It was a place of wild, deeply scarred highlands and rolling swells of limestone, overlaid by an inch thick layer of spongy mosses and blown soil. Constant winds kept the few trees which had managed to sink roots into the water-rotted stone low, bending along the line of the ground like old men about to die.
The train was stopped at the bottom of a protective depression. He did not notice it at first, for the faded camouflage blended almost perfectly with the valley's spotty vegetation. Cavandish had made his camp there; a tarpaulin, speckled olive and tan like the train, had been stretched out from the left side of the first passenger car. One or two of the lines had broken from decay, and the sheet flapped roughly in the diminished wind.
A camp chair was set up against one of the car's wheels. Cavandish's corpse still sat in it. The insects and few birds of the region had trimmed most of the flesh from his bones. He sat there, quite unidentifiable as Cavandish, quite indistinguishable from any of the hundreds of corpses and skeletons VanRoark had seen in his wanderings. The skeleton's sole claim to identity was Cavandish's metal larynx and jaw; it was a tulip-shaped affair of a dull copper material, narrow where it had lain along the throat, and then expanding upward to duplicate the shape of the original jaw. There was a small oval grid where the mouth would have been; it was neatly flush-riveted to the skull—a very workmanlike job.
As VanRoark approached the skeleton he could hear it talking. Later, he would discover that the units powering the artificial speaking unit had unaccountably kept on functioning. In the absence of any coherent signals from the brain—the connective wires lay frayed and tangled inside the empty skull—the unit kept up a sporadic chatter of random sounds, sometimes joining them into a coincidental word or even a full sentence. Usually it was gibberish.
VanRoark was amused at this grotesquerie. "Even from your grave you're telling me your sorrows," he said and laughed at the skeleton; he received a garbled eruption whose closest approach to sense was satisfactorily obscene.
Then he drew back, remembering how funny he had thought Tapp's death at the Burn; and he remembered the first and most violent of the madnesses that had followed. Walking backward, afraid to take his eyes off the corpse, he lost the sound of the ventriloquist's voice under the wind and the tarpaulin's flappings.
Nothing happened; he was properly upset, of course, because finding the train meant he would have to articulate at least part of his plan: that he was going back to the Burn and then to the Meadows.
He returned to the camp and examined the body again. "Won't be able to bury you in this stuff, Cavan-dish," he said, feeling the jagged rock underneath the mossy ground with the toe of his boot. Cavandish said nothing. "Come on now, Cavandish. I can't leave you sitting out here on that chair talking to whoever might blunder past without being formally introduced."
There was a small burst of noise, short syllables which VanRoark's mind perversely interpreted as "Burn."
VanRoark stood up warily, speculating on how much of this he could allow his mind to play with before it would become dangerous. "All right then, if you really want to." The parchment shreds of skin and connective tissue turned to cold sand in his arms. He almost vomited. Pushing this down and being careful not to breathe through his nose, he carried the skeleton up the ladder and into the first crew car. He found Cavandish's cabin and carefully laid him down on the bunk.
A burst of incoherencies followed him beyond the door and he made quite sure it was securely locked.
The machine had been carefully prepared for a long wait by Cavandish. The operating manuals were set out beside the driver's throne, and a handwritten list of special quirks not covered by those manuals had been thoughtfully provided.
VanRoark took almost a week familiarizing himself with the machine again, venturing into areas Cavandish had never shown him. He disconnected the two empty fuel cars, removed the preservative grease from critical parts and generally did what he could to put the train back into cruising condition. He uncovered the gun and took aim on a rock prominence on the northern side of the valley; the first shot landed at its base and toppled it. Intending to pick out some other targets, he found he was shaking too badly to take aim; for the first time in almost a year he felt he might go insane. The gun was hurriedly capped and hidden.
The only thing he could not get working was the train's navigational equipment. The magnetic compass was not worth repairing, considering the world's irrationality probably applied to its magnetic field too, and the rest of the equipment was utterly beyond his understanding.
