He flicked at the rump of the cow, delivering a signal to it; the cow lumbered forward, dragging his cart after it.
I got away, he said to himself. The horde of black children ebbed back, making a way open to him; they had watched the entire interaction between himself and the Great C. Why doesn’t it dissolve them? Tibor wondered. Strange.
The cow reached the road beyond the felled trees and continued slowly on its way. Flies buzzed at it but the cow ignored them, as if the cow, too, understood the dignity of triumph.
Eight
Higher and higher the cow climbed; she passed through a deep rift between two rocky ridges. Huge roots from old stumps spurted out on all sides. The cow followed a dried-up creekbed, winding and turning.
After a time, mists began to blow about Tibor. The cow paused at the top of the ridge, breathing deeply, looking back the way they had come.
A few drops of poisoned rain stirred the leaves around them. Again the wind moved through the great dead trees along the ridge. Tibor flicked at the cow rump ahead of him, and the cow once more shuddered into motion.
He was, all at once, on a rocky field, overgrown with plantain and dandelion, infested with the dry stalks of yesterday’s weeds. They came to a ruined fence, broken and rotting. Was he going the right way? Tibor got out one of his Richfield maps, studied it, held it before his eyes like an Oriental scroll. Yes; this was the right way; he would encounter the tribes of the south, and from there—
The cow dragged the cart through the fence, and arrived at last before a tumbledown well, half filled with stones and earth. Tiber’s heart beat quickly, fluttering with nervous excitement. What lay ahead? The remains of a building, sagging timbers and broken glass, a few ruined pieces of furniture strewn nearby. An old automobile tire caked and cracked. Some damp rags heaped over the rusty, bent bedroom springs. Along the edge of the field there was a grove of ancient trees. Lifeless trees, withered and inert, their thin, blackened stalks rising up leaflessly. Broken sticks stuck in the hard ground. Row after row of dead trees, some bent and leaning, torn loose from the rocky soil by the unending wind.
Tibor had the cow move across the field to the orchard of dead trees. The wind surged against him without respite, whipping the foul-smelling mists into his nostrils and face. His skin was damp and shiny with the mist. He coughed and urged the cow on; it stumbled on, over the rocks and clods of earth, trembling.
“Hold,” Tibor said, reining the cow to a stop.
For a long time he gazed at the withered old apple tree. He could not take his eyes from it. The sight of the ancient tree—the only living one in the orchard—fascinated and repelled him. The only one alive, he thought. The other trees had lost the struggle… but this tree still clung to precarious semilife.
The tree looked hard and barren. Only a few dark leaves hung from it—and some withered apples, dried and seasoned by the wind and mists. They had stayed there, on the branches, forgotten and abandoned. The ground around the trees seemed cracked and bleak. Stones and decayed heaps of older leaves in ragged clumps.
Extending his front right extensor, Tibor plucked a leaf from the tree and examined it.
What have I got here? he wondered.
The tree swayed ominously. Its gnarled branches rubbed together. Something in the sound made Tibor pull back.
Night was coming. The sky had darkened radically. A burst of frigid wind struck him, half turning him around in his seat. Tibor shuddered, bracing himself against it, pulling his log coat around him. Below, the floor of the valley was disappearing into shadow, into the vast nod of night.
In the darkening mists the tree seemed stern and menacing. A few leaves blew from it, drifting and swirling with the wind. A leaf blew past Tiber’s head; he tried to grasp it, but it escaped and disappeared. He felt all at once terribly tired, as well as frightened. I’m getting out of here, he said to himself, and nudged the cow into motion.
And then he saw the apple, and it all was different immediately.
Tibor activated the battery-powered radio mounted behind him in the car. “Father,” he said. “I can’t go on.” He waited, but the receiving portion of the two-way radio sent forth only the rushing noise of static. No voices. For a moment he tuned the receiver’s dial, hoping to pick up someone somewhere. Tibor the unlucky, he thought. A world, a whole world of sorrow—I have to carry it, that which can’t be carried. And within me my heart breaks.
You wanted it like this, he thought. You wanted to be happy, unendingly happy… or find unending grief. And this way you achieved endless grief. Lost here at sundown, at least thirty miles from home. Where are you going now? he wondered.
Pressing the button of his microphone, he grated, “Father Handy, I can’t stand it. There is nothing out here except what’s dead; it’s all dead. You read me?” He listened to the radio, tuning it on to Father Handy’s beam. Static. No voice.
In the gloom, the apple from the apple tree glistened moistly. It looked black, now, but it was of course only red. Probably rotten, he thought. Not worth eating. And yet it wants me to eat.
Maybe it’s a magic tree, he said to himself. I’ve never before seen one, but Father Handy tells about them. And if I eat the apple, something good will happen. The Christians—Father Abernathy—would say the apple is evil, a product of Satan, and that if you bite into it you sin. But we don’t believe that, he said to himself. Anyhow that was long ago and in another land. And he had not eaten all day, he had become famished.
I’ll pick it up, he decided. But I won’t eat it.
He sent a manual extensor after the apple, and, a moment later, held it directly before his eyes, a beam from his miner’s hat illuminating it. And somehow it seemed important. But—
Something stirred at the periphery of his vision; he glanced swiftly up.
“Good evening,” the leaner of the two shapes said. “You are not from here, are you?” The two shapes came up to the car and stood bathed in light. Two young males, tall and thin and horny blue-gray like ashes. The one who had spoken raised his hand in greeting. Six of seven fingers—and extra joints.
“Hello,” Tiber said. One had an ax, a foliage ax. The other carried only his pants and the remains of a canvas shirt. They were nearly eight feet tall. No flesh—bones and hard angles and large, curious eyes, heavily lidded. There undoubtedly were internal changes, radically different metabolism and cell structure, ability to utilize hot salts, altered digestive system. They both stared at Tibor with interest.
“Say,” one of them said. ‘“You’re a human being.”
“That’s right,” Tibor said.
“My name’s Jackson.” The youth extended his thin blue horny hand and Tibor shook it awkwardly with his front right extensor. “My friend here is Earl Potter.”
Tibor shook hands with Potter. “Greetings,” Potter said. His scaly rough lips twitched. “Can we have a look at your rig, that cart you’re tied into? We’ve never seen anything quite like it.”
Muties, Tibor said to himself. The lizard kind. He managed to suppress a thrill of aversion; he made his face smile. “I’m willing to let you look at what I have,” he said. “But I can’t leave the cart; I don’t have any arms or legs, just these grippers.”
“Yeah,” Jackson said, nodding. “So we see.” He slapped the cow on its flank; the cow mooed and raised her head. Her tail, in the evening gloom, switched from side to side. “How fast can she pull you?” he asked Tibor.
“Fast enough.” In his front left gripper he held his single-shot pistol; if they tried to kill him he would get one of them. But not both. “I’m based about thirty miles from here,” he said. “In what we call Charlottesville. Have you heard of us?”