A Heritage of Stars (3 page)

At one time, family groups may have held on to small homesteads, hiding from the world. Many of these homesteads no longer exist, either wiped out or their members forced to join a tribe for the protection that it offered. And there are always the nomads, the roving, far-wandering bands with their cattle and their horses, at times sending out war parties to pillage, although there now is little enough to pillage. Such is the state of the world as we are acquainted with it; such is our own state, and sorry as it may be, in certain ways we are far better off than many of the others
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To a certain small extent we have kept alive the flame of learning. Our children are taught to read and write and cipher. Those who wish may gain additional rudimentary learning and there are books to be read, of course, tons of books, and from the reading of those, many in the community are fairly well informed. Reading and writing are skills that few have today, even those basic skills being lost through the lack of anyone to teach them. Occasionally, there are a few who make their way to us to gain the little education we can offer, but not many, for education apparently is not highly regarded. Some of those who come continue to stay on with us and thus some diversity is added to our gene pool, a diversity of which we stand in need. It may be that some of those who come to us, professing a wish for education, may actually come to seek the security of our walls, fleeing the rough justice of their fellows. This we do not mind; we take them in. So long as they come in peace and keep the peace once they are here, they are welcome
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Anyone with half an eye, however, should be able to see that we have lost much of our effectiveness as an educational institution. We can teach the simple things, but since the second generation of the enclave's establishment, there has been none qualified to teach anything approaching a higher education. We have no teachers of physics or chemistry, of philosophy or psychology, of medicine or of many other disciplines. Even if we had, there would be little need. Who in this environment needs physics or chemistry? What is the use of medicine if drugs are unobtainable, if there is no equipment for therapy of surgery?

We have often idly speculated among ourselves whether there may be other colleges or universities still existing in the same manner as we exist. It would seem reasonable that there might be, but we've had no word of them. In turn, we have not attempted to find out and have not seen fit to unduly advertise our presence
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In books that I have read, there are contained many considered and logical prophesies that such a catastrophe as came about would come to pass. But, in all cases, war was foreseen as the cause of it. Armed with incalculable engines of destruction, the major powers of that olden day possessed the capability to annihilate one another (and, in a smaller sense, the world) in a few hours' time. This, however, did not come about. There is no evidence of the ravages of war and there are no legends that tell of such a war
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From all indications that we have at this date, the collapse of civilization came about because of an outrage on the part of what must have been a substantial portion of the populace against the kind of world that technology had created, although the outrage, in many instances, may have been misdirected.…

4

Dwight Cleveland Montrose was a lithe, lean man, his face a seasoned leather, the brownness of it set off by the snow-white hair, the bristling grayness of the mustache, the heavy eyebrows that were exclamation points above the bright eyes of washed-out blue. He sat straight upright in the chair, shoving away the dinner plate he had polished clean. He wiped his mustache with a napkin and pushed back from the table.

“How did the potatoes go today?” he asked.

“I finished hoeing them,” said Cushing. “I think this is the last time. We can lay them by. Even a spell of drought shouldn't hurt them too much now.”

“You work too hard,” said Nancy. “You work harder than you should.”

She was a bright little birdlike woman, shrunken by her years, a wisp of a woman with sweetness in her face. She looked fondly at Cushing in the flare of candlelight.

“I like to work,” he told her. “I enjoy it. And a little proud of it, perhaps. Other people can do other things. I grow good potatoes.”

“And now,” said Monty, brusquely, brushing at his mustache, “I suppose you will be leaving.”

“Leaving!”

“Tom,” he said, “you've been with us how long? Six years, am I right?”

“Five years,” said Cushing. “Five years last month.”

“Five years,” said Monty. “Five years. That's long enough to know you. As close as we all have been, long enough to know you. And during the last few months, you've been jumpy as a cat. I've never asked you why. We, Nancy and I, never asked you why. On anything at all.”

“No, you never did,” said Cushing. “There must have been times when I was a trial.…”

“Never a trial,” said Monty. “No, sir, never that. We had a son, you know.…”

“He was with us just a while,” said Nancy. “Six years. That was all. If he had lived, he'd be the same age as you are now.”

