Clifford Simak - A Heritage of Stars

She nodded. "Confusing. Hard to come to grips with. As if there were more of them than there really are, although one never knows how many of them there really are, for you cannot count them. As if there were a crowd of them. As if there were a crowd of people, very many people."

"That is right," said Rollo. "Very many of them. All the people they have savored and made a part of them. For to start with, they are empty. They have nothing of their own. They're nobody and nothing. To become somebody, perhaps many somebodies—"

"Rollo," said Cushing, "do you know this for a fact, or are you only saying what you've heard from others?"

"Only what I have heard from others. As I told you, of evenings filled with loneliness, I'd creep up to a campfire and listen to all the talk that went back and forth."

"Yes, I know," said Cushing. "Tall tales, yarns.

Later that night, when Rollo had gone out for a scout-around, Meg said to Cushing, "Laddie buck, I am afraid."

"Don't let Rollo worry you," he said. "He's a sponge. He soaks up everything he hears. He makes no attempt to sort it out. He does not evaluate it. Truth, fiction—it is all the same to him."

"But there are so many strange things."

"And you, a witch. A frightened witch."

"I told you, remember, that my powers are feeble. A sensing power, a small reading of what goes through the mind. It was an act, I tell you. A way to be safe. To pretend to greater powers than I really had. A way to make the city tribes afraid to lay a hand upon me. A way to live, to be safe, to get gifts and food. A way of survival."

As they moved on, the land grew even more bleak. The horizons were far away. The sky stayed a steely blue. Strong winds blew from the north or west and they were dry winds, sucking up every drop of moisture, so that they moved through a blistering dryness. At times they ran short of water and then either Rollo would find it or Andy would sniff it from afar and they could drink again.

Increasingly, they came to feel they were trapped in the middle of an arid, empty loneliness from which there was no hope they ever would escape. There was an everlasting sameness: the cactus beds were the same; the sun-dried grass, the same; the little animal and bird life they encountered, unchanging.

"There are no bear," Rollo complained one night.

"Is that what you are doing all the time, running off?" asked Meg. "Looking for bear?"

"I need grease," he said. "My supply is running low. This is grizzly country."

"You'll find bear," said Cushing, "when we get across the Missouri."

"If we ever find the Missouri," said Meg.

And that was it, thought Cushing. In this place the feeling came upon you that everything you had ever known had somehow become displaced and moved; that nothing was where you had thought it was and that it probably never had been; that the one reality was this utter, everlasting emptiness that would go on forever and forever. They had walked out of old familiar Earth and, by some strange twist of fate or of circumstance, had entered this place that was not of Earth but was, perhaps, one of those far alien planets that at one time man may have visited.

Shivering Snake had formed itself into a sparkling halo that revolved sedately in the air just above Rollo's head, and at the edge of the farthest reach of firelight were flitting deeper shadows that were the Followers. Somewhere out there, he remembered, there was a place that he was seeking—not a place, perhaps, but a legend; and this place they traveled, as well, could be a legend. They—he and a witch and a robot, perhaps the last robot that was left; not the last left alive—for there were many of them that were still alive-but the last that was mobile, that could move about and work, the last that could see and hear and talk. And he and Meg, he thought— perhaps the only ones who knew the others were alive, imprisoned in the soundless dark. A strange crew: a woods runner; a witch who might be a bogus witch, a woman who could be frightened, who had never voiced complaint at the hardship of the journey; an anachronism, a symbol of that other day when life might have been easier but had growing at its core a cancer that ate away at it until the easier life was no longer worth the living.

Now that the other, easier, cancer-ridden life was gone, he wondered, what about the present life? For almost fifteen centuries men had fumbled through a senseless and brutal barbarism and still wallowed in the barbarism. The worst of it, he told himself, was that there seemed to be no attempt to advance beyond the barbarism. As if man, failing in the course that he had taken, no longer had the heart nor the mind, perhaps not even the wish, to try to build another life. Or was it that the human race had had its chance and had muffed it, and there would not be another chance?

"Laddie, you are worried."

"No, not worried. Just thinking. Wondering. If we do find the Place of Going to the Stars, what difference will it make?"

"We'll know that it is there. We'll know that, once, men traveled to the stars."

"But that's not enough," he said. "Just knowing's not enough."

The next morning his depression had vanished. There was, strangely enough, something exhilarating in the emptiness, a certain crispness and clearness, a spaciousness, that made one a lord of all that one surveyed. They were still alone, but it was not a fearsome aloneness; it was as if they moved across a country that had been tailor-made for them, a country from which all others had been barred, a far-reaching and far-seeing country. The Followers were still with them, but they no longer seemed to be a threat; rather, they were companions of the journey, part of the company.

Late in the day, they came upon two others, two human waifs as desolate as they in that vast stretch of emptiness. They saw them, when they topped a low swell, from half a mile away. The man was old; his hair and beard were gray. He was dressed in worn buckskins and stood as straight as a young oak tree, facing the west, the restless western wind tugging at his beard and hair. The woman, who appeared to be younger, was sitting to one side and behind him, her feet tucked beneath her, head and shoulders bent forward, covered by a ragged robe. They were situated beside a small patch of wild sunflowers.

When Cushing and the others came up to the two, they could see that the man was standing in two shallow holes that had been clawed out of the prairie sod, standing in them barefooted, with a pair of worn moccasins lying to one side. Neither he nor the woman seemed to notice their coming. The man stood straight and unmoving. His arms were folded across his chest; his chin tilted up and his eyes were shut. There was about him a sense of fine-edged alertness, as if he might be listening to something that no one else could hear. There was nothing to hear but the faint hollow booming of the wind as it raced across the land and an occasional rustle as it stirred the sunflower patch.

The woman, sitting cross-legged in the grass, did not stir. It was as if neither of them was aware they were no longer alone. The woman's head was bowed above her lap, in which her hands were loosely folded. Looking down at her, Cushing saw that she was young.

The three of them—Rollo, Meg, and Cushing—stood in a row, puzzled, slightly outraged, awaiting recognition. Andy switched flies and munched grass. The Followers circled warily.

It was ridiculous, Cushing told himself, that the three of them should be standing there like little naughty children who had intruded where they were not wanted and, for their trespass, were being studiously ignored. Yet there was an aura about the other two that prevented one from breaking in upon them.

While Cushing was debating whether he should be angry or abashed, the old man moved, slowly coming to life. First his arms unfolded and fell slowly, almost gracefully, to his sides. His head, which had been tilted back, inclined forward, into a more normal position. His feet lifted, one by one, out of the holes in which he had been standing. He turned his body, with a strange deliberation, so that he faced Cushing. His face was not the stern, harsh, patriarchal face that one might have assumed from watching him in his seeming trance but a kind, although sober, face-the face of a kindly man who had come to peace after years of hardship. Above his grizzled beard, which covered a good part of his face, a pair of ice-blue eyes, set off by masses of crow's feet, beamed out at the world.