DANSE MACABRE
Duelmaster R. Smith adjusted his black tam. "Do not touch your shootinghand to your weapon until the buzzer sounds," he instructed. "Otherwise,the weapon may be carried as you wish. At the slightest infringement ofthe rules, a robot gun will kill you. If you have any elaborate lastwords, say them now; because the pen is soundproof." He laughed anobviously much rehearsed laugh.
L. Dan wore orange tights today, but no armor, since the rules requireddeulists to present naked torsos for probable bullets. Stonecypher facedthe duelmaster. "I reckon this room is the only place a man really hasfree speech," he said. "You're deaf, and can't see good enough to readlips, and me or him will soon be dead.
"I don't believe in this duelin'. It gives a man who's wrong a chance tokill one who's right. A man shouldn't oughta have to die because he'sright. Just like ever'thing else in this Manly Age. It's painful. Thatoughta be our motto, More Pain, just like in the Machine Age it was MoreGadgets At Any Cost."
"Why don't you go on tevee?" Dan jeered. "She'll soon forget you,farmer."
Stonecypher's words rolled over the hobbyist. "I reckon the Manly Agecame because a man started thinkin' he wasn't much of a man any more. Hewas just as fast as his car, and just as strong as his electric lawnmower. And a loud minority of the women was claimin' they could doanything a man could, and maybe better. So the men started playin'football in shorts and huntin' each other on game preserves, and thewomen went back to the kitchen and bedroom. Lots of things that went onundercover come out in the open. Cockfights, dogfights, coon-on-a-log,duels, stallion fights, bullfights.
"And people like you, L. Dan, went on livin'. You got no right to live.You don't do any useful work. The Earth is slowly starvin', and you takethe grub out of some feller's mouth who might could help a little.That's why--"
"Time!" announced the duelmaster with his face close to a large clock onthe wall. He opened the door. Two men carrying a body on a stretcherpassed. The body had four bullet wounds in it.
Dan said, "That drivel gives me a real reason to kill you, farmer. I'llbe good to her for a few days."
As prearranged, Dan took the right branch of the corridor andStonecypher, the left. A hooded man gave Stonecypher the Magnum revolverand shut him into a space resembling a windowed closet with a door oneither side. Stonecypher secured the revolver in the clip holster. Hisbony hands formed knotted fists.
The pen door slid back. Stonecypher stepped into a room thirty by ninetyfeet with three bullet-marred concrete walls and a fourth wall ofbulletproof glass, behind which sat the ghoulish audience. Dan, crouchedand with his pistol in the crook of his left elbow, advanced. His righthand fluttered an inch from the pistol butt.
Stonecypher, grotesque with thin chest exposed and overall bib wrappedaround belt, waited. Two photoelectric robot machine guns followed eachmovement of the duelists. A buzzer sounded. Dan's index finger failed toreach the trigger, for a guardian machine gun removed the hobbyist'shead in a short efficient burst. The noise of a louder buzzer punctuatedthe execution.
When the soundproof inner door of the closet opened, the hooded man, whohad a pair of crossed pistols tattooed on the back of his right hand,said, "He was too anxious."
"Yeah," Stonecypher grunted.
The man watched Stonecypher pass out to the street. Stonecypher snappedup the bib of his overalls. An extremely rare bird, a robin, hopped fromhis path and continued a fruitless search for insects. Stonecypherwalked down Watauga Street until the pavement vanished under thebrownish-green water of Kings Lake.
Catriona squealed when she saw him. Ignoring all Correct Procedures, shealmost knocked him down and attempted to smother him. "Ah told you itjust took practice!" she blubbered. "You did it, Stony!"
With muffled mumbles, Stonecypher managed to put her in the Tenitecanoe. The few people along the quay, who had witnessed the illegalmanner of their meeting, watched with shock, or with incredulity, orwith guarded admiration. When they saw that Stonecypher's hand rested ona holstered revolver, they lost their curiosity.
Wading, Stonecypher shoved the canoe off and hopped aboard. As he tookup the paddle, his hand trailed in the water and released the smallbuzzer that had made possible Catriona's best carnival act.
* * * * *
For July, the afternoon was cool. Blue-gray clouds drifted before largerdirty white masses. To the southwest opened the mile-wide mouth of HorseCreek; and, far beyond, the great blue pyramid of Chimney Top Mountainstood defiantly above Sevier Lake. The world seemed water broken only bypartly submerged hills and mountains.
Stonecypher gazed across the Lake at Bays Mountain and at the fiveCement Islands apparently floating against that backdrop. Softly, hesaid, "Some folks call the big one Martyrs Island. There's a marblepillar right in the middle. Nobody knows who put it there, and theGovernment never bothered to knock it down. I reckon the poison ivy'scovered it by now, but I went and read the inscription, once, when I wasa boy. It says:
"They moved me off the Powell River. They covered my farm with water. I bought me another near Beans Station. The water covered it. I was getting old, but I built at Galloway Mill. When they flooded that, I gave up and lived in Kingsport. I will not move again."
The canoe bounded over the choppy water, one hundred feet above thesilted streets of the flooded city of Kingsport. Stonecypher said, "Thetime I was there, you could still find a few copter-trooper helmets andold cankered shells. Couple of years back, a diver brought up two skullsoff shore."
Catriona's eyes remained moist, but she smiled. Her teeth werebeautiful. "It'll be all rahght, Stony. You can't change the wo'ld inone day. You did fine, and Moe will too."
"I told you to stay at the bullring," Stonecypher said.
"Ah couldn't watch that! And those puny, little, mousy women stare andtalk about me, because theah's a little meat on mah cahcass. Oswell saidMoe would be last, anyhow. Ah was so wo'ied about you, ah couldn't sitstill."
