A Heritage of Stars (12 page)

He used his toe to push the sack from beneath the bush, knelt to unfasten the thongs, then seized it by the bottom and upended it.

Loot. Three knives, a small mirror in which the glass had become clouded, a ball of twine, a decanter of cut glass, a small metal fry-pan, an ancient pocket watch that probably had not run for years, a necklace of opaque red and purple beads, a thin, board-covered book, several folded squares of paper. A pitiful pile of loot, thought Cushing, bending over and sorting through it, looking at it. Not much to risk one's life and limb for. Although loot, he supposed, had been a small by-product, no more than souvenirs. Glory was what the owner of the bag had ridden for.

He picked up the book and leafed through the pages. A children's book from long ago, with many colored illustrations of imaginary places and imaginary people. A pretty book. Something to be shown and wondered over beside a winter campfire.

He dropped it on the pile of loot and picked up one of the squares of folded paper. It was brittle from long folding—perhaps for centuries—and required gingerly handling. Fold by careful fold he spread it out, seeing as he did so that it was more tightly folded and larger than he had thought. Finally the last fold was free and he spread it out, still being careful of it. In the growing light of dawn he bent close above it to make out what it was and, for a moment, was not certain—only a flat and time-yellowed surface with faint brown squiggle lines that ran in insane curves and wiggles and with brown printing on it. And then he saw—a topographical map, and, from the shape of it, of the one-time state of Minnesota. He shifted it so he could read the legends, and there they were—the Mississippi, the Minnesota, the Mesabi and Vermilion ranges, Mille Lacs, the North Shore.…

He dropped it and grabbed another, unfolded it more rapidly and with less caution. Wisconsin. He dropped it in disappointment and picked up the third. There were only two others.

Let it be there, he prayed. Let it be there!

Before he had finished unfolding it, he knew he had what he was looking for. Just across the great Missouri, Rollo had said, and that had to be one of the Dakotas. Or did it have to be: It could be Montana. Or Nebraska. Although, if he remembered rightly from his reading, there were few buttes in Nebraska, or at least few near the river.

He spread the South Dakota map flat on the ground and smoothed it out, knelt to look at it. With a shaking finger he traced out the snaky trail of the mighty river. And there it was, west of the river and almost to the North Dakota line:
THUNDER BUTTE
, with the legend faint in the weak morning light, with the wide-spreading, close-together brown contour lines showing the shape and extent of it. Thunder Butte, at last!

He felt the surge of elation in him and fought to hold it down. Rollo might be wrong. The old hunter who had told him might have been wrong—or worse, simply spinning out a story. Or this might be the wrong Thunder Butte; there might be many others.

But he could not force himself to believe these cautionary doubts. This was Thunder Butte, the right Thunder Butte. It had to be.

He rose, clutching the map in hand and faced toward the west. He was on his way. For the first time since he'd started, he knew where he was going.

14

A week later, they had traveled as far north as they could go. Cushing spread out the map to show them. “See, we've passed the lake. Big Stone Lake, it's called. There is another lake a few miles north of here, but the water flows north from it, into the Red. Thunder Butte lies straight west from here, perhaps a little north or a little south. Two hundred miles or so. Ten days, if we are lucky. Two weeks, more than likely.” He said to Rollo, “You know this country?”

Rollo shook his head. “Not this country. Other country like it. It can be mean. Hard going.”

“That's right,” said Cushing. “Water may be hard to find. No streams that we can follow. A few flowing south and that is all. We'll have to carry water. I have this jacket and my pants. Good buckskin. There'll be some seepage through the leather, but not too much. They'll do for water bags.”

“They'll do for bags,” said Meg, “but poorly. You will die of sunburn.”

“I worked all summer with the potatoes and no shirt. I am used to it.”

“Your shirt only, then,” she said. “Barbaric we may be, but I'll not have you prancing across two hundred miles without a stitch upon you.”

“I could wear a blanket.”

