Shakespeare’s Planet
Copyright © 1976 Clifford D. Simak
1
THERE were three of them, although sometimes there was only one of them. When that came about, less often than it should, the one was not aware there ever had been three, for the one was a strange melding of their personalities, When they became as one, the transformation was something more than a simple addition of the three, as if by this pooling of themselves there had been added a new dimension which made the sum of them greater than the whole. It was only when the three were one, a one unconscious of the three, that the melding of three brains and of three personalities approached the purpose of their being.
They were the Ship and the Ship was them. To become the Ship or to attempt to become the Ship, they had sacrificed their bodies and, perhaps, a great deal of their humanity. Sacrificed, perhaps their souls as well, although that was something no one, least of all themselves, ever agreed on. This disagreement, it should be noted, stood quite apart from any belief or disbelief that they might have souls.
They were in space, as was the Ship, and this was understandable since they were the Ship. Naked to the loneliness and emptiness of space as the Ship was naked. Naked at once to the concept of space, which is not understood in its entirety, and to the concept of time, which is, in the final accounting, less understandable than space. And naked, too, they finally found, to those attributes of space and time, infinity and eternity; two concepts that stand beyond the capability of any intelligence.
As the centuries went on, they were collectively convinced they would become, in all truth, the Ship and nothing but the Ship, sloughing off all they had ever been before. But they had not reached that point yet. Humanity still persisted; memory still hung on. They still, at times, felt the old identities, perhaps with some of the sharpness dulled, with the pride less bright; because of the nagging doubt that they had been quite as noble in their sacrifices as they, at one time, had been able to convince themselves. For it finally came to them, although not to all of them at once, but one by one, that they had been guilty of semantic shuffling, using the term sacrifice to becloud and camouflage their basic selfishness. One by one, it came to them in those tiny intervals when they were truly honest with them selves, that the nagging doubts which hounded them might be more important than the pride.
At other times, old triumphs and regrets came surging out of time long gone and alone, not sharing with the others, each fondled the old triumphs and regrets, obtaining from them a satisfaction they would not admit, even to themselves. On occasion they stood aside from one another and talked to one another. This was a most shameful thing and they knew that it was shameful, delaying the time when they could finally sink their own identities into the one identity that came about through the consolidation of their three identities. In their more honest moments they realized that in doing this they were instinctively shying away from that final loss of personal identity which is the one outstanding terror all sentient life associates with death.
Usually, however, and increasingly as time went on, they were the Ship, and the Ship alone, and in this there was a satisfaction and a pride, and at times a certain holiness. The holiness was a quality that could not be defined In words or delineated in a thought, for it was outside and beyond any sensation or accomplishment that the creature known as man could have conjured up even in the utmost exercise of his not inconsiderable imagination, It was, in a way, a sense of minor brotherhood with both time and space, the sense of being one, strangely identified, with the spacetime concept, that hypothetical condition which is the basic pattern of the universe. Under this condition they were kin to the stars and neighbor of the galaxies, while the emptiness and loneliness, although never losing frightfulness, became familiar ground.
In the best of times, when they most nearly came to their final purpose, the Ship faded from their consciousness and they alone, the consolidated one of them alone, moved across and through and over the loneliness and emptiness, no longer naked, but a native of the universe that was now their country.
2
SHAKESPEARE said to Carnivore, “The time is nearly come. Life fades rapidly; I can feel it go. You must be ready. Your fangs must pierce the flesh in that small moment before death. You must not kill me, but eat me even as I die. And you remember, surely, all the rest of it. You do not forget all that 1 have told you. You must be the surrogate of my own people since none of them is here. As best friend, as only friend, you must not shame me as I depart from life.”
Carnivore crouched and shivered. “It is not something that I asked,” he said. “It is not something that I would elect to do. It is not my way to kill the old or dying. My prey must be always full of life and strength. But as one life to another, as one intelligence to another, I cannot refuse you. You say it is a holy thing, that I perform a priestly office and this is something from which one must never shrink, although every instinct in me cries out against the eating of a friend.”
“I hope,” said Shakespeare, “that my flesh be
not too tough nor the flavor strong. I hope the ingestion of it
does not make you gag.”
“I shall not gag,” promised Carnivore. “I shall be strong against
it. I shall perform most truly. I shall do everything you ask. I
shall follow all instructions. You may die in peace and dignity,
knowing that your last and truest friend will carry out the offices
of death. Although you will permit me the observation that this is
the strangest and the most obnoxious ceremony I have ever heard of
in a long and misspent life.”
Shakespeare chuckled weakly. “I will allow you that,” he said.
3
CARTER HORTON came alive. He was, it
seemed, at the bottom of a well. The well was filled with fuzzy
darkness
and, in sudden fright and anger, he tried to free himself of the
fuzz and darkness and climb out
of the well. But the darkness wrapped itself about him, and the fuzziness made it difficult to move. After a time he lay quiet. His mind clicked hesitantly as he sought to know where he was and how he might have gotten there, but there was nothing to give him any answers. He had. no memories at all. Lying quietly, he was surprised to find that he was comfortable and warm, as if he had been always there, comfortable and warm, and only aware now of the comfort and the warmth.