He was a year moving to the west after he pulled the train out of the valley, always verging slightly to the south for fear of blundering into the Meadows without warning. Endlessly—more endlessly than when he had been on board the
Garnet,
for here there was no Sea—the distances moved under the train, the tarn gradually giving way to the blasted forest where they had buried the bomber's crew years before. VanRoark kept the speed down to what he judged a safe rate, considering the terrain. In the grasslands this was as much as twenty miles an hour, but when the forests or palisaded badlands came up he was lucky to cover five miles a day.
He avoided civilization, for he knew very well his appearance would not cause a friendly reception. The machinery of the first world and the rim nations had been despised before he had left his home the first time, and the situation had only grown worse with time.
He also began going mad again. But this was a very subtle sort of thing, which he mistook for a simple hypnosis from nonstop traveling. Then he became dimly conscious, perhaps so dimly that he could understand it only as a feeling, like the slow dropping of small crystals into a pond: very tiny, falling with a sparkling light that reflected off their endless planes, spinning to the water and leaving rings upon which waterbugs climbed as they passed—all in silence, all with infinite patience and subtlety.
Instead of wrenching violently away from the conventional world and finding himself in what had been always recognizable as a nightmare, he would feel nothing more than a giddiness and a swell within him as the wave passed, so gently as to hardly trouble the waterbugs. Then he would see the white-streaked webs of aircraft in the sky again, heading west.
The damnable thing about it was that every once in a while there really was an aircraft aloft; his right eye would always reveal that. But he deemed this trivial and therefore harmless; he found the small fictions enjoyable most of the time, and refrained from shifting his right eye into the non-visual spectra, lest it destroy the fragile construction with which his mind had sought to amuse him.
During those long days of driving, which stretched into their fifth month with no indication he was anywhere nearer the Burn than when he had set out, he began to bring Cavandish's body up to the control cab for conversation. He knew it to be intensely morbid, but after all, the thing
did
talk and would thus protect him from his new insanity. And when it was talking, it seemed a disservice to call it "it." It, or rather he, could still be the old Cavandish at times, glaring out of hollow sockets at the storms which occasionally roiled up from the west, or late at night, again looking up (if VanRoark was disposed to place him so) at the constellations above and uttering properly mournful tones. With time, it seemed to Van-Roark, Cavandish had regained much of his rare eloquence; the coherent sentences appeared with more frequency, if he listened closely enough.
Somehow none of this affected him very much; he thought it ultimately rather pleasant, going to die in the company of the dead. At times he and Cavandish would have a good laugh speculating on how VanRoark would have reacted to this on their first meeting.
VanRoark began to admit that Cavandish had not been such a bad sort after all; he could see that, now that he had gone through all the things the old man had tried to help him avoid. He explained this very carefully to Cavandish on several occasions, sometimes when they were on the move (for Cavandish spent most of the days riding in the control cab by the sixth month), or in the evening outside the train, for he hardly wanted the old man to harbor any lasting hatred for him.
Eventually VanRoark was satisfied that he had adequately apologized to Cavandish for his behavior and that the old man had forgiven him. He knew they were back on their old terms when, near sunset one evening, Cavandish suddenly started talking. His voice had become much deeper since his death, for the absence of any brain or flesh allowed the skull to resonate with the artificial larynx, like a sounding board. VanRoark looked up at the sky, just in time to see chalk-marks tracing into the western sun. It was not very high and he would see the silver craft, a glittering bit of crystal, fire-wake behind turning to strands of carded wool.
The two of them sat looking out of the control car's windows until the sun had turned the filmy trail deep pink and then red, and then black, to be lost in the night. There was a silence, and VanRoark thought of carrying the corpse back to his cabin for the night and then watching the sky for a bit longer. But Cavandish began to talk—not as clearly as he once might have, and VanRoark had to sort out a lot of extraneous gibberish—and in the end he knew Cavandish was speaking of the rim nations, and the stars that briefly had been their homes, the woman to whom he had given them, and the dreams he had dreamed when sitting in the frigid, thinly webbed eyes of bombers.
