Stonecypher walked slowly toward Catriona"s open-topped sunbathing tent.
Danse Macabre
Duelmaster R. Smith adjusted his black tam. "Do not touch your shooting hand to your weapon until the buzzer sounds," he instructed. "Otherwise, the weapon may be carried as you wish. At the slightest infringement of the rules, a robot gun will kill you. If you have any elaborate last words, say them now; because the pen is soundproof." He laughed an obviously much rehea.r.s.ed laugh.
L. Dan wore orange tights today, but no armor, since the rules required duelists to present naked torsos for probable bullets. Stonecypher faced the duelmaster. "I reckon this room is the only place a man really has free speech," he said. "You"re deaf, and can"t see good enough to read lips, and me or him will soon be dead.
"I don"t believe in this duelin". It gives a man who"s wrong a chance to kill one who"s right. A man shouldn"t oughta have to die because he"s right. Just like ever"thing else in this Manly Age. It"s painful.That oughta be our motto, More Pain, just like in the Machine Age it was More Gadgets At Any Cost."
"Why don"t you go on tevee?" Dan jeered. "She"ll soon forget you, farmer."
Stonecypher"s words rolled over the hobbyist. "I reckon the Manly Age came because a man started thinkin" he wasn"t much of a man any more. He was just as fast as his car, and just as strong as his electric lawn mower. And a loud minority of the women was claimin" they could do anything a man could, and maybe better. So the men started playin" football in shorts and huntin" each other on game preserves, and the women went back to the kitchen and bedroom. Lots of things that went on undercover come out in the open. c.o.c.kfights, dogfights, c.o.o.n-on-a-log, duels, stallion fights, bullfights.
"And people like you, L. Dan, went on livin". You got no right to live. You don"t do any useful work. The Earth is slowly starvin", and you take the grub out of some feller"s mouth who might could help a little.
That"s why-"
"Time!" announced the duelmaster with his face close to a large clock on the wall. He opened the door.
Two men carrying a body on a stretcher pa.s.sed. The body had four bullet wounds in it.
Dan said, "That drivel gives me a real reason to kill you, farmer. I"ll be good to her for a few days."
As prearranged, Dan took the right branch of the corridor and Stonecypher, the left. A hooded man gave Stonecypher the Magnum revolver and shut him into a s.p.a.ce resembling a windowed closet with a door on either side. Stonecypher secured the revolver in the clip holster. His bony hands formed knotted fists.
The pen door slid back. Stonecypher stepped into a room thirty by ninety feet with three bullet-marred concrete walls and a fourth wall of bulletproof gla.s.s, behind which sat the ghoulish audience. Dan, crouched and with his pistol in the crook of his left elbow, advanced. His right hand fluttered an inch from the pistol b.u.t.t.
Stonecypher, grotesque with thin chest exposed and overall bib wrapped around belt, waited. Two photoelectric robot machine guns followed each movement of the duelists. A buzzer sounded. Dan"s index finger failed to reach the trigger, for a guardian machine gun removed the hobbyist"s head in a short efficient burst. The noise of a loud buzzer punctuated the execution.
When the soundproof inner door of the closet opened, the hooded man, who had a pair of crossed pistols tattooed on the back of his right hand, said, "He was too anxious."
"Yeah," Stonecypher grunted.
The man watched Stonecypher pa.s.s out to the street. Stonecypher snapped up the bib of his overalls.
An extremely rare bird, a robin, hopped from his path and continued a fruitless search for insects.
Stonecypher walked down Watauga Street until the pavement vanished under the brownish-green water of Kings Lake.
Catriona squealed when she saw him. Ignoring all Correct Procedures, she almost knocked him down and attempted to smother him. "Ah told you it just took practice!" she blubbered. "You did it, Stony!"
With m.u.f.fled mumbles, Stonecypher managed to put her in the Tenite canoe. The few people along the quay, who had witnessed the illegal manner of their meeting, watched with shock, or with incredulity, or with guarded admiration. When they saw that Stonecypher"s hand rested on a holstered revolver, theylost their curiosity.
Wading, Stonecypher shoved the canoe off and hopped aboard. As he took up the paddle, his hand trailed in the water and released the small buzzer that had made possible Catriona"s best carnival act.
