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Enkomputiligis Don Harlow |
When I wrote down the first paragraph or two of this story some twenty years ago, I intended it as a sort of hommage to the English country town in which I had just spent two and a half years. The story grew beyond that, over the next decade, to have other dimensions; but the town is still there, hidden under a false name. If you have the right Ordnance Survey maps and know something of the etymology of English village names, you can probably find the real town.
In the meantime, the single story grew into a plan for a series of six stories. The other five may yet be written, but a hard disk accident involving a very small boy and a Macintosh trashcan several years ago discouraged me, at least temporarily. The additional stories in the series were to be titled "Shadows on the Downs," "The Gates of Rye," "Out of the Weald, the Secret Weald," "Old Arts That Cease," and "Where You and I Will Fare." The second, third and fourth, like the first, were to take place in England over the first seven decades after the Great Death; the fifth was to be located in "Columbia Country" in North America a half century or so later; and the sixth would have been placed on a distant planet at some indefinite time in the future. All were to explore the dialectic between technophobia and technophilia, a conflict whose origins long predates Ned Lud and continues unabated to this day. Maybe those other five stories will eventually be written, if there is enough interest. Let me know.
The question of "Copyright" in something placed on the Net is still an open one. It is not clear how distribution of a piece of work made public can be controlled. Physically, it can't. Perhaps it shouldn't be. Nevertheless, I'm going to invoke the ethical honesty of you the reader and ask you to obey the following ground rules:
"Not Any Common Earth" is and remains the intellectual property of the author, Donald J. Harlow. This version is copyright (c) 1994. You may make as many electronic and/or physical copies as you need for your own use. You may lend out physical copies, but not electronic copies. You may not distribute physical copies to other individuals on a permanent basis, and you may not distribute electronic copies to other individuals at all. You may disseminate information about where this version can be obtained via FTP, gopher, WWW browser, or other means, and you may yourself establish electronic links to this version, either through a bookmark file or otherwise, but you may not undertake, encourage or permit the establishment of such an electronic link to any other copy of this story in any other location.
I'm depending on you to obey these fairly simple rules. Thanks.
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She is not any common Earth, Water or wood or air, But Merlin's isle of Grammarye Where you and I will fare. |
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Rudyard Kipling "Puck's Song" |
Through his dreams ran the thread of time, and the color of the thread was Man.
For years he slept, for centuries. Most of his folk had already slept for more than a thousand years, then, while clouds of coal smoke drifted across the waning moon and the broad green land was netted and tied down with ten thousand threads of steel and concrete by the uncountable millions of bustling Lilliputians who thronged there. In his long dreams, as they shaded from forest-green to sea-blue and finally to gun-metal grey, it seemed that there was naught that these large-bodied children of the Mother, they of the shrivelled souls, would not dare. Brains they had, and strength, and no dearth of courage, that would he give them: they dared the depths of the seas and the fastnesses of the jungles and the chill thinness of the high air with equal bravery. The fish they named, and the flowers, and the very stars themselves.
And they fouled the seas with their refuse, stripped the land of the towering forests, cleared the great soaring free eagles from the skies.
Bad enough it was that they should butcher their fellows, year after year. Shameful it was that they should tread brutally and gratuitously on magic and mystery. Atrocious it was that they should go out of their way to exterminate their cousins, the other children of the Mother. But to plot the destruction of the Mother herself -- that must not be born.
Nor was it.
Of all his grey dreams, the greyest was the one of the cold corridors, all steel and glass and concrete, mile upon mile of sterile, dead labyrinth more terrifying than the one he had once known at Knossos. The name that Men gave the place meant nothing to him. Hsu-ning, it might have been, or Michuringrad, or Fort Detrick, or Porton Down. Men strolled there, turned grey and lifeless as the dead halls around them by their formless smocks. They bustled aimlessly, talked without saying anything, smiled with no pleasure. And, in that greyest of dreams, they erred. A tiny glass container, no bigger than his own index finger, fell and shattered on that icy grey tile floor. He dreamed a man, down on his knees, scrubbing futilely at an amorphous wet blotch on the floor, and the man's face was frozen in a rictus of fear for the knowledge he carried. In that dream, the wet spot grew and spread, engulfing the man and the halls and all around them; and as it spread, its color turned to blood, and all the dream turned red, and the man burned, screaming.
In the dream the scream grew ... and grew ... and grew ... until it was a mighty chorus, seven billion despairing voices strong. Through two long years, as Man's color turned bloody scarlet, he dreamed that wail, swelling and peaking and fading. He dreamed corpses melting like wax in flames, bells that tolled the names of those seven billion fleeing souls. And then the scarlet faded and the voice of Man, which for a thousand years had crescendoed, faded to a weak background sussuration, and the dreams grew green. And then it was time to awaken.
Yawning, he awoke.
As always, his years weighed lightly on him. This was not the first time he had slept long to avoid unpleasantness; likely, it would not be the last. He slid upright in the space that the tree had left him, feeling sleep flake like rust from his joints. Turning and twisting, he loosened himself in ways he knew well. For moments he stood there among the stones and roots, down in his good brown clean earth, as naked as the day he was born -- ah, how long ago that had been! -- and let his perceptions roam after the manner of his kind. Trees he felt, hard and slow, and the stubbornly yielding complacence of the grass. There were, as always, birds going about their business, and foxes, and worms arrowing their way through eternal darkness. He found deer and chattering squirrels, feral dogs and cats, the leathery placidity of cattle, the wooly gentleness of sheep ... and there, off toward the arch of Sun and Moon, the faint echo of human despair -- and hope.
He raised the keep-spell from his clothing and what little weaponry he needed. Remembering the later dreams, he cast a minor Seeming to make his accoutrements less conspicuous. Then, belting a quiver at his side and slinging his short bow over his shoulder, he begged the tree to open the entrance to his hidey-hole.
This tree that sheltered him was great-granddaughter to that oak which had shadowed him when he went to earth so long ago. Around him were other, scattered descendants of hers, but none so high nor so broad as this giant. He felt a pang of nostalgia for the forest he had once known here, back when Men preferred the higher places. Now it was gone, replaced by the regular rolling green of farmlands, the alien straightness of hedgerows. But the grass had turned long, unkept and unkempt, free of the mow for seasons past, and most of the cattle that had so recently grazed here were gone with their late masters. All this land was wilding, empty. Someday, with luck, the forest would return.
His mind sought out others of his kind, there in that deserted land. They had always been a lonely, reclusive folk, never gregarious, given to living and wandering by themselves, disappearing one by one into their hollow hills to yield way for Man as he spread throughout the world and appearing only vaguely in his later legends. Now none remained to be found. He cast back through memories of his dreams for them. Yes, they were still here, though all in this land must still be sleeping. Over the Narrow Sea to the west, a few were awake, and even today there was some intercourse between the two Folks, out on the fringes of civilization where field met forest; Men called his people leprechaun in that land.
He stepped forth from under the spreading, sheltering branches of the ancient oak. The sky overhead was grey and misty with featureless bands of cloud drifting slowly, patiently out of the southwest. A brighter patch denoted the position of the sun, somewhere west of south. He could not be sure of the season, but the sun's elevation told him that it was spring or fall. The oak selected a season for him, letting three golden leaves float down past his face on the gentle breeze.
Once more his perception sought Men, and found them, off to the south on the low ridge that marked the boundary of this great field. With a joyous whistle he set off into the quiet wind.
The oak watched him dance across the tops of the tall grass as he fled southward from his long dreaming.
First, there was the long table. The Colonel sat at one end, his craggy, open face, handsome in a strong, fatherly way, identifying him even in mufti. Around the table, other faces were a blur, the voices that came from them a mere babble of sound without meaning. That did not matter
They don't celebrate Thanksgiving here, Danny, the Colonel said. But in a way it's one of those things that bind our two countries together.
What did matter, of course, was the food. Mother and Cynthia brought it. First there was a cylinder of cranberry jelly, deep red, quivering on its plate, rich and tart. Then came the peas, a mound of dark green globes, each one full and round, with streams of yellow butter -- real butter! -- flowing down the sides. Then a heaping mountain of mashed potatoes, thick and creamy, just lumpy enough to show that they had come out of the ground and not out of some cardboard box. Cynthia set down two wooden platters of fresh-baked white bread, still warm to the touch, the uncut crusts hard and flaking. In a bowl was the extra stuffing, thick and brown with an occasional bit of grey-green celery and a sprinkling of sage. And finally, on a huge blue-and-white willowware platter, came the twenty-pound Lord of the Feast himself -- a mighty tom turkey, cooked a rich golden brown with hours of careful basting.
Wow! said Danny Carey. He could feel the saliva welling in his mouth.
The chattering voices receded, faded into each other until they became nothing but a distant hum in his mind, then began to break up into their component parts again. He thought to hear the soughing of wind through grass and branches ... the distant sound of church bells ... a single human voice.
"Well, at least there's somebody still alive down there, Danny."
