Doomsday Warrior 11 - American Eden (11 page)

“You have some very interesting-looking sled dogs there,” Steelring said, pointing to the team that McCaughlin had driven to the spot.

“They’re not sled dogs, they’re sled
wolf
-dogs. And keep away from them, they bite.” McCaughlin said possessively.

“Well, what is it—do you want to leave them tied here? It would be hard to get the dogs down the cliff ladders.”

“Cliff ladders?”

“Yes. You see, it’s the only way to get down to our city. Maybe a look would be worth a thousand words. You can tie the dogs to that cactus over there.”

“Give the dogs a rest,” McCaughlin said. “They can use it.” Rockson agreed. “Tie them up here, we’ll come back for them—hopefully with some food—later.”

“Glad to meet you all,” Rockson muttered. “But we have to get some transportation from your tribe and move quickly, Smokestone. Please lead on to your—invisible—city.”

“This I’ve gotta see,” said McCaughlin, packing up the pot and cups and joining Rockson and the others in their walk across the barren plain with the chief and his two young relatives.

As they walked, mystified as to where they were headed, Rockson was asked by Smokestone if he knew Trickster Deity, leader of the Crazy Alligator tribe.

“Unfortunately I do, I spent some time with him and his tribe once. I give the experience mixed reviews.”

“I understand. He’s my distant cousin, but he’s sort of the black sheep of the family. Be careful now, walk slower all of you. Or you will fall into our beloved city.”

Rockson stopped when the chief put up his hand, and so did the others. “Golly,” McCaughlin said, “Will you have a look at that?”

Their feet were at the edge of a thousand-foot precipice. They were staring down into a circular hole in the ground about a hundred yards across. There were buildings, similar to Pueblo Indian cliff houses, carved into the opposite wall of the fantastic hole. And people were moving about the dwellings. Lots of people.

“We were afraid you would ride your odd-looking sleds right down into the abyss, so we three came up to greet you. Our remote-sensing devices—atop that mesa, the tall thin one about twelve miles backtracked some electronic device you have with you.”

Rockson turned to the Russian, fumed, “
That’s it
, Scheransky— You’re leaving that damned Schecter weather device
here
with the Yumaks.”

Rona changed the subject: “Chief, did your people always live out here?”

“My ancestors were urban Indians. Los Angeles. When our vision-seekers saw the nuke war coming, they left the city, en masse, trekked to a cavern, a big one, exposed for the first time in thousands of years by the nuke quakes. Some of us stayed there. Others thought living in a big cave was spooky so we went south. And here we are. We found this swell place. It used to belong to the ancient Anasazi Indians. They built most of the place, we just improved it.”

Smokestone was the first to start descending, using barely visible footholds in the rock as a ladder.

“Watch yourself now, friends,” he cautioned, “be sure to place your feet in the same places I do. There’s food and drink aplenty awaiting you—and some excellent motorcycles for continuing your mission.”

Rock was second to begin descending. The footholds and hand niches were adequate, but he couldn’t talk, he had to concentrate so carefully to make it. He wondered how the heck they got motorcycles up and down the canyon. Then he saw a rope device—some sort of elevator—far across the circular structure, near the houses. A platform of bent and shaped wood planks—more like a big basket without sides. Could that four-by-six basket on thin ropes hold a Harley?

Once they all descended, they were invited into a sandstone dwelling, and Indian maidens brought water and food. “This is wonderful,” exclaimed Danik. “But we must not tarry.”

Later, while the others were received by a group of high tribal officials, the chief took Rockson on a brief tour. From the erudite quality of the conversation, it soon became evident that Smokestone was a remarkable and educated man.

His house was highest on the cliff, accessed, Rock was happy to discover, by a series of sturdy ladders. They went up.

The home of the chief was most remarkable. Like the other dwellings it was a Pueblo-style, and bare of adornment, or even of glass in the windows. There was a fireplace, with a few embers being cared for by a pretty woman. There were bookcases—hundreds of shelves. All the classics—in five languages one could read Dickens, Cooper, Disney, Heinlein, and Proust—plus thousands of technical books dating from before World War Three. Rockson also found a newly bound twelve-volume
History of the Southwestern Indians in the 20th and 21st Centuries
by Chief Smokestone. “I am not finished with it,” Smokestone said, as Rockson removed one volume from the shelf and started thumbing through it.