But through the comfort and the warmth, he felt a frantic urgency and wondered why. It was quite enough, he told himself, to continue as he was, but something in him shouted that it was not enough. He tried again to climb out of the well, to shake off the fuzziness and darkness, and failing, fell back exhausted.
Too weak, he told himself, and why should he
be weak?
He tried to shout to attract attention, but his voice would not
work. Suddenly he was glad it didn’t, for until he was stronger, he
told himself, it might be unwise to attract attention. For he did
not know where he was or what or who might be lurking near, nor
with what intent.
He settled back into the darkness and the fuzziness, confident that
it would conceal him from whatever might be there, and was a bit
amused to find he felt a slow, seeping anger at being forced thus
to huddle against attention.
Slowly the fuzziness and the darkness went away, and he was
surprised to find that he was not in any well. Rather, he seemed to
be in a small space that he now could see.
Metal walls went up on either side of him and curved, only a foot
or so above his head, to form a ceiling. Funny-looking gadgets were
retracted into slots in the ceiling just above his head. At the
sight of them, memory began seeping back, and carried by that
memory was a sense of cold, Thinking about it, he could not recall
an actual coldness, although the sense of cold was there. As the
memory of the cold reached out to touch him, he felt a surge of
apprehension.
Hidden fans were blowing warm air over him, and he then understood
the warmth. He was comfortable, he realized, because he was lying
on a soft, thick pad placed upon the floor of the cubicle. Cubicle,
he thought—even the words, the terminology, were beginning to come
back. The funny-looking gadgets stored in the ceiling slots were
part of the life-support system, and they were there, he knew,
because he didn’t need them any more. The reason he didn’t need
them any more, he realized, was that Ship had landed.
Ship had landed and he had been awakened from his cold-sleep—his
body thawed, the recovery drugs shot into his bloodstream,
carefully measured doses of high-energy nutrients fed slowly into
him, massaged and warmed and alive once more. Alive, if he had been
dead. Remembering, he recalled the endless discussions over this
very question, mulling over it, chewing it, lacerating it,
shredding it to pieces and then trying to put the pieces
meticulously back together. They called it cold-sleep, sure—they
would call it that, for it had a soft
and easy sound. But was it sleep or death? Did one go to sleep and
wake? Or did one die and come to resurrection?
It didn’t really matter now, he thought. Dead or sleeping, he was
now alive. I be damned, he told himself, the system really
worked—realizing for the first time that he had held some doubt of
it really working despite all the experiments that had been carried
out with mice and dogs and monkeys. Although, he remembered, he had
never spoken of the doubts, concealing them not only from the
others, but from himself as well.
And if he were here alive, so would the others be. In just a few
more minutes he’d crawl Out of the cubicle and the others would be
there, the four of them reunited. It seemed only yesterday that
they had been together—as if they’d spent the evening in one
another’s company and now, after a short night’s sleep, had
awakened from a dreamless night. Although he knew it would be much
longer than that—as much as a century, perhaps.
He twisted his head to one side and saw the hatch, with the port of
heavy glass set into it. Through the glass he could see into the
tiny room, with the four lockers ranged against the wall. There was
no one about—which meant, he told himself, the others were still in
their cubicles. He considered shouting to them, but thought better
of it. It would be unseemly, he thought—too exuberant and somewhat
juvenile.
He reached out a hand to the latch and pulled down on it. it
operated stiffly, but finally he got it down and the hatch swung
out. He jackknifed his legs to thrust them through the hatch and
had trouble doing it, for there was little room. But finally he got
them through, and twisting his body, slid carefully to the floor.
The floor was icy to his feet, and the metal of the cubicle was
cold,
Stepping quickly to the adjacent cubicle, he peered through the
glass of the hatch and saw that it was empty, with the
life-supports retracted into the ceiling slots. The other two
cubicles were empty as well. He stood transfixed with horror. The
other three, revived, would not have left him. They would have
waited for him so they all could go out together. They would have
done this, he was convinced, unless something unforeseen had
happened. And what could have, happened?
Helen would have waited for him, he was sure of that. Mary and Tom
might have left, but Helen would have waited.
Fearfully, he lunged at the locker that had his name upon it. He
had to jerk hard on the handle once he had turned it to get the
locker open. The vacuum inside the locker resisted, and when the
door came open, it opened with a pop. Clothing hung upon the racks
and footwear was ranged neatly in a row. He grabbed a pair of
trousers and climbed into them, forced his feet into a pair of
boots. When he opened the door of the suspension room, he saw that
the lounge was empty and the ship’s main port stood open. He raced
across the lounge to the open port.