Regretfully, Danny let the Colonel and Mother and Cynthia go back to wherever it was that they were now. He hoped that it was at the right hand of God.
He looked down at the aluminum skillet. It was crusted black with ill usage and poor cleaning. The four strips of bacon sizzled and popped merrily, though perhaps not totally hygenically, as he mechanically moved it back and forth over the tiny fire.
He looked up at the man who had spoken in a trans-Atlantic accent so similar to his own. He saw a form tall and thin, with deep-sunk grey eyes, black hair receding at the temples and already streaked with grey, black stubble on leathery cheeks and jutting chin. The man wore a battered, torn, travel-stained anorak that might once have been green. He stood in an unconsciously heroic pose on the hood of a burnt-out automobile, searching the southeast through a pair of binoculars.
The bells were far away, their sound dim for distance. Danny knew that they were tolling the waning of a day and of a way of life. There was sorrow in their tones.
"Sure," he said in his flat drawl. "Figure that the place had a population of about two thousand before the beginning of the Death, and you can assume anywhere from fifty to a couple of hundred people still living there."
He looked around and thought for a second about their location. Here they were on a ridge that came down toward the east like a long, wide, spreading ramp spilling out from the higher country of the northern Cotswolds. The road they were on was asphalt, but under its pavement was a part of the long way that had originally run from the far southwest up to the broad flatlands of country now vanished beneath the waves of the North Sea. Used by the men of olden times, the Flint men, the Bell Beaker folk, Goidels and Brythons alike, later Romans and Saxons and Normans, more recently parts of it had been recovered for the use of cars. But grass was already crowding its way through cracks near the shoulders. Someday the road would be gone.
Shivering, he pulled his own windbreaker tighter around him and with his free hand put yet another stick on the fire. "Tom, the year's getting on. Why don't we just pass this one by and walk straight on into Banbury? We could be there in a day! The Coalition should have their motor depot in place by now; we could ride back to London in style ..."
"Hell, we can't be sure that they ever did get that depot established; and even if they did, we can't be sure that it'll be able to do anybody any good." The tall man, coming out from behind his binoculars, had a hang-dog look; suddenly the heroic pose looked merely pathetic. "Remember how they were dynamiting bridges across the rivers and canals two months back? Not that I can blame them all that much ..." His voice trailed off.
"Tom, you're sounding more and more like these hicks all the time," Danny said with scorn in his voice. "Why blame everything on science and technology, like they're doing? Look, Tom, it's technology -- only technology! -- that can save us from a new, permanent dark age. We can't let it go by default! What do you think the Coalition was set up for? Just to hold on to what we've got!"
Tom wearily eased himself down from the ruined vehicle. The argument was not a new one between them. "That's the old refrain, Danny. Have faith -- science will provide. Every time you solve one problem with technology, you invent a whole raft of new ones, and things just keep on getting worse."
"Worse?" Danny was angry, and not a little disgusted. "God damn it, Tom! Do you want us to go back to the days of sixteen-hour-a-day, year-in-year-out stoop labor? Do you want us to die at age thirty like people used to do?"
Tom stared at his boots. "Of the people alive two years ago, more than half died before they made thirty. Two and a half billion never made twenty!"
"It was just a fluke!" Danny insisted. "A mistake! Next time we'll all be wiser -- we won't make the same blunder ..." He stopped. Tom was looking over his head, at a point north of the road. Slowly, Danny turned and put the skillet down.
The watcher emerged from the row of trees across the road. Seen at a distance, he was indistinguishable from other men: black hair, grey eyes, a slightly vulpine face framed in a fringe of natural curls. He wore a rather battered set of ordinary street clothes.
And he was perhaps three feet tall.
"Uh ... good afternoon," Danny said lamely. "Would you care to join us?"
"Thanks, 'twill be my pleasure," the little man said. He crossed the road, after looking both left and right for cars -- a rather affected action, Danny thought, given the circumstances. He sat down next to Danny, for all the world as though he owned the place, first giving Tom a rather quizzical look.
"Who're you?" Danny asked bluntly. "You look as though you just escaped from the circus."
"Danny ..." Tom began.
The little man's easy gesture shut him up. "Aye, the youngster has the right of it. But I didn't 'escape,' as you put it. There's nothing left of Maxwell's Greatest Circus save myself and one of the bareback riders, who set forth for her home in Carlisle -- a home I fear she'll not be finding -- leaving me to fend for myself. Please be pardoning me for the intrusion, but I felt that -- being alone in all this wide, empty land -- you'd not be averse to company. Robin is my name -- Robin ... uh, Daly, though for many years I've been known as Robin Little." He paused expectantly.
Tom, Danny felt, looked lost for a reply. But then Tom often looked lost these days. Like so many others, he had had the props kicked out from under him by the collapse of Western civilization. "Uh ... we're pleased to meet you, Robin," he finally said. "Danny ... have we enough lunch to share?"
Danny looked down at the four shrivelled pieces of bacon. In his knapsack there were two untouched hardboiled eggs ... "Sorry it is that I am, indeed," said Robin, making a negative gesture, "but I don't touch the flesh of swine. A dietary restriction. Thank you, natheless."
Satisfied that the visitor was not about to make off with their lunch, Danny turned back to his "preparations." Tom squatted down opposite Robin, bringing his eyes level with the little man's. "You'll have to excuse us if we're not the best of company. We're on the way back from a survey for the Coalition of Urban Councils, and the trip's been rather long and ... grueling. Now that we're headed back for our London HQ, we're both just a little bit jumpy and anxious. By the way, I'm Tom Rowan, and my partner's Danny Carey."
"Hi," Danny said abstractedly. He did not particularly feel like company -- particularly that of a midget vagabond who, though he might not be hungry right now, certainly would have a growling stomach later on.
"From your way of speech," Robin said carefully, "you'll both be far from home."
"Yes, well ... we were both in the Air Force, United States, that is ... so to speak." Tom seemed to be struggling to hold his thoughts together. More and more off the deep end, Danny thought. "I was a tech sergeant working the flight line at Upper Heyford; Danny was the Wing Commander's son." He folded his legs easily into a lotus position and stared down at his lap as though he found something extraordinary in his navel. "Just two years ago, maybe a little bit less ..." Danny could see him going into the semi-trance he affected when he wanted to reminisce. "I was on my third tour in the UK; previously I had been stationed at Hillingdon, later at the new reflex base at Chesham Bois. This time around we had our own house, a nice little place just north of Bicester. Not an Anglo housing rental, but our own cottage, me and Sue and our two children, Jerry and Debbie. Jerry's six, Debbie'll be four in December ..."
"Going to show him their pictures?" Danny asked scornfully. Then he caught the look that Robin gave him and felt himself wither like an autumn leaf. He dropped his eyes, feeling a momentary suffusion of shame. Tom had not heard his comment, though. Tom, he knew, never heard anything that he didn't want to hear.
"Anyway, when the Death first broke out ... well, with people just lying down and dying in droves on the continent, they decided to evacuate us the hell out of here. Sue and the kids got out, and I was just finishing up maintenance on the fourth fighter squadron -- they'd have had me out the next day! -- when the first cases appeared in London, Southampton, Manchester -- and Oxford. We were quarantined. We later heard that it didn't do any good; the Death hit the States as well, first on the West Coast, then all over. Ninety-five percent susceptibility, fifty percent mortality. I guess it's gone now, though; there haven't been any cases that I've heard of in the better part of the year. The hand of God ..."
"The hand of the biotechs," Danny interjected. "They killed it with a tailored virophage. Something the Chinese invented."
"That I'd not heard," Robin said. "But you said 'fifty percent mortality.' I'd thought ..."
"You know what happened next," Tom went on, as though he hadn't heard the interruption. "The Death was followed by the Great Death. Everything broke down. No food in the cities. No sewage disposal. No power -- too few people to keep the power plants going, no distribution for oil and coal. Plague right and left -- typhus, typhoid, cholera, even bubonic mutating into pneumonic. Anarchy, conflict, even cannibalism. By the time they restored some kind of order -- and the damned winter was so long and cold! -- well, today I'd estimate there's not above a million people left alive on this island. And in the States ... well, it was just sheer luck that Sue, Jerry and Debbie came through all right."
"How is it, then," Robin said, and Danny could hear the care and deliberation he put into the question, "that you are here and not home with your family over sea?"
"Can't," Tom said. "We've had no communication with the States in well over a year, not since the last stages of the Death, when Maine went under."
"Then how do you know ..." Robin caught himself when he saw Danny shaking his head at him. Not that it mattered; Tom Rowan would never hear that question. No matter that he was the child of a rationalist culture; rationalism had already failed him on that particular subject.
Danny felt his usual mix of pity and contempt. He stood up and stepped across the tiny fire to his comrade, and forked bacon from the filthy skillet into Tom's hands. Hot grease trickled down his wrists to add stains to his already soiled shirt cuffs, but he seemed oblivious to the momentary, fading pain; for a moment his mind was far over sea, in the sunset. Unconscious of food and surroundings, he mechanically chewed off bits and pieces of the meager portion of bacon. Danny, more fastidious -- he was, after all, a colonel's son -- took two heels of coarse brown bread from a sack and made a rude sandwich.