He knew they were climbing into the highlands surrounding the Burn because, at times, he could smell the Sea and its wet, fecund life blowing over the dead sand.
They camped for the night about two miles from a rise which might have opened down onto the Burn. Van-Roark did not carry on, for he felt small, only partly unexplainable, bits of pain and fear stitching up and down his spine. He placed Cavandish back in the first crew car, and climbed atop the control car. Leaning on the cannon's shrouded barrel, he looked up into the brilliant welkin. It appeared that he might be at a very great distance in the air, looking down upon the infinite lights of the army; by shifting his right eye's spectrum sensitivity he could see the equally infinite colors the army had once possessed. Magnification brought him nebulas, torn, scattering shreds of what had been suns, their dying pennants embroidered with star-gryfons and strands of silver, like the reliquary hand he still kept with him.
He went to his cabin to get the hand, and then returned. The wrist had been trimmed down and fitted with a lock-joint; he could remove his articulated gauntlet and replace it with the hand.
There was no feeling in this limb; the coldness of its silver base reached past the insulated sockets at his wrist. But it was an indisputably beautiful thing. There was no thought of who made it; whether he had come from the stars or from Mountjoy; or of the dead saint's dust it had once protected.
It was a long hand, long and etherealized, like those of the artists who had built the cathedral; so different from the sharp, blunt form of the gauntlet-hand, which was more like ancient engraved rifles and field artillery than paintings and sculpture. He looked at the gauntlet, at its images of ships and stars and coiling dragons, and at the engraved prince, and he thought how much the noble's small hands looked like the one he had just mounted.
There were no engravings on this new hand, nothing but the hollow web-work of drawn silver. When he moved it across the star-glittering sand and mica-studded rocks, they were all within his hand. When he moved it again, he could sweep all the welkin into its interior, its stars and burning dust pennons captured like fragile birds or fireflies in its cool beauty.
More strangely than anything he had ever felt before, sorrow welled up inside him, just as the comets now danced inside the hand. He could not fathom it, not even by charging it off to madness; it remained, slowly bringing his head down into the hands of flesh and woven metal, grinding his back into the gun's breech.
He wept, at times from the sorrow, and at other times from the anger which came from not knowing where it had been born.
The purest, most beautiful thing you have known since that woman you knew in Thurber, and you cry. Idiot!
VanRoark fell asleep there, with his left eye red and puffed shut from the tears, and the right staring with a tearless, unfocused blankness.
He did not awake until noon, and then he immediately set out for the rise; he was so eager and fearful to see what was on the other side, he forgot to bring Cavandish up to the cab to view the sight.
The wind came to him again, as it had in the valley and badlands where he had found the train; he could hear it sigh through the bullet holes in the car's skin.
Below him was the enormous depression of the Burn; its sandy topsoil was rippled and coursed over by innumerable lines, the graves of men.
The train reached the floor of the Burn, moving forward slowly; he could hear the crunching of old bones and metal under the great wheels, the same way they had snapped under his feet at Brampton Hall. This hurt him; he could feel the sadness of the previous night returning, not as close this time, but still threatening with its inexplicable sense of loss.
VanRoark brought the train across the Burn and parked it under a huge sloping wing of one of the rim nations' aircraft. Ahead of him, across the causeway ramp, was the river, substantially unchanged; beyond that was the featureless plain, only a little less desolate than the Burn, and the gun-metal mountains to the north.
Aside from the wind and the gentle slap of the surf, there was no noise. He moved fearfully, as if one wrong step would suddenly awaken all the army's ghosts and set them to their mindless, brawling life once again.
He spent the day roaming around the Burn's beaches, looking at the rusted, mutilated hulks of destroyers, the battle cruiser and tanker; he could still spot the ordered rows of field artillery secured to the deck of this last one—except along the starboard quarter forward, where the graceful flaring of her bow had been ripped outward and up like the blossom of a huge, cancerous flower.