Flesh (3 page)

By the time this incident had passed, the procession was halted at the foot of the steps to the Capitol Building. Here there was some momentary confusion, as the Guards and priestesses tried to shove the girls back. The Elks pulled the Sunhero off the stag and began to lead him up the steps.

“Hold on just a minute, Great Stag!” they said. “Hold on until you get to the top of the steps. And we will let you go!”

Raving, the Sunhero glared at them, but he allowed them to hang on to him. He looked at the statue of the Great White Mother on the top of the steps by the entrance to the building. Carved marble, it was fifty feet high with enormous breasts. She was suckling her baby Son. One of her feet was crushing the life out of a bearded dragon.

The crowd broke into a mighty roar, “Virginia! Virginia!”

The high priestess of Washington had appeared from the shadows of the columns of the immense porch that ran around the Capitol.

The light from the torches gleamed whitely on her long skirt and bare shoulders and breasts. It turned dark her honey-colored hair, which fell to her calves. It turned dark the mouth which in the daylight was red as a wound. It turned dark the eyes which in the sun were a deep blue.

The Sunhero bellowed like a stag who scents a female during rutting season. He shouted, “Virginia! You’ll not put me off any longer! Nothing can stop me now!”

The dark mouth opened, and the teeth flashed white in the torchlight. A long slim white arm beckoned to him. He tore loose from the many hands holding him and ran up the steps. He was only faintly aware that the drums and bugles and pipes behind him had risen to a crescendo and that the screaming was the high-pitched lust of a mob of young girls. He was only dimly aware of these... and not at all aware that his bodyguard was fighting for its life, trying to keep from being trampled underfoot or torn apart by the long sharp nails of the virgins. Nor did he see that mingled with the fallen bodies of the men were the white skirts and blouses of the girls, cast aside.

Only one thing made him pause for even a second. That was the sudden appearance of a girl in an iron cage, set at the base of the statue of the Great Mother. She was a young woman, too, but clad differently than the others. She wore a long-billed cap like a baseball player’s, a loose shirt with some indistinguishable marking on it, loose calf-length pants, thick stockings, and thick-soled shoes.

Above the cage was a large sign with thick-limbed letters in Deecee spelling:

MAESST

GAKAETI REA KESILAE

Translated:

MASCOT

CAPTURED IN A RAID ON CASEYLAND

The girl gave him one horrified look, then covered her eyes and turned her back on him.

His puzzled look disappeared, and he ran toward the high priestess. She was facing him with her two arms spread out, as if bestowing a benediction upon him. But the arc of her back bending backwards and the outthrust of her hips made plain that his long waiting was over. She would not resist.

He growled so deeply that it seemed to come from the root of his spine, and he seized her robe and pulled.

Behind him the many throats rose to an insane screeching, and, surrounded by flesh, he disappeared from the view of the fathers and mothers assembled at the foot of the steps.

1

Around and around the Earth the starship sped.

Where air ends and space begins, it skimmed from north pole to south pole and around and around.

Finally, Captain Peter Stagg turned away from the viewplate.

“Earth has changed very much since we were here eight hundred years ago. How do you interpret what you’ve seen?”

Dr. Calthorp scratched his long white beard and then turned a dial on the panel below the viewplate. The fields and rivers and forests below expanded and shot out of sight. Now the magnifier showed a city on both sides of a river, presumably the Potomac. The city was roughly ten miles square, and could be seen in the same detail as if the men on the ship were five hundred feet above it.

“How do I interpret what I see?” said Calthorp. “Your guess would be as good as mine. As Earth’s oldest anthropologist, I should be able to make a fair analysis of the data presented—perhaps even explain how some of these things came to be. But I can’t. I’m not even sure that is Washington. If it is, it’s been rebuilt without much planning. I don’t know; you don’t either. So why don’t we go down and see?”

“We’ve little choice,” said Peter Stagg. “We’re almost out of fuel.”

Suddenly, he smacked his palm with his huge fist.

“Once we land, then what? I didn’t see a single building anywhere on Earth that looked as if it might house a reactor. Or anything like the machines we knew. Where’s the technology? It’s back to the horse and buggy—except that they don’t have any horses. The horse seems to be extinct, but they’ve got a substitute. Some sort of hornless deer.”

“To be exact, deer have antlers, not horns,” Calthorp said. “I’d say the latter-day Americans have bred deer or elk or both, not only to take the place of the horse but of cattle. If you’ve noticed, there’s a great variety among the cervines. Big ones for draft and pack and meat animals, some bred with the lines of race horses. Millions of them.” He hesitated. “But I’m worried. Even the seeming non-existence of radioactive fuel doesn’t bother me as much...”

