Highway of Eternity (13 page)

She rose from the pilot's chair and made her way to the port. When she opened it, she heard a strange sound, a little like the buzzing of a swarm of bees. When she stepped away from the traveler she saw what it was.

The traveler lay on a slope, some little distance below the top of a high ridge. On top the slope moved a band of people, and it was from them that the sound was coming—a thin babbling of many voices, all talking at once.

To her left and right, so far as she could see in either direction, the line of people moved along the ridge. The line was uneven. In some places the people were all massed together, then there would be a place where there were small groups of them or a few walking by themselves. All were in motion, right to left, in the same direction, but moving slowly.

Moving, not with them, but beside them, as if they were outriders of the procession, were strange and varied figures. Some of them had the appearance of being human; others did not appear human in the least; but all of them were alive and moving—crawling, humping along, rolling, scurrying frantically, striding, floating. A few were flying.

She drew her breath in sharply when she recognized what those outriders were. Some of those who had human appearances were robots, and undoubtedly others that did not appear to be human were robots as well. The rest of them were aliens. In the time that had been her home, there had been many aliens who had formed weird and not always understandable relationships with humans, but her own people, the outlanders, had as little as possible to do with them.

Enid moved out a short distance from the traveler and climbed a few steps up the slope that ran to the ridge where the procession walked its slow and awkward way. The land was high and dry. It had a sense of bigness and it seemed to stand on tiptoe to reach the very sky, which was deep and blue—the bluest sky she had ever seen, without a cloud to fleck its surface. There was a wind that blew strong and steady, rippling the cloak she wore. It had the breath of chill in it, as if it might have blown for a long distance over a cold and empty land, but the sun that stood at noon was warm. A smooth sward of grass grew beneath her feet, short and well-behaved grass that had no wildness in it. Here and there along the ridgetop grew occasional trees, each shaped and sculptured by the wind that must have blown there for centuries to bend them to its will.

No one noticed her. Not for a moment did her presence interfere with what was taking place.

A rite, she wondered, a religious pilgrimage, a celebration, perhaps, of some old mythology? But these, she thought, were no more than feeble guesses. Conceivably, there might be danger if she intruded, although, from where she stood, the procession seemed immune to intrusion. There was about it a solid sense of purpose.

A voice spoke at her elbow. “Have you come to join us, lady?”

Startled, she spun about. The robot stood close beside her. Any noise of his approach had been blotted out by the wind. He wore a human form and was extremely civilized. There was no crudity about him. He was a machine, of course; that could be seen by a single glance. But in a strange way, he was nobly human. His face and body were human in the classic meaning of the term, and he was tastefully decorated, the metal of him incised in discreet little patterns that made her think of the exquisite etching on the barrels of the most expensive shotgun in Timothy's collection. Over his shoulder he carried a scraped, dressed-out hog, and underneath one arm he bore a large and bulging grain sack.

“I beg your pardon, lady,” said the robot. “I had no wish to startle you. As I came up behind you I sought to make some sound to announce myself, but the wind, you know. You hear nothing in this wind.”

“I thank you for your thoughtfulness,” said Enid. “You did startle me, but not too violently and only momentarily. And, no, I did not come to join you. I have no idea of what is going on.”

“It is all a matter of hallucination,” said the robot, speaking bluntly. “What you see is a Pied Piper's march. Are you, perchance, acquainted with the ancient story of the Pied Piper?”

“Why, yes, I am,” said Enid. “I read it in one of the books that my brother picked up. It is a story about a piper whose piping lured all the children from a village.”

“This is the same,” the robot said. “A Pied Piper's march, except there isn't any piper. It is the fault of all these aliens.”

“If there isn't any piper, whom might they be following?”

“In their hallucinations, which I am convinced are supplied by the aliens, they follow dreams. Each follows a dream uniquely his own. I have told them and told them, and so have all the other robots, but they pay no attention to us. They disregard us and follow filthy aliens.”

“Then why are you here? You are not alone; there are other robots here.”

“Someone must take care of the humans. Someone must protect them against themselves. They left without provisions to feed themselves, without food or water, without sufficient clothing to protect them from the cold and damp. You see this shoat upon my back, this bag of meal beneath my arm? I scrounge the countryside, gathering what I can. It is not a job, I can assure you, that a robot of my integrity and sensibility could easily bring himself to do. And yet I must, for these foolish humans of mine are caught up in their silly dreams and pay no attention to their needs. There must be someone who will look out after them.”

“What will be the end of it?” asked Enid. “What will happen to them? How will it all end?”

“I know not,” the robot said. “I can hope only for the best. This may, at other times, have happened otherwhere, but this is the first time it has ever happened here. Much as I love my humans, begging your pardon, there are times when they can be the most thoughtless, most unreasonable forms of life existent. My age runs to many centuries, lady, and I have read the histories that cover untold centuries. The human race, according to the old historians, always has been thoughtless and unreasonable; but it seems to me that now they are gaily unreasonable, whereas before they were stupidly and perversely unreasonable. To be gaily unreasonable, to take joy from unreason, seems to me to be the worst form that perversity can assume.”

“I'd have to think about that,” said Enid. “I suppose you could be right.”

Perversity, she thought. Could that have been what happened to the human race—a willing perversity that set at naught all human values which had been so hardly won and structured in the light of reason for a span of more than a million years? Could the human race, quite out of hand and with no sufficient reason, have turned its back upon everything that had built humanity? Or was it, perhaps, no more than second childhood, a shifting of the burden off one's shoulders and going back to the selfishness of the child who romped and frolicked without thought of consequence or liability?