The ramp ran down to a grassy plain that swept off to the left. To
the right, rugged hills sprang up from the plain and beyond the
hills a mighty mountain range, deep blue with distance, reared into
the sky. The plain was empty except for the grass, which billowed
like an ocean as wind gusts swept across it. The hills were covered
with trees, the foliage of which was black and red. The air had a
sharp, fresh tang to it. There was no one in sight.
He went halfway down the ramp and still no one was in sight. The
planet was an emptiness and the emptiness seemed to be reaching out
for him. He started to cry out to ask if anyone were there, but
fear and the emptiness dried up the words and he could not get them
out. He shivered in the realization that something had gone wrong.
This was not the way it should be.
Turning, he went clumping up the ramp and through the
lock.
“Ship!” he yelled. “Ship, what the hell is going on?”
Ship said, calmly, unconcernedly, inside his mind, What’s the problem, Mr. Horton?
“What’s going on?” yelled Horton, more angry now than frightened,
angered by the supercilious calmness of this great monster, Ship.
“Where are all the others?”
Mr. Horton, said Ship, there aren’t any others.
“What do you mean there aren’t any others? Back on Earth there was
a team of us.”
You are the only one, said
Ship.
“What happened to the others?”
They are dead, said Ship.
“Dead? How do you mean, dead? They were with me just the other
day!”
They were with you, said Ship,
a thousand years ago.
“You’re insane. A thousand years!”
That’s the span of time, said Ship,
speaking still inside his mind, we have been
gone from Earth.
Horton heard a sound behind him and spun about. A robot had come
through the port.
“I am Nicodemus,” said the robot.
He was an ordinary robot, a household service robot, the kind that
back on Earth would be a butler or a valet, or a cook or errand
boy. There was no mechanical sophistication about him; he was just
a sloppy, flat-footed piece of junk.
You need not, said Ship, be so disdainful of him. You will find him, we are sure,
to be quite efficient.
“Back on Earth…”
Back on Earth, said Ship, you trained with a mechanical marvel that had far too much
that could go wrong with it. Such a contraption could not be sent
out on a long-haul expedition. There would be too much chance of it
breaking down. But with Nicodemus there is nothing to go wrong.
Because of his simplicity he has high survival
value.
“I am sorry,” Nicodemus said to Horton, “that I was not present
when you woke. I had gone out for a quick scout around. I had
thought there was plenty of time to get back to you. Apparently,
the recovery and reorientation drugs worked much more swiftly than
I’d thought. It usually takes a fair amount of time for recovery
from cold-sleep. Especially cold-sleep of such long duration. How
are you feeling now?”
“Confused,” said Horton. “Completely confused. Ship tells me I am
the only human left, implying that the others died.” And he said
something about a thousand years. .
To be exact, said Ship, nine hundred fifty-four years, eight months and nineteen
days.
“This planet,” said Nicodemus, “is a very lovely one. In many ways
like Earth. Slightly more oxygen, a bit less gravity. .
.“
“All right,” said Horton, sharply, “after all these years we are
finally landed on a very lovely planet. What happened to all the
other lovely planets? In almost a thousand years, moving close to
the speed of light, there must have been. .
“Very many planets,” Nicodemus said, “but none of them lovely.
Nothing a human could exist upon. Young planets, with the crusts
unformed, with fields of bubbling magma and great volcanoes, vast
pools of molten lava, the sky seething with boiling clouds of dust
and poisonous vapors and as yet no water and little oxygen. Old
planets slipping down to death, the oceans dry, the atmosphere
thinned out, without sign of life upon them—life, if it ever had
existed, now wiped out. Massive gas planets rolling along their
orbits like great striped marbles. Planets too close to their suns,
scoured by solar radiation. Planets too far from their suns, with
glaciers of frozen oxygen, seas of slushy hydrogen. Other planets
that somehow had gone wrong, clothed in atmosphere deadly to all
life. And a few, a very few, too, lusty with life—jungle planets
occupied by ravening life-forms so hungry and ferocious that it
would have been suicidal to set foot upon them. Desert planets
where life had never started—barren rock, with no soil ever formed,
with very little water, the oxygen locked in eroding rock. We
orbited some of the planets that we found; we merely glanced at
others. A few we landed on. Ship has all the data if you want a
printout.”
“But now we’ve found one planet. What do we do now— look it over
and go back?”
No, said Ship, we
can’t go back.
“But this is what we came out for. We and the other ships, all of
them hunting planets the human race could colonize.”
We’ve been out too long, said Ship.
We simply can’t go back. We’ve been out almost
a thousand years. If we started back right now, it would take
almost another thousand years. Perhaps a little less, for we’d not
be slowing down to have a look at planets, but still not too far
from two thousand years from the time we left. Perhaps a great deal
longer, for time dilation would be a factor, and we have no
reliable data on dilation. By now we’ve probably been forgotten.
