Deprived of both sexuality and motherhood in a situa-
tion where both were doubly important—no wonder Sola
was miserable! "We need you in Helicon," he said. "I
shall not let you go. There is no life for you outside."
"Sosa can do my job; talk to her."
"No! Sosa has a different temperament. She—" Then
he had it. "She can't bear children!"
"Do you think / can?" Sola snapped. "I'm thirty-three
years old!"
"You bore Vara! Then you lived with a castrate, and
then a sterile man. When you tried with Var, he was
sterile too. They could not make life; you could. And you
can still! And Helicon must have that life! Children are
our most important—"
"Childbirth would kill me at this age. I'm almost a
grandmother." Yet he knew by her tone that she wanted
to be convinced.
"Not with Dick the Surgeon attending. He made the
Weaponless what he was—"
"Sterile!" she put in.
"That was an accident! Look what he did for these
hands of mine! No one else could have restored me like
that, and he didn't make me sterile! He can save life; he
can save yours no matter how many babies you might
bear, no matter how old. And if—it won't happen, but if—
if you do die—what difference does it make? You'll die
anyway in the wilderness!"
That bit of cruelty brought a perverse glimmer of hope
to her face, but it passed. "No man will touch me," she
said sullenly.
"Every man will touch you!" he cried. "This is Helicon,
and I am master! I'll send—" he broke off, realizing this
was the wrong approach. He was saying in effect that
men had to be forced, and she would never go along with
that.
"You see? You don't travel; you know what I mean."
He did know. Now he saw his duty. "When I first saw
you, you were sixteen. You were beautiful—more lovely
than any. I used to dream about you—lewd dreams."
"Did you?" She seemed genuinely flattered.
"You're older now—but so am I. You're bitter—and so
am I. Yet we can do anything the youngsters can. I will
give you your baby—one no one can take away from
you."
"You've done your duty already by my daughter," she
said, the hint of a chuckle in her voice.
"That's over. The baby will not bear my name. I had
to give her what I had taken from her. She will share
hereafter—as will I. And you. You have beauty yet."
"Do I?" It was a little-girl query, plaintive.
There on the tracks he took her. And in the dark he
found that he had spoken truly, and there was a lot of
Vara in her, and it was better than he had expected.
CHAPTER TWENTY
It was just a faint whiff, but it brought a rash of strange
feelings. Neq followed his nose.
There was a tiny crack in the wall he hadn't noticed
before. From a distance it looked like an imperfection in
the finish, but now he discovered that it was deep. Had
Bob had a secret compartment in his office, along with
all the rest?
He inserted the corner of a sheet of paper into it and
probed. The paper disappeared—and now he had lost his
weapons-production statistics for the past month! There
was space in there, all right—and the odor was jetting
out, a very small current of air.
He fetched a dagger and maneuvered it into the crack
with his pincers. He pried. Something snapped, and a
section of the wall swung in. There was a passage here—
one he had missed, and might never have found, except
for the little smell.
He peered in. It was dark, of course, and there was a
warm draft. The odor was much stronger.
It was a man-hewn tunnel into the unexplored subter-
ranean wilderness of Mt. Helicon. Anything at all could
lie within, and the chances were more than even that it
was deadly. This called for an armed party.
Neq shrugged and entered, alone. The stiflmlating breath
of fragrance washed down along the corridor, lightening
his step, and the stone and metal walls seemed to widen.
This was Bob's escape route—and he had been right, a
man needed such an exit from the tedium of leadership.
Vara had borne a fine boy and named him Vari. She
had spent a reasonable period recovering and tending the
baby, then begun sharing. Sosa spent considerable time
with the baby also, and already it seemed as though Vari
were hers. Three months after the first birth, Vara was
pregnant again, and not by Neq.
Sola, too, conceived, and her joy transformed her. The
two women became closer, not as mother and daughter
but as sister-expectants, comparing notes and talking about
plans for the Helicon nursery facilities and schooling of
children. They were fine examples for the others, and the
problems of the sharing system were diminishing.
Neq walked on, in a daze of memory despite the danger
of exploring the unknown alone. He had a flashlight, for
he never could anticipate when he might need light in
Helicon, and he used it to pick out his path through the
expanding passage. Now there was no metal, and the rock
bore mosslike growths and was convoluted into treelike
formations.
