Clifford Simak - A Heritage of Stars

As he slogged along, keeping off the clearer paths of the one-time streets, the noise of the drumming grew. There was in it now a blood-curdling savagery that had not been evidenced at the start. Listening to it, Cushing shivered, and yet, chilling as it was, it held a certain fascination. From time to time, interspersed between the drumbeats, he could hear a shouting and the yapping of dogs. In another mile or so he detected the flare of fires, slightly to the north and west, reflected off the sky.

He stopped to gauge the situation better. Whatever was going on was taking place just over the brow of the hill that reared up to his right—much closer than he first had judged it. Perhaps, he told himself, he should angle to the south, putting more distance between himself and whatever might be going

on. There might be sentries out and there was no sense in taking the chance of bumping into them.

But he made no move. He stood there, with his back against a tree, staring up the hill, listening to the drumming and the shouting. Maybe he should know, he told himself, what was happening just beyond the hill. It would take no time at all. He could sneak up the hill and have a look, then be on his way again. No one would spot him, He'd keep a close outlook for sentries. The moon was out, of course, but here, underneath the heavy foliage of the trees, its light was tricky and uncertain at the best.

Almost before he knew it he had started up the hill, moving at a crouch, sometimes on hands and knees, seeking the deeper shadows, watching for any movement, slithering up the slope, the low-hanging branches sliding noiselessly off his buckskins.

There is trouble brewing, Monty had reminded him, trouble in the west. Some nomad band that had suddenly been seized with the thirst for conquest, and probably moving east. Could it be, he wondered, that the city tribes had spotted such a movement and were now in the process of whipping themselves into a warlike frenzy?

Now that he was near the brow of the hill, his caution increased. He slid along from one deep shadow to another, studying the ground ahead before he made any move. Beyond the hill the bedlam grew. The drums rolled and thundered and the yelling never ceased. The dogs kept up their excited barking.

Finally he reached the ridge top, and there, below him, in a bowl-like valley, he saw the ring of fires and the dancing, yelling figures. In the center of the circle of fires stood a gleaming pyramid that caught and reflected the light of the leaping flames.

A pyramid of skulls, he thought—a pyramid of polished human skulls—but even as he thought it, he remembered something else and knew that he was wrong. He was looking at, he knew, not human skulls but the skulls of long-dead robots, the shining, polished brain cases of robots whose bodies had gone to rust centuries before.

Wilson had written of such pyramids, he recalled, and had speculated on the mysticism or the symbolism that might be behind the collection and display of them.

He hunkered close against the ground and felt a shiver growing in him, a shiver that reached forward across the old, gone centuries to fasten icy fingers on him. He paid little attention to the leaping, shouting figures, his attention fastened on the pyramid. It had about it a barbaric aura that left him cold and weak and he began inching back, carefully down the hill, moving as cautiously as he had before, but now driven by a gripping fear.

Near the foot of the hill he rose and headed south and west, still moving warily, but in a hurry now. Behind him the drumming and the shouting faded until it was no more than a murmur in the distance. But he still drove himself.

The first paleness of dawn was in the eastern sky when he found a place to hole up for the day. It was what appeared to be an old estate, set above a lake and situated on a piece of ground enclosed by a still-standing metal fence. Glancing eastward across the lake, he tried to pinpoint the spot where the tribe had held its dance, but except for a thin trickle of smoke, he could make out nothing, The house was a stone and brick structure and so thoroughly masked by trees that he did not see it until he had made his way through a broken place in the fence and was almost upon it. Chimneys sprouted from both ends of it and a sagging portico, half collapsed, ran along its front. Behind it stood several small brick buildings, half obscured by trees. Grass grew tall and here and there beds of perennials, some of them in bloom, had persisted through the ages since the last people had occupied the house.

He scouted the area in the early dawn. There was no evidence that anyone had visited the place in recent days. There were no paths, no trails, broken through the grass. Centuries before, the place must have been looted, and now there would be no reason for anyone to come back here.

He did not approach the house, contented to view it from the shelter of the trees. Satisfied that it was deserted, he sought a place where he could hide himself, finding it in a thick cluster of lilac trees that had spread over a comparatively wide area. On hands and knees he wormed his way deep into the thicket until he came to a spot near the center where there was room enough to lie down.

He rose to a sitting position, propping his back against a thick tangle of lilac trunks. He was engulfed in the greenery of the clump. It would be impossible for anyone passing by to know that he was there. He unshipped the quiver and laid it, with the bow, alongside him, then slipped off the backpack and untied the thongs that closed it. From it he took a slab of jerked meat and with his knife belt cut off a piece of it. It was tough to chew and had little flavor, but it was good food for the trail. It was light of weight, would not spoil, and was life sustaining— good solid beef, dried until there was little moisture left. He sat and munched it, feeling the tension draining out of him, draining, it seemed, into the ground on which he sat, leaving him tired and relaxed. Here, he thought, was momentary peace and refuge against the day. The worst was over now. He had crossed the city and was now in its western reaches.

He had faced the dangers of the city and had come through unscathed. Although, in thinking this, he realized, he was deluding himself. There had never been any actual danger, no threat directed at him. The set trap had been an accident. The intended game, most likely, had been a bear or deer and he had simply blundered into it. It had posed a danger born of his own carelessness. In a hostile, or even unknown, land a man did not travel trails. He stayed well off them, at worst paralleling them and keeping eyes and ears well open. Three years of woods-running had taught him this and he should have remembered it. He warned himself that he must not forget again. The years at the university had lulled him into a false security, had changed his way of thinking. If he was going to get through this foray into the west, he must revert to his old way of caution.

Sneaking up to take a look at the dance or celebration or whatever it might have been had been a piece of pure foolhardiness. He had told himself that he must see what was taking place, but in this he had only fooled himself; what he actually had done had been to act impulsively, and one man traveling alone must never act on impulse. And what had he found? Simply that for some unknown reason a tribe, or a combination of tribes, was holding some sort of festivity. That and the confirmation of what Wilson had written about the pyramiding of robotic brain cases.

Thinking about the brain cases, an involuntary shudder of apprehension ran through him. Even here, in the early morning light, safely hidden in a lilac clump, the memory of the brain cases could still trigger a strange residual and unreasoning fear. Why should this be so? he wondered. What about the brain cases could arouse such an emotion in a man?