Shakespeare's Planet (14 page)

“I've often thought about it,” she said. “Wondered about it. For I'm not the only one who has it. There are others. A new ability, an acquired instinct—there is no way of telling. When men went into space and landed on other planets, they were forced to adapt to—what would you call it?—the unlikely, perhaps. They had to develop new survival techniques, new habits of thinking, new insights and senses. Maybe that's what we have, a new kind of sense, a new awareness. The pioneers of Earth, when they pushed out into unknown areas, developed something of the sort. Primitive man had it, perhaps, as well. But back on old settled and civilized Earth, there came a time when there was no longer any need of it and it was lost. In a civilized environment there were few surprises. One knew fairly well what he might expect. But when he went out to the stars, he found a new need of this old awareness.”

“Don't look at me,” said Horton. “I'm one of those people from what you call civilized Earth.”

“Was it civilized?”

“To answer that, you must define the term. What is civilized?”

“I wouldn't know,” she said. “I have never seen a completely civilized world—not in the sense that Earth was civilized. Or I don't think I have. These days you can't be sure. You and I, Carter Horton, come from different ages. There may be times when the only proper course will be for each of us to be patient with the other.”

“You sound as if you've seen a lot of worlds.”

“I have,” she said. “On this mapping job. You reach a place, stay a day or two—well, maybe more than that, but never very long. Only long enough to make some observations and jot down some notes, to, get an impression of what kind of world it is. So you'll be able to recognize it, you see, if you come back to it again. For it's important to know if the tunnel system ever brings you back to a place you've been before. Some places you'd like to stay awhile. Once in a great while, you find a really pleasant place. But there are few of these. Mostly you are glad to leave.”

“Tell me one thing,” Horton said. “I've been wondering about it. You are on this mapping expedition. That is what you call it. It sounds to me more like a wild-goose chase. Your chances can't be more than one in a million and yet …”

“I told you there are others.”

“But even if there were a million of you, there'd be only one of you who has any chance of returning to a world that has been visited before. And just one of you finding their way back would be a waste of time. There'd have to be a number of you who succeeded before there could be any statistical probability the tunnels could be mapped, or even started to be mapped.”

She stared coldly at him. “Back there where you came from, you, of course, had heard of faith.”

“Certainly I have heard of faith. Faith in one's self, faith in one's country, faith in one's religion. What has that got to do with it?”

“Faith is often all that one possesses.”

“Faith,” he said, “is thinking something's possible when you're quite sure it's not.”

“Why so cynical?” she asked. “Why so short of vision? Why so materialistic?”

“I'm not cynical,” he said. “I just take the odds into some account. And we were not short of vision. We were the ones, remember, who first went to the stars and we were able to go, to persuade ourselves to go, because of the materialism you seem so much to scorn.”

“That is true,” she agreed, “but that's not what I am talking about. Earth was one thing; the stars are another. When you get out among the stars, the values change, the viewpoints shift. There's an ancient phrase—it's a different ball game—can you tell me what that phrase means?”

“I suppose it alludes to some sort of sports event.”

“You mean those silly exercises that once were held on Earth?”

“You don't hold them any more? No sports events at all?”

“There is too much to do, too much to learn. We no longer need to seek artificial amusement. We haven't got the time, and even if we had, no one would be interested.”

Elayne pointed at a building almost engulfed by brush and trees. “I think that's the one,” she said.

“The one?”

“The one where the strangeness is. The somethingness that I have been talking about.”

“Should we go and see?”

“I'm not entirely sure,” she said. “To tell you the truth, I'm a little frightened. By what we might find, you know.”

“You have no idea? You say you can sense this somethingness. Does your perception extend far enough to give you at least some hint?”

Elayne shook her head. “Only that it's strange. Something out of the ordinary. Perhaps frightening, although I feel no actual fright. Just a tugging at my mind, a fear of the unusual, of the unsuspected. Just this terrible sense of strangeness.”

“It's going to be tough getting there,” he said. “That growth is fairly dense. I could go back to camp and get a machete. I think that we brought one along.”

“No need,” she said. She unholstered the weapon on her belt.

“This will burn a path,” she said. It was larger than it had looked when holstered, needle-nosed and a bit cumbersome.

He eyed it. “A laser?”

“I suppose so. I don't know. Not a weapon only, but a tool. It's standard on my home planet. Everyone carries one of them. You can adjust it, see …” She showed him the dial set into the grip. “A narrow cutting edge, a fan effect, whatever you may want. But why do you ask? You carry one as well.”

“Different,” said Horton. “A fairly crude weapon, but effective if you know how to handle it. It throws a projectile. A bullet. Forty-five caliber. A weapon, not a tool.”

Elayne crinkled her brow. “I have heard of the principle,” she said. “A very ancient concept.”

“Perhaps,” siad Horton, “but up to the time I left the Earth, the best we had. In the hands of a man who knows its operation, it is precise and very deadly. High velocity, tremendous stopping power. Powder-powered—nitrate, I think, maybe cordite. I'm not up on the chemistry.”

“But powder—no compound—could last the many years that you were on the ship. It would break down with time.”

Horton gave her a startled look, surprised at her knowledge. “I hadn't thought of that,” he said. “But it's true. The matter converter, of course …”

“You have a matter converter?”

“That's what Nicodemus tells me. I haven't actually seen it. I have never seen one, to tell you the truth. There was no such thing as a matter converter when we went into cold-sleep. It was developed later.”

“Another legend,” she said. “A lost art …”

“Not at all,” said Horton. “Technology.”

She shrugged. “Whatever it is—lost. We have no matter converter. As I said, another legend.”

“Well,” asked Horton, “are we going to see what this something of yours is, or do we …”

“We'll go and see,” she said. “I'll set it at the lowest power.”