Robin gave Tom a few moments to bring his attention back to the world that was before he spoke again. "What, then, of this survey you're making? What is the 'Coalition of Urban Councils'?"
"Huh?" Tom looked up, then down at his grease-stained hands, now empty. He wiped them dry on filthy pants legs. "Oh. The Coalition of Urban Councils is a loose confederation of city governments, led by London, Manchester, Birmingham and Southampton. They claim that their purpose is 'to preserve the blessings of science and technology through this difficult period of readjustment.' I guess that means that they intend to go on making the same mistakes over and over again. They're reestablishing the old governmental system; they've already got a new sovereign, George the Seventh, formerly Viscount something-or-other. We're one of a number of teams who were sent out to sound the mood of the country, particularly the rural areas."
"And what mood have you found? Robin asked with interest.
"Bunch of idiots, if you ask me," Danny said into the fire. "You tell these people about the new government, and its, 'Oh, aye, but them in London never done naught for me before.' Or: 'More of them damned bloody machines and them damned bloody sicknesses, I'll be blowed; I'll have no to do wi' 'em.'"
Tom turned his head toward his young companion. "But Danny, can't you see their point? For at least the next few years, the cities are going to be the only ones to benefit from technology; as far as the rural areas are concerned, it's going to be nothing but take! take! take! by London and its satellites."
Danny dug a handful of dirt out of the shoulder of the road and used it to scrub the skillet, furiously wiping grease away. For a few moments, no one said anything. Overhead the sky had grown slightly darker behind its covering of cloud; night would be coming on fairly early here, this time of the year.
Finally Danny spoke again. "Tom, if you think the Coalition is going to try to cheat these people -- if you're siding with them against us -- then why in the name of Hell don't you just stay out here with them?"
Tom gave him the first really steady look he had seen from his companion in a long time. "Maybe I will, Danny," he said slowly. "I may just choose to do that."
SUTTON OVERLETHE: ... hardly notable, save for its fine cruciform Norman church. See especially the excellent baptismal font. The pagan-appearing jack-in-the-woods peering between the leaves on one of the wall friezes may be a later addition ... a small brewery turns out some of the finer ale of the south Midlands ...
--Beyond London, p. 316.
They packed their meager belongings into their battered and stained knapsacks and set off down the road. Within a hundred yards they came to a stile on the right side, and a decrepit green sign that read:
SUTTON OVERLETHE 1,63 km
An argument ensued. Danny was all for continuing along the road toward Banbury, still ten miles away; Tom insisted on making the detour to Sutton. Danny argued that there was no use in visiting another town; they already had a satisfactory sample, statistically speaking, and in any case these people were all narrow-minded hicks who were incapable of putting the common good above their own personal biases. Tom countered that both Sutton and its neighbor Staneford, on the tiny River Stane, were significant communities, at least according to the Ordnance Survey map; they could visit Sutton, cross the ridge to the valley of the Stane, then climb up the next ridge to hit the A361 with an easy walk through Bloxham to Banbury. "Anyway," he added, "Dan and Consuelo Harris live in Sutton, and I want to see how they are."
Robin looked at Tom with interest. Danny, too, wondered. "Who are Dan and Consuelo Harris?"
"Before your time," Tom said. "Dan was a young lieutenant, four years ago, a maintenance officer on the flight line at Chesham Bois. He took an early out and went to work as an assistant manager at the Leyland plant in Banbury. He and Consuelo moved here, to Sutton Overlethe. Sue and I had dinner with them a couple of times before ... before."
Danny threw up his hands in disgusted resignation. "What are the chances of either of them still being alive?" But it was his final shot. Tom did not answer but merely climbed over the half-overgrown stile. The other two followed him, Robin making a quick leap over the wall, and the three of them filed on down through the high-grown field on the other side.
From this shallow slope they had a good view out over the valley of Lethe Brook. The town itself was an ancient village of brown ironstone houses with grey slate roofs setting off the occasional yellow patch that marked thatching. It was nestled in the shallow cove between this ridge and the next one south, surrounded by green fields whose grass was long and rank for lack of mowing. The wind was picking up from the southwest, now, and Danny could see waves moving across the fields, ripples of white on green, in the low gusts. Far across the town, in a valley within the valley, where the Lethe Brook disappeared into a dense thicket of oak and beech and bramble as it wound its way east toward the valley of the Cherwell, there stood a row of tall brown stone pillars, fingers pointing up toward the sky.
"What the devil are those?" Danny asked. "I've never seen them listed in the guide books."
"Indeed," Robin said, "they look like monuments raised to a deity. Fertility symbols?"
"Railway supports," said Tom. "There was a line through here once, many years ago, from Adderbury to Chipping Norton. It was cut in the readjustment of the late fifties, when Beeching was minister of transport." Irrelevantly: "Why do they call it the Lethe Brook? Are the waters supposed to bring forgetfulness and peace?"
Robin and Danny both smiled; Tom's choice of words was psychologically revealing. "I think not," the little man said. "There's much chalk in these hills, and perhaps when the rain drives hard the stream might flow a bit white -- like milk. Lethe is simply a form of an old word meaning milk."
The footpath was almost hidden in the long grass, but Danny did not let that worry him; it was unlikely that the farmer would appear to chastise them should they stray. They followed what seemed to be its route for a few hundred feet, until they reached the southeast corner of the field; then, turning south and crossing the southern boundary wall, they followed yet another drystone wall downslope through a second field and across another stile. A quarter mile brought them to a rutted, grassy dirt track bordered with brambles and wild roses. This way led east down a shallow slope, toward the now-hidden village.
In half a mile they came to another main road. As they strolled south on the asphalt pavement, houses began to appear on either side. Most of them appeared to be empty; their casements gaped emptily, like blind eyes staring at what had once been and should still be. A few hundred yards beyond the first house, the road split opposite the gutted corpse of what might once have been a small pub. The right branch led off to the south, over the Lethe Brook and up a tree-shaded hill on the opposite side. The other, a narrow lane, turned east and led off between the two rows of the brown stone houses with the grey slate roofs.
A hundred yards along this main street -- for the few street signs, set into the corners of several of the houses, read High Street -- they came up opposite a magnificent long ironstone house two stories high, with a delightfully peaked roof and gables of thick brown thatch. Here they met their first inhabitant. He was a small boy, perhaps ten years of age, driving a tiny herd of four or five cows west along the road. The three travelers stepped onto the sidewalk, ceding the roadway to the boy and his bovine charges. As he came up to them he stopped and stared. Not many visitors here any more, Danny thought.
"Good afternoon," Tom said to him politely. The boy said nothing, and gradually the open, wondering expression on his face took on a nuance of wariness. "Can you tell us where we might find Mr. and Mrs. Harris?"
"Don't know 'em," the boy said, almost resentfully.
"They live on High Street ..."
"This 'ere's uh High Street," the boy said, "but oy don't know 'em."
Tom looked exasperated, but said nothing more. "Oy orter be goin'," said the boy, "an' get 'em ta barn, else Da'ull whup me." He gave Robin a piercing, half-frightened look, and then, without waiting for a reply, he waved his switch and drove his kine down the road toward the ruined inn.
Tom's stare followed the retreating lad. "Come on!" Danny urged and, not stopping to see whether he was followed, started on up the street.
Just over a slight rise and then a hundred feet or so downhill they came to the center of the village. To the left, on a patch of high lawn dotted with ancient and crumbling tombstones, stood the village church, a large cruciform structure with the usual square Norman bell tower. The ironstone walls looked ancient and faded. Just across the road from the church stood two pubs, side by side, sharing a parking lot as they must once have shared their custom. One of them -- that on the left -- might have been any of a hundred or a thousand other pubs of the same franchise that Danny had seen throughout England. But its identifying sign was gone, now, and empty windows gaped darkly at him. The other pub, an ancient brown building with slate roof green with moss, still kept all its windows. The sign hanging above the door read The Full Moon in gilt Gothic letters on a red background. In front, at the edge of the empty parking lot, stood two round white metal tables. At one of these, three elderly men were sitting, nursing glass mugs of clear light-brown ale. They looked up as Danny approached. On their faces he saw that same reticent look he had come to associate with the rural survivors, here in the west of the land.
"Afternoon," one of them said reluctantly. He was a thin man with a craggy face, thin white hair, and poorly-fitting, poorly-cleaned baggy shirt and pants. He might have been of any age from forty to eighty. His eyes flicked past Danny to Tom and Robin. For a brief moment, surprise seemed to shine through at sight of the little man. Then the wary look returned. "Ye're lost? Huntin' for someone 'er somethin'?"
Tom was looking around, confused. "This looks like the right place," he said, "but I just don't remember ..."
"I'm Daniel Carey," Danny said, "and this is Tom Rowan. And Robin Daly," he added, remembering the little man. "We're looking for the home of ..." He turned to Tom.
