Shakespeare's Planet (6 page)

They scrambled up the cleft and emerged on a hill that rose to another ridge, higher than the other two they had crossed. At the top, a scatter of boulders and a low ledge of rock outcropping ran along the ridge. Carnivore sat down upon a slab of stone and patted a place beside him, inviting Horton to sit.

“Here we pause and catch the breath,” he said. “The land is rugged hereabouts.”

“How much farther?” Carter asked.

Carnivore waved a nest of tentacles that served him as a hand. “Two more hills,” he said, “and we are almost there. Did you, by the way, catch god-hour last night?”

“God-hour?”

“Shakespeare called it that. Something reaching down and touching. Like someone being there.”

“Yes,” said Horton, “we caught it. Can you tell us what it is?”

“I do not know,” said Carnivore, “and I do not like it. It look inside of you. It lay you open to the gut. That's why I left you so abruptly. It jitters me. It turns me into water. But I stayed too long. It caught me going home.”

“You mean you knew that it was coming?”

“It comes every day. Or almost every day. There are times, not for very long, when it may not come at all. It moves across the day. It is coming now of evenings. It comes each time just a fraction later. It walks across the day and night. It keeps changing of its hour, but the change is very small.”

“It's been coming all the time you've been here?”

“All the time,” said Carnivore. “It does not leave one be.”

“You have no idea what it is?”

“Shakespeare said it something out of space. He said it works like something far in space. It comes when this point of planet that we stand upon faces some point far in space.”

Nicodemus had been prowling along the ledge of rock, stooping now and then to pick up a fallen chunk of stone. Now he came stalking toward them, holding out several small stones in his hand.

“Emeralds,” he said. “Weathered out and lying on the ground. There are others in the matrix.”

He handed them to Horton. Horton looked closely at them, holding them in the palm of his hand, probing at them with an index finger.

Leaning over, Carnivore had a look at them. “Pretty rocks,” he said.

“Hell, no,” said Horton. “More than pretty rocks. These are emeralds.” He looked up at Nicodemus. “How did you know?” he asked.

“I am wearing my rockhound transmog,” said the robot. “I put in my engineering transmog and there was room for one more, so I put in the rockhound …”

“Rockhound transmog! What the hell are you doing with a rockhound transmog?”

“Each of us,” Nicodemus said sedately, “was allowed to include one hobby transmog. For our own personal gratification. There were stamp transmogs and chess transmogs and a lot of others, but I thought a rockhound transmog …”

Horton pushed about the emeralds. “You say there are others?”

“I would suggest,” said Nicodemus, “that we have a fortune here. An emerald mine.”

Carnivore rumbled, “What do you mean, a fortune?”

“He is right,” said Horton. “This entire hill could be an emerald mine.”

“There pretty rocks have value?”

“Among my people, a great deal of value.”

“I never heard the like,” said Carnivore. “Mad to me it sounds.” He gestured with contempt at the emeralds. “Only pretty rocks, pleasing to the eye. But what to do with them?”

He rose slowly. “We go on,” he said.

“All right, we'll go on,” said Horton. He handed the emeralds to Nicodemus.

“But we should look around …”

“Later,” Horton said. “They'll still be here.”

“We'll need a survey, so that Earth …”

“Earth is no longer a consideration for any of us,” said Horton. “You and Ship made that clear. No matter what happens, no matter what we find, Ship's not going back.”

“You speak incomprehensible to me,” said Carnivore.

“Forgive us,” Horton told him. “It is a small private joke. Not worthy of explaining.”

They went on down the hill and across another valley, then up another hill. This time there were no rest pauses. The sun rose higher and dispelled some of the forest gloom. The day grew warm.

Carnivore slouched along at a ground-gaining pace which seemed easy for him, with Horton puffing along behind him and Nicodemus bringing up the rear. Watching him, Horton tried to make up his mind what kind of creature Carnivore might be. He was a slob, of course—there was no doubt of that—but a vicious, killing slob that could be dangerous. He seemed friendly enough with his continual chatter about his old friend Shakespeare, but he would bear watching. So far he had given no indication of other than bluff good humor. There was no question that the affection he held for the human, Shakespeare, had been anything but geniune, although his talk of eating Shakespeare still rankled. His nonrecognition of the value of emeralds was a puzzling factor. It seemed impossible that any culture should fail to recognize the value of gemstones, unless it were a culture which had no concept of adornment.