“Quite impressive,” the Doomsday Warrior said.

“I am adding a volume,” said Smokestone, “so that people in the future will know of us, and of our ways. Perhaps it will help them. The air is very dry hereabouts, and the books keep well. But just in case I am having them all transferred to hard disk in our computer room.”

“It seems,” said Rockson, “that you have updated these ancient dwellings.”

“We do what we can,” Smokestone replied modestly. He showed the Doomsday Warrior more of the complex—cafeteria-style communal eating areas, gymnasiums with stone barbells, and of course the computer room—deep in the interior of the living rock. Must have been hard carting it all down here.

After seeing all their progress Rockson was more than happy to retire to the Indian chief’s study and discuss their relative philosophies while the rest of the team looked around, led by eager Indian maidens, who expertly elucidated the many sights for them.

After inquiring about how Rockson’s trip had been so far, and Rockson saying “Not too bad” laconically, the subject got heady. As usual among men of learning, the discussion turned to the Great Nuclear War. And the usual Monday-morning quarterbacking got more intense than usual. The Indian chief insisted that if the Indians had run the world, the war would never have happened.

“Please explain that,” Rockson asked.

Smokestone had put on a softer loose shirt and lit up a pipe with a pungent tobacco. He offered Rockson some—there were many pipes—and Rockson accepted one. He puffed away too. They could, Rockson mused, be sitting in an ancient English mens’ club lined with books, and not in the middle of a primitive cliff dwelling in Arizona. Smokestone, between puffs of the stuff which tasted better than it smelled to Rockson, went on with his remarks.

“When the Indian nations owned America, they respected nature, worked with it. To us, to all the tribes, the earth was our mother. To dig up huge tracts of land with giant shovels was evil. Just as you cannot dig holes in your mother breasts with a knife—the Indian thought of the land as our mother. The land repaid us for our respect, and fed us, and the cycle of life was complete.

“Neither did the the Indians—the native Americans—consider the land dividable. We couldn’t own the land, instead it owned us. Our way was—and is—to walk with the beauty, to know that the spirit of land and sky and man are one whole. The white man lost that identification to the earth. They took away the soil, dug it up and refined it, made it into uranium, and then into thermonuclear bombs. To destroy themselves, and us, and the land and the air and water, in all the ten directions.

“It all started a hundred years before the war. The fences went up—barbed wire, then razor wire. The white man said to the native Americans: ‘This piece is my land, and this piece is your land,’ and gave themselves the better land. Then the white man discovered oil, and it was on the Indian lands. And they said, ‘Wait a minute, sorry about that,
this
piece of land is not your land either, so get off.’ And the Indian nations were moved again to even dryer, more remote and useless lands. And still we, the Arapaho, the Cheyenne, the Hopi, the Dineh, survived.

“Then this wasn’t enough. The white man found an evil element—plutonium, the deadliest, most unnatural element of all—could be made out of a whole lot of another element—uranium. And guess where all the uranium was? Right, it was on the useless scrubland of the Indian reservations. But the times had become liberal, so they couldn’t just take Indian land anymore. They would have the Indians sell it cheap to the big corporations. But the Indians would not sell their mother, the earth.

So the companies found the few Indians that wanted to sell—Indians that had ceased to be Indians—and made them into the tribal councils. They did this by holding elections. Even though the company men knew Indians ways were different. To an Indian,
not
voting is a negative vote. Just not showing up at the polls means they vote
against
this new council. But the newspapers reported that the elections were held, and though turnout of voters was low, the Indians who wanted to sell the digging rights to our land
won
the elections.

“And so all was done legally. The earth was raped, a knife was dug into our mother’s heart and the uranium dug up, to make plutonium, and the plutonium to make bombs.

“If the white men could understand that nature is a unity, if he could
walk in the beauty
, he would not disturb nature. There would not be any big holes in the mesa land, and no uranium and no bombs to destroy everyone and everything under the sun and stars.”