There would have been records, but more than likely they now are
lost or forgotten or misplaced. By the time we got back, we’d be so
outdated that the human race would have no use for us. We and you
and Nicodemus. We’d be an embarrassment to them, reminding them of
their bumbling attempts of centuries before. Nicodemus and we would
be technologically obsolescent. You’d be obsolescent as well, but
in another way—a barbarian come from the past to haunt them. You’d
be outdated socially, ethically, politically. You’d be, by their
standards, a possibly vicious moron.
“Look,” protested Horton, “there is no sense in what you say. There
were other ships. .
Perhaps some of them found suitable
planets, said Ship, shortly after they
had left. In such cases they could safely have returned to
Earth.
“But you went on and on.”
Ship said, We performed our
mandate.
“You mean, you hunted planets.”
We hunted for one particular planet. The kind
of planet where man could live.
“And took almost a thousand years to find it.”
There was no time limit on the search,
said Ship.
“I suppose not,” said Horton, “although it was something we never
thought about. There were a lot of things we never thought about. A
lot of things, I suppose, we were never told. Then tell me this:
Suppose you’d not found this planet. What would you have
done?”
We’d have kept on searching.
“A million years, perhaps?” If need be, a
million years, said Ship.
“And now, having found it, we cannot go back.”
That is correct, said Ship.
“So what’s the good of finding it?” asked Horton. “We find it, and
Earth will never know we found it. The truth of the matter is, I
think, that you have no interest in returning. There is nothing
back there for you.”
Ship made no answer.
“Tell me,” Horton cried. “Admit it.” Nicodemus said, “You’ll get no
answer now. Ship stands on silent dignity. You have offended
it.”
“To hell with Ship,” said Horton. “I’ve heard enough from them. I
want some answers from you. Ship said the other three are dead . .
.“
“There was a malfunction,” said Nicodemus. “About a hundred years
out. One of the pumps ceased functioning, and the cubicles heated
up. I managed to save you.”
“Why me? Why not one of the others?”
“It was very simple,” said Nicodemus, reasonably. “You were number
one on line. You were in cubicle number one.”
“If I had been in cubicle number two, you would have let me
die.”
“I let no one die. I was able to save one sleeper. Having done
that, it was too late for the others.” “You did it by the
numbers?”
“Yes,” said Nicodemus, “I did it by the numbers. Is there a better
way?”
“No,” said Horton. “No, I guess there’s not. But when three of us
were dead, was there no thought of aborting the mission and going
back to Earth?”
“There was no thought of it.”
“Who made the decision? I imagine Ship.”
“There was no decision. Neither of us ever mentioned it.” It had
all gone wrong, thought Horton. If someone had sat down and worked
at it, with wholehearted concentration and a devotion that fringed
on fanaticism, they couldn’t have done a better job of screwing it
all up.
A ship, one man, one flat-footed stupid robot—Christ, what an
expedition! And, furthermore, a pointless one-way expedition. We
might just as well not have started out, he thought. Except that if
they hadn’t started out, he reminded himself, he’d now be dead for
many centuries.
He tried to remember the others, but could not remember them. He
could see them only dimly, as if he were seeing them through fog.
They were indistinct and blurred. He tried to make out their faces
and they seemed to have no faces. Later on, he knew, he’d mourn
them, but he could not mourn them now. There was not enough of them
to mourn. There was no time now for mourning them; there was too
much to do and to think about. A thousand years, he thought, and we
won’t be going back. For Ship was the only one that could take them
back, and if Ship said it wasn’t going back, that was the end of
it.
“The other three?” he asked. “Burial in space?”
“No,” said Nicodemus. “We found a planet where they’ll rest through
all eternity. Do you want to know?”
“If you please,” said Horton.
4
FROM the platform of the high plateau where Ship had landed, the planetary surface stretched out to distant, sharp horizons, a land with great blue glaciers of frozen hydrogen creeping down the slopes of black and barren rock. The planet’s sun was so distant that it seemed only a slightly larger, brighter star—a star so dimmed by distance and by dying that it did not have a name or number. On the charts of Earth there was not even a pinprick marking its location. Its feeble light never had been registered on a photographic plate by a terrestrial telescope.
Ship, asked
Nicodemus, is this all that we can
do?
Ship said, We can do no
further.
It seems cruel to leave them here, in this
place of desolation.
We sought a place of solitude for them,
said Ship, a place of dignity and aloneness,
where
nothing will find them and disturb them for study or display. We owe them this much, robot, but when this is done, it is all that we can give them.
Nicodemus stood beside the triple casket, trying to fix the place forever in his mind, although, as he looked out across the planet, he realized there was little he could fix. There was a deadly sameness here; wherever one might look at it all seemed to look the same. Perhaps, he thought, it is just as well—they can lie here in their anonymity, masked by the unknownness of their final resting place.