From the last hill they had climbed, they went down, not into a valley, but into a cuplike depression rimmed by hills. Carnivore stopped so suddenly that Horton, walking behind him, bumped into him.

“There it be,” said Carnivore, pointing. “You can see it from here. We almost are upon it.”

Horton looked where he was pointing. He could see nothing but the forest.

“That white thing?” asked Nicodemus.

“That is it,” said Carnivore, delighted. “That is it, the whiteness of it. I keep it clean and white, scrubbing off the tiny plants that essay to grow upon it, washing off the dust. Shakespeare called it Grecian. Can you tell me, sir or robot, what a Grecian is? I inquire of Shakespeare, but he only laugh and shake his head and say too long a story. I think at times he does not know himself. He only used a word he heard.”

“Grecian comes from a human folk called Greeks,” said Horton. “They achieved a greatness many centuries ago. A building built as they once built is called Grecian. It is a very general term. There are many factors to Grecian architecture.”

“Simply built,” said Carnivore. “Wall and roof and door. That is all it is. Good habitat to live in, though. Tight to wind and rain. Do you not see it yet?”

Horton shook his head. “Soon you will,” said Carnivore. “We be there very quickly.”

They went on down the slope and at the bottom of it, Carnivore stopped again. He pointed to a path. “That way to home,” he said. “That way, step or two, to spring. You want good drink of water?”

“I would,” said Horton. “That was a strenuous hike. Not too far, but all up and down.”

The spring gushed out of the hillside into a rock-rimmed pool, the water escaping from the pool to go trickling away in a tiny stream.

“You go ahead of me,” said Carnivore. “You are guest of mine. Shakespeare said guests all go first. I was guest of Shakespeare. He was here ahead of me.”

Horton knelt, and bracing his hands, lowered his head to drink. The water was so cold that it seemed to burn his throat. Sitting up, he squatted on his heels while Carnivore dropped to his four feet, lowered his head and drank—not really drinking, but lapping up the water as a cat would do.

For the first time, squatting there, Horton really saw and appreciated the somber beauty of the forest. The trees were thick and, even in the full sunlight, dark. While the trees were not conifers, the forest reminded him of the dark pine forests in the northlands of the Earth. Growing around the spring and extending up the slope down which they had come were clumps of shrubs, three feet or so in height, all blood-red in color. He could not recall that he had seen, anywhere, a single flower or blossom. He made a mental note to ask about that later.

Halfway up the path, Horton finally saw the building that Carnivore had attempted to point out to him. It stood upon a knoll in a small clearing. It did have a Grecian look about it, although he had no background on Grecian or any other type of architecture. Small and constructed of white stone, its lines were severe and simple, but somehow it seemed to have a boxlike appearance. There was no portico, no fanciness at all—just four walls, an unadorned door, and a gable, not too high, with very little pitch.

“Shakespeare lived there when I come,” said Carnivore. “I settled in with him. We spend happy time here. Planet is tail-end of nowhere, but happy comes inside you.”

They crossed the clearing and came up to the building, walking three abreast. When they were a few feet from it, Horton glanced up and saw something he had missed before, the bleached whiteness of it lost in the whiteness of the stone. He stopped dead in horror. Affixed above the door was a human skull, grinning down at them.

Carnivore saw him staring at it. “Shakespeare bids us welcome,” he said. “That is Shakespeare's skull.”

Staring in fascination and horror, Horton saw that Shakespeare had two missing front teeth.

“Hard it was to fasten Shakespeare up there,” Carnivore was saying. “Bad place to put him, for bone soon weather and be gone, but that was what he asked. Skull above the door, he told me, bones hung in sacks inside. I do it as he ask me, but it was sorrowful task. I do it with no liking, but a sense of duty and friendship.”