Jim the Gun had completed his initial renovation of the
equipment and instituted a training program for operation
and maintenance so that the work could carry on without
him. "I'm not leaving," he said. "I like it here. Machines
are my thing, and these are wondrous! But accidents
happen, and I am aging."
As the machinery of Helicon moved toward capacity
production—the capacity of the human attendants, not
the machines—the exports to the crazies increased. The
old trucks were renovated, for Helicon produced motors
and tires and gasoline and gears, and the six trucks the
crazies had been able to maintain became twenty, then
fifty. Nomads had to be recruited as drivers and guards,
being paid in food and good weapons and medicine. The
trucks always traveled in convoys: one for the payload,
another filled with warriors armed and spoiling for battle,
the third carrying gasoline and replacement parts and
food and similar staples. A new tribe formed: the trucker
tribe, dedicated to this service. The existence and function
of Helicon w,as no longer secret, of course, but the con-
ditions of admittance remained stringent. The Truckers
felt they had the best of it: Helicon provisions, a rambling
nomad life. Many died in the actions against greedy
outlaws, but this was the nomad way. Heroism.
The trail wandered between the overhanging trees,
tunnel-like. Neq walked faster, eager to get where he was
going.
He had wanted to have a crew lay down a telephone
cable from Helicon to the main crazy outpost. But the
expenditure in manpower would have been prohibitive,
since they would have had eit
her to raise the wire out of
the casual reach of the outlaws, or bury it where it could
not be found. There were mountains and rivers and bad-
lands along the route. He had to settle for continuous
radio contact, which would soon become television contact.
Dick the Surgeon started a hospital where nomads could
receive medical attention and such drugs as required.
But this posed another problem: either he had to leave
Helicon, or nomads had to be admitted on a temporary
basis. The old guidelines were inadequate. Neq dispensed
with them. A portion of the underworld was blocked off
from the rest, and a separate entrance opened. Dick began
training those nomads who were interested in the poten-
tials of medicine, though most of these were illiterate and
ignorant. He had to devise simplified picture-codes for
prescriptions: a circle with a jagged arrow through it rep-
resenting a headache for aspirin; the outline of a tooth for
novocaine; a squiggle representing a germ for antibiotics.
He made sure no dangerous drugs were available without
his supervision, and the system worked well enough. The
nomad trainees were not stupid; they merely had to leam.
But Neq declared that the children of Helicon should
be literate. He set the example by attending classes him-
self, painstakingly mastering the words: MAN, ROOM,
FOOD, HONOR. There was an enormous amount to be
learned from the old books, and the new generation
would not be able to improve on the past without under-
standing it. The present generation was too busy to prac-
tice reading, and Neq had to graduate after building a
vocabulary of twenty words, but he knew that once
Helicon was thoroughly established the priorities would
change.
Yes, it was all going well. Neq was as successful in
running Helicon as he had been in running his own tribe
for the empire.
This region was familiar. The contour of the route, the
type of forest—there was a dead-spoked giant pine he
remembered. The memories were at once poignant and
horrible, but he had to go on.
Vara's love had proved fickle. It was apparent that her
affair with him had been the swing of the pendulum,
compensation for her prior abuse of him. And his love for
her—it had never compared to the sublime passion he
had had for Neqa. He had succumbed to the lure of
young flesh, thinking the experience more meaningful
than it was. Vara had merely started sharing early, that
Helicon might be repopulated.
Neqa: there was the meaning of it all. He had done
what he had done to bring back the world that sponsored
her kind—but he had not brought her back. This was
where Yod's barricade had been set across the trail, balk-
ing their truck. Yod's tribe was gone now, of course,
and even the staring skulls on poles were gone. Ven-
geance. . ..
It was time to make camp, for he had come far. Neq
bared his sword to cut down saplings for a temporary
lean-to. The gleaming steel reminded him: had he demon-
strated just a bit of his sworder-skill and agreed to join
Yod's outlaw tribe, he could have saved his hands and
Neqa's life. Were he in the same situation today, he
would do it. She would have had to share—but would
that have been so very different from Vara's sharing at
Helicon, after bearing the child of her husband's murderer?