“It would be quite safe, I am sure, if you are of the mind to go up the hill and have a look at them,” the robot said. “I am sure there is no danger. They are not dangerous folk, only silly ones.”

“I might like to do that.”

“Or better yet, if you have the time, you might like to join with us—with my humans and perhaps a few assorted and disgusting aliens—when we break fast this night. There'll be roast pig and fresh baked bread and probably other edibles that my fellows will bring in. You need have no fear of intruding; you'll be with the family only. Come nighttime and all the different families will gather by themselves and eat the food their robots will bring in. You might like to meet my family. Other than for this silly exhibition, they are very beautiful. I have hopes this madness soon will run its course.”

“I would like to do that,” Enid said. “I am glad you asked me.”

“Then come along with me and I will seek them out. They must be somewhere in the line, not too distant from us. Then I'll hunt out a place for camping and make ready for the feast—perhaps at a spot some distance ahead so that they will be not too far off when this insanity is suspended in the face of dark.”

“They don't march all night?”

“No, of course not. They have not taken leave entirely of their senses.”

“I'll go with you,” said Enid. “But I don't want to join the march. I'd be out of place there. Going with you, I might be able to help you set up camp.”

“No need of that,” the robot said. “There are others of us and all of us are good workers. But I'll be glad to have you come with me. Since we are going to be together for a while, you might call me Jones.”

“I am glad to know your name,” she said. “You might call me Enid.”

“I'll call you Miss Enid. Young females are entitled to the ‘Miss.'”

“I thank you, Jones,” she said.

All this time they had been walking up the hill together and now were close to the line of march. The procession, Enid saw, was following a faint track that ran along the ridgetop, the sort of path that ordinarily would have seen but little use, followed only now and then by lonely way-farers hurrying along in the hope of reaching shelter by the fall of night.

The procession stretched in both directions as far as she could see. There were occasional empty gaps in it, but in no case were the gaps so large as to wipe out the sense that this, indeed, was one vast procession.

Each and every person walked as if walking alone, paying no more than courteous attention to those who were moving with them. They walked with their heads held high and confident, looking ahead rather than upward, as if there were something that they would see at any moment and they were entirely confident that they would not be disappointed. Their expression was serenely expectant and there was about them a subdued rapture—although, she told herself, in no way a holy or religious rapture. This was not, as she first had thought it might be, a religious procession.

There were no children. There were teen-agers and the middle-aged, the old and the very old who hobbled on canes or levered themselves along on crutches.

With them ran, scurried, humped, and hobbled a great array of aliens—not as many as there were humans, but enough to make a continuous impression on the watcher. There was a wraithlike creature that floated, bobbing along, now on the same level as the human marchers, now above them, changing its shape constantly. There was a three-legged creature that stalked along as if mounted on stilts, with a body that had no features on it, but looked like just an ordinary box. There was another that was at once a wriggler and a ball—a wriggler that twisted along like a slithering snake, twisting its way among the humans' marching feet and legs, then at intervals rolling itself into a ball that moved gently and serenely. There was a head, a head alone that was mostly one eye and a mouth, scampering all about, as if it might be in a hurry without knowing where to go. There were many others.

The humans paid no attention to the aliens—it was as if the aliens, to them, were simply other humans. The aliens, in turn, paid no attention to the humans, as if they were well acquainted with these humans, who were nothing to be wondered at.

Enid had the impression that all of them, humans and aliens alike, were watching for something, but that there was no single sign they watched for, as if each sought a personal revelation.

She looked about for Jones, the robot, and could not locate him. There were other robots, but few of them mingled with the humans and the aliens in the line of march. Mostly they stayed off to the side of the procession. She kept on looking for Jones, but there was no sign of him. Perhaps, she told herself, she should hurry forward along the line of marchers, in the hope that she could catch up with him. She was hungry, and hot pork and new-baked bread sounded awfully good. It had been silly of her to have lost contact with him. She started trotting along the side of the line, but after a few steps she stopped. She had not observed the direction Jones had taken; she might be moving away from him rather than closer. A voice spoke, almost in her ear, a twangy, nonhuman voice that used human words.

It said, “Kind human, would you perform a small task for me?”

She jerked herself around, involuntarily jumping to one side as she turned.

It was an alien, as she had known it would be, but slightly more humanoid than most aliens were. Its head, bent forward on a long and scrawny neck, was a cross between that of a winter-gaunted horse and a woebegone hound dog. It stood upon two badly bowed legs and its torso was a warty bloat. Its two arms were long and limber, twisting like a pair of performing serpents. The ears flared out like trumpet bells. Two groups of eyes were mounted on its forehead; each with several irises. The mouth was wide and the lips were slobbery. A pair of gills, one on each side of the scrawny throat, bellowed in and out as it breathed.

“I am to you,” it said, “a disgusting sight, no doubt. As humans once were to me before I became accustomed to them. But my heart is kind, and my honor of the best.”

“I have no doubt of that,” she said.

“I approach you,” said the thing, “because, of all the humans here, you seem not preoccupied with what is going on, impelling me to believe that you'd be willing to waste a small amount of time on me.”

“I cannot imagine anything that I could do for you,” she said.

“But of a surety you can,” it insisted. “A very simple task which, because of the perplexity of the chore, I cannot do myself. I have not enough …” The woebegone horseface hesitated, as if searching for a word. “Let us say that someone was tying up a package with a piece of string and was having difficulty because of lack of hands when it came to the tying of the knot. And that person says to you, will you hold your finger so upon the crossing of the string so I can tie the knot. In a somewhat different manner, that is what I would ask of you.”

“Because of the lack of hands?”

“Not because of the lack of hands, but the lack of another facility for which I have no word that you could understand. This is my fault and not yours.”