here am I going to die, a part of his brain declared, and, instantly, he jeered—jeered at himself and his broken plight. He did not need anyone else; he could heap ridicule on himself single-handedly.
He clicked on his emergency bullhorn. Powered by the huge wet-cell battery of the cart, the bullhorn wheezed: his breath augmented. And now his voice.
“Now h-h-hear this!” he declared, and, from all around him, his voice amplified. “I am Tibor McMasters, on an official Pilg for the Servants of Wrath, Incorporated. I’m stuck. Could you give me a hand?” He shut off the bullhorn, listened. Only the lisping of the wind in the tall weeds to his right. And, everywhere, the flat orange luminosity of the sun.
A voice. He heard it. Clearly.
“Help me!” he called into the bullhorn. “I’ll pay you in metal. Okay? Is that okay?” Again he listened. And heard, this time, the scamper of many voices, very shrill, like screams. The noise echoed, blended with the hushed quiver of the weeds.
He got out his binoculars, gazed around him. Nothing but barren countryside, spread out ugly and bleak. Great red spots that hadn’t yet been overgrown, and slag surfaces were still visible—but by this time most ruins had become covered by soil and crabgrass. He saw, far off, a robot farming. Plowing with a metal hook welded to its waist, a section torn off some discarded machine. It did not look up; it paid no attention to him because it had never been alive, and only a living thing could care. The robot farmer continued to drag the rusty hook through the hard ground, its pitted body bent double with the strain. Working slowly, silently, without complaint.
And then he saw them. The source of the noise. Twenty of them scampered across the ruined earth toward him; little black boys who leaped and ran, shouting shrill commands back and forth, as if in a single roofless cage.
“Whither, Son of Wrath?” the nearest little boy piped, meanwhile pushing through the tangled debris and slag. He was a little Bantu, in red rags sewn and patched together. He ran up to the cart, like a puppy, leaping and bounding and grinning white-teethed. He broke off bits of green weeds that grew here and there.
“West,” Tibor answered. “Always west. But I am stuck here.”
The other children sprinted up, now; they formed a circle around the stranded cart. An unusually wild bunch, completely undisciplined. They rolled and fought and tumbled and chased one another madly.
“How many of you,” Tibor said, “have taken your first instruction?”
There was a sudden uneasy silence. The children looked at one another guiltily; none of them answered.
“None of you?” Tibor said, amazed. Only thirty miles from Charlottesville. God, he thought; we have broken down like a rusty machine. “How do you expect to phase yourselves with the cosmic will? How can you expect to know the divine plan?” He whipped his grippers toward one of the boys, the nearest to his cart. “Are you constantly preparing yourself for the life to come? Are you constantly purging and purifying yourself? Do you deny yourself meat, sex, entertainment, financial gain, education, leisure?” But it was obvious; their unrestrained laughter and play proved. “Butterflies,” he said scathingly, snorting with disgust. “Anyhow,” he grated, “get me loose so I can roll on. I order you to!”
The children gathered at the rear of the cart and began to push. The cart bumped against the first fallen tree, going no farther.
“Get in front,” Tibor said, “and lift it up. All of you—take hold at the same time!” They did so, obediently but joyfully. He reclutched the cart in forward one—it shuddered and then passed over the first tree, to come to rest halfway up the second. A moment later he found himself bumping over the second tree and up against a third. The cart, raised up, jutting its nose into the sky, whined and groaned, and a wisp of blue smoke trickled up from the engine.
Now he could see better. Fanners, some robot, some alive, worked the fields on all sides. A thin layer of soil over slag; a few limp wheat stalks waved, thin and emaciated. The ground was terrible, the worst he had ever seen. He could feel the metal beneath the cart, almost at the surface. Bent men and women watered their sickly crops with tin cans, old metal containers picked from the ruins. An ox was pulling a crude car.
In another field, women weeded by hand; all moved slowly, stupidly, victims of hookworm from the soil. They were all barefoot. The children evidently hadn’t picked it up yet, but they soon would. He gazed up at the clouded sky and gave thanks to the God of Wrath for sparing him this; trials of exceptional vividness lay on every hand. These men and women were being tempered in a hot crucible; their souls were probably purified to an astonishing degree. A baby lay in the shade, beside a half-dozing mother. Flies crept over its eyes; the mother breathed heavily, hoarsely, her mouth open, an unhealthy flush discoloring the paperlike skin. Her belly bulged; she had already become pregnant again. Another eternal soul to be raised from a lower level. Her great breasts sagged and wobbled as she stirred in her sleep, spilling out over her dirty wraparound.
The boys, having pushed him and the Holstein past the logs, the remnants of former trees, trotted off.
“Wait,” Tibor said. “Come back. I will ask and you will answer. You know the basic catechisms?” He peered sharply around.
The children returned, eyes on the ground, and assembled in a silent circle around him. One hand went up, then another.
“First,” Tibor said.
“Fifth,” one of the boys muttered.
“Sixth!” Tibor cried.
“Seventh!
“Eighth!
“Ninth!
“Tenth—” But at that moment Tibor broke off. An adult human shape approached his cart; instinctively, his Holstein lowered her head and pretended—or tried—to crop the bitter weeds growing around her.
“We got to go,” the black children piped. “Goodbye.” They scampered off; one paused, looked back at Tibor, and shouted, “Don’t talk to her! My momma say never to talk to her or you get sucked in. Watch out, y’hear?”
“I hear,” Tibor said, and shivered. The air had become dark and cool, as if awaiting the thrashing fury of a storm. He knew what this was; he recognized her.
He would go down the ruined streets, toward the sprawling mass of stone and columns that was its house. It had been described to him many times. Each stone was carefully listed on the big map back at Charlottesville. He knew by heart the street that led there, to the entrance. He knew how the great doors lay on their faces, broken and split. He knew how the dark, empty corridors would look inside. He would pass into the vast chamber, the dark room of bats and spiders and echoing sounds. And there it would be. The Great C. Waiting silently, waiting to hear the questions. The queries on which it thrived.
“Who is there?” the shape asked him, the female shape of the Great C’s peripatetic extension. The voice sounded again, a metallic voice, hard and penetrating, without warmth in it. An enormous voice that could not be stopped; it would never become still.
He was afraid, more afraid than ever before in his life. His body had begun to shake terribly. Awkwardly he thrashed about in his seat, squinting in the gloom to make out her features. He could not. She had a dished-in face, with almost vestigial features, almost without the courtesy of features at all. That chilled him, too.
“I’ve—” He swallowed noisily, revealing his fear. “I have come to pay my respects, Great C,” he breathed.
“You have prepared questions for me?”
“Yes,” he said, lying. He had hoped to sneak past the Great C, not disturbing it, not being disturbed by it either.
“You will ask me within the structure,” she said, putting her hand on the railing of his car. “Not out here.”
Tibor said, “I do not have to go into the structure. You can answer the questions here.” Huskily he cleared his throat, swallowed, pondered the first question; he had carried them with him, in written form, just in case. Thank god he had; thank god that Father Handy had prepared him. She would eventually drag him inside, but he intended
