgrown, and slag surfaces were still visible—but by this time most ruins had become covered by soil and crabgrass. He saw, far off, a robot farming. Plowing with a metal hook welded to its waist, a section torn off some discarded machine. It did not look up; it paid no attention to him because it had never been alive, and only a living thing could care. The robot farmer continued to drag the rusty hook through the hard ground, its pitted body bent double with the strain. Working slowly, silently, without complaint.
And
then he saw them. The source of the noise. Twenty of them scampered across the ruined earth toward him; little black boys who leaped and ran, shouting shrill commands back and forth, as if in a single roofless cage.
“Whither, Son of Wrath?” the nearest little boy piped, meanwhile pushing through the tangled debris and slag. He was a little Bantu, in red rags sewn and patched together. He ran up to the cart, like a puppy, leaping and bounding and grinning white-teethed. He broke off bits of green weeds that grew here and there.
“West,” Tibor answered. “Always west. But I am stuck here.”
The other children sprinted up, now; they formed a circle around the stranded cart. An unusually wild bunch, completely undisciplined. They rolled and fought and tumbled and chased one another madly.
“How many of you,” Tibor said, “have taken your first instruction?”
There was a sudden uneasy silence. The children looked at one another guiltily; none of them answered.
“None of you?” Tibor said, amazed. Only thirty miles from Charlottesville. God, he thought; we have broken down like a rusty machine. “How do you expect to phase yourselves with the cosmic will? How can you expect to know the divine plan?” He whipped his grippers toward one of the boys, the nearest to his cart. “Are you constantly preparing yourself for the life to come? Are you constantly purging and purifying yourself? Do you deny yourself meat, sex, entertainment, financial gain, education, leisure?” But it was obvious; their unrestrained laughter and play proved. “Butterflies,” he said scathingly, snorting with disgust. “Anyhow,” he grated, “get me loose so I can roll on. I order you to!”
The children gathered at the rear of the cart and began to push. The cart bumped against the first fallen tree, going no farther.
“Get in front,” Tibor said, “and lift it up. All of you—take hold at the same time!” They did so, obediently but joyfully. He reclutched the cart in forward one—it shuddered and then passed over the first tree, to come to rest halfway up the second. A moment later he found himself bumping over the second tree and up against a third. The cart, raised up, jutting its nose into the sky, whined and groaned, and a wisp of blue smoke trickled up from the engine.
Now he could see better. Farmers, some robot, some alive, worked the fields on all sides. A thin layer of soil over slag; a few limp wheat stalks waved, thin and emaciated. The ground was terrible, the worst he had ever seen. He could feel the metal beneath the cart, almost at the surface. Bent men and women watered their sickly crops with tin cans, old metal containers picked from the ruins. An ox was pulling a crude car.
In another field, women weeded by hand; all moved slowly, stupidly, victims of hookworm from the soil. They were all barefoot. The children evidently hadn’t picked it up yet, but they soon would. He gazed up at the clouded sky and gave thanks to the God of Wrath for sparing him this; trials of exceptional vividness lay on every hand. These men and women were being tempered in a hot crucible; their souls were probably purified to an astonishing degree. A baby lay in the shade, beside a half-dozing mother. Flies crept over its eyes; the mother breathed heavily, hoarsely, her mouth open, an unhealthy flush discoloring the paperlike skin. Her belly bulged; she had already become pregnant again. Another eternal soul to be raised from a lower level. Her great breasts sagged and wobbled as she stirred in her sleep, spilling out over her dirty wraparound.
The boys, having pushed him and the Holstein past the logs, the remnants of former trees, trotted off.
“Wait,” Tibor said. “Come back. I will ask and you will answer. You know the basic catechisms?” He peered sharply around.
The children returned, eyes on the ground, and assembled in a silent circle around him. One hand went up, then another.
“First,” Tibor said. “Who are you? You are a minute fragment in the cosmic plan. Second—what are you? A mere speck in a system so vast as to be beyond comprehension. Third! What is the way of life? To fulfill what is required by the cosmic forces. Fourth! What—”
“Fifth,” one of the boys muttered. “Where have you been?” He answered his own question. “Through endless steps; each turn of the wheel advances or depresses you.”
“Sixth!” Tibor cried. “What determines your direction at the next turn? Your conduct in this manifestation.
“Seventh! What is right conduct? Submitting yourself to the eternal forces of the Deus Irae, that which makes up the divine plan.
“Eighth! What is the significance of suffering? To purify the soul.
“Ninth! What is the significance of death? To release the person from this manifestation, so he may rise to a new rung of the ladder.
