"Then we were clear, over the Sea, and Pena would shove everything up against the pegs. Man, you should see the sky when we had to break through some clouds. You couldn't hear the engines at all up there; just like you were a little man sitting inside someone else's skull, with all the darkness around you except for the eye and its wire frame.
"I kept wanting to reach through the eye and grab the lights, especially the one my family had come back from—I knew which one it was then. But I remember that once I touched the glass and my skin froze to it, so I could only watch.
"But the watching was fair enough, in that eye. I have to laugh at myself now; I was young then, and I had given those skies to a woman, because I loved her, and in those days I still thought I owned the sky—whether from inheritance or default from the world I could never say." Cavandish closed his eyes and smiled faintly, and laughed as he said he must, very low and gently.
The eyes opened and were hard. "Pena would eventually come back and say that we were nearing the target. We dropped below the clouds and I couldn't see the stars anymore. I saw instead some dusty plain or plateau, or maybe a coastline where the surf was like a white line of pus trying to keep the land from infecting the Sea.
"Our formation, there were usually about four of us, would make one low run to make sure we had the right target; and then one more single line, stepped formation, if they couldn't throw anything up at us; from four different directions, one after the other, if they could."
"What did you bomb?"
"Ruins mostly. You see—I wonder if I will laugh at this too—when the nations came back, they built their cities and then left or were destroyed. Many of the ruins from the first days—when everything was going straight and no one had left for the sky—a lot of those are still half-alive. Like the Black Libraries, they still held invaluable machineries and knowledge."
"And you bombed this?"
This is like a minstrel show,
thought VanRoark,
with me as the straight man and Cavandish cracking the long, wretched jokes, and even the applause of the stupidly delighted audience in the crackling desert.
"We had to. My fathers built many of them, but the world had grown too large and malignant for my poor rim nations. You see, many of these ruins which we had built or maintained for a while were then beyond our reach. They were in the hands of the world and they could only have hurt us. I know what you're going to cry to me now; about the knowledge in which all those godforsaken slobs might have found some measure of solace. Sure, we knew that, and we also flaming well knew that they would discard or warp or bungle anything that wouldn't suit their own vicious ends. That's what my grandfather found out when they loaded up an ancient ship they found moored in some northern river with equally ancient cordite they'd dug out of the Armories, and sailed it into his precious shipyard. And my father found out when they cut the suspension cables on one of his new bridges while he was still on it.
"All that we had left were the guns and the bombs. We couldn't get to the books or the machines or the art before the world did. So I sat behind the wired eye and looked through another one where there were only two wires, and when the Library or the church was under their intersection, I pressed a button. The bombs fell; sometimes I could see a bit of star or moonlight on their casings and fins.
"Then Pena would take us up and back to the stars and the river with the landing field beside it, the lights, and the hangars cut into the side of the valley walls.
"There were about forty bombers and a couple of dozen lighter craft operating from that field when I was still flying. As things went on, quite a few of them left for the Meadows and others just dropped apart from sheer exhaustion. Others crashed or were shot down or sabotaged, but mostly it was fuel. It came from Black-woods Bay and every year there was less and less of it. Then they started sinking the tankers or fouling up the oil, even when we sent escort ships along. Finally, there was that nice little war that Ihetah and Cynibal decided to have.
"So gradually there were fewer craft lifting off. And, oh, you should have seen the lads who still kept flying. Lord! How grim and bitter they grew, how quiet and bitter. They thought of themselves as undertakers, cutting off the limbs and crushing a huge corpse into shape so that it would fit a small coffin. I really couldn't bear those people, either because I had been one of them or had at least come dangerously close to becoming one of them. . . ." He shrugged. "I don't know . . . again.
"The nation was breaking up then; no wars or revolution, just a lot of poor, tired bastards who could see no reason for hanging together any longer. Except, of course, for the air crews that still flew. Every night, while they lasted, I could hear them coming down the valley heading for Krysale Abbey, or Iriam or the Armories or the Tyne Fortress, the Yards, Calnarith, the Wastes, the Barrens—ah, Amon! Such names we left behind us; such sad rotten names. They hung on until there was nothing more to fly, until they had bombed all the places with our names and even started in on the rim nations themselves.
"I traveled around for a while, passing myself off as an optical engineer, ship's navigator, and then an electrician until I met up with Zaccaharias and Kenrick and their crew." Cavandish brooded on this for a while, as if he had forgotten some part. "Ah yes," he said at last in mock triumph, "the prophet! One night I thought the lot of them were the biggest pack of idiots I'd seen since I left home. Then, that same day, I heard a man called Marion or something like that. I listened very hard and when my mind had snapped back into something resembling its original shape, I thought it over again, all of it."
"And you were possessed, on fire with what you had heard," VanRoark added sadly.
"You should say, I was on fire at what I heard. I knew then, just as Lyndir and the rest knew, not only what the prophet had meant, but what he had meant in himself. Understand?" VanRoark did not but he was too shy to say so. "He was the world, just as surely as any man of that army; he couldn't help it, we knew that. But we also knew that the only chance for any peace we would ever have—forget the rest of the world and their blithering Abstractions—would be to go to the Meadow and die. We could see, with the appearance of this last little man and his incredible manner of speaking, the last pieces going bad. That's the bleeding thing, Amon; what the prophet said was only part of it; so many of those that listened forgot to consider the man himself and the failure of his predecessors. That's where the whole bleeding thing comes together;
that
is the end of creation they were speaking of!"
His voice had risen—again, it seemed from some other place than his mouth—with the remembered disgust and fury of that day. Now it dropped back again. "So I came to the Burn. And it seems that I must be more of the world than of the rim nations because, like the world, I could not even die; I lived, much against my will and against all the lovely plans and orders. Now I'm going home. I know that there's no home anymore; it's just a label I've given to my wandering to make it seem respectable."
