Chapter Twenty-One

Palmer the Guardian knelt on the cliff edge, on the very rim of his world, and stared southwest across the desolate plain. He could see the spiraling dust cloud from the war caravan, like a tornado whipping over the desert. Palmer knew that the Spirit in the Mist had called these things to it, and he was unafraid. There would be much blood, and the Mist would be greatly satisfied. In the months to come, there would be good hunting, seasonable weather and many male babies.

The clan had been preparing for this day for months; they had been awaiting it for better than ten decades. It had been foretold in the diaries of First Palmer, a collection of lengthy handwritten documents that had been handed down from guardian to guardian since the Apocalypse. Much of the clan’s lifestyle and belief system was based on these diaries. First Palmer had found several women and multiplied with them. He also multiplied with the female offspring of those unions, in effect setting the standard for the group’s conjugal philosophy.

The diaries had laid out detailed plans for the defense of the road, which subsequent Palmers had followed to the letter. First Palmer had seen this approaching juggernaut, perhaps in a vision brought on by the devil’s club plant. Perhaps the Spirit had showed him. Most emphatically the diaries said, “First the few, then the many. First the few, then the many. First the small, then the big.”

Working from the diagrams, the Palmers had carefully expanded and deepened their antitank trenches. Now they were much higher than a man’s head, and longer than five men laid head to foot. And they were hidden. The clansmen had buttressed and reinforced with timber and rock the fixed machine gun positions above the cliff face on either side of the road. And they had positioned, only after much grueling labor, a series of enormous rockfalls along the cliff edges. These manmade avalanches were designed to crush anything attempting to climb the road below. Or failing that, to at least block in an attacking wag, fore and aft, so it couldn’t maneuver its blasters and it couldn’t escape the mountain men.

In the diary, First Palmer had made diagrams of many different types of battle wag. These pictures showed clearly where all the air-intake vents were. It showed how to seal them off with tarry rags and baling wire. It also showed how to connect the engine exhaust pipes to the vents with lengths of hose. First Palmer wrote that if you could stop a war wag in its tracks, you could turn it into a coffin for its crew, by either cutting off their air and sealing them in, or forcing them to abandon it and come under your blasters. Palmer the Guardian was hoping that there might be some fresh women among the coming caravan, suitable for breeding purposes. Whenever the clan happened upon such females, they were made available to all the males for seeding, as was the case with the women and the girl children born to the group. Much of the time of the females of all ages was spent in collecting, cleaning and preparing the root of the devil’s club for consumption.

According to the legend passed down since skydark,Oplopanax horridum , a member of the ginseng family, had been the Spirit in the Mist’s gift to First Palmer. It flourished on the slopes of the mountain, and was easy to spot with its broad green leaves and above-ground canes that were covered with thousands of yellow, needlelike thorns. The plant’s creeper, the rootlike sucker vine that grew just under the soil, contained the magic elixir. One only had to peel the bark away and chew the pithy inner stem. It vanquished pain and gave a man the strength of three.

The leader of the Palmer clan had been chewing devil’s club for most of his life. He even chewed it in his sleep. He awakened automatically when all that was left was the dry, fibrous cud. He spit the gob across the floor of his cave, reached into the bowl beside his sleeping mat, selected another chunk and packed it in. So ingrained was the grinding motion of his jaws that he could do it while unconscious. Because of his virtual twenty-four-hour-a-day intake, the level of psychotropic drag in his bloodstream had been more or less constant for the past forty-nine years. He got no distinguishable “high” from it, but he was completely addicted to it, as were all of the other adults, male and female, and many of the children. It gave them a sense of well being. Of wholeness. Of connection to the larger universe.

Though their parents were addicted, the children weren’t born in a similar condition. The root seemed to have no effect on the development of the clan’s fetuses. None that could be sorted out, anyway. A much bigger problem was the limited nature of the Palmer gene pool. More of a puddle, really.

The cud in Palmer’s mouth had begun to dry out. It scratched the inside of the cheeks and gums. He patted his pockets for more and, finding none, was loath to spit out what he could still manage to chew. He looked around for a woman, and seeing one standing at the machine-gun post farther along the cliff edge, waved for her to come in a hurry.

While he waited, he watched the nearing dust cloud. His clan was embarked on more than just the defense of all that they held sacred. This was the fulfillment of First Palmer’s great prophecy. And as such, the vindication of all that they believed. It was a time for joy. For dancing. For congress. For fertilization. What luck, he thought, to have been born, to have been present when it all came to pass. He knew that for hundreds of years after this day, Palmers yet unborn would hear the stories and wish they could have been alive to see it.

For as long as seven decades, there had been no room in the group for doubters or dissent. Those who speculated aloud that the Spirit wasn’t in fact the physical embodiment of God, or who dared to glance sidelong during the equinox ceremonies, were summarily cast over the white stones to meet their Maker.

This interpretation of the Mist as God wasn’t part of the original canon. First Palmer had referred to the Mist metaphorically as a beast of flesh and blood. Or he had used terminology that was beyond the understanding of his progeny. What did they know of molecular computers, of trans-substantial intelligence, of vaporous membranes? Even though they could read the words, after a fashion, they had no clue as to their meaning. So it was far easier for them to deal with this thing that was always hungry, that could never be chilled, if they thought of it as God.

And to them it seemed that their monstrous fog bank of a God provided everything. If only because they made it responsible for all the good and bad that happened in their lives. Poor hunting. Rainy summers. Bat-eared babies. Like most other members of their species, the Palmers were desperate to make sense of the chaos and pain that surrounded them. And afraid to leave the pain that they knew for the pain of the unknown. The world beyond the mouth of the canyon was filled with dangers they could not imagine or understand.

The woman approached Palmer the Guardian, bearing on her head a large basket woven of pine needles. She was indistinguishable from nine-tenths of her fellow clans-women: cross-eyed, slack mouthed, waistless, stocky and pregnant. She lowered the basket to her hip, tipped it down and offered its bounteous contents to him. It was heaped with chunks of freshly peeled devil’s club.

Palmer picked over the top of the pile, selecting a handful of the best. Spitting out his cud, he popped a fresh chunk in his mouth and began to chew. His molar teeth were worn down flat like a cow’s or an elk’s, from so many years of grinding the stringy root to extract the psychoactive juice.

After he had worked up a good saliva, he made the woman sit next to him on the rocks. She remained placid, almost catatonic, as he absentmindedly stroked her stringy hair, then her shoulders and, reaching through the armholes of her loose shift, her bare breasts. Her pregnancy was far enough advanced to show in her breasts, and her belly had begun to swell. When he fondled her, she stared off into the middle distance, not seeing the oncoming war party, or if seeing it, not caring in the least, the tiniest of smiles on her face as she, too, chewed.

Palmer the Guardian felt himself getting powerfully aroused, which angered him, and he roughly pushed her away.

There was no time for that.

Women had no sense of propriety or proportion, he thought. They were good for gathering the root, for making food and for making babies. They couldn’t conceive of complex and important problems, or weren’t interested in trying. Palmer found this highly irritating. Though he had to admit, some of the females could fistfight passably well and some could even hunt small game with throw-sticks. Most of them were more like this one—eager to please in certain areas. In areas of their own limited self-interest. And in all other areas, impossibly dense and stubborn.

The woman looked disappointed for a second, then with a gleam in her eye, she started to lift the hem of her shift over her dirt-smeared thighs.

Palmer the Guardian waved her off with an impatient gesture. Chewing his cud furiously, he pulled back from the lookout to check on his fighters and make sure they hadn’t succumbed to temptation.