“A blanket would be poor clothing,” Rollo said, “to go through a cactus bed. And there'll be cactus out there. There's no missing it. Soon I will kill a bear. I'm running low on grease. When I do, we can use the bearskin to make us a bag.”

“Lower down the river,” Cushing said, “there were a lot of bear. You could have killed any number of them.”

“Black bear,” said Rollo, with disdain. “When there are any others, I do not kill black bear. We'll be heading into grizzly country. Grizzly grease is better.”

“You're raving mad,” said Cushing. “Grizzly grease is no different from any other bear grease. One of these days, tangling with a grizzly, you'll get your head knocked off.”

“Mad I may be,” said Rollo, “but grizzly grease is better. And the killing of a black bear is as nothing to the killing of a grizzly.”

“It seems to me,” said Cushing, “that for a lowly robot you're a shade pugnacious.”

“I have my pride,” said Rollo.

They moved into the west, and every mile they moved, the land became bleaker. It was level land and seemed to run on forever, to a far horizon that was no more than a faint blue line against the blueness of the sky.

There were no signs of nomads; there had been none since that morning when the war party had moved so quickly out of camp. Now there were increasingly larger herds of wild cattle, with, here and there, small herds of buffalo. Occasionally, in the distance, they sighted small bands of wild horses. The deer had vanished; there were some antelope. Prairie chickens were plentiful and they feasted on them. They came on prairie-dog towns, acres of ground hummocked by the burrows of the little rodents. A close watch was kept for rattlesnakes, smaller than the timber rattlers they'd seen farther east. Andy developed a hatred for the buzzing reptiles, killing with slashing hoofs all that came within his reach. Andy, too, became their water hunter, setting out in a purposeful fashion and leading them to pitiful little streams or stagnant potholes.

“He can smell it out,” said Meg, triumphantly. “I told you he would be an asset on our travels.”

The Shivering Snake stayed with them now around the clock, circling Rollo and, at various times, Meg. She took kindly to it.

“It's so cute,” she said.

And now, out in the loneliness, they were joined by something else—gray-purple shadows that slunk along behind them and on either side. At first they could not be sure if they were really shadows or only their imagination, born of the emptiness they traveled. But, finally, there could be no question of their actuality. They had no form or shape. Never for an instant could one gain a solid glimpse of them. It was as if a tiny cloud had passed across the sun to give rise to a fleeting shadow. But there were no clouds in the sky; the sun beat down mercilessly on them out of the brassy bowl that arced above their heads.

None of them spoke of it until one evening by a campfire located in a tiny glade, with a slowly trickling stream of reluctant water running along a pebbled creek bed, a small clump of plum bushes, heavy with ripened fruit, standing close beside the water.

“They're still with us,” said Meg. “You can see them out there, just beyond the firelight.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Cushing.

“The shadows, laddie boy. Don't pretend you haven't seen them. They've been stalking us for the last two days.”

Meg appealed to Rollo. “You have seen them, too. More than likely, you know what they are. You've traveled up and down this land.”

Rollo shrugged. “They're something no one can put a finger on. They follow people, that's all.”

“But what are they?”

“Followers,” said Rollo.

“It seems to me,” said Cushing, “that on this trip we have had more than our share of strangenesses. A living rock, Shivering Snake and, now, the Followers.”

“You could have passed that rock a dozen times,” said Meg, “and not known what it was. It would have been just another rock to you. Andy sensed it first, then I.…”

“Yes, I know,” said Cushing. “I could have missed the rock, but not the snake, nor the Followers.”

“This is lonesome land,” said Rollo. “It gives rise to many strangenesses.”

“Everywhere in the West?” asked Cushing, “or this particular area?”

“Mostly here,” said Rollo. “There are many stories told.”

“Would it have something to do,” asked Cushing, “with the Place of Going to the Stars?”

“I don't know,” the robot said. “I know nothing about this Place of Going to the Stars. I only told you what I heard.”

“It seems to me, Sir Robot,” said Meg, “that you are full of evasiveness. Can you tell us further of the Followers?”

