To VanRoark's right was one more of the boxlike cars and then about six slightly bulged cars. The analogy of a huge wheeled serpent was unavoidable.
"Like her?" Cavandish was on the ground next to him.
"And you run all of this, alone?" VanRoark asked in amazement.
"So far. It's been kind enough not to present me with any difficulties that'd require a Zaccaharias or a Maus to fix. About the most troublesome operation has been you, Amon, and Kenrick seems to have fixed that up well enough for me to fumble through. I'm taking off your bandages after dinner."
"No period of recuperation or anything like that?"
Cavandish laughed politely. "Hardly; you've had four months of that. Kenrick figured it'd be easier for me if you did your healing in one spot and quietly. You'll have to be careful for a while, though; some of your muscles might have atrophied despite the doctor's drugs."
It was beginning to get dark. VanRoark could see a star or two appearing over the control car's gun. They moved over to a small fire, where Cavandish had some coffee and a skewered jackeroo heating. They ate in comparative silence, the old man apparently having nothing more to say for the moment and VanRoark suddenly concerned only with getting some solid food into his stomach. He did not realize just how much it had shrunk, and was gorged after only a few bites.
When they finished, Cavandish brought a small leather case out and drew closer to VanRoark. "Now, you know that you're, ah, different than you were before the army broke up," he began cautiously.
"You mean my arm and eye?" VanRoark asked. "I was sure they had been shot off."
"They were, but Kenrick replaced them with mechanical substitutes which I assure you are almost the equals of your original limbs, maybe even superior in some areas. Now, I'm telling you this before I take off the bandages because some people get fairly worked up when they take a first look at a new arm or leg. These aren't just hooks or pegs, Amon; you have an arm that will feel everything your old one could, move in every direction your old one could. You have a small lens setup where your right eye used to be; it'll pipe images directly into the brain just as the first eye did. And even better; you'll be seeing more with this one. You can adjust the range to see into the far ends of the spectrum, far past the limits where light radiation becomes invisible X-rays or simple heat."
Cavandish considered this for a moment and then decided it was not enough. "Look, I think I know how you'll feel because I felt the same way myself. You see, my lower jaw and larynx were pretty well torn up by shell fragments down on the Burn. Kenrick fitted me up with a whole artificial jaw and all I need to eat and speak. That's why I don't move my jaw much—because it's riveted to my skull."
"And what did this Kenrick have? Was he all of flesh and blood?" VanRoark was amazed at the tinges of bitterness which edged into his voice.
"Ah, Kenrick. No; before we left our home he had this operation and got a mechanical heart; some of the motor areas of his brain were solid state electronics too.
"Enough talk. Here, give me your arm and we'll show that it isn't so bad after all." Cavandish cut away his shirt, almost apologetically it seemed, and then began making a long incision on the side of the shoulder and arm cast with a knife that hummed like the grayness. "All right," he said when he was through, "here it comes." He gave a slight tug and the cast fell apart into five pieces.
VanRoark gazed down at where the stump of his shoulder was neatly tucked into a blued steel collar; the skin was drawn and slightly wrinkled around the collar as if someone had carefully riveted and then shrunk the serrated ring around the arm—which was probably just what had been done anyway. From the ring, which looked like a bracelet, proceeded an arm such as one could find on the armored dress of the Great Plains knights. Finally, there was a hand—or rather a gauntlet, for the fingers were hinged and a flaring skirt of metal hid the wrist joint.
He held the hand up to his left eye; it was engraved, even to the palm, and the hunting parties and serpents ran down from the shoulder ring in a parade such as he had only seen in the tapestries of his home cathedral. There was a small sun in the center of his hand, and tiny planets with continents of gunmetal and seas of silver spinning around it. Galaxies patterned the metal folds of the hand, clustering in thick bands that cut in back of the solar system, random agglomerations filling in the cobalt spaces between, and then fading out into the wrist and fingers. There was a rocket, long and barbed with graceful wings, one side etched in bare silver light from the silver sun; it was bound outward. There was a serpent, winged with almost as much grace, coiled about his index finger; a lance whose grip and guard solidified out of the universe dust ran nearly the length of the middle finger. Finally, there was a man, a knight in fine-etched mail, on his fourth finger—and a queen on his last finger whose hair was wound around the metal like the body of the dragon.
