ONE MOMENT outside the eleventh, outer Wall of my Stronghold I’m sitting calm as a cold ball of lead, my heart tuned to low-low, my pale green blood on dormant, barely washing through the tube miles of my flesh-strips, my wide-range Moderan vision turned to casual-sweep and scouring across homeless plastic into the red-brown vapor shield of mid-July. I am thinking of nothing; I am looking for nothing; I am between wars, and resting, but properly alert as always, as befits us here. . . .
It struck me hot-cold and cold-hot how he came riding. My hip-snuggie chair seemed to strike its two front feet down like explosion, sharp down to the plastic from where I had them tilted in air when I was leaned back against my eleventh Wall in my resting. His horse surely filled up a hill when I first saw him, bold on that tenth rise to my left. If I had been on punch-introven, the spiked flesh-strip feeding, I would have thought it a drunken vision, a thing bred in my muzzy sight and born in the red-brown vapor shield as mirage. But I was stark sober and the vapor was the usual and intended one for mid-July.
My Warner was beginning now its din, and standard prudent Moderan procedure called for my planned withdrawal. A Moderan man sensing danger works his hinges and braces and drags his hip-snuggie chair back through Walls towards launchers. But sometimes one is drawn, held, bemused—even in firm-planned Moderan. A vision clamped me and a horseman came—cantering—in a place where there should be no horse and no rider at all. The rider reined up in a slow uncertain stopping, and I saw at once that the huge brown horse was without sight. Nay, he was not only blind—he had no eyes at all; there were two round red holes and a little stick of dried or drying blood hanging from the lowest arc of each hole. I noted especially how a cold little breeze through Moderan shook the frail blood sticks and how the horse, bracing into the breeze, snorted lustily. I had the strange chill feeling that here was the horse that would walk right into Walls and, not seeing them, pass on through in a casual inexorable cantering. Just a feeling, of course, but it persisted.
The rider was not of Moderan. I saw that all at once. There was no mark of flesh-strip join upon him. There was no steel. He was as all-flesh as his horse and, in his way, just as odd for these times. He did not have that mutant look about him, though his horse, perhaps, did. As near as I could tell, frantically thinking back to the Old Days, this was a flesh man who had not been “replaced”; not having the flesh-strips join about him, neither did he have steel arms nor the hinges and braces for walking of the “replaced” peoples. But why? And why here?
Suddenly, and without my seeing how or from where, he had in his hands two glittering gemmy balls about the size of tennis balls in the Old Days. “When we move into that City, he won’t be blind,” he said and gestured at his nag. “I keep these wrapped in oil against the day when my horse must have some kind of showing eyes.”
My mouth chopped hard up and down and made no sound. I stared and gulped. “We came across the blind fields,” he said, “mile on mile of sterile homeless plastic. And some strange metal bird hung high and on our track all the tedious way. I thought it might be a tin buzzard. I noticed it roosted down somewhere in the Stronghold country.”
He looked at me hard and asked answer. “We have metal birds of detection here,” I said.
“Are they warlike? Do they eat people?”
“Everything is apt to be warlike here. No, they do not eat people.”
“I’m glad. I would not wish to be eaten by a tin buzzard. Detection does not concern me.”
“Detection is for our wars,” I said. “You are not of us, I see, and you do not concern us. However, when the truce lifts up, you and your horse will be blasted. Our business here is war, in the Stronghold country, and little flesh-flimsy people and big blind meat-huge horses have no place. I do not wish to be unduly blunt.”
“If you’re telling me to move, you’re wasting speech. And time. I’m tied to this big horse. His movements are not preplanned. Neither are they stoppable. I thought I should tell you this. I too do not wish to be blunt. Nor do I wish to be unfriendly.”
I looked, and indeed he was tied on his horse. Two lengths of soiled much-traveled-looking rope, not connected, went under the horse’s belly and lashed the rider on, being knotted above the knees.
“Who—who trussed you on like this?”
“Many things, let us say, and tradition. But it was my own choosing hands that knotted the ropes to my knees. Each rope is conscience, if you wish to think it so. My horse is duty, if you like comparisons. Otherwise, just think of me as a man on a blind horse who has ridden the blind fields as he must. And now this Stronghold country! Would you in this land know aught of such talk?”
“We have not talked so since we have come of age. That sounds like flesh talk and flesh thinking. We are ‘replaced.’ We hate and war by trade; our needs are served by Gad-Goes. We are completely modernized in Moderan. We are ‘replaced’ to live forever and have no need of bargain deals for heaven. We are our own eternity. It seems to me all these things would of necessity make senseless your talk of conscience and duty—too much concerned with emotions and heart palpitations and guess-work, which we have down-played here.”
He dropped the future horse eyes into long leather pouches on either side his saddle and he stared me with a bold and steady look. My steel eyes smote his flesh ones and there was no give. “I could tell you how my horse is sometimes gaunt,” he said. “Some centuries he has been all knobs, indeed. But now he’s fat and ready, and I’m tied on. I am his eyes, as much as he can have eyes just now. He is my legs. I feel it in my bones we’re near some bright unveiling. I must confess right now I’m riding a little dark, although I’m looking all ways for a sign. Seeing none, it’s onward. That’s all I know. But confidentially, soon I expect a star to point out something.”
“There’ll be star shells out and big missiles up and doll bombs walking, I’m warning you,” I said. “And whether you’re clear or not to me is of no worry at all. But I’d just as soon you were, I guess, given a choice. What little flesh-strip I own compels me to say this, although I’m not sure I’m altogether happy with it said. And since it’s come to a discussion, I guess I’m happiest when I’m steel. I guess I’m happiest when I’m in my War Room handing the big orange switch of war to ON and pressing the buttons of launchers. Or, to put it another way, I’m not unhappy or worried or asking questions then—and I’ll settle for that.”
“To a man twice tied by conscience on this blind horse of duty that seems a settlement of convenience. And your fight is all a makeshift sham then—purposeless, something to fill out time?”
“My fight is what I am designed for. And if you stir me, I’ll blast your horse myself. With just a nod of my head it can be done.”
“Blast him,” he said, and a steel-cold flesh-eye looked at me and so looking stared me down. My head fell forward in shame and deep deliberation, and I thought I heard him continue, “For every piece he’s torn to there’ll be a new and bigger horse grow up and a rider lashed upon him.” Then I snapped my head up to answer and no one—nothing—not even a shadow, a leaf, a bird or a blowing cloud was there between me and the red-brown vapor shield of mid-July. My Warner was dinning that the truce was lifting, my weapons men as they raced for their battle stations were setting up that strange dry sound of metal hurrying inside the Walls, and immediately I had things more real than a horse and a hopeless rider to think about, or a mirage talking about conscience and duty.
The war, let me say, that followed was a tremendous success; the doll bombs homed with dispatch down to the kill, the White Witch rockets flashed far and wide over steel-topped Moderan, and the high-up weird shrieking wreck-wrecks were never better. But next truce time I could hardly wait to get on the viewer-talk and ask all around at the Strongholds if any had seen this huge blind horse and his rider. The negative replies I received and the quizzical, odd, lifted-eye looks on the viewer-talk told me it was perhaps not best to inquire of this strange horse and his rider again.