There was no sky. Where there should have been a sky was only the black nakedness of space, lighted by a heavy sprinkle of unfamiliar stars. When he and Ship were gone, he thought, for millennia these steely and unblinking stars would be eyes staring down at the three who lay within the casket—not guarding them, but watching them—staring with the frosty glare of ancient, moldering aristocrats regarding, with frigid disaproval, intruders from beyond the pale of their social circle. But the disapproval would not matter, Nicodemus told himself, for there now was nothing that could harm them. They were beyond all harm or help.
He should say a prayer for them, he thought, although he’d never said a prayer before nor ever thought of praying. He suspected, however, that prayer by such as he might not be acceptable, either to the humans lying there or whatever deity might bend his ear to hear it. But it was a gesture—a slender and uncertain hope that somewhere there might still be an agency of intercession.
And if he did pray, what could he say? Lord,
we leave these creatures in your care— And once he had said that?
Once he had made a good beginning?
You might lecture him, said Ship.
You might impress upon him the importance of
these creatures with whom you are concerned. Or you might plead and
argue for them, who need no pleading and are beyond all
argument.
You mock me, said Nicodemus.
We do not mock, said Ship. We are beyond all mockery.
I should say some words, said
Nicodemus. They would expect it of me. Earth
would expect it of me. You were human once. I would think there’d
be, on an occasion such as this, some humanity in
you.
We grieve, said Ship. We weep. We feel a sadness in us. But we grieve at death,
not at the leaving of the dead in such a place. It matters not to
them wherever we may leave them.
Something should be said, Nicodemus insisted to himself. Something
solemnly formal, some intonation of studied ritual, all spoken well
and properly, for they’ll be here forever, the dust of Earth
transplanted. Despite all our logic in seeking out a loneliness for
them, we should not leave them here. We should have sought a green
and pleasant planet…
There are, said Ship, no green and pleasant planets.
Since I can find no proper words to
say, said the robot to the Ship, do you
mind if I stay awhile? We should at least do them the courtesy of
not hurrying away.
Stay, said Ship. We have all eternity.
“And do you know,” Nicodemus said to Horton, “I never did get
around to saying, anything.”
Ship spoke. We have a visitor. He came out of
the hills and is waiting just beyond the ramp. You should go out to
meet him. But be alert and cautious and strap on your sidearms. He
appears an ugly customer.
5
THE visitor had halted some twenty feet beyond the end of the ramp and was waiting for them when Horton and Nicodemus came out to meet him. He was human-tall and stood upon two legs. His arms, hanging limply at his side, did not end in hands, but in a nest of tentacles. He wore no clothing. His body was covered by a skimpy, molting coat of fur. That he was a male was aggressively apparent. His head appeared to be a bare skull. It was innocent of hair or fur, and the skin was tightly stretched over the structure of the bones. The jaws were heavy and elongated into a massive snout. Stabbing teeth, set in the upper jaw, protruded downward, somewhat like the fangs of the primitive saber-tooth of ancient Earth. Long, pointed ears, pasted against the skull, stood rigid, overtopping the bald, domed cranium. Each of the ears was tipped with a bright red tassle.
As they reached the bottom of the ramp, the
creature spoke to them in a booming voice. “I welcome you,” he
said, “to this asshole of a planet.”
“How the hell,” blurted Horton, startled, “do you know our
language?”
“I learned it all from Shakespeare,” said the creature.
“Shakespeare taught it to me. But Shakespeare now is dead, and I
miss him greatly. I am desolate without him.”
“But Shakespeare is a very ancient man and I do not understand
…”
“Not an ancient one at all,” the creature said, “although not
really young, and he had a sickness in him. He described himself as
human. He looked very much like you. I take it you are human, too,
but the other is not human, although it has human
aspects.”
“You are right,” said Nicodemus. “I am not a human. I am the next
best thing to human. I am a human’s friend.”
“Then that is fine,” said the creature, happily. “That is fine
indeed. For I was that to Shakespeare. The best friend he ever had,
he said. I surely miss the Shakespeare. I admire him very greatly.
He could do many things. One thing he could not do was to learn my
language. So perforce I must learn his. He told me about great
carriers that go noisily through space. So when I hear you coming,
I hurry very fast, hoping that it be some of Shakespeare’s people
coming.”
Horton said to Nicodemus. “There is something very wrong here. Man
could not be this far out in space. Ship fooled around, of course,
slowing down for planets and it took a lot of time. But we’re close
to a thousand light-years out...”
“Earth by now,” said Nicodemus, “may have faster ships, going many
times the speed of light. Many of such ships may have overleaped us
as we crawled along. So, peculiar as it may seem…”
“You talk of ships,” the creature said. “Shakespeare talk of them
as well but he need no ship. Shakespeare come by tunnel.”
“Now, look here,” said Horton, a trifle exasperated, “try to talk
some sense. What is this tunnel business?”
“You mean you do not know of tunnel that runs among the
stars?”
“I’ve never heard of it,” said Horton.