"Dan Harris," Tom supplied.
The elderly man nodded gravely. "Ye'll be Americans, from over the water," he said. "Oy'd not 'eard that London 'ad ... what were them wireless words, Samuel?"
"'Reestablished contact," one of the other men said carefully.
"Aye, that." He settled back and took another sip of his ale.
"Actually, they haven't," Tom said. "We're both from the base at Heyford. Right now we're returning from a survey we've been doing for the Coalition of Urban Councils. You've probably been visited already; we're just here to look up a couple of old friends."
"Aye." The man drained the rest of his mug. "We 'ad 'un. He'd scant comfort from us." He slammed the mug down. "'Tis pity that John's 'ad to ration uh good ale." For a moment he seemed to be taking their measure with his eyes. The eyes passed over Danny quickly and the young man shivered with the sudden feeling that, in scarce a second, he had been weighed and somehow found wanting. It was on Tom that they rested the longest. "Ye like trees, son?" the old man asked.
Tom did not look as surprised at the question as Danny felt. "When I was a boy back in Oregon I had my own pet Douglas fir."
"A roight Druid, George," said one of the other two men, and chuckled. There was no sense of malice in the laugh.
"Aye." George seemed to think for a moment. "'Tis on a good day ye've come, son. Dan 'arris lived just over uh way 'ere." He pointed to the last in a row of semidetached houses, the church's nearest neighbor, a two-story ironstone structure with double door set in the front between large bay windows, heavily curtained. "Uh Death got 'im."
Tom's face went white and his head dropped. "So many!" he whispered. "So God-damned many! Why did we ever ..."
The man hunched forward over the table and peered up into Tom's downturned face. A faint hint of a smile appeared at the corners of his mouth. "'Tis not all out of luck ye are, son," he said. "Hardly an 'undred but still live 'ere in uh village, but one o' 'em is Consuelo 'arris." He pointed to the house again. "She's at 'ome roight now, wi' ..." Again the wary look came over his face, but this time Danny thought to see a look of respect mixed with it. "... wi' Missus White."
"Thanks," Danny said. "We'll go take a look ..."
He turned to cross the street, and then the double doors swung wide and a short, slightly stocky figure stepped out onto the single porch step and shaded her eyes. For just a moment she stood there and then, with a cry, leaped down onto the sidewalk and rushed lightly out onto the street, heedless of the non-existent traffic. "Tom!" she cried. "Tom Rowan! Oh, Tom!"
"What I miss most," Consuelo said softly, " -- that is, besides my Dan -- is the ringing of the changes."
Dinner had been served -- a bit of beef in thin gravy, a few brussels sprouts, all the potatoes they could eat, a still warm glass of boiled milk -- and now they were sitting in the living room. Beyond the big bay window a wan orange light still illuminated the High Street and the buildings across the way. In The Full Moon the evening candles had been lit in the public bar, and five or six men and women had gone in through the door. The saloon remained dark. The church bells had sounded again, for about twenty seconds, and when they stopped Consuelo was sitting erect in her straight-backed wooden chair, her ears cocked. Danny had asked her why.
She was a woman in her early thirties, hardly beautiful but with a full, alive face with deepset brown eyes, an aquiline nose that would have done justice to a Mayan profile, long black hair. Though her proportions, especially at the hips, were ample, she could not honestly have been called fat, though Danny guessed that she might once have been and, given a pre-Death sufficiency of food, could be again. He seemed to detect the faint trace of some Latin accent when she spoke, but could not be sure. She was not well-dressed for a dinner party -- she wore an old blouse, a pair of levis and sandals that had probably seen better days -- but he had expected nothing better. These days, nobody had any new clothes, except for a few people in the cities, where stocks were carefully rationed.
"The ringing of the changes," she repeated. "It used to be that on this evening of the week they would ring the changes on the bells in practice for Sunday. They could ring the seven bells for as much as half an hour and never repeat a single pattern." She sighed. "It was beautiful. So much has been lost ..."
"But little of real value, dear." The younger woman, who had been introduced as Andred White, was sitting in an old overstuffed armchair opposite Danny. Between them, Tom was crouched at her feet, blowing on a few glowing coals to revive the fire.
To Danny, Andred White was an enigma. She was an ash-blonde of perhaps twenty-five years, thin almost to the point of emaciation, with long legs, narrow hips, and small breasts artlessly but effectively concealed beneath a set of tattered, soiled clothing similar to that worn by Consuelo. Her behavior did not match that of anyone Danny had encountered this side of the Great Death. She was calm and open about her feelings. In the cities -- or at least in London -- people had retreated into themselves almost to the point of paranoia. In the countryside, villages had a communal spirit lacking in London, but the community as a whole seemed to erect a psychic barrier against the outside. Andred seemed to have no distrust of other people; in that, she was an anomaly in this disintegrating world.
But it was her treatment of the three of them as individuals that most surprised him. To Robin she gave the expected look of surprise, but then smiled, and seemed to take him more for granted than either of the others, despite his unusual appearance. When Tom went on at length about his family back in the States, she merely nodded with a sort of clinical detachment, though Danny was sure that she understood that he was, at least on this one subject, certifiably insane. And when Danny tried to point out to her the need to support the maintenance of technology in Britain through the next few years, she just gave him the look that she should have given poor mad Tom.
"Technology," she said in her cultivated aristocratic accent, "has its place in the world, I do agree. But, I fear, that place is neither here nor now."
Consuelo nodded her head in automatic agreement, then looked furtively over to where a stack of stereo components sat, forlorn and dust-covered, on a shelf of the divider. "But I do miss Vaughan Williams," she said simply.
"As do I, dear," Andred replied. "To me the Fifth Symphony, the last few passages of Job, those contain the quintessence of the British countryside. But you will live to hear them again. The scores remain. And, whatever else may be lost or preserved, there will always be those who love to make music. Orchestras in the cities ..."
"So you're ready to make an eighty-mile trip to London just to hear a concert?" Danny asked in disbelief. "Wouldn't it be easier just to get the electric power system back in working order so that you could hear a recording any time you wanted?"
"It would certainly be more convenient," Andred said. "But, under the circumstances, I would not be unwilling to make such a trip -- very occasionally -- just to hear a concert, even if it need be afoot. I believe that would mean more to me than disk or cassette would, even though I could hear that whenever I wanted."
Danny snorted. He did not want to be impolite to his hostess -- and it appeared that the house was now as much Andred's as it was Consuelo's, whatever meaningless words were written on the deed -- but it seemed to him that Andred White was a convert to the modern Ludditism that was sweeping rural Britain, and he felt no sympathy for her position.
Seeing the antagonism on his face, she leaned past Tom and put her fingertips to his forehead. He tried to flinch back, but it seemed as though an electric shock ran through him, from forehead down to his toes. The feeling faded, and he suddenly felt more relaxed than he had in many months. "Poor Danny," she cooed at him. "I had my own music collection, you know, at home in Sussex. I had an electric sewing machine, and a Midget, and a computer, and all those other lovely little bits of machinery that made life so convenient and easy for us. And, oh, I loved them so, and I miss them so! But Danny, you must try to understand: they are gone, and for a long time -- perhaps forever -- they are not coming back!"
"They are coming back!" Danny said, almost furiously. "We'll bring them back. We've got telephones and some radios ... we'll have the rail system back running before you know it ... we have enough stockpiled aviation fuel for occasional light aircraft flights ... we'll be able to make fertilizers and pesticides ..."
"And rifles, bombers, nuclear armaments, artificial viruses," she added, "to keep Britain free? Danny, that's what will result from the cities' purposes! Don't you see? They all come together in one big package!"
"They don't have to," he insisted.
"But they do," she said. "That is what our way of life has led to: the belief that if you can do something, you have the right to do it, you should do it. If the cities reconstruct the old civilization, we shall have that whole terrible package back again."
"What do you suggest, then?" Danny asked. "We need nuclear power plants, because there's almost no easily accessible petroleum left -- and the bombs come with the plants."
"I have never been one of those," Andred said quietly, "who argued against the need for nuclear power plants. But I don't want the bombs -- and now that there are so few of us to depend on the world's resources, I'd rather do without the power plants than have to put up with the bombs." Then, abruptly, she turned her attention to Robin, where he sat quietly near the window, listening to the others. "My friend, I hope that you do not feel neglected. I believe ..."
Robin nodded without waiting for her to finish the sentence. "You have the right of it, Mistress White," he said affably.
"I had not thought that we would have to wait for long. Something old is coming back to our land, then?" There was an eagerness in her voice that Danny couldn't understand.
"Something old is coming awake in our land," he corrected gently. "It was never gone, Couldn't you feel it?"
"In the beechwood forests ... during a windy day atop the downs ... sometimes. Never in London, never in Brighton." She was silent for a moment. Then: "You know what I am?"
"I know. You were in my dreams -- you and the others. You remembered -- and you were always here when the others needed you."