And then VanRoark told Cavandish his story. The younger man spoke, he thought, almost as Cavandish had, with a voice far and removed; there was even the rude audience of the wastes, apparently almost as pleased with his tale as it had been with Cavandish's. But the world must have become bored; as the night grew colder and the stones lost all their heat, the crackling stopped.
When the noise had diminished and his own voice was like a far sea-roaring, VanRoark became momentarily aware of his new eye; the images he saw through it blurred and redefined themselves.
Cavandish looked up when he noticed the eye twisting in and out of VanRoark's skull and the changing color of the lens as different filters dropped into place behind it. He smiled one of his strange non-smiles and explained again that VanRoark's eye was not limited to visible light now. He would develop more control, Cavandish told him, in time; but for the moment he would just have to put up with seeing the world bathed in red light when there was no moon and heavy cloud cover. The sky above him occasionally blazed with sapphire lights, a whole universe far beyond what he could see with his left eye.
VanRoark began to see that just as there were many things he could perceive beyond the simple world of light and darkness, so now could he see the creations multiplying on his arm. The images were vague and ill-formed, as they had been when he had first used the artificial eye; then, his left eye had reconstructed the images on the wire frames as he had come out of the coma: somehow they frightened him.
VanRoark stopped his narrative. Cavandish didn't display any interest in hearing the rest and, at any rate, VanRoark hardly felt like telling any more of it. The older man helped him back into his bunk and plugged the cables back into the arm.
Cavandish told him he had been out for only five days this time. It was raining heavily and the plain had turned largely to mud. He led him down through the corridor to the other end of the car and then opened a door, reached out and opened another in the car in front. They worked their way forward until they reached the control car. VanRoark could feel the humming of the engines much more clearly here; Cavandish said the bottom deck of the car held four turbines and dynamos. Current from there was carried outward and aft to electric motors buried in each of the twelve foot wheels.
The control room took up the whole forward half of the car; there was a low bench, raised in the center for the driver. In front of this raised section, a panel was fitted with a steering wheel, throttles, gauges and other things at which VanRoark's knowledge of machinery would only allow him to guess. Cavandish mounted the driver's throne and gestured that VanRoark should sit beside him.
He fooled with some of the controls and VanRoark heard the subdued wailing of the turbines rise under the floorboards.
Why?
he asked himself again.
Why does everything sound as if it comes from someplace other than its obvious source?
The sound of the turbines and now the remote jounce of the huge wheels against the desert soil, four hundred miles away. Ever since they had come upon the army, wrapped and shrouded in sea fog, he realized his senses had become more distrustful of what they reported. Perhaps if this Kenrick had given him an ear of copper and brass, then he would hear the sounds of things as they really were; but he was chilled at this thought and tried hard to listen to Cavandish, discoursing upon the history of the indisputable distant mountains (but only, VanRoark despaired, if he did not increase the magnification of his right eye).
He seemed to be right back where he had been on board the
Garnet,
with all reference points and perspectives falling away from him. This was particularly bad, for he had thought that here, in a creation of the old world or at least one of its descendants, he should have felt more secure than ever, with the steel and fiber of the old worlds riveted and welded into his own body.
The hand and eye burned on him. They felt completely normal except, of course, when his eye decided to wander off into some unknown extreme of the spectrum. It was his own mind that terrified him; it seemed to have developed a sudden talent for thinking up the most perverse observations on his new limbs to fill the spaces where the Sea and the promises of Timonias had been: How would a woman enjoy the touch of the hand inside her? Would he corrode from it? Could he rent himself out to carnivals? And when Cavandish's dead friends saw him walking alone with his arm and eye, would they come in their wrecked and rusted bombers to crush him? He asked himself if it was his own blood that lubricated the arm, or if by now his body was fed by machine oil.
Even then, on his first full day awake since he had left the Burn, these thoughts began to prey on him and he knew that he had the makings of a fine insanity. He also knew that this obsessive madness would involve a monumental hatred for Cavandish; but this was one of the things he chose to ignore.
They passed to the east, bending gradually southward, as there they could find one of the numerous fjords of the Talbight River system; they could also avoid any possible contact with Enador's remaining river monitor. Cavan-dish said that the one which had been anchored off the Burn had been sunk in the first few minutes of action; a cruiser had rammed her at twenty knots and her badly cast and recast armor had parted easily.
Slowly, the pebbled desert changed into rough badlands. There was only the long, rolling stone floor that marked the roots of ancient mountains; the land was split by sharp crevices that seemed to run from horizon to horizon, like the grid lines on a vast chart or spider's web. Eventually, Cavandish pointed out, the lines would become more numerous, intersecting at more points; boulders would be wrenched from the solid rock and the land would be like the desert they had just left. There were not enough small stones yet for applause to an evening's story, rather, individual cracks that sounded like artillery pieces dueling with each other.
Although Cavandish was now letting him take occasional turns at the wheel, the journey was a boring one. The land was one of unremitting sterility; the huge masses of rock did not even allow the wolf-spiders and other subterranean life which contrived to live in the desert to exist. Oddly, the two men had spoken comparatively little since their first few days together. VanRoark asked the old man as courteously as he could, if there was nothing more to talk about, if the substance of his life was so meager as to support no more conversation.
Cavandish said that if VanRoark cared to put it in such a manner, then he supposed it was true; he added that there were many other things he might have talked about once, but now it would be worse than useless. Then Cavandish asked VanRoark why he did not offer more conversation and smiled his thin, machine-smile when VanRoark saw that he had come to view things in the same light. Talk of the prophets, Armageddon, the army, the Burn, the rim nations, his past—everything was fixed in its own meaningless death; the talk only brought pain.