Moonrise

The bearded old man, lithe and easy for his age, swung to the street and gestured to Richard and the others. 'Drift along, Dream-oddities,' he said. '- And see the past and future kiss.'

The booted stompers began to crawl from beneath their great rust-red box – crawled out from under, and were kicked into a stumbling line by two of the men with spring-shooters… All finally stood holding hands like children, naked but for their heavy boots. Naked and shaved bare. It appeared that their nuts had been cut away. And their eyes. Their eyes had been taken out, and round little wooden eyes with painted blue pupils put in.

Baj said, 'My God,' a serious thing to say.

The two spring-shooter men were hitting the naked blind ones – striking them lightly, casually as pig-drovers, to move them, hand in hand, back down the graveled road toward the tamaracks and long wooden buildings there.

'We aren't going to get out of this,' Nancy said, and sounded close to weeping. 'These Sunrisers do terrible things.'

'They cannot keep us,' Richard said. 'We would spoil their truth. They'll either be easy and let us swiftly go, or turn us into those. And before that happens,' Richard made no effort to keep his voice low, '- we fight.'

'If they try to take our weapons,' Baj said, and had to clear his throat, '- we fight.'

The old man called to them again. 'Drift along, Apparents!' And they filed after him and the other spring- shooter men, Baj now more frightened than weary. He had a sickening vision of Nancy, ruined and eyeless. Nancy, and all of them.

… They were led down that street, and across another. Baj saw more pretty wooden houses down little side streets – noticed each had a chimney-stack, and windows showing cloth drapings inside, but no panes of leaded glass. From these houses, men were coming walking with their friends and families. They carried spring-shooters, and all were dressed in one of four different ways: some in jacket, trousers, throat-tie, and low shiny shoes… others in mottled-brown cloth and black lace-up boots (those wore round brown helmets on their heads). Others were dressed either in blue cloth with blue peaked caps, or gray cloth with gray peaked caps (the ones in gray all barefooted). But in whichever color, these peak-cap men wore beards and mustaches… The blue cloth, Baj supposed, dyed with crushed blueberry; the gray by thinned glue and powdered soot; the brown, by nutshells – ground then soaked. In whatever dress or uniform, the men seemed tired, rumpled, unwashed. A number were bandaged. Several limped.

At the far end of the last graveled street they crossed, Baj saw another imitation locomotive standing still, come into the town, apparently, on another of their gravel roads… He supposed they had others as well, and those had brought their men to marching-distance of the Robins.

'Soldiers,' Baj kept his voice low. Low-speaking seemed the safest way. 'Those are dressed as Warm-time soldiers.'

Nancy lifted her head, sniffed the air. 'Smoke,' she said. 'They smell of smoke. More than one village has been burned.'

Richard, gripping Errol's arm, looked back. 'Shhh…'

All those men and their families were walking the same way, the women leaving their plant-tending – and apparently not minding showing their legs – while the children ran here and there, from mothers to fathers, like schools of river fish… ran yelling past Baj and the others, so Errol clicked his tongue and tugged to join them.

But none of these people, not even the young, seemed to notice Baj and the others – not even Richard looming among them.

They followed the old man and his neck-clothed Spring-shooters toward the thumping clashing music, surrounded by what might have been veterans of Warm-time wars, many centuries ago.

At what would have been the third cross-street, there was, instead, a very large grassed square with seven or eight wood-built buildings – all painted gray (likely also with hoof-glue and soot) – standing along its eastern edge. Baj could see National Bank painted across the front of the biggest. There were letters on the other buildings, but too small to read.

In the middle of the square, there was a garden house – very much like those the river lords built amid their flower gardens along the Mississippi – a raised, open wooden floor, with latticework walls and a shingle roof.

The musical band was sitting on benches there, playing very loud, brass horns and decorated bleached-hide drums bright in morning sunlight. The music players, in odd tall hats, were dressed in red clothes with shiny buttons down the front.

All, Baj supposed, a slightly awkward and innaccurate recreation of the distant past… On those warm, sunny afternoons of six hundred years before, certainly not all little towns were green, perfect, and pleasant, with musical bands playing in their grassy squares. Though all were certain, at least, of a winter survivable with scientific heating, or, far from their splendid cities, with only a woodstove and warm coat.

Those peoples' lives lived rich in confidence that earth would never turn hot or cold enough to kill them, and destroy the wheat and corn and rice to leave hundreds and hundreds of millions with the choice of freezing or starvation… A confidence proved misplaced by nothing but a slight shift in great Jupiter's orbit.

It seemed to Baj that of all the things this pretend, this nearly, this almost town was not, there was still something it was, though its men maimed and burned. And that something – a recreation of the past, apparently as instrument of creation-anew – drew Baj to it as the crowd drew him and his friends into the bannered square, into the noisy merry music – sounding old as Island's celebratory 'Washington Post,' and meant, apparently, to be marched to.

Baj felt that something, and saw that Richard, Nancy – and empty Errol – did not. There had been no Persons in Warm-times. That past was not theirs. Before centuries of cold, before the mind- making of Boston Talents, there had been only beasts, and men.

… Baj and the others – Errol kept close – were drawn along with the townspeople: the weary soldiers grimy in their odd uniforms, their wives and children, elderly parents… sweethearts. Drawn with them as if herded – but always with a distance kept, so the travelers stayed separate in the crowd. Errol was strutting to the music's solid beats, thin legs and moccasined feet pumping up and down.

The biggest flag had been raised on a pole by the garden house, and its cloth, striped and starred, brightly colored as dyed honey candies, rippled out on the north wind – a chill breeze, despite the sunshine – as if in time to the music.

Though to what celebration these people were called – the end of their so-short northern summer, or perhaps only a triumph after killing, burning Robins – had not been spoken of, the festival air lent for Baj an additional magic to this town. A town that might be his in wishes for the past – if he were asked, and lived blind to what it wasn't. If he were willing to maim sweat-slaves, blind them, slice their manhoods so they acted only as engines to power the false-locomotives – power those, and likely other things: a wood mill, a stone mill to crush rock to gravel, a manufactury for spring-shooters. Making all those work, though slowly, poorly, straining in imitation of machinery that once had hummed and roared and whirled in heat and heated oil.

Still, perhaps because of so many boyhood hours reading, perhaps by a would-be poet's imagination that had fleshed the copybooks out, this remembrance-place of a lost time seemed not so strange to him at all.

The soldiers and their families gathered, and gathered Baj and the others with them – though slightly separate – to crowd before the garden house and music band… Then the band stopped playing with a blare and crash, seemed to draw fresh breath, and commenced another, slower melody – to which, here and there, then throughout, the men and women began to sing.

It was a song that began 'Oh, beautiful,' and continued in such sweet description that Warm-times, even by these sad and crippled ways, seemed to rouse and return to bless them.

* * *

There were rows of rough wooden tables and benches beside the garden house, where people were already seating themselves, and several long serving tables past those, where women dealt with bowls and platters of food, and a cooking pit smoked with roasting meat.

Nancy said, 'Uh-oh.' One of the oldest exclamations.

A young man in a dark jacket, dark trousers, white shirt and throat-tie, was wending through the tables toward them. He was not carrying a spring-shooter.

When he stood smiling in front of them, Baj saw the young man was weary, unshaven, his white shirt stained