Cavandish looked a little embarrassed at all this. "Please don't be honored, Amon; none of that was done for you," he said, almost laughing. "The arm is as old as the train, maybe older, and was used by many men before it came to you. Some of them were artists and naturally spent some time dressing it up."
"Dead men's arm?" VanRoark asked absently.
"Well, if you want to be morbid about it, I suppose it is."
VanRoark did not hear this, for his eye was traveling up the length of the arm, over the lines of rune figures and numbers and even some formulae, over forests seeded with all manner of fantastic animals, unicorns, hippogriffs, hooded basilisks and gryphons—cut by roads and cities that spiraled upward around mountains, their streets awash in swarming crowds of etched figures, their battlements and gates proud against skies where the galaxies once again appeared. There were ships upon his arm, fine great sailing craft and steel battle cruisers, no less powerful for their microscopic length.
VanRoark moved the arm unsurely, expecting to hear it creak or feel the hideous scrape of metal against bone within him; but none of that happened. He felt only the cool of the evening air upon it, and when he laid the metal palm to the sandy ground he could feel the rough granules—even a slight twinge of pain as he brushed over a piece of dead thornbush.
He touched himself; the metal was as warm as his skin, but its strength and rigidity was indisputably that of steel.
Cavandish saw him smiling too. "Ah, good, now for your eye." He raised his tool and began to work on the cast. "Keep your eye closed."
"Huh?"
"Keep it closed; even the firelight might be something of a shock after so long." VanRoark shrugged and commanded a lid he was sure did not exist to close; he was almost happy when he felt nothing move.
The cast was removed and VanRoark was further reassured when he couldn't see a thing out of where his right eye had been. "Not a thing, sir."
"Of course not, you've got it closed. Open it."
The younger man blinked his left eye and then tried to repeat the muscle sequence on the right side of his face. There were wires before him again, or rather woolen threads whose color was solid only in their centers and then diffused off into the darkness. The color mists shifted and expanded; he could see the campfire in front of him. "It'll take a little time for everything to sort itself out."
"Who owned this before me?"
"No one at all; now is the time to be honored. Honored not only for the eye but for the incredible job Kenrick did of weaving it into the stump of your optic nerve. A really incredible feat for a man in his condition. There's a small metal plate around it where some bone used to be, so don't worry if you feel the skin pulling a little when you smile or scream or something. And try not to touch the lens—it protrudes a little—feel it?—because it's fairly easy to smudge or get dirtied up. And watch your right hand; you could easily forget it's not entirely human and put a scratch onto it." Cavandish settled back and watched VanRoark for a while; he decided not to mention the grotesque effect the lens tube made twisting in and out of the skull plate as VanRoark focused to different distances. "What makes it run?"
"Body enzymes, the natural electrical impulses of your own nervous system. Kenrick could have told you more. He knew all about men."
"And you know nothing by comparison?"
Cavandish answered good-humoredly. "I am but a poor simple navigator carrying out the instructions of a wise and learned man of healing."
"Ah, a navigator." VanRoark's attention was easily diverted, for now he had already ceased to notice any difference between the functioning of his real and artificial limbs. "You've always been with the land train, then?"
Cavandish considered a moment and then chose to follow the drift of the conversation. "No, not always."
"Then what did you do before the train? Where did your family come from?"
"From there." Cavandish pointed to the welkin. "From that part of the sky approximately, though I can no longer name the star, things have changed so much."
VanRoark really had no idea of what to say to this. The old man continued: "Though not originally, of course. The way I was told it, my family had left the world back in the days of the First World, or very soon after its end, when things were still going just about as they should have been. We are supposed to have spread out along the arms of our galaxy, searching around the numberless suns and finding an occasional world that was green and empty."