For July, the afternoon was cool. Blue-gray clouds drifted before larger dirty white ma.s.ses. To the southwest opened the mile-wide mouth of Horse Creek; and, far beyond, the great blue pyramid of Chimney Top Mountain stood defiantly above Sevier Lake. The world seemed water broken only by partly submerged hills and mountains.
Stonecypher gazed across the Lake at Bays Mountain and at the five Cement Islands apparently floating against that backdrop. Softly, he said, "Some folks call the big one Martyrs Island. There"s a marble pillar right in the middle. n.o.body knows who put it there, and the Government never bothered to knock it down. I reckon the poison ivy"s covered it by now, but I went and read the inscription, once, when I was a boy. It says:
"They moved me off the Powell River.
They covered my farm with water.
I bought me another near Beans Station.
The water covered it.
I was getting old, but I built at Galloway Mill.
When they flooded that, I gave up and lived in Kingsport.
I will not move again.""
The canoe bounded over the choppy water, one hundred feet above the silted streets of the flooded city of Kingsport. Stonecypher said, "The time I was there, you could still find a few copter-trooper helmets and old cankered sh.e.l.ls. Couple of years back, a diver brought up two skulls off sh.o.r.e."
Catriona"s eyes remained moist, but she smiled. Her teeth were beautiful. "It"ll be all rahght, Stony. You can"t change the wo"ld in one day. You did fine, and Moe will too."
"I told you to stay at the bullring," Stonecypher said.
"Ah couldn"t watch that! And those puny, little, mousy women stare and talk about me, because theah"s a little meat on mah cahca.s.s. Oswell said Moe would be last, anyhow. Ah was so wo"ied about you, ah couldn"t sit still."
Only a few boats, mainly those of piscatorial maniacs, were on the lake. Stonecypher glared at them and muttered, "I hope I did right by Moe. He wanted to fight. Maybe, Catriona, if I"d had you when I found out he could talk-not just mimic-I"d of raised him different. Maybe I shouldn"t have shown him that bullfight movie, but I wondered what the only bull to see a bullfight from outside the ring thought about it.
"That led to him wantin" to know all about the Man-Animal War. I told him the best I could, how one of a man"s basic drives is to exterminate, ever" since prehistoric times when he did in the wooly mammothand rhinoceros. The dodo, quagga, pa.s.senger pigeon, great auk, aurochs, Key deer, bison, African elephant, gorilla, tiger-there"s an awful list. Why, five hundred species of mammals, alone, have become extinct since 1 A.D., "bout four hundred of them since 1850. A man"ll even kill off other men, like the Neanderthals and the Tasmanians!" Stonecypher rested the paddle and grinned, faintly, at Catriona reclining in the bow. "I guess you"ve heard this before."
"Go rahght ahead, Stony," Catriona sighed. "Ah like to heah yoah speech. It"s the only time you really get angry, and you look so fine and n.o.ble."
"Yeah. Well. I told Moe how a man exterminates useful or harmless species, and then he lets dangerous ones, like rats, eat him out of house and home. Course, I explained this was just kinship. Folks used to argue man come from a monkey, or from spontaneous combustion, or something. Now we got fossil proof he"s not like anything anybody ever saw. He"s a case of straight line development all the way back to the first mammal, a sort of rat."
The canoe glided past Highland Pier. Every type of small watercraft, from a punt, through an electric motorboat, to a sloop, had docked. More boats lined the sh.o.r.e on either side of the pier. The flying field contained so many b.u.t.terfliers and copters that there seemed no possibility of any of them taking off.
Human voices welled in a mob roar from the great open cylinder of the bullring. A huge banner draped on the curving white wall proclaimed, in ten-foot letters:
DEPENDENCE DAY.
BULLFIGHT.
HONOR THE GREAT.
GOVERNMENT ON WHICH.
WE DEPEND.
SIX BULLS-THREE KILLERS.
Stonecypher ran the canoe aground in a patch of dead weeds, exposed by a slight lowering of the lake level, and helped Catriona over the rocks that lined the bank. He said, "I told Moe other things men do to animals. All the laboratory butchery, done because it would be cruel to treat a man like that, but it"s all right with a animal, like takin" out a dog"s brains and lettin" "im live. I told him about huntin", how the kudu became extinct "cause a bunch of fools wanted to see who could kill the one with the biggest horns.
