“You’ll pardon me,” said Cushing, “if I seem unable immediately to grasp the full significance of what you’re telling me. This is something that I have never thought of even in the wildest fantasies. Tell me—just now, were you listening only, or were you talking with them?”
“They were talking to me,” said the old man. “They were telling me of a thing of wonder. To the west, they tell me, is a group of plants—I gather they are trees—that seem alien to this land, brought here many years ago. How brought, they do not know, or perhaps I only failed of understanding, but, in any case, great plants that stand as giants of understanding.… Ah, my dear, I thank you.”
He took the cup from Meg and drank, not gulping it down but drinking it slowly, as if he were savoring every drop of it.
“To the west?” asked Cushing.
“Yes, to the west, they said.”
“But … how would they know?”
“It seems they do. Perhaps seeds, flying in the wind, may carry word. Or wafting thistledown. Or passed along, one root to another.…”
“It’s impossible,” said Cushing. “It is all impossible.”
“This metal creature, shaped in the form of man—what may it be?” the old man asked.
“I am a robot,” Rollo said.
“Robots,” said the old man. “Robots? Ah, yes, now I know. I’ve seen brain cases of robots, but not a living robot. So you are a robot?”
“My name is Rollo,” the robot said. “I am the last one that there is. Although if I cannot find a bear …”
“My name is Ezra,” said the old one. “I am an ancient wanderer. I wander up and down the land to converse with neighbors, wherever I may find them. This splendid patch of sunflowers, a vast stretch of tumbleweeds, a cluster of rosebushes, even the grass at times, although the grass has little to recommend itself.…”
“Grandfather,” said Elayne, “put on your moccasins.”
“So I shall,” said Ezra. “I had quite forgotten them. And we must be on our way.”
He scuffed his feet into the shapeless, battered moccasins.
“This is not the first time,” he said, “that I have heard of this strange growing in the West. I heard of it first many years ago and wondered greatly at the news, although I did not act upon it. But now, with age fastening its bony grasp upon me, I do act upon the information. For if I fail to do so, perhaps no one else ever will. I have questioned widely and I know of no one else who can talk with plants.”
“Now,” said Meg, “you go to hunt these legendary plants.”
He nodded his head. “I do not know if I shall find them, but we wander westward and I ask along the way. My people cried out against our going, for they thought it a foolish quest. Death along the trail, they said, was all that we would find. But once they saw that we were set upon the going, they urged us to accept an escort, a body of horsemen who, they said, would not interfere but would only accompany us at a distance to afford protection in case there should be danger. But we begged off from the escort. People of good heart can travel widely and no danger comes to them.”
“Your people?” Meg asked.
“A tribe,” said Ezra, “that lives in the prairies east of here, in a kinder land than this one. When we left, they offered horses and great stores of supplies, but we took none of them. We have a better chance of finding what we seek if we travel naked of all convenience. We carry nothing but a flint and steel with which to make a fire.”
Cushing asked, “How do you manage to eat?”
“With great apology to our friends and neighbors, we subsist on roots and fruits we find along the way. I am sure our plant friends understand our need and harbor no resentment. I have tried to explain to them, and though they may not entirely understand, there has been no censure of us, no shrinking away in horror.”
“You travel west, you say.”
“We seek the strangeness of these plants somewhere in the West.”
“We also travel west,” said Cushing. “Both of us may be seeking different things, but what you tell us makes it seem we may find what each of us seeks in the same location. Would it be agreeable for you to travel with us? Or must you go alone?”
Ezra thought for a moment. Then he said, “It seems to me that it might be proper for all of us to go together. You seem plain and simple folk, with no evil in you. So we will gladly travel with you upon one condition.”
“And that condition?”
“That occasionally, on the way, I may stop for a while to talk with my friends and neighbors.”
15
West of the river, the land heaved up in tortuous, billowing surges to reach the dry emptiness of the high plains.
From where he stood, Cushing looked down to the yellow streak of river, a smooth and silky ribbon of water that held in it something of the appearance of a snake, or of a mountain lion. So different here from what it had been during the days they had camped upon its bank, resting for this, the final lap of their journey—if, indeed, it should be the final lap. Viewed close at hand, the river was a sand-sucking, roiling, pugnacious terror, a raucous, roistering flood of water that chewed its way down across the land. Strange, he thought, how rivers could have such distinctive characteristics—the powerful, solemn thrust of the upper Mississippi; the chuckling, chattering comradeship of the Minnesota; and this, the rowdy bellicosity of the Missouri.
Rollo had lit the evening fire in a swale that ran down a slope, selecting a place where they would have some protection from the wind that came howling and whooping from the great expanse of prairie that stretched for miles into the west. Looking west, away from the river, one could see the continuing uplift, the rising land that swooped and climbed in undulating folds, to finally terminate in the darkness of a jagged line imprinted against the still-sunlit western sky. Another day, Cushing figured, until they reached the plains country. So long, he thought, it had taken so long—the entire trip much longer than it should have been. Had he traveled alone, he’d be there by now, although, come to think of it, traveling alone, he might have no idea of the location of the place he sought. He pondered for a moment that strange combination of circumstances which had led to his finding of Rollo, in whose mind had stuck the name of Thunder Butte; and then the finding of the geological-survey maps, which had shown where Thunder Butte—or, at least, where one of many possible Thunder Buttes—might be found. Traveling alone, he realized, he might have found neither Rollo nor the maps.