There were great pauses between each sentence, and longer ones before VanRoark spoke; it was as if the one was trying desperately to remember the proper questions while the other was slowly dredging up the answers from where they had laid for so long. "Why did they, your family, come back?'
Cavandish sighed. "They came back for the Wars; they all came back, all of the families who had left. It took a long time—which I suppose is why some of the rim nations seem so odd and out of touch with the current state of the world—but one by one, on every world where we had settled, the prophets appeared. And they spoke, these prophets, and we both know how they spoke, the words and the hope—how odd to call what they offered,
hope
—and we came back. All the sciences and beliefs that had lived for a bit longer on worlds named after stars and in countries named after gods . . . they came home. Of course, by this time, home was already degenerating into what it is now.
"But they—we tried, Amon, you'll have to give us that. We landed and founded the new nations that were only supposed to last for a few years, and we built our new machines and began, my great-grandfather told me, with such fine and noble purpose to play our part in all of this.
"Then the systems broke down, at times so ludicrously and utterly that even my proud, unbending fathers could not ignore it. We had lost our ships by then and the skill to steer them through the skies. The rim nations became scattered; some met their planned annihilation at the Meadows. Many, I suspect, were overrun by earthly enemies." Then his lips curled slightly upward, which was as close as Cavandish could come to a smile. "The men we had come so far to help in our mutual destiny hunted us out, and one by one they infected, sabotaged, betrayed the rim nations until all that was left was what you saw on the Burn."
The lips relaxed back into a scar line; VanRoark thought he could see wire mesh behind it. "Why?"
"Why did they destroy us?"
"Yes"—now VanRoark could feel himself smiling sadly—"us."
"For as many reasons as they had for coming to the Burn. Though mostly it seemed to us they hated the machines, the building. None of us could ever really figure it out completely. It was almost as if they just gave up being humans; they were more like the mindless, drifting forces that seem to be controlling the universe these days. They shift and flow and anything that is thrown up in their way—no matter if it is there for Good or Evil—anything that the rim nations shaped and built against the darkness, they hated. They hated the trucks and tractors which could have ended their starvation, the ships that could have ended their wandering."
There was silence then except for the fire and an odd, faint cracking that slowly grew louder. The pebbles and rocks of the wastes, heated during the day, were now cooling too quickly with the fall of night and shattering. VanRoark imagined it to be the huge, malicious applause of the world, complimenting Cavandish on the depth of his bewilderment and frustration.
"What did you build?" Why had he asked that? At this a roaring laughter slipped out of Cavandish's knife-slit mouth; he looked like a ventriloquist's doll whose real voice was coming from somewhere else.
"Me? Not me, Amon. Now, my grandfather, he was a builder; he worked in the shipyards repairing aircraft carriers and merchantmen. And my dad built bridges all the hell over the world—every single one of which was cut down or blown up within a year or two of its completion.
"I, on the other hand, am almost as much a child of this world as the army was; maybe even more so. I was a navigator-bombardier." Cavandish was laughing so hard that he had to stop talking and rub his jaws that had never moved. "I sat in the glass noses of our aircraft, like the big ones you saw on the causeway at the Burn.
"It was good for a while, you know. Because I could sit there alone with all the stars and a ribbon of black asphalt captured in the wire frame of the nose. Then, way off behind you, you'd hear the engines and feel the back of your seat pressing against you. Little dabs of white—no, it was more of a pale green in the star-light—moved under me and the plane until they blurred together.
"There were about ten, twenty seconds, just after we lifted off, while the landing gear was stowed, and that was like a tanner's hawk getting ready to fall or rise. The field was built beside a river and we had to fly down this valley for a few minutes; the engines were throttled back so we didn't clout some mountain and it was quite beautiful with the lights along the banks and maybe even some powerboats moving against the current.