"I told him the things done to domestic animals. Dehornin", emasculatin", brandin", slaughterin" with sledge hammers and butcher knives, keepin" "em in filthy barns. A man tells hisself he"s superior to other animals.
If he does somethin" bad, he uses words like inhuman, brutal, animal instincts, instead of admittin" it"s just typical behavior. And the psychologists take some animal, say a dog, and put him in a maze, something the dog never saw before. If the dog don"t run the maze in two seconds flat, they say he"s a pretty stupid animal. He just operates on instinct, but they can"t say how instinct operates. They"ll have a time explainin"
Moe"s instincts.
"I reckon the American bison made Moe madder than anything. They killed the bison off, "cept for protected herds, in the Nineteenth Century. A hundred years later, the herds had got pretty big, so they declared open season on bison. No more bison."
A recorded voice growled, "No guns permitted in ring. Deposit gun in slot. No guns permitted in ring." Stonecypher moved his permit in ineffectual pa.s.ses before the electric eye. He shrugged, dropped the revolver into the slot, and left his thumb print. Catriona displayed the pa.s.ses Ringmaster Oswell had given them. The teveer blinked, and the gate granted admission. They rode the escalator to the sixth tier and squirmed through pandemonium to their seats.
The male portion of the crowd wore every possible style and color of dress, in complete emanc.i.p.ation from the old business suit uniform, but the women wore sober false-bosomed sundresses and expressed excitement in polite chirps. Stonecypher pressed his mouth against Catriona"s ear and whispered through the din, "You got to understand, Cat, whatever happens, Moe wanted it. He says he can scare some killers into givin" up bullfights and maybe help stop it."
"He"ll do fine, Stony."
Several spectators stopped venting their wrath on the unfortunate man in the ring to gawk at the couple.
Catriona"s unorthodox physique aroused sufficient amazement; but, in addition, Stonecypher gave her the front seat and took the rear one, the correct place for a woman, himself.
Below, through a rain of plasti-bottles and rotten eggs, a tired man walked to the barrier which Oswell advertised as the only wooden fence in seven states. Behind the killer, a small electric tractor dragged out the b.l.o.o.d.y carca.s.s of a bull.
A gasping, gibbering little man grabbed Stonecypher"s arm and yelped, "Illard is the clumsiest killer, he ran the sword in three times, and the kid with the dagger had to stick twice before they finished, Big Dependence Day Bullfight my jet! This is the worst in years, Fergus made the only clean kill all afternoon, and I flew every one of eighteen hundred miles myself to see it, this last bull better be good!" The little man waved his bag of rotten eggs.
Although the bullfight followed the basic procedures established by Francisco Romero in the Spain of 1700, changes had occurred, including the elimination of all Spanish words from the vocabulary of the spectacle since the unpleasant dispute with the Spanish Empire twenty years before. The gaudy costumes worn by partic.i.p.ants had been replaced by trunks and sneakers.
A purring grader smoothed the sand. The crowd quieted, except for those near the box of Ringmaster Oswell. They suggested in obscene terms that their money be refunded. A trumpet recording blared. A scarlet door, inscribed, "Moe of Bays Mountain Farm," opened. The crowd awaited the first wild rush of the bull. It failed to materialize.
Grand Finale
Slowly, Moe came through the doorway. Above, on a platform inside the barrier, stood a gray-haired man who stuck identifying, streamered darts into bovine shoulders. His hand swept down, carrying Stonecypher"s chosen colors, black. Moe"s walk upset the man"s timing. His arm moved too soon. Moe"s front hooves left the ground. Horns hooked. The gray-haired man screamed and dropped the dart. With a spike of horn through his arm, between bone and biceps, he gyrated across the barrier. He screamed a second time before cloven hooves slashed across his body.
The crowd inhaled, then cheered the unprecedented entrance. Killer Fergus"s team stood rigid, not comprehending. Then men dashed through shielded openings in the barrier, yelling and waving pink and yellow capes to draw the bull from his victim.