“They eat you,” Rollo said.

“Eat us?”

“That is right. Not the flesh of you, for they have no need of flesh. The soul and mind of you.”

“Well, that is fine,” said Meg. “So we are to be eaten, the soul and mind of us, and yet you tell us nothing of it. Not until this minute.”

“You'll not be harmed,” said Rollo. “You'll still have mind and soul intact. They do not take them from you. They only savor of them.”

“You have tried to sense them, Meg?” asked Cushing.

She nodded. “Confusing. Hard to come to grips with. As if there were more of them than there really are, although one never knows how many of them there really are, for you cannot count them. As if there were a crowd of them. As if there were a crowd of people, very many people.”

“That is right,” said Rollo. “Very many of them. All the people they have savored and made a part of them. For to start with, they are empty. They have nothing of their own. They're nobody and nothing. To become somebody, perhaps many somebodies—”

“Rollo,” said Cushing, “do you know this for a fact, or are you only saying what you've heard from others?”

“Only what I have heard from others. As I told you, of evenings filled with loneliness, I'd creep up to a campfire and listen to all the talk that went back and forth.”

“Yes, I know,” said Cushing. “Tall tales, yarns.…”

Later that night, when Rollo had gone out for a scout-around, Meg said to Cushing, “Laddie buck, I am afraid.”

“Don't let Rollo worry you,” he said. “He's a sponge. He soaks up everything he hears. He makes no attempt to sort it out. He does not evaluate it. Truth, fiction—it is all the same to him.”

“But there are so many strange things.”

“And you, a witch. A frightened witch.”

“I told you, remember, that my powers are feeble. A sensing power, a small reading of what goes through the mind. It was an act, I tell you. A way to be safe. To pretend to greater powers than I really had. A way to make the city tribes afraid to lay a hand upon me. A way to live, to be safe, to get gifts and food. A way of survival.”

As they moved on, the land grew even more bleak. The horizons were far away. The sky stayed a steely blue. Strong winds blew from the north or west and they were dry winds, sucking up every drop of moisture, so that they moved through a blistering dryness. At times they ran short of water and then either Rollo would find it or Andy would sniff it from afar and they could drink again.

Increasingly, they came to feel they were trapped in the middle of an arid, empty loneliness from which there was no hope they ever would escape. There was an everlasting sameness: the cactus beds were the same; the sun-dried grass, the same; the little animal and bird life they encountered, unchanging.

“There are no bear,” Rollo complained one night.

“Is that what you are doing all the time, running off?” asked Meg. “Looking for bear?”

“I need grease,” he said. “My supply is running low. This is grizzly country.”

“You'll find bear,” said Cushing, “when we get across the Missouri.”

“If we ever find the Missouri,” said Meg.

And that was it, thought Cushing. In this place the feeling came upon you that everything you had ever known had somehow become displaced and moved; that nothing was where you had thought it was and that it probably never had been; that the one reality was this utter, everlasting emptiness that would go on forever and forever. They had walked out of old familiar Earth and, by some strange twist of fate or of circumstance, had entered this place that was not of Earth but was, perhaps, one of those far alien planets that at one time man may have visited.

Shivering Snake had formed itself into a sparkling halo that revolved sedately in the air just above Rollo's head, and at the edge of the farthest reach of firelight were flitting deeper shadows that were the Followers. Somewhere out there, he remembered, there was a place that he was seeking—not a place, perhaps, but a legend; and this place they traveled, as well, could be a legend. They—he and a witch and a robot, perhaps the last robot that was left; not the last left alive—for there were many of them that were still alive—but the last that was mobile, that could move about and work, the last that could see and hear and talk. And he and Meg, he thought—perhaps the only ones who knew the others were alive, prisoned in the soundless dark. A strange crew: a woods runner; a witch who might be a bogus witch, a woman who could be frightened, who had never voiced complaint at the hardship of the journey; an anachronism, a symbol of that other day when life might have been easier but had growing at its core a cancer that ate away at it until the easier life was no longer worth the living.