Danny had absolutely no idea what was going on, and Tom too seemed bemused by the conversation. Consuelo was leaning forward in her chair, listening to this dialogue with great interest. "Are we then ... the same ... as what you remember?"
Robin tittered. "Does it matter, Mistress? What came out of Africa with the Moors -- and before them, into Africa with the Two-Horned Macedonian -- has never been lost. But it was never all, either. The folk I knew a thousand years ago would feel strangeness in what you do -- but they would understand well why you do it. They, like you and I, were all Her children."
"We are few ..." Andred mused.
"As you have always been, will always be," Robin said. "But you have influence again today. I think you will use it wisely."
"I shall try. I have always tried." She looked out the window. The sun was completely gone, now, and the only light came from the candles in The Full Moon and their own fireplace. "You know what night this is ..."
"I know," said Robin. "We would not keep you ..."
"I go in an hour. We have taken their church for our use. After all," she said, almost defensively, "it was our place long before it was theirs ... and we intend no sacrilege to their God ..."
Consuelo glanced at Tom, then sideways at Danny. "Can you tell me ... is either of them ..." Anxiety colored her voice.
Robin gave Tom a barely perceptible nod. Tom smiled as though he half understood. Andred sighed. "So be it. I had half-hoped ..." She looked at Consuelo's smiling face, and nodded. "So be it," she said again. "Consuelo, I think that you must take Tom for a walk. I shall stay here and keep Danny company yet a while."
Danny started to stand up in protest. Consuelo laid a hand on his wrist. "Please, Danny. Tom, would you come with me, please? I really would like to get some air."
Obediently, as though in a trance, Tom -- who had hardly spoken all evening -- came to his feet and started toward the door. Danny watched the two of them go out and disappear into the blackness.
"And now, Danny," said Andred, relaxing again. "Tell me of some of the things you encountered during your journey."
Sith she be a proper person, properly prepared.
--Book of Shadows
That night, there were few candles burning in the little stone-built village; most of the houses were empty, and those with occupants seemed to be asleep. The narrow streets and even narrower alleyways were full of ghosts -- two thousand of them, Tom thought, and all pressing in upon him. When the wind shifted around to the northwest, turning chill with oncoming winter, and the clouds overhead cracked and splintered like an eggshell opening to let the chick free, the northern stars shone down, pale and unblinking, like the eyes of those two thousand ghosts. Tom hugged his anorak tighter around himself; Consuelo shivered in the old raincoat that she had donned, and he put an arm around her shoulders in a protective gesture.
They said nothing for a time, but simply wandered down the high street for a few yards, and then left and right, up and down the little alleys. Sometimes they were crowded in between the bare back walls of houses; sometimes there were fences and hedgerows and fields on either side. Finally, Consuelo broke the silence. "It's been a long time, Tom." Tom said nothing. Consuelo was quiet for a minute, then went on: "What are your plans now?"
Tom thought for a moment. "I suppose that I'll go on to Banbury," he said reluctantly, "and then back to London. The Coalition will want the results of our survey ..."
"Will they really?" she asked doubtfully.
He caught her meaning at once and shook his head in the darkness. "No. We don't have anything to tell them that they'll want to hear. From what we've seen, the countryside -- at least, here in the west -- is closed to them. Barring military action, of course, and I just don't think they're up to that."
"It will be the same in the north and the south, and in East Anglia." She walked on beside him in silence for a few minutes, matching his long strides effortlessly with her shorter legs. Then: "Tom? What do you want to do?"
Not stopping to think: "Stay here. Work here. Forget."
"We'll never be able to forget," she said. "The past is too much a part of our present. But some of us hope that we'll be able to learn from it. Robin seems to think that you might be able to help us with that."
"Who," he asked, "is Robin? And who are 'some of us'?"
"Robin? I'm not sure. I think he's just a person -- though a different sort of person -- and at the same time he's a symbol, a proof to us that our way is based on reality -- though maybe a different reality than the one you and I both grew up with. As to who 'some of us' are, that I'm not allowed to tell you. All I can say is that if you want to join us, you'll be asked to do things that may seem childish, foolish to you; and you'll end up believing in things that seem outlandish or even impossible. And in the long run, you'll work your tailbone off, just as Andred and I are doing. But you'll never be allowed to forget." She stopped for a moment. "Are you with us?"
"I don't know anything about 'us'," he replied. "Is your group something that developed in reaction to the Great Death? Are you some sort of collection of technophobes?"
"We're not technophobic per se -- think about what Andred said to Danny back in my living room. And we didn't develop after the Great Death -- we've been around for far longer than that. But that's all I can tell you now, Tom; you'll just have to take the rest on trust. In our work, we're sworn to secrecy."
"Some religious thing," he guessed.
"Some religious thing," she agreed.
"And to join you, I have to become a true believer?"
"To join us, you have to be willing to work. What you believe is your own business. All we want is for you to do a bit of play-acting with us. Perhaps you'll learn a few things."
"And if I don't pan out?" he asked.
"You will," she said confidently. "We don't invite those who won't."
"When do I have to make up my mind?"
She turned her eyes up to the stars. "If you accept us, you won't be going back to London, not even to Banbury -- at least, not now. Your work will be here, and it will begin tonight."
He wanted to consider the matter, to think it over, to learn more about what it was that Consuelo was into, but somehow it seemed to him then as though the decision had already been made for him long before, perhaps in some other life. Here, he thought, would be something, some place, that he could tie to, something that did not conflict with his own beliefs about this horribly mutable world into which he had been thrown like a newborn babe. With almost no hesitation, he turned to her and said, "Yes."
They went on wandering, then, and with an utter trust that astonished him she told him of her group, what it did, what its purposes were, and if he could not later remember just what he learned there under the cold light of Polaris, that was because it seemed to him as though he had always known it. Then she went on to question him about himself, about Sue and their children, and he answered with no reluctance. They talked for a long time of his beliefs, his desires, his intentions.
After he heard what she had to say, he felt no desire to go back on his acceptance of her group and its goals. Sue would not mind, he felt, nor Jerry, nor Debbie. They would approve wholeheartedly. When they returned from America and saw what he was doing ...
They walked back along the High Street, past the house. Tom took only a cursory glance through the bay window and saw that Danny and Robin were still sitting silently before the fire. Andred was gone. Then they were past the house, next to the churchyard. "Come on," Consuelo said. "We'll go in through the back."
They scrambled up onto the lawn and strolled around to the rear of the church, carefully making their way past the ancient gravestones. Many of these still stood, although on most the legends had been eroded away; some lay tumbled on the ground. Behind the church, in the light of the new-risen moon, Tom noticed a single mound, maybe two feet high and nine or ten feet in diameter, with a small beech tree growing on it. "That's very old," Consuelo told him, following his eyes. "The mound goes back, oh, three or four thousand years -- maybe as far back as Stonehenge. You know that in the early medieval period it was the Church's practice to build these cruciform churches on such raised bits of ground; that's because they were already holy places, sanctified by older religions, long before Christianity arrived, and the Church merely took them over for its own purposes."
"Does this church go that far back?" Tom asked.
She laughed. "No, only to the fourteenth century. But there was a wooden church here earlier than that."
She led him through a rear door into what must have been a vesting room. A metal tub full of steaming hot water stood in the center of the candlelit space. Two slightly soiled white robes hung from hooks on the wall near the door. Towels lay stacked on the floor below them. "Get undressed and soak yourself," Consuelo ordered. "You need a bath anyway, and you'll have little chance of one around here most of the time. Hot water was one of the fatalities of the Death."
Inexplicably, he felt no self-consciousness about disrobing in front of her. Perhaps that was because she paid absolutely no attention to him as he did so. As he lowered himself into the tub, feeling the warm water easing the weeks of dirt and sweat from his pores, she stripped off her blouse and bra with quick facility, then removed sandals, levis and panties and stood there, like an undersized Venus of Willendorf, in front of him. Again to his surprise -- and despite months of celibacy -- he felt no arousal.
She seemed to read his thoughts. "This is not the time," she said quietly. "That's why." Then, with a practiced movement, she slipped into one of the linen robes and drew it in at the waist with a white cord. "When you're finished," she said, "put on the other one. I'll be back for you in a few minutes. Right now I have duties to perform. Don't leave the room until I come for you."
After she had gone, he lay back in the metal tub for a few minutes, drowsing in the pleasant warmth. He could have relaxed all night like that, but eventually he realized that the tub was becoming cramped, the water turning cool. No time like the present, he thought, and got to his feet. The air was late-October chill, though the half-dozen candles provided some heat. He stepped out onto the panelled floor, picked up a towel, and started to dry himself. After he had erased every drop of water, he took the robe and struggled into it, sliding it over his head and down his body. There was a cingulum like Consuelo's hanging from the hook that had held the robe; he used it to draw the waist in, wrapping it around him three times before he could finally tie it without leaving ends to drag on the floor. When he finally had it cinctured, it felt loose and comfortable above and below the waist, as though it had been made for him.