“Let’s back up,” said Nicodemus, “and try to get another start. I
take it you are a native of this planet.”
“Native?”
“Yes, native. You belong here. This is your home planet. You were
born here.”
“Never,” said the creature, most emphatically. “I would not urinate
upon this planet could I avoid it. I would not stay a small
time-unit could I get away. I came hurriedly to bargain outward
passage with you when you leave.”
“You came as Shakespeare did? By tunnel?”
“Of course, by tunnel. How otherwise I get here?”
“Then leaving should be simple. Go to the tunnel and depart by
it.”
“I cannot,” the creature wailed. “The damn tunnel does not work. It
has gone the haywire. It works only one way. It brings you here,
but does not take you back.”
“But you said a tunnel to the stars. I gained the impression it
goes to many stars.”
“To more than the mind can count, but here it need repair.
Shakespeare try and I try, but we cannot fix it.
Shakespeare pound upon it with his fists, he kick it with his feet,
he yell at it, calling terrible names. Still it does not
work.”
“If you are not of this planet,” said Horton, “perhaps you’ll tell
us what you are.”
“That is simply said. I am a carnivore. You know
carnivore?”
“Yes. The eater of other forms of life.”
“I am a carnivore,” the creature said, “and satisfied to be one.
Proud of being one. There be among the stars those who look with
disdain and horror upon carnivore. They say, mistakenly, it is not
right to eat one’s fellow beings. They say it be cruel to do so,
but I tell you there is no cruelty. Quick death. Clean death. No
suffering at all. Better than sickness and old age.”
“All right, then” said Nicodemus. “No need to carry on. We hold
nothing against a carnivore.”
“Shakespeare say humans also carnivores. But not as much as me.
Shakespeare shared the meat I killed. Would have killed himself,
but not as good as me. I glad to kill for Shakespeare.”
“I bet you were,” said Horton.
“You are alone here?” asked Nicodemus. “You are the only one of
your kind upon the planet?”
“The only one,” said Carnivore. “I arrive on sneaky trip. I tell no
one of it.”
“This Shakespeare of yours,” said Horton. “He was on a sneaky trip
as well?”
“There were unprincipled creatures who would have liked to find
him, claiming he had done them imaginary harm. He had no wish for
them to find him.”
“But Shakespeare now is dead?”
“Oh, he’s dead, all right. I ate him.”
“You what?”
“The flesh only,” said Carnivore. “Careful not to eat the bones.
And I don’t mind telling you he was tough and stringy and not of a
flavor that I relished. He had a strange taste to him.”
Nicodemus spoke hastily to change the subject. “We would be glad,”
he said, “to come to the tunnel with you and see about the fixing
of it.”
“Would you, in all friendship, do that?” Carnivore asked
gratefully. “I was hoping that you would. You can fix the goddamn
tunnel?”
“I don’t know,” said Horton. “We can have a look at it. I’m not an
engineer…”
“I,” said Nicodemus, “can become an engineer.”
“The hell you can,” said Horton.
“We will have a look at it,” said this madman of a robot, “Then it
is all settled?”
“You can count on it,” said Nicodemus.
“That is good,” said Carnivore. “I show you ancient city
and...”
“There is an ancient city?”
“I speak too hugely,” said Carnivore. “I let my enthusiasm at the
fixing of the tunnel to run off with me. Perhaps not an actual
city. Perhaps an outpost only. Very old and very ruined, but
interesting, perhaps. But now I must be going. The star is riding
low. Best to be undercover when darkness is come upon this place. I
am glad to meet you. Glad Shakespeare’s people come. Hail and
farewell!! I see you in the morning and the tunnel
fixed.”
He turned abruptly and trotted swiftly into the hills, without
pausing to look back.
Nicodemus shook his head. “There are many mysteries here,” he said.
“Much to ponder on. Many questions to be asked. But first I must
get dinner for you. You’ve been out of cold-sleep long enough for
it to be safe to eat. Good, substantial food, but not too much at
first. You must curb your greediness. You must take it
slow.”
“Now just a goddamn minute,” Horton said. “You have some explaining
to be done. Why did you head me off when you knew I wanted to ask
about the eating of this Shakespeare, whoever he might be? What do
you mean, you can become an engineer? You know damn well you
can’t.”
“All in good time,” said Nicodemus. “There is, as you say,
explaining to be done. But first you must eat, and the sun is
almost set. You heard what the creature said about being undercover
when the sun is gone.”
Horton snorted. “Superstition. Old wives’ tales.”
“Old wives’ tales or not,” said Nicodemus, “it is best to be ruled
by local custom until one is sure.”
Looking out across the sea of billowing grass, Horton saw that the
level horizon had bisected the sun. The sweep of grass seemed to be
a sheet of shimmering gold. As he watched, the sun sank deeper into
the golden shimmer and as it sank, the western sky changed to a
sickly lemon-yellow.
“Strange light effect,” he said.