“Measles,” said Monty. “Measles, for the love of God. There was a time when men knew how to deal with measles, how to prevent them. There was a time when measles were almost never heard of.”

“There were sixteen others,” Nancy said, remembering. “Seventeen, with John. All with measles. It was a terrible winter. The worst we've ever known.”

“I am sorry,” Cushing said.

“The sorrow is over now,” said Monty. “The surface sorrow, that is. There is a deeper sorrow that will be with us all our lives. We speak very seldom of it because we do not want you to think you are standing in his stead, that you are taking his place, that we love you because of him.”

“We love you,” said Nancy, speaking gently, “because you're Thomas Cushing. No one but yourself. We sorrow less, I think, because of you. Some of the old-time hurt is gone because of you. Tom, we owe you more than the two of us can tell you.”

“We owe you enough,” said Monty, “to talk as we do now—a strange kind of talk, indeed. It was becoming intolerable, you know. You not saying anything to us because you thought we'd not understand, held to us because of a mistaken loyalty. We knowing from the things you did and the way you acted what you had in mind and yet compelled to hold our peace because we did not think we should be the ones who brought what you were thinking out into the open. We had feared that if we said anything about it, you might think we wanted you to leave, and you know well enough that we never would want that. But this foolishness has gone on long enough and now we think that we should tell you that we hold enough affection for you to let you go if you feel you really have to, or if you only want to. If you must leave us, we would not have you go with guilt, feeling you have run out on us. We've watched you the last few months, wanting to tell us, shying away from telling us. Nervous as a cat. Itching to go free.”

“It's not that,” said Cushing. “Not itching to go free.”

“It's this Place of Going to the Stars,” said Monty. “I would suppose that's it. If I were a younger man, I think that I'd be going, too. Although, I'm not sure that I could force myself to go. I think that through the centuries we people in this university have become agoraphobes. All of us have stayed so long, huddled on this campus, that none of us ever thinks of going anywhere.”

“Can I take this to mean,” asked Cushing, “that you are trying to say you think there may be something to this business Wilson wrote down in his notes—that there could be a Place of Going to the Stars?”

“I do not know,” said Monty. “I would not even try to guess. Ever since you showed me the notes and told me of your finding them I have been thinking on it. Not just wool-gathering, romantic thoughts about how exciting it might be if there were such a place, but trying to weigh the factors that would make such a situation true or false, and I am forced to tell you that I think it might be possible. We do know that men went out into the solar system. We know they went to the Moon and Mars. And in light of this, we must ask ourselves if they would have been satisfied with only Moon and Mars. I don't think they would have been. Given the capability, they'd have left the solar system. Given time, they would have gained that capability. We have no hint of whether they did gain the capability because those last few hundred years before the Collapse are hidden from us. It is those few hundred years that were excised from the books. The people who brought about the Collapse wanted to erase all memory of those few centuries and we have no way to know what might have happened during that long span of time. But judging from the progress that men had made during those years that we do know about, that were left to us to read, it seems to me almost certain that they would have gained deep-space capability.”

“We had so hoped that you would stay with us,” said Nancy. “We had thought it might be only a passing fancy, and that in time you would get over it. But now it is apparent to us that you will not get over it. Monty and I talked it over, not once, but many times. We were convinced finally that for some compelling reason you did wish to go.”

“There is one thing that bothers me,” said Cushing. “You are right, of course. I've been trying to screw up my courage to tell you. I cringed from it, but each time that I decided not to go, there was something in me that told me I had to go. The thing that bothers me is that I don't know why. I tell myself it's the Place of Going to the Stars and then I wonder if, deep down, it may be something else. Is it, I ask myself, the wolf blood still in me? For three years before I came knocking at the gate of the university, I was a woods runner. I think I told you that.”

“Yes,” said Monty. “Yes, you told us that.”

“But nothing more,” said Cushing. “You never asked. Neither of you ever asked. I wonder now why I never told you.”

“You need not tell us now,” said Nancy, gently. “We have no need to know.”

“But now I have a need to tell you,” Cushing said. “The story is a short one. There were three of us: my mother and my grandfather—my mother's father—and myself. My father, too, but I don't remember him. Maybe just a little. A big man with black whiskers that tickled when he kissed me.”