“Shakespeare asked you to do this?”

“Yes, of course. You think I did it on my own?”

“I don't know what to think.”

“Way of death,” he said. “Eat him even as he dies. Priestly function, he explained. I do it as he say. I promise not to gag, and I do not gag. I harden me and eat him, bad as he might taste, down to last scrap of gristle. I polish off his bones meticulously until none but bone remain. More than I want to eat. Belly full to bursting, but I keep on eating, never stopping until he all is gone. I do it right and proper. I do it with all holiness. I do not shame my friend. I was only friend he had.”

“It could be,” said Nicodemus. “The human race can come up with some peculiar notions. One friend ingesting another friend as a gesture of respect. Among prehistoric people, there was ritual cannibalism—doing a true friend or a great man a special honor by the eating of him.”

“But what was prehistoric,” Horton objected. “I never heard of a modern race …”

“A thousand years,” said Nicodemus, “since we were upon the Earth. Plenty of time for the development of very strange beliefs. Maybe those prehistoric people knew something that we didn't. Maybe there was a logic to ritualistic cannibalism, and that logic was rediscovered in the last thousand years or so. Twisted logic, probably, but with appealing factors.”

“You say,” Carnivore asked, “that your race do not do this? I do not understand.”

“A thousand years ago they didn't, but perhaps they do it now.”

“Thousand years ago?”

“We left Earth a thousand years ago. Perhaps a great deal more than a thousand years ago. We do not know the mathematics of time dilation. It could be a lot more than a thousand years.”

“But no human lives a thousand years.”

“True, but I was in cold-sleep. My body was frozen.”

“Frozen and you die.”

“Not the way we did it. Someday I'll explain.”

“You think not ill of me for the eating of the Shakespeare?”

“No, of course we don't,” said Nicodemus.

“That is well,” said Carnivore, “for if you did you would not take me with you when you leave. Dearest wish I have is to get off this planet as soon as possible.”

“We may be able to fix the tunnel,” said Nicodemus. “If we are able to, you can leave by tunnel.”

10

The tunnel was a ten-foot square of mirrored blackness set into the face of a small dome of rock which thrust itself upward out of the underlying rock a short distance down the hill from the Grecian building. Between the building and the dome of rock ran a path worn down to rock and even, it seemed, worn into the very rock. There had been, at some time in the past, heavy traffic there.

Carnivore gestured at the mirrored blackness. “When it is working,” he said, “it is not black, but shiny white. You walk into it, and on second step somewhere else you are. Now you walk into it and it shove you back. You cannot approach it. There is nothing there, but the nothing shove you back.”

“But when it takes you somewhere,” asked Horton, “when it's working, I mean, and will take you somewhere, how do you know where it is about to take you?”

“You don't,” said Carnivore. “At one time, maybe, you say where you want to go, but not now. That machinery over there,” he waved his arm, “that panel set beside the tunnel—it is possible, at one time, with it you could select your destination, but no one knows now how it operates. But it makes small difference, really. If you do not like the place you get to, you step back into it again and go otherwhere. You always, after many times, perhaps, find some place that you like. For me, I'd be happy to go anywhere from here.”

“That doesn't sound quite right,” said Nicodemus.

“Of course it's not,” said Horton. “The entire system must be out of kilter. No one in their right mind would build a nonselective transportation system. This way it could take you centuries to reach your destination—if you ever reached it.”

“Very good,” said Carnivore, placidly, “for being on the dodge. No one—not even self—knows where you will wind up. Maybe if pursuer sees you ducking into tunnel and ducks in after you, it may not take him to same place as you.”

“You know this, or are you just guessing?”

“Guessing, I suppose. How is one to know?”

“The entire system's haywire,” said Nicodemus, “if it works at random. You do not travel in it. You play a game with it, and the tunnel always wins.”

“But this one takes you nowhere,” wailed Carnivore. “I'm not picky where I go—anywhere but here. My fervent hope is that you can fix it so it takes me anywhere.”