The progress of the expedition had been slower since the addition of the old man and the girl, with Ezra digging holes in which to stand, to talk with or listen to (or whatever it was he did) a patch of cactus or a clump of tumbleweed, or flopping down into a sitting posture, to commune with an isolated bed of violets. Standing by, gritting his teeth, more times than he liked to think of, Cushing had suppressed an impulse to kick the old fool into motion or simply to walk away and leave him. Despite all this, however, he had to admit that he liked Ezra well enough. Despite his obstinate eccentricities, he was a wise, and possibly clever, old man who generally had his wits about him except for his overriding obsession. He sat at nights beside the campfire and talked of olden times when he had been a great hunter and, at times, a warrior, sitting in council with other, older tribal members when a council should be needed, with the realization creeping on him only gradually that he had an uncommon way with plant life. Once this had become apparent to other members of the tribe, his status gradually changed, until finally he became, in the eyes of the tribe, a man wise and gifted beyond the ordinary run of men. Apparently, although he talked little of it, the idea of going forth to wander and commune with plants and flowers also had come upon him slowly, a conviction growing with the years until he reached a point where he could see quite clearly he was ordained for a mission and must set forth upon it, not with the pomp and grandeur that his fellow tribesmen gladly would have furnished, but humbly and alone except for that strange granddaughter.
“She is a pa
rt of me,” he’d say. “I cannot tell you how, but unspoken between us is an understanding that cannot be described.”
And while he talked, of her or of other things, she sat at the campfire with the rest of them, relaxed, at peace, her hands folded in her lap, at times her head bent almost as if in prayer, at other times lifted and held high, giving the impression that she was staring, not out into the darkness only but into another world, another place or time. On the march, she moved lightly of foot—there were times when she seemed to float rather than to walk—serene and graceful, and more than graceful, a seeming to be full of grace, a creature set apart, a wild sprite that was human in a tantalizing way, a strange, concentrated essence of humanity that stood and moved apart from the rest of them, not because she wished to do so but because she had to do so. She seldom spoke. When she did speak, it was usually to her grandfather. It was not that she ignored the rest of them but that she seldom felt the need to speak to them. When she spoke, her words were clear and gentle, perfectly and correctly spoken, not the jargon or the mumbling of the mentally deficient, which she at times appeared to be, leaving all of them wondering if she were or not, and, if so, what kind of direction the deficiency might take.
Meg was with her often, or she with Meg. Watching the two of them together, walking together or sitting together, Cushing often tried to decide which of them it was who was with the other. He could not decide; it was as if some natural magnetic quality pulled the two of them together, as if they shared some common factor that made them move to each other. Not that they ever really met; distance, of a sort, always separated them. Meg might speak occasionally to Elayne, but not often, respecting the silence that separated them—or the silence that, at times, could make them one. Elayne, for her part, spoke no oftener to Meg than she did to any of the others.
“The wrongness of her, if there is a wrongness,” Meg once said to Cushing, “is the kind of wrongness that more of us should have.”
“She lives within herself,” said Cushing.
“No,” said Meg. “She lives outside herself. Far outside herself.”
When they reached the river, they set up camp in a grove of cottonwoods growing on a bank that rose a hundred feet or so above the stream, a pleasant place after the long trek across the barren prairie. Here, for a week, they rested. There were deer in the breaks of the bluffs that rimmed the river’s eastern edge. The lowlands swarmed with prairie chicken and with ducks that paddled in the little ponds. There were catfish in the river. They lived well now, after scanty fare.
Ezra established rapport with a massive cottonwood that bore the scars of many seasons, standing for hours on end, facing the tree and embracing it, communing with it while its wind-stirred leaves seemed to murmur to him. So long as he was there, Elayne was there as well, sitting a little distance off, cross-legged on the ground, the moth-eaten elkskin pulled up about her head, her hands folded in her lap. At times, Shivering Snake deserted Rollo and stayed with her, spinning and dancing all about her. She paid it no more attention than the rest of them. At other times, the Followers, purple blobs of shadow, sat in a circle about her, like so many wolves waiting for a feast, and she paid them no more attention than she paid Shivering Snake. Watching her, Cushing had the startling thought that she paid them no attention because she had recognized them for what they were and dismissed them from her thoughts.
Rollo hunted grizzly, and for a couple of days Cushing went out to help him hunt. But there were no grizzlies; there were no bear of any kind.
“The oil is almost gone,” wailed Rollo. “I’m already getting squeaky. Conserving it, I use less than I should.”
“The deer I killed was fat,” said Cushing.
“Tallow!” Rollo cried. “Tallow I won’t use.”
“When the oil is gone, you’ll damn well use whatever comes to hand. You should have killed a bear back on the Minnesota. There were a lot of them.”