Would Neqa have been unworthy of his love after bearing
Yod's child? She could have borne fifty children by other
men, if that were the price of preserving her life! With
greater circumspection he could have bided his time and
eventually assumed the mastery of the tribe and recovered
his woman. He had acted impetuously—and paid a grievous
price.
Dusk—and someone was coming!
Neq's blade lifted, ready. He did not wish to kill—but
this place was in its way sacred to him, and the man who
abused his privacy would be in trouble.
In the gloom of evening beneath the dense forest, Neq
paced the man more by sound than sight. The tread was
light yet not furtive.
Now he saw the figure: small, very small, with no
visible weapon.
"Neq!"
By the voice he knew her: Sosa.
"What are you doing here?" he demanded, knowing
she had followed him all the way from the mountain:
several days swift march. Did she seek to bring him back
as he had brought Sola back?
"I smelled the flowers," she said. "I tend them now,
and I thought it was a leak, but it wasn't. So I traced it to
your office . . . I'm almost immune, after these months
with the vine. But you—"
Neq stepped toward her, lifting the sword. But even in
the worst of his vengeance he had not attacked women.
"I was afraid of that," she murmured. "I'll have to watch
you, until I can locate the plants and shut them off."
She walked by him, passing quite close, and he was
aware of her athletic surprisingly attractive body. Women
didn't have to fade as they aged! Bemused, he followed
her, not certain what she intended or what he desired.
Then he recognized her destination. "Stay clear of that
grave!" he cried.
"Grave? That's your real wound, isn't it?" she said. "Ah,
I think this is it. The passage is blocked, but there's an
updraft—"
She began to scrape away the leaves and twigs that
covered the site of Neqa's grave, exposing the rich earth
beneath. "This is garbage!" she exclaimed.
Neq raised the sword again. "Stop, or surely you must
die!"
"I'm doing this for you," she said, continuing. "The draft
is bringing the fumes straight out. The flowers must be
just beyond this refuse."
"I would not slay a woman," Neq said, his blade poised
above her body. "But if I must—"
"In a moment I'll have it," she said. "Meanwhile, please
don't threaten me with that thing. If you knew how many
times I have been widowed, you woujd see that your
sorrow is hardly unique. I don't care what you think you
see; I have a job to do here."
He saw that she would not stop. But he could not
allow Neqa's bones to be defiled.
He spread his arms so that the sword would not strike
her and moved forward, shoving her aside with his body.
His own torso would guard the sacred earth!
But Sosa's dirt-caked hands came up, striking him
across the neck so that he choked. She got her little shoulder
under him and somehow threw him back. "Please stay
clear," she said quietly. "There may be danger, and I
have to get this junk out."
Now he remembered what Vara had said about this
woman. She was skilled, circle-skilled, with her bare hands!
She had taught the Weaponless his art. It was folly to
attempt to wrestle with her.
Numbly, he watched the hole deepen. It was not mere
bones she was searching out. He had no idea whether
anything at all remained of Neqa after all these years. It
was the associations of Neqa—the manner she had died,
the way he had acted then. The nightmare portion of his
nomad dream, that he had tried to put aside. Rape,
murder, anguish, vengeance, futility. . . .
She struck solidity. Horrified, Neq shone the light as
she reached down, grasped, and hauled up—
A hooflike foot.
Appalled, Neq stumbled back. This was the cairn of
Var the Stick—the other nightmare!
The foot stirred, the gross blunted toes twitching. Earth
showered off as the hairy leg kicked out of the ground.
"Oh-oh," Sosa said. "I didn't expect this'" She scrambled
away from the hole.
An arm came up, levering against the surface. The
body heaved. The corpse sat up.
The shock of it sobered Neq momentarily, and he real-
ized that he was under the influence of the narcotic vine-
flowers, as Sosa had tried to tell him. They must have
seeded here, for the fumes were actually pollen, and there
had been some leakages. If there were earth here, and
moisture, and occasional light, the vines could have
sprouted and bloomed.
The corpse was neither Neqa nor Var, but some living
thing climbing out of the partially stopped passage. Some-
thing manlike—but what? Already his vision was becoming
distorted again, for the fumes were heavy in this semi-
confined space.
Neq tapped on the glockenspiel with his pincers, but