“As what?”

“As what kind of reception we’ll get when we land. Much of Earth has become a desert. Erosion, the razor of God, has slashed its face. Look at what used to be the good old U.S.A. A chain of volcanoes belching fire and dust along the Pacific coast! As a matter of fact, the Pacific coast all around—both Americas, upper Asia, Australia, the Pacific islands—is alive with active volcanoes. All that carbon dioxide and dust released into the atmosphere has had a radical effect on the terrestrial climate. The icecaps of the Arctic and Antarctic are melting. The oceans have risen at least six feet and will rise more. Palm trees grow in Pennsylvania. The once-reclaimed deserts of the American Southwest look as if they’d been blasted by the hot breath of the Sun. The Midwest is a dust bowl. And...”

“What has this got to do with the reception we might get?” said Peter Stagg.

“Just this. The central Atlantic seaboard seems to be on the road to recovery. That is why I’m recommending we land there. But the technological and social setup there is apparently that of a peasant state. You’ve seen how the coast is busy as a hive of bees. Gangs planting trees, digging irrigation ditches, building dams, roads. Almost every activity out of which we’ve been able to make sense is directed at rebuilding the soil.

“And the ceremonies we’ve seen through the plate were obviously fertility rites. The absence of an advanced technology might indicate several things. One, science as we knew it has been lost. Two, a revulsion against science and its practitioners exists—because science is blamed, fairly or not, for the holocaust that has scourged Earth.”

“So?”

“So these people probably have forgotten that Earth once sent out a starship to explore interstellar space and locate virgin planets. They may look upon us as devils or monsters—especially if we represent the science they may have been taught to loathe as the spirit of evil. I’m not just conjecturing on the basis of pure imagination, you know. The images on their temple walls and the statues, and some of the pageants we’ve witnessed, clearly show a hatred of the past. If we come to them out of the past, we might be rejected. Rather fatally for us.”

Stagg began pacing back and forth.

“Eight hundred years since we left the Earth,” he muttered. “Was it worth it? Our generation, our friends, enemies, our wives, sweethearts, children, their children and their children’s children... shoveled under and become grass. And that grass turned to dust. The dust that blows around the planet is the dust of the ten billion who lived when we lived. And the dust of God knows how many more tens of billions. There was a girl I didn’t marry because I wanted this great adventure more...”

“You’re alive,” said Calthorp. “And eight hundred and thirty-two years old, Earth-time.”

“But only thirty-two years old in physiological time,” Stagg said. “How can we explain to those simple people that as our ship crept toward the stars, we slept, frozen like fish in ice? Do they know anything about the techniques of suspended animation? I doubt it. So how will they comprehend that we only stayed out of suspended animation long enough to search for Terrestrial-type planets? That we discovered ten such, one of which is wide open for colonization?”

“We could go around Earth twice while you make a speech,” said Calthorp. “Why don’t you get down off your soapbox and take us to Earth so we can find out what’s facing us? And so you might find a woman to replace the one you left behind?”

“Women!” shouted Stagg, no longer looking dreamy.

“What?” said Calthorp, startled by his captain’s sudden violence.

“Women! Eight hundred years without seeing a single, solitary, lone, forlorn woman! I’ve taken one thousand ninety-five S.P. pills—enough to make a capon out of a bull elephant! But they’re losing their effect! I’ve built up a resistance! Pills or not, I want a woman. I could make love to my own toothless and blind great-grandmother. I feel like Walt Whitman when he boasted he jetted the stuff of future republics. I’ve a dozen republics in me!” “Glad to see you’ve quit acting the nostalgic poet and are now yourself,” said Calthorp. “But quit pawing the ground. You’ll get your fill of women soon enough. From what I’ve seen in the plate, women seem to have the upper hand, and you know you can’t stand a domineering female.”

Gorilla-fashion, Stagg pounded his big hard chest.

“Any woman comes up against me will run into a hard time!”

Then he laughed and said, “Actually, I’m scared. It’s been so long since I’ve talked to a woman, I won’t know how to act.”

“Just remember that women don’t change. Old Stone Age or Atomic Age, the colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady are still the same.”

Stagg laughed again and affectionately slapped Calthorp’s thin back. Then he gave orders to make planetfall. But during the descent, he said, “Do you think there’s a chance we might get a decent reception?”

Calthorp shrugged.

“They might hang us. Or they might make us kings.”

As it happened, two weeks after he made a triumphal entry into Washington, Stagg was crowned.

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