Hell, he thought suddenly, remembering a book he had once read. I'm a character in a Dion Fortune novel.
He waited, then, and as Consuelo had suggested during their walk he passed the time sitting on the floor and thinking of Sue and Debbie and Jerry, of high rolling green English hills and little English villages nestled at their feet, of autumn air and the tang of wood smoke coming from chimneys in valleys golden with the turning of the year.
The door came softly open. "It's time," Consuelo said. She held out a pillowcase. "This is a hoodwink. Put it over your head. Don't lift it, no matter what."
He obeyed willingly. As the pillowcase came down over his head he was immersed in a flickering orange haze -- the discrete candleflames transformed by the weave into a single mellow all-encompassing glow. He knew, as she took his hand and led him through the door, that when he could see again everything would be changed and the world would be remade. So much faith he had in her.
Hoodwinked as he was, he could make out a few things. The new room was warmer, as though there were a fire going nearby. The padded footsteps of his bare feet seemed to produce echoes off of faraway walls. And he heard the hushed breathing of several people.
Consuelo signalled him to stop with a restraining hand on his shoulder. For a moment, nothing happened; then he felt a sudden prick over his heart, not deep enough to draw blood, not even to pierce the linen robe, but strong enough to be threatening. No fear, he said to himself, but all the same his heart picked up the pace a bit.
A voice: Andred White. "You stand on the threshold of the Other World. Have you the courage to cross?"
He nodded, voiceless. His left brain told him that this was a lot of play-acting; his right brain knew that something awesome was happening.
Andred said: "If you do not, now is the time to turn back." Silence for a moment: waiting. He would not give up. "Have you the passwords?"
Consuelo had told him what they were. Under the circumstances, they made sense. He leaned slightly forward, giving the person holding the knife a better chance to thrust, and said the five requisite words.
The point was withdrawn from his chest. "You are welcome here, seeker," Andred said. Consuelo urged him a foot or so forward. Someone moved behind him, then in front of him, and he heard a momentary sound of metal on wood. The feeling of Andred's thin body and tiny breasts against him was a surprise. The lower part of the pillowcase was lifted and her lips met his with just the right minimum of passion -- and it was as though a spark had leaped from one to the other. There was about her something more vital than he remembered from the firelit living room.
"That," she said, "was the final password." The pillowcase dropped again.
Consuelo guided him for another yard or so, then brought him to a halt. For a few moments Andred spoke to him, repeated much of what Consuelo had already said, but more forcefully, more imperatively. She finished after a while, and then he felt a fumbling at his feet. Someone tied his hands behind his back and another cord -- or part of the same one -- was used to draw the hoodwink in around his neck.
He was paraded clumsily around a circle, stopping four times; each time, Andred cried out, to someone he could not see -- though he could feel their presence -- "I call upon you to recognize that Thomas is to be made a Priest of our Craft!"
At the fifth station, she said: "Kneel, Thomas." He knelt and heard the ringing of a bell over his head. Gentle hands helped him back to his feet and he heard her say, from below him: "Thomas, in other beliefs it would be demanded of you that you kneel before your Master; but in our Craft we are taught service and humility, and so we kneel before you."
For a while there was silence, and he felt hands touching him at various points, as though a tailor were measuring him for a suit -- or a shroud. Eventually he was left alone for a moment; then two hands pressed down on his shoulders and he was forced to kneel. Something fumbled at his ankles. The bell rang again -- with a slightly different tone -- three times. Andred said: "Are you now ready to swear that you will always be true to our Craft?"
Tom swallowed. "I am," he said.
"First you must be purified." Consuelo had told him about this and he steeled himself, but there was only the feeling of something falling lightly on his back a number of times. Obviously the purification was symbolic rather than substantive. Andred's voice came again. "Will you always give help and aid to your Brothers and Sisters of our Craft?" "I will."
"Then say after me ..." And, following her lead, he swore his Oath, an oath more significant than "preserve and defend" had once been to him.
Hands were at his ankles again, and suddenly they were free; the cord at his neck was untied and the hoodwink was lifted away. He found himself standing in the nave of the church. All the pews had been removed, and the floor was bare for yards around. Behind him the chancel had been screened off -- respect for the crucifix? he wondered.
He was inside a circle that had been carefully laid out on the floor with a long white strand of cord; at four points on its perimeter stood burning candles, plain of color. In the center of the circle was a square altar with other candles and paraphernalia resting on it. Inside the circle with him were Andred, Consuelo, and an elderly white-haired Englishman whom he did not recognize. Outside the circle were two others: George from the pub and a girl of about eighteen. All wore white linen robes.
Andred stood in front of him and he waited, but it was obvious that the ceremony was not quite at an end. She consecrated him with several different substances -- symbolic of the four elements, he thought -- finished with another of those extraordinarily vital kisses. Releasing her, he pulled back and gazed for a moment into those cornflower-blue eyes. A sudden shiver ran up his spine. Something looked back at him that was not Andred White -- or at least not merely Andred White.
She gazed upon him with love and compassion that were terrifying because they were infinite. Would you then flee from Me? she asked.
How can I? he replied. To where would I flee?
She laughed. That is wisdom, Thomas. Truly, you are one of My people -- they who call themselves 'the wise'.
Andred, who was more-than-Andred, went around behind his back and untied his hands. When she came back in front of him again, he saw that she was merely Andred again. She gave him another kiss and said, "I now salute you in the names of our Goddess and our God ..." She named them for him. " ... newly made a Priest of our Craft." Then, leading him to each of the four candles in turn: "Hear ye, oh Mighty, that Thomas has been consecrated a Priest and a Brother in our Craft."
She made a way for the two outside to enter the circle, then returned to him, embraced him, kissed him warmly. "Welcome to our Circle, Brother Thomas. I am Andred." The others proceeded to welcome him also, the women with a kiss, the men with a simple embrace. Consuelo was called Cerridwen in the Circle; the elderly man was Dougal. George from the pub bore the name Conn, and the teen-age girl was Serena.
No doubt in time he would learn all their everyday names. For now, he knew what was important.
The next half hour was devoted to a rite, led by Andred and Dougal, that Tom recognized as having to do with the waning of the year. Then Andred raised her hand for silence. "It is, I think, fitting," she said, "that Thomas should have come to us on this night of nights, this night of the year when the dead can, should they will it, pierce the veil between the worlds, speak to the living, show us the paths that we must follow." She looked Tom squarely in the eyes. "No, Thomas," she said in answer to his unspoken question. "We have riddled some of the secrets of which you are thinking, but we of the Craft do not practice the Art Necromantic; we do not rob graves of their hallowed dead for use in our Art. But on this night of the Samhain -- what you know as All Hallows' Eve, or Hallowe'en -- we are not averse to listening, to see whether our own dead, our beloved dead, have anything they find needful to say to us." She smiled at him. "It is always possible, of course, that the dead, being dead and so disinterested in our affairs, don't speak at all, and that what we hear rises out of our own subconscious minds. As to that, you must in the end judge for yourself. We offer no proof and we make no claims." She turned to the others again. Her voice turned grave and sad. "I am sure that in this year of all years, each of us has her or his own beloved dead with whom she will wish to speak."
"How do I go about this?" Tom asked. "I've never conversed with dead people before."
"Take whatever position you find most comfortable for meditation," she told him. "Then just close your eyes, think on your dead for a bit, and let whatever comes ... come. Listen to your own heart."
He obeyed and at once found himself sinking into that lassitude that came over him whenever he took time out to reminisce about Sue and the children. From far off, like the pounding of the sea, he could hear the eternal throb-throb of systole and diastole, and it seemed to him to be an eternal symphony, played by the entire world.
Sue ... he wondered what she was doing now. Had they ended up in New York? Or California? Or did those old political divisions even have meaning any more? In post-Death America they must be having a hard time keeping it all together ...
You are supposed to think of those dead with whom you would speak, he said to himself, deep down in his mind.
I'm thinking of Sue, he replied. But she's not dead.
Of course not, the voice said to him. If she were, you'd know it.
And if she were dead, she'd be speaking to me now, because I'm thinking of her.
Of course I would, darling ... if I were dead. But I'm not, am I.
No, his mind cried out, you're not. You can't be! That's my own mind talking back at me! I want to hear you, so in my imagination I do ...
Well, perhaps, darling, the voice said. But it's hard to say. It might be your subconscious throwing things up to you ... and then again, maybe Andred is right, maybe it is me. Maybe I am dead. Could you admit it if I were?
You're not, you're not! he cried out in silent anguish. You can't be dead! You went home and you lived, and the children lived!
Well, yes, I think Debbie lived, poor thing, the voice said. As for myself and Jerry, I can't be sure of that ... and neither can you. Your mind plays tricks ...
Give me a sign, he begged, tell me something that will prove it's you,,tell me something that only the two of us can know.
Ah, the voice said, that would be so easy. There are so many things ... but that proves nothing, Tom, darling. You could have dredged it up yourself, out of your memories. No, Tom, maybe I'm dead and maybe I'm not, but you'll never know, will you. You'll never know.
