Danton was thrown up, over, out and down, and other forms fell around
him. He heard a moan from something not quite dead. Metal clanged.
Machinery whirred. He thought of the mart, disposal mart. He thought
of dropping through a hole maybe into a pit of fire, or into a vat of
something. All through him as from an intravenous injection--horror.
He looked. A mound of metal, as though a bald giant had been buried up
to his eyebrows. Metal corroded with green slime. And there, an opening
appearing as heavy metal doors slid open. A railcar with a spherical
truck bed emerging from the opening and waiting with an eery suggestion
of eager sentience in its cold metal.
The men throwing the bodies into the railcar.
"What happens to them?"
"Who knows? No one ever hears of them again. Morlan mentioned it the
other day. He said the Powers demand sacrifice, like gods maybe. I'm
not superstitious or anything, but--"
"Why not? Something's taking care of us, making us move around, dance
on the invisible wires. Maybe the Powers are gods. Why not? They're
supposed to live forever. Never grow old."
"Push the button! Push it! Get them out of here. Wait, here's another
one."
Danton felt himself plunging, striking, rolling among the other dead
logs. He didn't move. Some of the horror was dissolving, because this
whole disposal system was too elaborate. There was something basic and
symptomatic about it, and Danton felt that it was a key. Van Ness and
Keith were gone. He couldn't think about them now. Their disappearance
had seemed so very final. He was alone. He still had his duty, and he
was curious. He wanted to find out what he could, although the idea of
somehow getting a ship and returning to Earth with what information
he could garner was no longer part of his thoughts. You could take
advantage of the impossible if it happened perhaps. You couldn't
anticipate it as a basis for action.
But he was still curious, and that was part of his duty. The Oligarchs,
the Powers, seemed interested in gathering in the blossoms of death
from the fields. Very interested. One of these soldiers had said the
Powers would be happy. Surely then the bodies wouldn't simply go into a
vat or a flame.
"Here she goes!"
Darkness. Silent movement whirring, rapidly accelerating speed, hot
wind sighing dry past his face. The body of the dead girl, her body
tight up against him in the darkness, moved a little. She sighed
brokenly.
Danton felt around, found the belt, holster, ancient revolver he had
spotted earlier. He removed it, buckled it around his own waist. He
was careful not to raise his head. Above him, close, he felt a ceiling
rushing back.
Feeling the girl beside him, the girl soldier, still alive somehow, he
thought of Mara who had found him unbearable because he still had the
mind of a soldier and had refused to be reconditioned. She had grown
to hate him--no, not hate, revulsion. It was natural. She had been
reconditioned to hate anything suggesting violence.
Well, that was long ago and far away. Further away than long ago.
The car slowed, tilted. Doors slid open and a soft blue radiance
filtered through. Danton clung to the metal and stared down a gleaming
metal chute. He began to hear incoherent sounds coming out of his
own throat, uncontrollably, as the car tilted further. He grabbed
desperately, hung on as the car dumped its load into the chute, down,
down into a giant pit. The pit was surrounded with high mesh walls and
a steel rail. And behind the rail a circular walkway, with panels, or
doors, spaced at regular intervals. Maybe a hundred or more doors.
And cranes, cranes lifting metal mouths full of the squirming mass in
the pit, lifting them to the railing and onto moving belts that carried
them through the walls and out of sight.
To what? _God, to what?_ Danton thought.
* * * * *
Danton clung frantically to the empty car. Sweat made a stream down his
chest, though the pit was refrigerated. Cold. The metal was frosted,
it shone like ice. And in the pit some of the bodies moved and made
sounds. The girl soldier. She got to her knees.
Danton tried to crawl back, back up the slippery metal of the railcar.
He sought darkness back there, a place to hide. Then he stopped trying
and felt his fingers loosening as he watched the girl. Her face was
unrecognizable behind a mask of blood and dirt. But she was standing
up now. She raised one hand. She looked up at the many expressionless
doors.
The strength with which she forced the keening death-song from her body
was not the strength of her body. It came from someplace else. From
outside, from memory, from a last defiance that could no longer suffer
punishment, from the buried ghosts of thousands of years that had died.
