“But that was God.”
“Same difference, darling. Now you go to sleep. Your Papa was just thinking aloud and your Mommy was only pretending to be afraid. You know Mommy likes to pretend.”
“But why didn’t God come down from the electric poles when Mommy asked?”
“Maybe this line isn’t in use, honey. Maybe it’s broken. Tomorrow we’re going to walk down the line and find out. Anyhow I was probably wrong about the noise. That could be just a susperstition that wires hum, and only Dingoes are superstitious. The Masters probably can’t hear us through all the insulation on the wires. What would they be listening for way out here, anyhow? We’ll find our way to a nice kennel tomorrow, Petite, don’t you worry.”
Petite fell asleep then, but I could not. Great shafts of light streamed from the northern horizon. They glowed whitely in the black sky, dimming the stars as they shot out, dissolved, reformed.
The Northern Lights. Aurora Borealis.
It was there especially that the Masters loved to play and relax. They felt at home among the electrons of the Van Allen belt, and where it curved in to touch the Earth’s atmosphere at the magnetic poles they followed it, controlling the ionization of the air, structuring those pillars of light that men have always wondered at to conform to the elaborate rules of their supravisual geometry. These shifting patterns were the supreme delight of the Masters, and it was precisely because Earth, of all the planets in the solar system, possessed the strongest Van Allen belt that they had originally been drawn to this planet. They had only bothered to concern themselves with mankind after a number of nuclear explosions had been set off in the Van Allen belt in the 1960’s.
The aurora that night was incredibly beautiful, and so I knew that the Masters were still on Earth, living and flaming for their pets—their poor, lost maltreated pets—to see.
But it was a cold flame and very remote. I drew small comfort from it.
“Your courteous lights in vain you waste,” I muttered.
Julie, who has always been a light sleeper, stirred. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, probably too sleepy still to remember why she was supposed to be sorry.
“It’s all right. We’ll find them tomorrow,” I said, “and tomorrow and tomorrow.” Julie smiled and slid by imperceptible degrees back into sleep.
The next day we followed the lines to the north. They ran along beside an old asphalt road, scarred with fissures and upheavals, but still easier to travel than the rank brush on either side. We moved slower since I had found that my knees would no longer support the double burden of a knapsack and Petite, and we were obliged to match our pace against hers.
A faded sign gave the distance to Shroeder as twelve miles. Using the road (for the wires overhead were sufficient protection, as we thought, against the Dingoes), we could hope to reach the kennel by midafternoon. Regularly we passed deserted farmhouses set back from the road and, twice, the road widened and the ruins of houses were set closer together: a town. Here the wires would branch off in all directions, but the main power line followed its single course toward Shroeder. The poles were of rough pine, stained to reddish-brown by creosote, one just like another, until…
Julie noticed it as we were on the outskirts of Shroeder. Running up and down the poles were thin silvery lines that glinted metallically in the sunlight. On closer inspection these lines could be seen to form vertical chains of decorative elements in simple, repeating patterns. One common design consisted of overlapping circles linked in series by straight lines, so:
Another was a single zigzag pattern:
The most frequent design resembled a circuiting diagram of dry cells in series:
In fact they were all circuiting diagrams.
It was too crude decoratively and such nonsense from any other viewpoint that I knew it could not be the work of the Masters. There was something barbaric about these markings that smelt of Dingoes!
But what Dingo would dare approach this near the sanctuary of the Masters? The Kennel must be only a few hundred yards off. I began to have misgivings about our security. Before I could properly begin to savor this danger, another, and graver, had presented itself.
“Cuddles!” Julie screamed. “Gods and Masters, look! The power station!”
I scooped up Petite and was at Julie’s side instantly. A cyclone fence that ran some hundred feet along the road prevented our entrance to the power station, but it made no difference, for it was nothing but a rubble heap now. I-beams, gnarled and twisted like the limbs of denuded oaks, showed in gruesome silhouette against the light blue of the summer sky. The pylons that had fed the high-tension wires into the substation lay on the ground like metal Goliaths, quite dead. The wires that had led out from the station had been snapped and hung inert from the top of the cyclone fence, where now and again a breeze would stir them. All, all defunct.
“It’s been bombed,” I said, “and that’s impossible.”
“The Dingoes?” Petite asked.
“I daresay. But how could they?”
It made no sense. So primitive an attack as this could not succeed against the Mastery when the whole rich arsenal of twentieth-century science had failed. Oh, the nuclear blasts in the Van Allen belt had annoyed them, but I doubted then and I doubt now whether man has it in his power actually to kill one of the Masters.
How could it be done? How do you fight something without dimensions, without even known equations that might give some symbolic approximation of their character? Not, surely, by bombing minor power stations here and there; not even by bombing all of them. As well hope to kill a lion with a thistle. The Masters transcended mere technology.
Inside the fence, from somewhere in the tangle of gutted machinery, there was a moan. A woman’s voice reiterated the single word: “Masters, Masters…”
“That’s no Dingo,” Julie said. “Some poor pet is caught in there. Cuddles, do you realize this means all the pets have been abandoned?”
“Hush! You’ll only make Petite cry with talk like that.”
We made our way through a hole in the fence sheared open by a falling pylon. Kneeling a few feet from that hole, her face turned away from us, was the moaning woman. She was using the blasted crossbeam of the pylon as a sort of prie-dieu. Her hair, though tangled and dirty, still showed traces of domestication. She was decently naked, but her flesh was discolored by bruises and her legs were badly scratched. Confronted with this pathetic ruin of a once-handsome pet, I realized for the first time how terribly wild Julie looked: dressed in the most vulgar clothes, her hair wound up in a practical but inartistic bun and knotted with strips of cloth, her lovely feet encased in clumsy rubber boots. We must have looked like Dingoes.
The poor woman stopped moaning and turned to confront us. By slow degrees her expression changed from despair to blank amazement. “Father!” she said, aghast.
“Roxanna!” I exclaimed. “Is it you?”
Chapter Six
In which I defend a woman’s honor, and with what dire consequence.