Moe ignored the distraction, trotted nonchalantly to the center of the ring, and turned his bulging head to examine the spectators jabbering at his strange appearance. The short horns, the round skull, the white-banded eyes, the mane that seemed slightly purple under the cloudy sky, and the exaggerated slope from neck to rump that made the hind legs too short-together they amounted to a ton of muscle almost like a bull. "Where"d you trap it, Oswell?" someone near the ringmaster"s box yelled.
Forgetting the mess Illard had made with the previous bull, the crowd commented. "It"s the last of the bison!"
"He"s poiple! Lookit! Poiple!"
"The bull of the woods!"
"Howya like "im, Fergus?"
Killer Fergus posed behind the barrier and studied his specialty, an odd bull. Two stickers, Neel and Tomas, flourished capes to test the bull"s charge, with Neel chanting, "Come on, bull! Come on, bull!
Come on! Bull, bull, bull!"
Moe did not charge. He moved, in a speculative walk, toward the chanting Neel who tantalized with the cape and retreated with shuffling steps. The charge, when it came, occurred almost too fast for sight.
Neel wriggled on the horns, struck the sand, and the horns lifted him again. He smashed against the barrier. Tomas threw his cape over the bull"s face. The left horn pinned the cape to Tomas"s naked chest over the heart.
Moe retired to the center of the ring and bellowed at the crowd, which, delirious from seeing human blood, applauded. Blood covered Moe"s horns, dripped through the long hair on his neck, and trickled down between his eyes.
Quavering helpers removed the bodies. The first lancer, livid and trembling, rode a blindfolded horse into the ring. "He"ll fix this horse!" the crowd slavered. "We"ll see guts this time!"
Moe charged. The lancer backed his mount against the barrier and gripped his weapon, a stout pike.
Sand sprayed like water as Moe swerved. On the left side of the horse, away from the menacing pike, Moe reared. The lancer left the saddle. A tangle of naked limbs thrashed across the wooden fence and thudded against the wall of the stands.
Twenty-five thousand people held their breaths. The blindfolded horse waited with dilated nostrils and every muscle vibrating in terror. Moe produced a long red tongue and licked the horse"s jaw.
Fergus dispersed the tableau. Red-haired, lean, and scarred with many past gorings, the popular killerstalked across the sand dragging his cape and roaring incomprehensible challenges. In the stands, the cheer leaders of the Fergus Fanclub lead a welcoming yell. "Yeaaaa, Fergus! Fergus! Fergus! Rah, rah, rah!"
Moe wandered through the helpers trying to distract him from the horse and looked at the killer. Fergus stamped his foot, shook his cape, and called, "Bull! Come on! Charge!" Moe completely circled the killer, who retired in disgust when another lancer rode into the ring. "Stick him good!" Fergus directed.
The pike pointed at the great muscles of Moe"s back, as the bull charged. Moe"s head twisted in a blur of violence. Teeth clamped on the shaft behind the point. Too surprised to let go, the lancer followed his weapon from the saddle. He released his hold when Moe walked on him.
Like some fantastic dog stealing a fresh bone, the bull trotted around the ring, tail high and pike in mouth.
The crowd laughed. Wild-eyed men carried out the trampled lancer.
A third, and extremely reluctant, lancer reined his horse through the gate. A pike in the mouth of a ton of beef utterly unnerved the man. He stood in the saddle and jumped over the barrier where a rain of rotten eggs from the booing fans spattered him thoroughly.
An uninjured bull pawed alone in the sand when the trumpet recording announced the end of the lancers"
period. The crowd noises softened to a buzz of speculation, questions, and comment, as the realization that weird events had been witnessed slowly penetrated that collective mind. The bull had not touched a horse, no pike had jabbed the bull, and five men had been killed or injured.
"Great Government!" a clear voice swore. "That ain"t no bull, it"s a monster!" This opinion came from a sticker in Illard"s team. Fergus attempted to persuade the man to help, since both of Fergus"s stickers were dead. Part of the crowd agreed with the sticker"s thought, for people began moving furtively to the exits with cautious glances at the animal in the ring. They, of course, could not know that the bull had been trained, with rubber-tipped pikes and dummies, in every phase of the bullfight; that he knew the first, and only, law of staying alive in the ring, "Charge the man and not the cloth."