“Come on, let’s get back aboard,” urged Nicodemus. “What do you
want to eat? Vichyssoise, perhaps—how does that sound to you? Prime
ribs, a baked potato?”
“You set a good table,” Horton told him.
“I am an accomplished chef,” the robot said.
“Is there anything you aren’t? Engineer and cook. What
else?”
“Oh, many things,” said Nicodemus. “I can do many
things.”
The sun was gone and a purple haze seemed to be sifting down out of
the sky. The haze hung over the yellow of the grass, which now had
changed to the color of old, polished brass. The horizon was
jet-black except for a glow of greenish light, the color of young
leaves, where the sun had set.
“It is,” said Nicodemus, watching, “most pleasing to the
eye.”
The color was fading rapidly, and as it faded, a chill crept across
the land. Horton turned to go up the ramp. As he turned, something
swooped down upon him, seizing him and holding him. Not really
seizing him, for there was nothing there to seize him, but a force
that fastened on him and engulfed him so he could not move. He
tried to fight against it, but he could not move a muscle. He
attempted to cry out, but his throat and tongue were frozen.
Suddenly he was naked—or felt that he was naked, not so much
deprived of clothes as of all defenses, laid open so that the
deepest corner of his being was exposed .for all to see. There was
a sense of being watched, of being examined, probed, and analyzed.
Stripped and flayed and laid open so that the watcher could dig
down to his last desire and his final hope. It was, said a fleeting
thought inside his mind, as if God had come and was assessing him,
perhaps passing judgment on him.
He wanted to run and hide, to jerk the flayed skin back around his
body and to hold it there, covering the gaping, spread-eagled thing
that he had become, hiding himself again behind the tattered shreds
of his humanity. But he couldn’t run and there was no place to
hide, so he continued, standing rigid, being watched.
There was nothing there. Nothing had appeared. But something had
seized and held and stripped him, and he tried to drive out his
mind to see it, to learn what kind of thing it was. And as he tried
to do this, it seemed his skull cracked open and his mind was
freed, protruding and opening out so that it could encompass what
no man had ever understood before. In a moment of blind panic, his
mind seemed to expand to fill the universe, clutching with nimble
mental fingers at everything within the confines of frozen space
and flowing time and for an instant, but only an instant, he
imagined that he saw deep into the core of the ultimate meaning
hidden in the farthest reaches of the universe.
Then his mind collapsed and his skull snapped back together, the
thing let loose of him and, staggering, he reached out to grasp the
railing of the ramp to hold himself erect.
Nicodemus was beside him, supporting him, and his anxious voice
asked, “What is the matter, Carter? What came over you?”
Horton grasped the railing in a death grip, as if it were the one
reality left to him. His body ached with tension, but his mind
still retained some of its unnatural sharpness, although he could
feel the sharpness fading. Helped by Nicodemus, he straightened. He
shook his head and blinked his eyes, clearing his vision. The
colors out on the sea of grass had changed. The purple haze had
faded into a deep twilight. The brassiness of the grass had
smoothed into a leaden hue, and the sky was black. As he watched,
the first bright star came out.
“What is the matter, Carter?” the robot asked again.
“You mean you didn’t feel it?”
“Something,” said Nicodemus. “Something frightening. It struck me
and slid off. Not my body, but my mind. As if someone had used a
mental fist and had missed the blow, merely brushing against my
mind.”
6
THE brain-that-once-had-been-a-monk was frightened, and the fright brought honesty. Confessional honesty, he thought, although never in the confessional had he ever been as honest as he was being now.
What was that?
asked the grande dame. What was that we
felt?
It was the hand of God, he told her,
brushed against our brow.
That’s ridiculous, said the scientist.
That is a conclusion reached without adequate
data or
conscientious
observation.
What then, asked the grande dame,
do you make of it?
I make nothing of it, said the
scientist. I note it; that is all. A
manifestation of some sort. From far
out in space, perhaps. Not a product of this planet. I have the distinct impression that it was not of local origin. But until we have more data, we must make no attempt to characterize it.
That’s the sheerest
twaddle I have ever heard, said the grande dame.
Our colleague, the priest, did
better.
Not a priest, said the monk.
I have told you and told you. A monk. A mere
monk. A very piss-poor monk.
And that was what he’d been, he told himself, continuing with his
honest self-assessment. He never had been more. A less-than-nothing
monk who had been afraid of death. Not the holy man that he had
been acclaimed, but a sniveling, shivering coward who was afraid to
die, and no man who was afraid of death ever could be holy. To the
truly holy, death must be a promise of a new beginning, and,
thinking back, he knew he never had been able to conceive of it as
anything but an end and nothingness.