In his mind he was sobbing with sorrow and frustration.
But consider it mathematically, the voice urged. What are the probabilities? One in twenty that I survived, one in eight thousand that we all did. No, darling, face it: I am dead, Jerry is dead, perhaps even Debbie is dead -- even if this is only your subconscious speaking and not me at all. *We are dead*.
But what shall I do if you are dead? It seemed to him that he couldn't hide his anguish.
Ask Andred, the voice said, or Consuelo. They can guide you. Consuelo needs someone, now that Dan has gone, and Andred will need someone with the strength to help Consuelo when she has moved on to some other place. And Tom, what I foresee now that everything is clear to me ...
What do you foresee, then? he asked.
I can only tell you so much ... and do not forget that I may be nothing but the voice of your subconscious speaking to you. Darling, it seems to me now that half the future of Britain -- and perhaps of the world! -- lies in your hands, and those of Consuelo and Andred and those few who believe as you do. Half the future, my darling!
And what of the other half?
He could almost feel her gentle smile. That belongs to Danny Carey and those like him. You are the guardians of wisdom; they are the guardians of knowledge.
But they're wrong, he insisted. They're terribly, terribly wrong! It was they who killed you!
No, she said quietly. It was the Death that killed me, not Danny Carey. And, just as Danny said, it was technology that eventually killed the Death. No, darling, they aren't wrong. They are just not as right as they think they are. They do not yet understand that there is more to the world than what they can weigh and measure. But they must remain, the repository of the world's mind and knowledge. When the time comes, it will be they who teach that knowledge to your people -- if you have not let your people stray too far from theirs for the learning.
And what, he asked, have we to teach them in return?
That is not important right now, she said, nor could you understand yet. When the time comes, your descendants will know. I tell you only that you must be able to teach it to them if you want no more Sues and Jerrys to die in yet another Great Death.
For a moment his mind was a blank and he struggled to bring her back, as though he were trying to remember something important. Then: Darling, I must go. Live, darling, do what you must ...
Then our story is ended? he cried out bitterly in his mind.
For a moment he seemed to hear her old, familiar laughter. Then, fading away into the distance, one last phrase: Darling, our story will *never* end ...
"Sue!" he cried out and opened his eyes. Andred was standing before him, her head cocked to one side. Next to him, Consuelo was smiling sadly at the floor. He knew, he thought, to whom she had been talking.
"She is dead, you know," he said to no one in particular. It was a simple statement of fact, and one that he now knew he could live with.
"Yes, we knew that." Andred's voice was quiet, but he could hear the gentle -- and no longer infinite -- compassion in it. "I'm glad that you can accept it now."
"Was it my own mind?" Tom asked. "Or did she really speak to me?"
"As to that," Andred said, "you must draw your own conclusion."
Tom and Consuelo had been gone for half an hour, and silence had fallen in the room. Andred stood up and smiled down at Danny. "I must go out myself for an hour or so," she said to him. "Danny, I would take it kindly if you did not leave the house this evening." She turned to Robin. "You wouldn't mind staying with him?"
"None of the others are about yet," he said, "nor is our way your way. When the spring comes around in the turning ... but for tonight, it will be good to relax a bit."
"Good. Keep an eye on the lad, I beg."
"'Tis my pleasure, Mistress."
Danny stood up quickly. "Hey, just a minute ..."
Andred stepped toward him, stood on tiptoe and kissed his forehead. "Get some sleep, Danny, my dear," she said, and for a moment she reminded him inexplicably of his mother. "It will do you good. I should be back in an hour or so, with Tom and Consuelo." Then, before he could muster up another protest, she walked over to the door, opened it, and disappeared into the black night.
When the door had closed, he sat back down again, helpless. "Don't take it to heart," Robin said. "She means you no hurt."
Danny refused to reply. For a while, he sulked silently, and Robin on his part showed no further inclination to talk. Finally, Danny grew tired of waiting. "I'm going over to the pub," he said, standing up.
"You've not looked over the way recently," Robin said quietly. "The pub closed early tonight. This is All Hallows Eve, and the folk of the village prefer to be safe at home in their houses."
"Oh, my God!" muttered Danny in sheer disgust. "Superstition and fear! The Dark Ages are closing down again."
"Could you not," said Robin, "be mistaking faith for superstition, respect for fear? Is there nothing in which you yourself believe, nothing you respect?"
"I believe in rationality," Danny said. "I respect knowledge."
"Perhaps there are different forms of rationality, different types of knowledge, from those you know." He looked up at Danny with an untranslatable expression on his fox-face. "Danny, please sit down."
"No." Danny started for the door. "She said something about going over to the church. I'm going to ..."
"Danny," said Robin in a calm, steady voice, "*sit down.*" The timbre of his voice deepened slightly until it seemed to resonate with Danny's nerves. "In Her name I command thee!"
"Fuck you," Danny replied. But it suddenly struck him that to go further would in some way offend not only this innocuous little man, but Andred as well; and the memory of her slender beauty tugged at his heartstrings. He could almost see her in front of him, reproaching him: "Was it too much to ask, Danny, that you stay indoors for a couple of hours?"
He could do nothing to upset her. Feeling foolish, he decided to go back to his chair and sit down.
Robin smiled at him. "That's better, Danny. Now ... would it not be better to get some sleep, as Mrs. White suggested?"
"I don't want to ..." He looked into the small fire and yawned. "Maybe you're right," he admitted. "It's been a long day." The rest of the room was already in shadows, and even as he watched the flames receded and died, leaving ruddy coals on the hearth, and darkness crept in from all sides, obscuring everything but that dim red glow ... He leaned back, turned partially to one side, closed his eyes.
Somehow it was but a step from that darkened room to the towpath along the Oxford Canal, and from autumn into spring again, with the sun high in the morning sky and his father striding along at his side. "Pick it up a bit," the Colonel ordered. "We have to get to Banbury today, you know."
"I'm asleep and dreaming, aren't I," Danny said calmly.
"No doubt about it." The Colonel chuckled.
"That little bastard put me to sleep!"
"Command voice," said the Colonel. "I've heard it from time to time; it's a kind of magic I wish I commanded. Did I ever tell you about the time I saw the solar eclipse?"
"No," said Danny, savoring the voice of a man now more than a year dead. "No, father, tell me about it."
"It was at a place called ... I forget the name, now, but it was in the state of Washington, where they have that replica of Stonehenge. Back in '79 or '80, I believe. There were a lot of weird people there in weird clothes. The sky was covered with clouds, and they made them go away -- some magical chant or other, I remember."
"I don't believe in that stuff," Danny said.
"I believe in what works, son," said the Colonel. "Take a hint from the Old Man. Anyway, the moon slipped across in front of the sun, and all the land went dark, and soon you could see the flames blazing out around the moon. Right next to me there was this fellow -- rather ordinary looking, except he seemed to be wearing a priest's cassock of some kind -- talking to a Moroccan woman. 'There's Bailly's Beads,' he was saying in a perfectly ordinary voice, 'and now you can see the corona. Temperature's a million and a half degrees, but so little gas to carry the heat that you'd freeze to death behind a parasol.' "Just then a television person down ahead of us decided to photograph all the weirdos and switched on his klieg lights right in our eyes, right in the middle of the last North American total eclipse of the century. I didn't know what to do, but my priest neighbor raised his right arm and pointed his finger at that TV fellow and thundered out in a voice that should have made lenses pop: 'Turn out those lights!' Son, that was a magical command voice if ever there was one. That TV man didn't stop to argue, he just switched those lights off chop-chop."
"Probably realized he was being a boor," said Danny.
"Son, it is the job of such people to be boors. It took real magic to get that man to turn out his lights, no questions asked."
"I don't believe in such stuff," Danny said again. He took a deep breath of the chill morning air, feeling the soft scent of growing things in his nose and throat. He didn't believe in dreams, either, but he didn't want to let this one slip out of his grasp. Far away, a church clock chimed. Two ducks swam placidly past. "Where's Tom?" he asked. "He was going to Banbury, too."
"Sergeant Rowan has a new assignment," the Colonel said. "It's a very special assignment, the sort that only an NCO can handle properly. You and I, son, we're going on to Banbury. Tom's staying behind."
"That's a crying shame," Danny said. "We had a great hike together, even if he is a little crazy. All that guff about our troubles being due to technology ..."
The colonel stopped, picked up a small flat stone, and skipped it across the canal. "Man, how I loved to do that when I was a boy. Glad to see that I haven't lost the touch. Danny, Tom's wrong, I agree, but in a way so are you. Did you ever stop to think that without technology the Death would not have occurred? And without our excessive dependence on technology, the subsequent Great Death could have been avoided."
"Oh, Dad!" Danny cried out. "You're not turning into a Luddite, too!"
"Of course not," he said. "I'm a product of my times, just as you are. I love my car and my camera and my computer. Technology is what makes life not only livable but enjoyable as well. But it has to be used right."
