Norman Spinrad - The Iron Dream

The outside of the cabin was a flawless emerald green set off with modest brown striping, and the iron of the boiler and control cab was gleaming and totally free of rust. Inside, the cabin was done up in pine planking, the window glass was spotless, the fifty seats were upholstered in plush red velvet and filled with soft down, and only half of them were occupied, these moreover by fine-looking specimens for the most part. This magnificent roadsteamer was a stirring tribute to Helder craftsmanship and technology. Further, much of the road to Walder lay in the winding dells and forest groves of the Emerald Wood, a country famous for scenic beauty. Finally, he would be traveling not alone in a gaggle of mongrels, but with his newfound protege Seph Bogel, in the company of Helder.

It promised to be a pleasant journey indeed!

Feric and Bogel took up seats near the center of the cabin, equally removed from the noise of the steam engine in front and the exaggerated jouncing of the rear; choice seats of the sort preferred by seasoned travelers, Bogel assured him. Bogel graciously insisted that his new leader occupy the seat next to the window.

When all the passengers had boarded, a hostess in green-and-brown livery emerged from the small chamber between the front of the passenger cabin and the rear of the woodbin, introduced herself as Truelady Garth, and distributed cushions to those desiring them.

The cabin door was closed, the brakes released in a great hiss of steam; then the engine began to send a steady, low, powerful, altogether pleasant throb through the cabin, and the roadsteamer moved slowly out of the station yard.

The steamer gathered speed steadily as it moved through the streets of Ulmgarn, and by the time it reached the edge of town and the open highway, it was making a good thirty-five miles an hour, and was still accelerating.

Nothing in Borgravia had ever moved this fast, and Feric found himself exhilarated by the physical sensation of the heady speed. The steamer did not stop accelerating until its speed had reached nearly fifty miles an hour as it barreled down a long straight stretch of road that arrowed through neatly cultivated green farmland toward the margin of the Emerald Wood, which loomed closer and closer like a wall of forest greenery.

“Look at that!” Bogel suddenly cried, interrupting Feric’s reverie. Feric turned and saw that Bogel was pointing out the rear window of the roadsteamer cabin at something (hat was overtaking the steamer with incredible speed. “A gas car!” Bogel exclaimed. “I’ll wager you’ve not seen its like in Borgravia!”

Feric knew of this marvel but had never seen one.

Unlike roadsteamer engines, which burned readily available wood, the gas car was powered by a so-called internal combustion engine, which required petroleum as fuel.

This black liquid had to be brought by armed and shielded ship convoy from the wildlands far to the south, or purchased from the foul inhabitants of Zind; both involved enormous expense. The result was a vehicle capable of incredible speeds approaching one hundred miles an hour, but consuming a fuel of great rarity and expense. In Borgravia, such engines were employed only in the half-dozen aircraft the country owned, or for vehicles of the highest officials. Peric had heard that such gas cars were more numerous in the higher civilization of Heldon, but counted himself fortunate to encounter such a sight so early in the journey.

In a few moments, the gas car had overtaken the roadsteamer and swung wide around it to pass. Feric got a short clear look at the vehicle and saw a conveyance a quarter the length of the roadsteamer, a third its height, and half its width, with a long cowl in front, then an open cab with a driver in gray-and-black government livery, and finally a small closed cabin in which no more than six passengers could have ridden. The whole was brightly enameled in red trimmed with black, and made a truely magnificent sight as it pulled easily abreast of the road steamer, sounded a hom, then quickly sped ahead with a smooth roar up the road to disappear from sight where the roadway entered the Emerald Wood.

“Someday soon we must have one of those for transportation,” Feric told Bogel. “That’s how a leader should travel! In fact, that’s how any elite group should travel—with speed, and style, and dash!”

“Petroleum is monstrously expensive,” Bogel pointed out ruefully. “As things now stand, it would bankrupt the Party treasury to run one gas car for a year.”

“Not if we controlled the oil fields of southwestern Zind,” Feric muttered to himself.

“What?”

Feric smiled. “I am thinking of the future, Bogel,” he said. “A future in which all Heldon is bound together by magnificent roadways and even Helder of modest means can afford to drive gas cars, a future in which the great oil fields of southwestern Zind are our private reservoir of petroleum.”

Bogel goggled slightly at this. “You dream heroic dreams, Feric Jaggar!” he said.

Replied Feric: “The New Age will be heroic beyond even my present dreams, Bogel. We must become a race of true heroes to bring it about. And when we have, we will live in the manner appropriate to such a race of demigods.”

Soon the roadsteamer had entered the Emerald Wood.

Here the roadway ran along the right bank of a clear, rapid stream which meandered its way in gentle curves through the bosky groves of the forest lowlands. Thus the driver of the roadsteamer was constrained to lower the speed to the vicinity of thirty miles an hour in order to assure that the vehicle remained on the road around the sharper turns. This more stately pace afforded Feric a fine and leisurely look at this fabled primeval forest.

The individual trees were themselves of venerable age, their rough-barked trunks carved by nature into rich gargoyle shapes, and topped with luxuriant dark green foliage. They were spaced in stately, almost measured, intervals so that men might walk with relative ease through the groves while shielded from the sun in heavy, deep shadows. The undergrowth was primarily fems, low bushes, and patches of grass, along with mushrooms and other fungi. There was none of the crowding and purplish cancerous profusion of obscenely mutated tangle that choked the scattered patches of Borgravian radiation jungle, and made such places dire and unpenetrable sinkholes, wherein roamed beasts the very sight of which was enough to sour a strong man’s stomach.

The trees of the Emerald Wood were genotypically pure; this forest had somehow survived the Time of Fire virtually untouched, the soil uncontanunated. The age of the forest was unknown; it was far older than Heldon itself, conceivably it had existed in this form even prior to the emergence of the true human genotype. Old wives’ tales had it that the human race had been bom in this forest.

This might be mere superstition, but it was fact that here, in the Emerald Wood, small bands of true men had huddled after the Fire, and slain whatever mutants were foolish enough to wander into the forest, and had finally been unified by Stal Held into the Kingdom of Heldon.

Generation by generation, the Helder had slowly expanded out of the forest, purifying the surrounding lowlands of mutation, until Heldon reached borders similar to those of modem times. Here too, Sigmark IV, last of the Helder kings, had fled during the Civil War, retreating as if by instinct into the ancestral heartland, where, legend had it, he had hidden the Great Truncheon of Held against the day when a pure specimen of the royal pedigree might once again wield the legendary weapon and reclaim the throne. Then Sigmark IV, his court, and the royal pedigree had disappeared into the mists of history.

Yes, the Emerald Wood was filled with legends that stretched back beyond the Fire and occupied a special place in the history and soul of Heldon. Feric felt an unabashed awe in this place. The glory of the past was palpable all around him in the legends of the Wood, in the glorious and sometimes somber history that had played itself out here, and in the very fact of the forest itself—an island of woodland that had passed uncontaminated through the Fire, that had spread its purity through the centuries over what was now Heldon, that was living promise that one day the forces of genetic purity would regain the whole world.