Rockson found himself largely agreeing with the chief. Still, the Doomsday Warrior said, “Some of the uranium was used to make power plants, to supply electricity to the big cities. Not all of it was used for bombs. What was wrong with that?”

“The sun could provide as much or more power for nothing. The greed of the big companies was to make nuclear power plants, and so control all the energy, sell all the energy that people could gather free from the sun and the wind. And the nuclear power plants spread radiation death even before they were targeted by Soviet ICBMs. One plant, located in the Ukrainian slave state and run by the Russians, exploded three years before the war—in 1986. The cancer rate in Europe doubled. No, Rockson, it was as I say to you—the utility companies here in the United States, and the government fat cats in Russia, wanted nuclear power to enslave the people.

“White man—or should I say
paleface
, for some whites did understand, it wasn’t a racial thing—never understood. Paleface never understood that he was a part of the cycle of nature. He didn’t understand that nature is a reflection of the Great Spirit, that man is part of that great spirit, as is every rock and tree and mountain. The white man’s religions all said man was separate from nature, greater than nature. Such
conceit.”

“There were some white people who believed as you do, Chief. They saw what was happening and tried to stop it.”

“These people,” said Smokestone, “I would call Indians. They are American Indians in spirit, though their skin is white. I believe that you, Rockson, are such a man—a white Indian.”

The Doomsday Warrior was touched by the compliment, he could only say, “Thank you, Chief, you do me an honor.”

“To be an Indian is not a matter of race—it is a state of mind. Did you know that in the 1850s, when Indians captured white women, we took them into the tribe? And if they learned to be squaws they were welcome. The nonracist Indians did this because the long-knives—the cavalry—had depleted our numbers in the war of genocide. Indians took in runaway slaves too. We Indians were never bent on genocide, just on saving the earth—the precious land we roamed. We failed to do this.” Smokestone’s pipe had been used up, he put it down.

“The human race failed,” Rockson said, “all of us.”

“You will see the seeds of the destruction, Rockson, I have assembled it all in the Hall of Atrocities—come with me. You will see how humankind defiled the Great Spirit.”

Thirteen

A
fter walking down a long rock-hewn corridor deep into the canyon wall, Rockson was ushered into a room the size of a good-sized ballfield. It was loaded with exhibit cases.

“Take a look at the first case on the right,” Chief Smokestone said.

Rockson did. There were photographs, blown up to two by three feet—the inside of some sort of metal building—and what was inside made him nearly sick. “This is a real photograph?”

“Yes. Before the war, the Great Nuke War, the meat for American tables was raised this way—cows in small cells, confined, force-fed. The reason was greed. Cattle that don’t move gain weight faster. Of course we Indians believe that animals, like man, are part of the Great Spirit. They are killed for meat, to eat. But they are respected, not tortured, Rockson. Only meat from animals roaming free, Indians believe, is healthy. These photographs are proof of the fall of man—his ignorance of the way of the Spirit.”

“I had no idea,” Rockson said, “that twentieth-century civilized man did such things—even the Soviet occupation forces are hardly more cruel. It takes a sadistic bent of mind to treat animals in such ways.”

“There’s more,” said Smokestone. “Here is a small sample of the way the chickens were stacked one atop another, in thirty-story buildings with a thousand wire mesh cages one atop the other.”

Rockson saw the pictures, and there was even a cutaway diorama. The birds were tightly confined, never allowed to move, unable to flex their wings or avoid the rain of excrement from above. The cages were stacked thirty, even fifty atop one another. In thousands of rows.

“And people consumed the meat of these cattle and chickens?”

“By the time of the war, ninety percent of all beef and poultry sold in the United States was raised in close confinement. The meat of these diseased, tortured animals was sold in every food market, as if there was nothing wrong. People chose not to know or they didn’t care. Of course these animals’ flesh had lot of residues of chemicals and antibiotics that were used to raise them quickly. Naturally, they passed on a lot of cancers and leukemias to their eaters. Aside from the cruelty of raising animals in such ways, there was that danger to the consumers.