"So tell me, Dad ... how can we know how to use it right?"
"That's the problem," the Colonel admitted, perplexed. "I don't know. Neither does anybody else. Maybe somebody will, someday. But that somebody is going to have to think about technology, look at it, without becoming dependent on it."
"The cities ..." said Danny, and then he stopped for a moment. "The Coalition ... we won't be able to go on without technology."
"I understand that," the Colonel conceded. "The people in the cities need all the technology they can hang onto for survival. Which means that they won't ever be able to determine how to use it properly."
"Should we leave everything to the Luddites?" Danny asked acidly.
"No, son," the Colonel said, "because then there would be no technology at all, and man would revert. No more stars, no more nothing."
"Then what is the answer?" Danny asked.
A narrowboat appeared in the canal ahead of them, moving toward them. It was gaily painted in red and black, like so many of that fraternity. The Colonel waved to it and it swung in toward the bank. He turned to Danny. "You have half the answer, Danny," the Colonel said. "You have the technology. Tom has the key to the other half ..."
"Tell me what it is that Tom has, dad," Danny said anxiously. "Then we can skip all this screwing around and get down to cases."
The Colonel shook his head. "I don't know what Tom has, Danny; it's outside my world view. Really, he doesn't either. If any of us did, this island probably wouldn't have to go through what it's going to suffer in the next century or so. But you and I -- and Tom, too, for that matter -- we haven't got the right approach to the problem. You and I never will have it; we don't think the right way. Tom might find it. Or Tom's children. They'd better find it ..."
The narrowboat pulled in to the shore and the Colonel boarded it. "I have to get back to base, Danny," he said. "There's a big exercise coming up ... but you go on to Banbury, son, and do what you've got to do. There's work ahead. Work for all of us." Danny stood there, helplessly, as the narrowboat, without another soul on board, moved smoothly away down the canal toward the south. Then the canal was gone, and before his eyes closed again he realized that he was staring at a bed of dim red coals ...
|
With a host of furious fancies Whereof I am commander, With my burning spear and my horse of air Through the universe I wander. |
| -- Loving Mad Tom |
Someone was shaking his shoulder. He opened bleary eyes to find himself swung around in his chair, facing the bay window. Sunlight was pouring in through it. He was no longer in the wooden seat but sprawled out in Andred's far more comfortable armchair.
Andred was standing at his side, dressed in a checkered flannel work shirt that had seen better days and the same pair of jeans she had worn before. She had one hand on his shoulder; in the other she was holding a plate with a small portion of scrambled eggs and bacon. In the light of the autumn morning she was no longer quite so beautiful as he had thought her the previous evening, only a wan, emaciated woman, exhausted not so much by what had come before, he thought, but by what was yet to come. "I thought you might care to break your fast," she said.
"Thanks," he said grudgingly. "Where are the others?"
"Consuelo has already gone out to the allotments to work our garden," she said. "Winter is here, and we have to get in the last of our harvest and rework the ground a bit. Eat your breakfast." She handed it to him. "You'll not be staying the day?"
"I think not," he told her. "We have to be going. We've got a job to do in London, and the sooner we get back, the faster we can finish it and move on to something else."
As he ate, she sat down on the floor before him, cross-legged, in front of the tiny anthracite fire. "I think that Tom will not be going with you, Danny," she said quietly. "He has found his place here."
Danny paused for a moment, then went on eating. "I guess I knew that," he said after a while. "I guess I've known for some time that he'd be caught up in this futile dream that you country people have."
"You really believe that we are retrogressing, don't you, Danny," Andred said with a hint of sadness. "Or -- be honest with yourself -- is it just that you can't admit that there might be more than one way to get to the same place?"
"You," he said, "want to live in a world that never was. You believe in the beauties of rural existence, the turning of the seasons, natural food untainted by pesticides, probably even in magic."
She bowed her head but said nothing.
"Oh, I understand," he told her. "A couple of years ago, when we were all rich enough and comfortable enough to be able to afford to be romantics, I might have been a little like that myself. Think of it: a rural paradise where every yeoman lives off the fruit of the land, in a great, sprawling, warm manor house. Well, it isn't like that, Andred. It never was and it never will be. You people are condemning yourselves -- I think you'd condemn the world, if you could -- to mud huts and hopeless drudgery. Without fertilizers, without tractors, without electricity, you'll work your fingers to the bone and put permanent kinks in your spines and go blind working at night, just to get enough food to keep you from starving -- sometimes. And children! Think of the babies, dying in their cradles because you haven't got any more modern medicine. That's what the cities want to avoid! We don't have to fall back; there's still a chance to have the stars. But in a few years, it'll be too late!"
"Danny," she said, "you misunderstand us, I think. We know what we must suffer over the next few decades ... or even centuries. Oh, it won't be quite so bad as you seem to think, but you have the right idea. Do you know what I was, Danny? I was a very happy little housewife, and my husband -- he was a very successful young solicitor -- provided me with all the modern conveniences I needed to free my days from the housewife's traditional drudge work. Now Consuelo and I work about eleven hours a day planting, weeding and harvesting our allotment -- that's not much land on which to grow a year's food -- keeping the house in shape, occasionally working in the pub, doing laundry. We know that there will never be a utopia for us here.
"What we -- and by we, I mean all of us who live beyond the cities -- want is not to reject your technology permanently, but to learn how to live without it, to stand aside from it for a time and give it a good hard look, so that someday we may know best how to live with it. In the meantime, you must keep it alive -- and we must feed you. In the end we shall all be one again."
"It won't work," Danny said, handing her his now empty plate. "Where's my knapsack?"
"It will work," she told him. "It must work. Because if everyone chooses your way, then we must finally suffer the Great Death yet again, world without end; and if everyone chooses our way, that must be the end of mankind's great dreams of the stars and we will disappear from the world without a trace. But thank all the gods, Danny, yours and mine, that this is a big world and a bigger universe, with room enough for all of us, no matter what our beliefs." She pointed toward the door. "Your knapsack is at the foot of the stairs. Tom is over the street having a morning drink with George Selby." She stood up and put the plate on the mantel; then, reaching up, she kissed him on the lips. "Fare you well, Danny. We don't, after all, begrudge you the road you must follow; please don't begrudge us ours."
He could think of nothing to say. Going into the hall, he gathered up his pack, slung it over one shoulder, and went out the door.
Tom was sitting at one of the white tables with Robin and the same elderly man who had directed them the day before. Catching sight of Danny, he waved to the boy. "Danny!" he called. "Come on over here!" His voice had more cheer in it that Danny could remember hearing since before the start of the Death.
He crossed the street but did not sit. "I hear that you're staying, Tom," he said quietly.
"That I am," Tom said, and Danny fancied that his soft, mid-Atlantic voice was already starting to take on the slow, thick rural accent of these people. "And what luck I have! I'm going to work with George here on his allotment, help him with his cattle, and help him provide wood for the town during the winter. George will choose what trees to take, of course; I haven't any idea how to go about that, yet." There was real enthusiasm in his tones.
"Aye," said George laconically, sipping at his morning ale. "But in time ye'll learn."
"Later on ..." Tom continued. " ... well ... Consuelo and I have an understanding of sorts ... you know what I mean."
"What about Sue?" Danny asked sardonically.
Tom looked directly into his eyes and said quietly: "Sue is dead, Danny. She's been dead for a long time."
Danny tried to outstare him, but found his own eyes dropping to the ground before the quiet, and quite sane, intensity he confronted. He resolutely swung the other strap up over his free shoulder and shrugged into the knapsack. "Well, Tom, I wish you luck. I think you know that I believe you've made the wrong decision, but ... well, it's your decision. Maybe we'll be seeing each other again."
Tom got up from his chair and extended his hand. "I don't think so, Danny. But, believe it or not, I wish you -- and the cities -- luck, too." He looked down at Robin, who had slid off his seat and now stood at Danny's side. "You're going too?" There was surprise in his tone.
"For a way, Thomas, for just a little distance." Robin looked up at Danny. "You don't mind, of course."
"Not at all," Danny said, also surprised. He took Tom's hand, gripped it emphatically for a moment, then turned and walked away without so much as a backward glance at the two men in front of the pub or the tall brown Norman church or the two-story house with the wide bay windows. In spite of his shorter legs, Robin kept pace with him easily.
A block down the High Street, where the valley of Lethe Brook and the stone railway supports that straddled it came into view between houses, Robin pointed toward the distant thicket. "If you'd prefer a nicer route," he said, "there's an old footpath along the Lethe that will take you past Collington and down to the three-six-one just southwest of Bloxham. It's nice and cool in the fall, with running water and late berries, and plenty of shaded spots to rest ..."
"I think I'll stick to the main road," Danny said. "That way I won't lose time and I can't get lost."
"I thought you would," Robin said, with a dry chuckle that somehow held a note of regret. "I thought you would."
Together they strolled away toward Bloxham, Banbury and London Town. Behind them the bells in the church tower rang in a short, final farewell.