She leveled the contraption, and a pale blue haze leaped out from it. The underbrush puffed with an eerie whisper, and dust floated in the air.

“Careful,” he cautioned.

“Don't worry,” she said sharply. “I know how to use it.”

It was evident she did. She cut a neat and narrow path, detouring around a tree. “No use of burning it. It would be a waste.”

“You still feel it?” Horton asked. “The strangeness. Can you figure what it is?”

“It still is there,” she said, “but I have no more idea what it is than I ever had.”

She holstered the gun and, shining the light ahead of him, Horton led the way into the building.

The place was dark and dusty. Pieces of crumbling furniture stood along the walls. A small animal squeaked in sudden terror and raced across the room, a blur of motion in the darkness.

“A mouse,” said Horton.

Elayne said, unruffled, “Probably not a mouse. Mice belong on Earth, or so say the old nursery rhymes. There's that old one, hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock.”

“Then the nursery rhymes survived?”

“Some of them,” she said. “I suspect not all of them.”

A closed door confronted them, and Horton put out his hand and pushed against it. The door collapsed and fell into a pile across the threshhold.

He lifted the torch and shone the light into the room beyond. The room flared back at them, a glare of golden light thrown back into their faces. They staggered back a step or two and Horton lowered the flash. Cautiously he raised it again and this time, through the flare of the reflected light, they saw what it was that had given rise to the reflection. In the center of the room, almost filling it, stood a cube.

Horton lowered the flash to cut down on the reflection and moving slowly, stepped into the room.

The light from the flash, no longer reflected by the cube, seemed to be absorbed by it, sucked in and spread out throughout its interior so that it seemed the cube was lighted.

A creature lay suspended in the light. A creature—that was the only description that would come to mind. It was huge, almost filling the cube, its body extending beyond their line of vision. For a moment, there was a sense of mass, but not just any kind of mass. There was a sense of life in it, a certain flow of line that said instinctively it was a living mass. What seemed to be a head was hunched down low against what may have been its chest. And the body—or was it a body? A body covered by an intricate filigree of etching. Like armor, Horton thought—an expensive example of the goldsmith's art.

Beside him, Elayne gasped with wonder. “It's beautiful,” she said.

Horton felt frozen, half with wonder, half with fear. “It has a head,” he said. “The damn thing is alive.”

“It hasn't moved,” she told him. “And it would have moved. At the first touch of light, it would have moved.”

“It's asleep,” said Horton.

“I don't think it's asleep,” she said.

“It has to be alive,” he said. “You sensed it. This has to be the strangeness that you sensed. You still have no idea what it is?”

“None at all,” she said. “Nothing that I've ever heard about. No legends. No elder stories. Nothing at all. And so beautiful. Horrible, but beautiful. All those fine, intricate designs. It is something it is wearing—no, I see now it is not something it is wearing. The etchings are on scales.”

Horton tried to trace the outline of the body, but each time he tried, he failed. He'd start out all right and trace it for a ways, then the outline would be gone, fading and dissolved in the golden haze that lingered in the cube, lost in the convoluted intricacies of the form itself.

He took a step forward for a closer look and was stopped—stopped by nothing. There was nothing there to stop him; it was as if he had run into a wall he could neither see nor feel. No, not a wall, he thought. His mind scurried frantically for some sort of simile that would express what had happened. But there seemed no simile, for the thing that stopped him was a nothingness. He lifted his free hand and felt in front of him. The hand found nothing, but the hand was stopped. No physical sensation, nothing he could feel or sense. It was, he thought, as if he had encountered the end of reality, as if he'd reached a place where there was nowhere to go. As if someone had drawn a line and said the world ends here, there is nothing that extends beyond this line. No matter what you see, or think you see, there is nothing there. But if that were true, he thought, there was something very wrong, for he could see beyond reality.

“There is nothing there,” said Elayne, “but there must be something there. We can see the cube and creature.”

Horton stepped back a pace and, in that moment, the goldenness of the cube seemed to flood out and enfold the two of them, making them a part of the creature and the cube. In that golden haze, the world seemed to go away and for the moment they stood alone, divorced from time and space.

Elayne stood close to him and looking down, he saw the rose tattooed on her breast. He reached out a hand and touched it.

“Beautiful,” he said.

“Thank you, sir,” she said.

“You do not mind that I noticed it?”

She shook her head. “I had been beginning to feel disappointed that you hadn't noticed it. You must have known that it was there to direct attention. The rose is intended as a focal point.”

19

Nicodemus said, “Take a look at this.”

Horton bent to stare at the faint line the robot had chiseled in the stone around the perimeter of the panel.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “I see nothing wrong. Except that it seems you haven't made much progress.”

“That is exactly what is wrong,” said Nicodemus. “I have been getting nowhere. The chisel chips the stone for a depth of a few millimeters; then the stone gets hard. As if it were a metal with a small portion of its surface reduced to rust.”

“But it isn't metal.”

“No, it's stone, all right. I tried other parts of the rock face.” He gestured toward the wall of stone, indicating scratches on it. “It's the same on the entire face. Weathering seems to be at work, but underneath the weathering, the stone is incredibly hard. As if the molecules were bonded more tightly than they should be naturally.”

“Where is Carnivore?” asked Elayne. “He might know something of this.”

“I doubt it very much,” said Horton.

“I sent him packing,” said Nicodemus. “I told him to get the hell out. He was breathing down my neck and cheering me on …”

“He is so terribly anxious to get off this planet,” said Elayne.

“Who wouldn't be?” asked Horton.

“I feel so sorry for him,” said Elayne. “You're sure there is no way to put him on the ship—if all else fails, I mean.”

“I don't see how,” said Horton. “We could try cold-sleep, of course, but it would more than likely kill him. What do you think, Nicodemus?”