“I waited for the grizzly. And now there are no grizzlies.”
“That’s all damn foolishness,” said Cushing. “Grizzly oil is no different from the oil from any other bear. You’re not clear out, are you?”
“Not entirely. But nothing in reserve.”
“We’ll find grizzly west of the river,” said Cushing.
Andy had eaten the scant bitter prairie grass in the East with reluctance, consuming only enough of it to keep life within his body. Now he stood knee-deep in the lush grass of the valley. With grunts of satisfaction, his belly full to bulging, he luxuriated by rolling on the sandy beach that ran up from the river’s edge, while killdeer and sandpiper, outraged by his invasion of their domain, went scurrying and complaining up and down the sands.
Later Andy helped Rollo and Cushing haul in driftwood deposited by earlier floods on the banks along the river. Out of the driftwood Cushing and Rollo constructed a raft, chopping the wood into proper lengths and lashing the pieces together as securely as possible with strips of green leather cut from the hides of deer. When they crossed the river, Rollo and Meg rode the raft—Meg because she couldn’t swim, Rollo because he was afraid of getting wet since his oil supply was low. The others clung to the raft. It helped them with their swimming and they tried as best they could to drive it across the stream and keep it from floating too far down the river. Andy, hesitant to enter the swift-flowing water, finally plunged in and swam so lustily that he outdistanced them and was waiting for them on the other side, nickering companionably at them when they arrived.
Since that mid-morning hour, they had climbed steadily. Ezra, for once, had not insisted on stopping to talk with plants. Behind them the river had receded slowly; ahead of them the great purple upthrust never seemed closer.
Cushing walked down the short slope of ground to reach the evening fire. Tomorrow, he thought, tomorrow we may reach the top.
Five days later, from far off, they sighted Thunder Butte. It was no more than a smudge on the northern horizon, but the smudge, they knew, could be nothing other than the butte; there was nothing else in this flat emptiness that could rise up to make a ripple on the smooth circle of horizon.
Cushing said to Meg, “We’ve made it. We’ll be there in a few more days. I wonder what we’ll find.”
“It doesn’t matter, laddie boy,” she told him. “It’s been a lovely trip.”
16
Three days later, with Thunder Butte looming large against the northern sky, they found the wardens waiting for them. The five wardens sat their horses at the top of a slight billowing rise, and when Cushing and the others approached them, one of them rode forward, his left hand lifted, open-palmed, in a sign of peace.
“We are the wardens,” he said. “We keep the faith. We mount guard against wanderers and troublemakers.”
He didn’t look much like a warden, although Cushing was not quite sure how a warden should look. The warden looked very much like a nomad who had fallen on hard times. He carried no spear, but there was a quiver resting on his back, with a short bow tucked in among the arrows. He wore woolen trousers, out at the knees and ragged at the cuffs. He had no jacket, but a leather vest that had known better days. His horse was a walleyed mustang that at one time might have had the devil in him, but was now so broken down that he was beyond all menace.
The other four, sitting their nags a few paces off, looked in no better shape.
“We are neither wanderers nor troublemakers,” Cushing said, “so you have no business with us. We know where we are going and we want no trouble.”
“Then you had best veer off,” the warden said. “If you go closer to the butte, you will be causing trouble.”
“This is Thunder Butte?” asked Cushing.
“That is what it is,” the warden said. “You should have known that if you had been watching it this morning. There was a great black cloud passing over it, with lightning licking at its top, and the thunder rolling.”
“We saw it,” Cushing said. “We wondered if that is how it got its name.”
/> “Day after day,” the warden said, “there is this great black cloud.…”
“What we saw this morning,” said Cushing, “was no more than a thunderstorm that missed us, passing to the north.”
“You mistake me, friend,” the warden said. “It’s best we palaver.” He made a sign to the other four and slid down off his horse. He ambled forward and squatted. “You might as well hunker down,” he said, “and let us have a talk.”
The other four came up and hunkered down beside him. The first man’s horse wandered back to join its fellows.
“Well, all right,” said Cushing, “we’ll sit awhile with you, if that is what you want. But we can’t stay long. We have miles to cover.”
“This one?” asked the warden, making a thumb at Rollo. “I never saw one like him before.”
“He’s all right,” said Cushing. “You have no need to worry.”
Looking at the five of them more closely, he saw that except for one roly-poly man, the rest of them were as gaunt and grim as scarecrows, as if they had been starved almost to emaciation. Their faces were little more than skulls with brown, parchmentlike skin stretched tightly over bone. Their arms and legs were pipestems.
From the slight rise of ground, Thunder Butte could be plainly seen, a dominate feature that rose above all the terrible flatness. Around its base ran a darker ring that must be the trees that Rollo had said formed a protective circle about it—and more than likely Ezra’s trees as well, although perhaps not exactly the kind of trees that Ezra claimed the sunflowers and the other plants had told him.
“This morning,” Cushing said to the squatting wardens, “through the glasses, I caught a glimpse of whiteness at the very top of Thunder Butte. They had the look of buildings, but I could not be certain. Do you know if there are buildings up there?”