A Heritage of Stars (13 page)

Now that the other, easier, cancer-ridden life was gone, he wondered, what about the present life? For almost fifteen centuries men had fumbled through a senseless and brutal barbarism and still wallowed in the barbarism. The worst of it, he told himself, was that there seemed to be no attempt to advance beyond the barbarism. As if man, failing in the course that he had taken, no longer had the heart nor the mind, perhaps not even the wish, to try to build another life. Or was it that the human race had had its chance and had muffed it, and there would not be another chance?

“Laddie, you are worried.”

“No, not worried. Just thinking. Wondering. If we do find the Place of Going to the Stars, what difference will it make?”

“We'll know that it is there. We'll know that, once, men traveled to the stars.”

“But that's not enough,” he said. “Just knowing's not enough.”

The next morning his depression had vanished. There was, strangely enough, something exhilarating in the emptiness, a certain crispness and clearness, a spaciousness, that made one a lord of all that one surveyed. They were still alone, but it was not a fearsome aloneness; it was as if they moved across a country that had been tailor-made for them, a country from which all others had been barred, a far-reaching and far-seeing country. The Followers were still with them, but they no longer seemed to be a threat; rather, they were companions of the journey, part of the company.

Late in the day, they came upon two others, two human waifs as desolate as they in that vast stretch of emptiness. They saw them, when they topped a low swell, from half a mile away. The man was old; his hair and beard were gray. He was dressed in worn buckskins and stood as straight as a young oak tree, facing the west, the restless western wind tugging at his beard and hair. The woman, who appeared to be younger, was sitting to one side and behind him, her feet tucked beneath her, head and shoulders bent forward, covered by a ragged robe. They were situated beside a small patch of wild sunflowers.

When Cushing and the others came up to the two, they could see that the man was standing in two shallow holes that had been clawed out of the prairie sod, standing in them barefooted, with a pair of worn moccasins lying to one side. Neither he nor the woman seemed to notice their coming. The man stood straight and unmoving. His arms were folded across his chest; his chin tilted up and his eyes were shut. There was about him a sense of fine-edged alertness, as if he might be listening to something that no one else could hear. There was nothing to hear but the faint hollow booming of the wind as it raced across the land and an occasional rustle as it stirred the sunflower patch.

The woman, sitting cross-legged in the grass, did not stir. It was as if neither of them was aware they were no longer alone. The woman's head was bowed above her lap, in which her hands were loosely folded. Looking down at her, Cushing saw that she was young.

The three of them—Rollo, Meg, and Cushing—stood in a row, puzzled, slightly outraged, awaiting recognition. Andy switched flies and munched grass. The Followers circled warily.

It was ridiculous, Cushing told himself, that the three of them should be standing there like little naughty children who had intruded where they were not wanted and, for their trespass, were being studiously ignored. Yet there was an aura about the other two that prevented one from breaking in upon them.

While Cushing was debating whether he should be angry or abashed, the old man moved, slowly coming to life. First his arms unfolded and fell slowly, almost gracefully, to his sides. His head, which had been tilted back, inclined forward, into a more normal position. His feet lifted, one by one, out of the holes in which he had been standing. He turned his body, with a strange deliberation, so that he faced Cushing. His face was not the stern, harsh, patriarchal face that one might have assumed from watching him in his seeming trance but a kind, although sober, face—the face of a kindly man who had come to peace after years of hardship. Above his grizzled beard, which covered a good part of his face, a pair of ice-blue eyes, set off by masses of crow's feet, beamed out at the world.

“Welcome, strangers,” he said, “to our few feet of ground. Would you have, I wonder, a cup of water for my granddaughter and myself?”

The woman still sat cross-legged on the grass, but now she raised her head and the robe that had covered it fell off, bunching at her back. Her face held a terrible sweetness and a horrible innocence and her eyes were blank. She was a prim-faced, pretty doll filled with emptiness.

“My granddaughter, if you failed to notice,” said the old man, “is doubly blessed. She lives in another place. This world cannot touch her. Bespeak her gently, please, and have no concern about her. She is a gentle creature and there is nothing to be feared. She is happier than I am, happier than any one of us. Most of all, I ask you, do not pity her. It is the other way around. She, by all rights, could hold pity for the rest of us.”

Meg stepped forward to offer him a cup of water, but he waved it away. “Elayne first,” he said. “She is always first. And you may be wondering what I was doing, standing here in the holes I dug, and shut within myself. I was not as shut in as you might have thought. I was talking with the flowers. They are such pretty flowers and so sentient and well-mannered.… I almost said ‘intelligent,' and that would not have been quite right, for their intelligence, if that is what you can call it, is not our intelligence, although, perhaps, in a way, better than our intelligence. A different kind of intelligence, although, come to think of it, ‘intelligence' may not be the word at all.”

“Is this a recent accomplishment,” asked Cushing, with some disbelief, “or have you always talked with flowers?”

“More so now than was the case at one time,” the old man told him. “I have always had the gift. Not only flowers, but trees and all other kinds of plants—grasses, mosses, vines, weeds, if any plant can rightly be called a weed. It's not so much that I talk with them, although at times I do. What I mostly do is listen. There are occasions when I am sure they know that I am there. When this happens, I try to talk with them. Mostly I think they understand me, although I am not certain they are able to identify me, to know with any certainty what it is that is talking with them. It is possible their perceptions are not of an order that permits them to identify other forms of life. Largely, I am certain, they exist in a world of their own which is as blind to us as we are blind to them. Not blind in that we are unaware of them, for, to their sorrow, we are very much aware of them. What we are entirely blind to is the fact that they have a consciousness even as we have a consciousness.”

“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.