He'd not thought of it for years, not really thought of it, forcing himself not to think of it, but now, quite suddenly, he saw it clear as day. A little coulee that ran back from the Mississippi, in that land of tangled hills that lay a week's walking to the south. A small sand-bottomed creek ran through the narrow meadowlands that lay between the sharply sloping bluffs, fed by a large spring that gushed out of the sandstone at the coulee's head, where the hills pinched in. Beside the spring was home—a small house gray with the oldness of its wood, a soft gray that blended in with the shadow of the hills and trees so it could not be seen, if one did not know that it was there, until one almost stumbled on it. A short distance off stood two other small gray buildings as difficult to see as was the house—a dilapidated barn that housed two crowbait horses, three cows and a bull, and the chicken house, which was falling down. Below the house lay a garden and potato patch; and up a small side valley that angled out from the coulee, a small patch of corn.

Here he had lived for his first sixteen years, and in all that time, he remembered no more than a dozen people who had come visiting. They had no nearby neighbors and the place was off the path of the wandering tribes that went up and down the river valley. The coulee mouth was only one of many mouths of similar coulees, and a small one at that, and it had no attraction for anyone who might be passing by. It had been a quiet place, drowsing through the years, but colorful, with a flood of crab apple and wild plum and cherry blossoms clothing it in softness every spring. Again in autumn the oaks and maples flamed into raging fires of brilliant red and yellow. At times the hills were covered by hepaticas, violets, trout lilies, sweet william, bloodroot, spring beauty and yellow lady's slipper. There had been fishing in the creek, and also fishing in the river if one wanted to go that far to fish. But mostly fishing in the creek, where there might be caught, without too great an effort, the small, delicious brook trout. There had been squirrels and rabbits for the pot and, if one could move silently enough and shoot an arrow well enough, ruffed grouse and perhaps even quail, although quail were small and quick and tiny targets for a bow. But Thomas Cushing, at times, had brought home quail. He had used a bow and arrow from the time he had been big enough to toddle, having been taught its use by his grandfather, who was a master of it. In the fall the coons had come down from the hills to raid the corn patch, and though they took part of the crop, they paid heavily for it, returning in their meat and hides far more than the value of the corn they took. For there always had been coon dogs at the cabin, sometimes only one or two, sometimes many of them; and when the coons came down to raid, Tom and his grandfather had gone out with the dogs that trailed the coons and caught them or cornered them or treed them. When they had been treed, Tom had climbed the tree, with a bow in one hand and two arrows in his teeth, going slowly, searching for the coon, clinging to a limb somewhere above him and silhouetted against the night sky. It had been tricky climbing and tricky shooting, propped against the trunk of the tree to shoot. Sometimes the coon would get away and other times it wouldn't.

It was his grandfather whom it now seemed he could remember best—always an old man with grizzled hair and beard, sharp nose, mean and squinting eyes—for he was a mean man, but never mean with Tom. Old and tough and mean, a man who knew the woods and hills and river. A profane man who swore bitterly at his aching and arthritic joints, who cursed the fate of growing old, who brooked no foolishness and no arrogance except his own foolishness and arrogance. A fanatic when it came to tools and weapons and to domestic animals. Although a horse might be roundly cursed, it was never flogged, never mistreated, well taken care of—for a horse would be hard to replace. One might be bought, of course, if one knew where to go; or stolen, and stealing, as a rule, was easier than buying, but either took a great deal of time and effort and there was a certain danger in either of them. Weapons you must not use lightly. You shot no arrow uselessly. You shot at a mark to improve your skill; the only other time you shot was when you shot to kill. You learned to use a knife the way it should be used and you took care of knives, for knives were hard to obtain. The same thing with tools. When you were through with plowing, you cleaned and polished and greased the plow and stored it in the barn loft, for a plow must be guarded against rust—it must last through many generations. Harness for the horses was oiled and cobbled and kept in good repair. When you were finished with your hoeing, you washed and dried the hoe before putting it away. When haying was done the scythe was cleaned, sharpened, and coated with grease and hung back in its place. There could be no sloppiness, no forgetting. It was a way of life. To make do with what you had, to take care of it, to guard against its loss, to use it correctly, so that no damage would be done to it.