Only a few boats, mainly those of piscatorial maniacs, were on the lake.Stonecypher glared at them and muttered, "I hope I did right by Moe. Hewanted to fight. Maybe, Catriona, if I'd had you when I found out hecould talk--not just mimic--I'd of raised him different. Maybe Ishouldn't have shown him that bullfight movie, but I wondered what theonly bull to see a bullfight from outside the ring thought about it.
"That led him to wantin' to know all about the Man-Animal War. I toldhim the best I could, how one of a man's basic drives is to exterminate,ever' since prehistoric times when he did in the wooly mammoth andrhinoceros. The dodo, quagga, passenger pigeon, great auk, aurochs, Keydeer, bison, African elephant, gorilla, tiger--there's an awful list.Why, five hundred species of mammals, alone, have become extinct since 1A.D., 'bout four hundred of them since 1850. A man'll even kill offother men, like the Neanderthals and the Tasmanians!" Stonecypher restedthe paddle and grinned, faintly, at Catriona reclining in the bow. "Iguess you've heard this before."
"Go rahght ahead, Stony," Catriona sighed. "Ah like to heah yoah speech.It's the only time you really get angry, and you look so fine andnoble."
"Yeah. Well. I told Moe how a man exterminates useful or harmlessspecies, and then he lets dangerous ones, like rats, eat him out ofhouse and home. Course, I explained this was just kinship. Folks used toargue man come from a monkey, or from spontaneous combustion, orsomething. Now we got fossil proof he's not like anything anybody eversaw. He's a case of straight line development all the way back to thefirst mammal, a sort of rat."
The canoe glided past Highland Pier. Every type of small watercraft,from a punt, through an electric motorboat, to a sloop, had docked. Moreboats lined the shore on either side of the pier. The flying fieldcontained so many butterfliers and copters that there seemed nopossibility of any of them taking off. Human voices welled in a mob roarfrom the great open cylinder of the bullring. A huge banner draped onthe curving white wall proclaimed, in ten-foot letters:
DEPENDENCE DAY BULLF
IGHT HONOR THE GREAT GOVERNMENT ON WHICH WE DEPEND SIX BULLS--THREE KILLERS
Stonecypher ran the canoe aground in a patch of dead weeds, exposed by aslight lowering of the lake level, and helped Catriona over the rocksthat lined the bank. He said, "I told Moe other things men do toanimals. All the laboratory butchery, done because it would be cruel totreat a man like that, but it's all right with a animal, like takin' outa dog's brains and lettin' 'im live. I told him about huntin', how thekudu become extinct 'cause a bunch of fools wanted to see who could killthe one with the biggest horns.
"I told him the things done to domestic animals. Dehornin',emasculatin', brandin', slaughterin' with sledge hammers and butcherknives, keepin' 'em in filthy barns. A man tells hisself he's superiorto other animals. If he does somethin' bad, he uses words like inhuman,brutal, animal instincts, instead of admittin' it's just typicalbehavior. And the psychologists take some animal, say a dog, and put himin a maze, something the dog never saw before. If the dog don't run themaze in two seconds flat, they say he's a pretty stupid animal. He justoperates on instinct, but they can't say how instinct operates. They'llhave a time explainin' Moe's instincts.
"I reckon the American bison made Moe madder than anything. They killedthe bison off, 'cept for protected herds, in the Nineteenth Century. Ahundred years later, the herds had got pretty big, so they declared openseason on bison. No more bison."
A recorded voice growled, "No guns permitted in ring. Deposit gun inslot. No guns permitted in ring."
Stonecypher moved his permit in ineffectual passes before the electriceye. He shrugged, dropped the revolver into the slot, and left his thumbprint. Catriona displayed the passes Ringmaster Oswell had given them.The teveer blinked, and the gate granted admission. They rode theescalator to the sixth tier and squirmed through pandemonium to theirseats.
The male portion of the crowd wore every possible style and color ofdress, in complete emancipation from the old business suit uniform, butthe women wore sober false-bosomed sundresses and expressed excitementin polite chirps. Stonecypher pressed his mouth against Catriona's earand whispered through the din, "You got to understand, Cat, whateverhappens, Moe wanted it. He says he can scare some killers into givin' upbullfights and maybe help stop it."
"He'll do fine, Stony."
Several spectators stopped venting their wrath on the unfortunate man inthe ring to gawk at the couple. Catriona's unorthodox physique arousedsufficient amazement; but, in addition, Stonecypher gave her the frontseat and took the rear one, the correct place for a woman, himself.
Below, through a rain of plastibottles and rotten eggs, a tired manwalked to the barrier which Oswell advertised as the only wooden fencein seven states. Behind the killer, a small electric tractor dragged outthe bloody carcass of a bull.
A gasping, gibbering little man grabbed Stonecypher's arm and yelped,"Illard is the clumsiest killer, he ran the sword in three times, andthe kid with the dagger had to stick twice before they finished, BigDependence Day Bullfight my jet! This is the worst in years, Fergus madethe only clean kill all afternoon, and I flew every one of eighteenhundred miles myself to see it, this last bull better be good!" Thelittle man waved his bag of rotten eggs.
Although the bullfight followed the basic procedures established byFrancisco Romero in the Spain of 1700, changes had occurred, includingthe elimination of all Spanish words from the vocabulary of thespectacle since the unpleasant dispute with the Spanish Empire twentyyears before. The gaudy costumes worn by participants had been replacedby trunks and sneakers.
A purring grader smoothed the sand. The crowd quieted, except for thosenear the box of Ringmaster Oswell. They suggested in obscene terms thattheir money be refunded. A trumpet recording blared. A scarlet door,inscribed, "Moe of Bays Mountain Farm," opened. The crowd awaited thefirst wild rush of the bull. It failed to materialize.