"You sing of the great clean guns, that belch forth death at will.
Oh, but the wailing mothers, the lifeless forms and still!"
Danton's hands let go, and he slid down the chute.
"... sing the songs of the billowing flags, the bugles that cry
before.
Oh, but the skeletons flapping rags, the lips that speak no more."
He scarcely felt the bodies under him. He looked at the woman singing
and he listened.
"... sing the clash of bayonets and sabres that flash and hew,
Will you sing of maimed ones, too, who die and die anew?"
Danton stumbled. He reached her side.
"Sing of feted generals who bring the victory home.
Oh ... but the broken bodies that drip like honey-comb!"
Danton touched her shoulder. Her uniform hung in tatters. A line of red
ran down her torn arm. She sank to her knees. He could barely hear the
last two lines of her song.
"... sing of hearts triumphant, long ranks of marching men.
And will you sing of the shadowy hosts that never march again?"
He lifted her and stood, holding her like a child. Now her eyes were
closed. She would have a pretty face, he thought. The army uniform cap
fell away and her hair tumbled down over his hand and arm like red
dust. Her lips moved. She whispered: "No one hears. No one--ever hears."
"I hear you," Danton said.
But you don't hear me, he thought. Her body was limp. She's dead, he
thought.
The crane dipped, steel jaws champing, steel-thewed neck stiff and
superior, now lifting.
Danton put the girl down, leaped, caught the metal lips, clung as the
crane lifted, swung, caught the rail, pulled himself over onto the
walkway. His breath was hot and his lungs burned.
He slid the ancient revolver free and examined it quickly. Its
mechanism was simple enough. He twirled the cylinder, removed the
safety catch. Doors? Where did they go? None of the doors seemed
inclined to tell him; nothing moved around him except the crane and the
conveyor belt.
He walked round the circular way once, came back. It would seem
that he must crawl onto the belt to escape the pit. That would take
him--somewhere. It seemed that he was destined to follow the dead
wherever the dead went in this place where the dead seemed to have lost
the last faint tinge of dignity or honor.
Silently, simultaneously, the doors slid open. A man was born from
the darkness of each black rectangle. Bronze giant men in tunics that
glittered like finely-woven metallic-silk. There was some variation,
yet they were amazingly alike, expressionless, cold, removed. Far
removed.
Danton heard the conveyor belt moving softly, swiftly behind him,
carrying its macabre load. The revolver felt heavy in his hand. Then,
from somewhere, a voice crackled in the pit like ice shifting.
"Bring this soldier to the Council Room."
A man's voice, without any particular characteristic other than one of
detachment. It might have been the voice of a machine, or something on
a tape.
[Illustration: _Danton fired seven times ... after that he stopped,
because the gun was empty...._]
Danton fired seven times. After that he stopped because the gun was
empty of cartridges. Each time he fired, a man fell soundlessly,
without dramatics, calmly. Each time, the man next in line stepped
forward to receive the next bullet. After the last bullet was gone,
three other men lifted the fallen bodies and placed them on the
conveyor belt. Five others surrounded Danton. They did not touch him.
If the episode had had any emotional significance at all for these men,
Danton hadn't seen it. Further resistance was futile; the firing of the
revolver had been only token defiance anyway.
Danton felt the refrigerated air of the pit clinging to him as the men
marched him down a long tubular hall walled in dull metal.
* * * * *
The room was large, metal-vaulted, brittle. Mesh grid screens
surrounded him at a distance, and the useless revolver hung cold and
damp in his hands. Three men and three women sat behind a half-moon of
bright silver suspended from the high ceiling by shimmering strands of
silver, like very fine wire.
As architecture, the things he had seen were the final stage in
constructivism. An elimination of the sense of weight and solidity of
traditional forms. Everywhere were space constructions of metal sheets,
glass, plastic, beams of angular light, some vaguely related to human
figures, largely as abstracts of geometrical shapes, technological
forms.
Environment and people were each a balanced projection of the other.
The general effect was one of machine-like precision, brittle coldness
in which man and machine had reached emotionless synthesis.