Clifford Simak - A Heritage of Stars

"Not exactly as a souvenir," said Cushing. "There is more to it than that. Attached to the brain cases of your fellows is a mystic symbolism that is not understood. A thousand years ago a man at the university wrote a history of the Time of Trouble and, in the course of his writing, speculated upon the ritual of the brain-case collections and their symbolism, but without reaching a conclusion. Until I read his history, I had not heard of the custom. I spent three years of woods-running, mainly in the South, and I had never heard of it. Perhaps it was because I made it my business to stay away from people. That's a good rule for a lone woods runner to follow. I walked around the tribes. Except by accident, I stayed away from everyone.

Rollo reached for his bag and dug around in it. "I carry here," he said, "the brain case of an unknown comrade. I have carried it for years. As a matter of sentiment, perhaps; perhaps as a loyalty; perhaps as a defender and caretaker of the dead; I do not know. I found it many years ago in an old deserted settlement, a former town. I saw it gleaming in the sun, not all of it, just a part of it that was exposed. It lay in a bed of rust that once had been a robotic head and skull. Digging further, I found the outline of the body, gone to rust, no more than a discoloration in the soil. That is what happened to the most of us, perhaps all of us, except myself, who escaped the human hunters. Once we no longer had any kind of oil to protect our bodies, the rust would set in and over the years would gradually spread, like a disease over which we had no control, biting ever more deeply into us until the day came when it disabled us and we could no longer move. We would lie where we had fallen, crippled by the rust, and as the years went by, the rust would burrow ever deeper. Finally, we would be a heap of rust, a pattern of rust that showed the outlines of the body. The leaves would drift over the outline, and forest mold or prairie mold, formed either by rotting leaves or rotting grasses, would cover us and hide us. The wind would sprinkle other dust over us and plants would grow in us or on top of us, more luxuriantly than elsewhere, feeding on the iron that once had been our bodies. But the brain case, built of some indestructible metal which today we cannot put a name to, would remain. So I took this brain case and put it iii my sack, to cheat the human who might come along and find it. Better for me to have it and to guard it, than for some human—"

"You hate humans?" Meg asked.

"No, I never hated them. Feared them, yes; I feared them. I kept out of their way. But there have been some I have not feared. The old hunter that I spent almost a year with. And the two of you. You saved me from the tree.

He handed over the brain case. "Here," he said, "have a look at it. Have you ever seen one?"

"No, I never have," said Meg.

She sat, turning it over and over, with the firelight glinting redly on it. Finally she handed it hack and Rollo put it in the sack.

The next morning, when Rollo had gone out to scout, she spoke to Cushing.

"That brain case, laddie. The one the robot let me look at. It's alive. I could sense it. I could feel the aliveness of it through my fingertips. It was cold, but alive and sharp and dark—so dark, so alone, and yet, in some ways, not alone. No expectations and yet not without hope. As if the coldness and the darkness were a way of life. And alive. I know it was alive."

Cushing drew in his breath sharply. "That means— "You are right. If this one is alive, so are all the others of

them. All those that have been collected. All those that lie in unsuspected places."

"Without any external sensory perceptions," said Cushing. "Cut off from all sight, all sound, contact with any other life. A man would go crazy.

"A man, yes. These things are not men, my bucko. They are a cry from another time. Robots—we speak the word, of course, but we do not know what they' were, or are. Robot brain cases, we say, but no one, no one except the two of us, suspects they' are still alive. Robots, we thought, were extinct. They had an old-time legendary ring, like dragons. Then one day you came walking into camp with a robot tagging you. Tell me, did you ask him to stay with us? Or did he ask to stay?"

"Neither one. He just stayed. Like he stayed a year or so with the old hunter. But I'm glad to have him. He is a lot of help. I don't think you should tell him what you just now told me.

"Never," said Meg. "No, he'd take it hard. It would haunt him. It's better if he thinks of them as dead."

"Maybe he knows."

"I don't think so," she said.

She made a cupping motion with her hand, as if she still held the brain case.

"Laddie," she said, "I could weep for them. For all the poor lost things shut up inside the darkness. But the thought occurs to me they may not need my tears. They may have something else."

"Stability," said Cushing. "Enduring a condition that would drive a man insane. Perhaps a strange philosophy that discovers within themselves some factor that makes it unnecessary to have external contact. You made no effort to communicate, to reach out to them?"

"I could not have been so cruel," said Meg. "I wanted to; the urge was there. To let it know it was not alone, to give it some sort of comfort. And then I realized how cruel that would have been. To give it hope when there is no hope. To disturb it after it had spent no one knows how long in learning to accept the aloneness and the darkness."

"I think you were right," said Cushing. "We could do nothing for it."

"Twice, in a small span of time," said Meg, "I have touched two intelligences: the brain case and the living rock, the boulder that we found. I told you that my powers are puny and the touching of those two lives almost makes me wish I had no powers at all. It might be better not to know. The thing within the brain case fills me with sadness, and the rock, with fearfulness."

She shuddered. "That rock, laddie. It was old—so old, so hard, so cynical. Although cynical is not the word. Uncaring. Maybe that's the word. A thing filled with repulsive memories so old they are petrified. As if they came from someplace else. No memories such as could be produced upon the earth. From somewhere outside. From a place of everlasting night, where no sun bas ever shone and there is no such thing as gladness."

They came upon only one person in their travel—a filthy old man who lived in a cave he had dug out of a hillside facing the river, the cave shored up with timbers, to provide a noisome den in which he could sleep or take shelter from the weather. Two lackadaisical hounds barked at the intruders, with a singular lack of enthusiasm, until the old man shushed them. The dogs settled down beside him, resuming their sleep, their hides twitching to dislodge the flies that settled on them. The man grinned, showing rotted teeth.

"Worthless," he said, nodding at the hounds. "Most worthless dawgs I ever had. Once they were good cooners, but now they've taken to treeing demons. Never knew there were so many demons in these parts. Of course, it's the demons' fault; they pester them dawgs. But it makes a man mad to spend the night out chasing coon, then find a demon up the tree. ‘Tain't worth a man's time to kill one of them. There ain't nothing you can do with demons. They're so tough you can't cook them enough to get a tooth into them, and even if you could, the taste of them would turn your stomach over."

He continued, "You folks know, don't you, there's war parties on the prowl. Mostly they stay out on the prairie. No need of coming down here, because there's water to be found out there. Some big chief has got a burr underneath his tail and he's out to make some coup. Heading for the cities, more than likely. He's like to get his clock cleaned. Them city tribes are mean, I tell you. All sorts of dirty tricks. No thing like fighting fair. Any way to win. And I s'pose that's all right, although it leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Them war parties have been going through right sprightly for the last week or so. Thinning out a little now. In another week or two, you'll see them trailing back, rubbing out their tracks with their dragging rumps.