“Tenth—” But at that moment Tibor broke off. An adult human shape approached his cart; instinctively, his Holstein lowered her head and pretended—or tried—to crop the bitter weeds growing around her.
“We got to go,” the black children piped. “Goodbye.” They scampered off; one paused, looked back at Tibor, and shouted, “Don’t talk to her! My momma say never to talk to her or you get sucked in. Watch out, y’hear?”
“I hear,” Tibor said, and shivered. The air had become dark and cool, as if awaiting the thrashing fury of a storm. He knew what this was; he recognized her.
He would go down the ruined streets, toward the sprawling mass of stone and columns that was its house. It had been described to him many times. Each stone was carefully listed on the big map back at Charlottesville. He knew by heart the street that led there, to the entrance. He knew how the great doors lay on their faces, broken and split. He knew how the dark, empty corridors would look inside. He would pass into the vast chamber, the dark room of bats and spiders and echoing sounds. And there it would be. The Great C. Waiting silently, waiting to hear the questions. The queries on which it thrived.
“Who is there?” the shape asked him, the female shape of the Great C’s peripatetic extension. The voice sounded again, a metallic voice, hard and penetrating, without warmth in it. An enormous voice that could not be stopped; it would never become still.
He was afraid, more afraid than ever before in his life. His body had begun to shake terribly. Awkwardly he thrashed about in his seat, squinting in the gloom to make out her features. He could not. She had a dished-in face, with almost vestigial features, almost without the courtesy of features at all. That chilled him, too.
“I’ve—” He swallowed noisily, revealing his fear. “I have come to pay my respects, Great C,” he breathed.
“You have prepared questions for me?”
“Yes,” he said, lying. He had hoped to sneak past the Great C, not disturbing it, not being disturbed by it either.
“You will ask me within the structure,” she said, putting her hand on the railing of his car. “Not out here.”
Tibor said, “I do not have to go into the structure. You can answer the questions here.” Huskily he cleared his throat, swallowed, pondered the first question; he had carried them with him, in written form, just in case. Thank god he had; thank god that Father Handy had prepared him. She would eventually drag him inside, but he intended to hold off as long as possible. “How did you come into existence?” he asked.
“Is that the first question?”
“No,” he said quickly; it certainly was not.
“I don’t recognize you,” the mobile extension of the giant computer said, her voice tinny and shrill. “Are you from another area?”
“Charlottesville,” Tibor said.
“And you came this way to question me?”
“Yes,” he lied. He reached into his coat pocket; one of his manual extensors checked that the derringer .22 pistol, single shot, which Father Handy had given him, was still there. “I have a gun,” he said.
“Do you?” Her tone was scathing, in an abstract sort of way.
“I’ve never fired a pistol before,” Tibor said. “We have bullets, but I don’t know if they still work.”
“What is your name?”
“Tibor McMasters. I’m an incom
plete; I have no arms or legs.”
“A phocomelus,” the Great C said.
“Pardon?” he said, half stammering.
“You are a young man,” she said. “I can see you fairly well. Part of my equipment was destroyed in the Smash, but I can still see a little. Originally, I scanned mathematical questions visually. It saved time. I see you have military clothing. Where did you get it? Your tribe does not make such things, does it?”
“No, this is military garb. United Nations, by the color, I would say.” Tremblingly, he rasped, “Is it true that you come originally from the hand of the God of Wrath? That he manufactured you in order to put the world to fire? Made suddenly terrible—by atoms. And that you invented the atoms and delivered them to the world, corrupting God’s original plan? We know you did it,” he finished. “But we don’t know how.”
“That is your first question? I will never tell you. It is too terrible for you ever to know. Lufteufel was insane; he made me do insane things.”
“Men other than the Deus Irae came to visit you,” Tibor said. “They came and listened.”
“You know,” the Great C said, “I have existed a long time. I remember life before the Smash. I could tell you many things about it. Life was much different then. You wear a beard and hunt animals in the woods. Before the Smash there were no woods. Only cities and farms. And men were clean-shaven. Many of them wore white clothing, then. They were scientists. They were very fine. I was constructed by engineers; they were a form of scientist.” She paused. “Do you recognize the name Einstein? Albert Einstein?”
“No.”
“He was the greatest scientist of them all, but he never consulted me because he was already dead when I was made. There were even questions I could answer which even he failed to ask. There were other computers, but none so grand as I. Everyone alive now has heard of me, have they not?”
“Yes,” Tibor said, and wondered how and when he was going to get away; it, she, had him trapped here. Wasting his time with its obligatory mumbling.
“What is your first question?” the Great C asked.