For the first time, thinking thus, he was able to admit what he
never had been able to admit before, or honest enough to admit
before—that he had seized the opportunity to become the servant of
science to escape the fear of death. Although he knew he had
purchased only a deferment of his death, for even as the Ship, he
could not escape it altogether. Or at least could not be certain
he’d escape it altogether, for there was the chance—the very
slightest chance—which the scientist and the grande dame had
discussed centuries ago, with himself staying strictly out of the
discussion, afraid to enter it, that as the millennia went on, if
they survived that long, the three of them possibly could become
pure mind alone. And if that should prove to be the case, he
thought, then they could become, in the strictest sense, immortal
and eternal. But if this did not happen, they still must face the
fact of death, for the spaceship could not last forever. In time it
would become, for one reason or another, a shattered, worn-out hulk
adrift between the stars, and in time no more than dust in the
cosmic wind. But that would not be for a long time yet, he told
himself, grasping at the hope. The Ship, with any luck, might
survive millions of years, and that might give the three of them
the time they needed to become pure mind alone—if, in fact, it was
possible to become pure mind alone.
Why this overriding fear of death, he
asked himself. Why this cringing from it, not
as an ordinary man would cringe, but as someone who was obsessed
with a repugnance against the very thought of it? Was it, perhaps,
because he’d lost his faith in God, or perhaps, which was even
worse, had never achieved a faith in God? And if that were the
case, why had he become a monk?
Having got a start with honesty, he gave himself an honest answer.
He had chosen monking as an occupation (not a calling, but an
occupation) because he feared not only death, but even life itself,
thinking that it might be easy work which would provide him shelter
against the world he feared.
In one thing, however, he had been mistaken. Monking had not proved
an easy life, but by the time he’d found this out, he was afraid
again—afraid of admitting his mistake, afraid of confessing, even
to himself, the lie that he was living. So he had gone on as a monk
and in the course of time, in one way and another (more than likely
by pure happenstance) had achieved a reputation for a piety and
devotion that was at once the envy and the pride of all his fellow
monks, although some of them, on occasion, delivered some rather
unworthy snide remarks. As time went on, it seemed that somehow a
great many people came to hear of him—not perhaps for anything he
had ever done (for, truth to tell, he had done but little), but for
the things he seemed to stand for, for his way of life. As he
thought about it now, he wondered whether there had not been a
misconception—if his piety may not have stemmed from his devotion,
as everyone seemed to think, but from his very fear and, because of
his fear, his conscious attempts at self-effacement. A trembling
mouse, he thought, that became a holy mouse because of its very
trembling.
But however that might have been, he finally came to stand as a
symbol for the Age of Faith in a materialistic world and one writer
who had interviewed him described him as a medieval man persisting
into modern times. The profile that came from the interview,
published in a magazine of wide circulation and written by a
perceptive man who, for dramatic effect, did not hesitate to gild
the lily slightly, had provided the impetus that, after several
years, had elevated him to greatness as a simple man who held the
necessary insight to return to basic faith and the strength of soul
to hold that faith against the inroads of humanistic
thought.
He could have been an abbot, he thought with a surge of pride;
perhaps more than an abbot. And when he became aware of the pride,
made no more than a token effort to quash it. For pride, he
thought, pride and, finally, honesty, were all that he had left.
When the abbot had been called to God, it had been made known to
him, in various subtle ways, that he could succeed the abbot. But,
suddenly afraid again, this time of responsibility and place, he
had pleaded to remain with his simple cell and simple tasks, and
because the order held him in high regard, he was granted his
petition. Although, thinking of it since and now drenched in
honesty, he allowed the suspicion that he had suppressed before out
into the open. It was this: had his petition been granted not
because of the order’s high regard of him, but because the order,
knowing him too well, had realized what a poor stick of an abbot he
would have made? In view of the favorable publicity his appointment
would have afforded because of the wide acclaim which had been
accorded him, had the order been forced into a position where it
had felt bound to make at least the offer? And had there been a
wholehearted sigh of relief throughout the entire house when he had
declined?
Fear, he thought—a man hounded all his life by fear—if not a fear
of death, then the fear of life itself. Maybe, after all, there had
been no need of fear. Perhaps, after, all the fearfulness, there
had been nothing actually to fear. It had been, more than likely,
his own inadequacy and his lack of understanding that had driven
him to fear.
I am thinking like a man of flesh and
bone, he told himself, not like a
disembodied brain. The flesh still clings to me; the bones will not
dissolve.
The scientist was still talking. We must
refrain especially, he was saying, from
automatically thinking of the manifestation as something that had a
mystical or a spiritual quality.
It was just one of those simple things,
said the grande dame, glad to get it settled.
We must keep firmly in our
consciousness, said the scientist, that
there are no simple things in the universe. No happenings to be
brushed casually to one side. There is a purpose in everything that
happens. There always is a cause—you may be sure of that—and in
time there will be effect as well.
I wish, said the monk, I could be as positive as you are.
I wish, said the grande dame,
we hadn’t landed on this planet. It is an ishy
place.
7
“You must restrain yourself,” Nicodemus said. “Not too much. The
vichyssoise, one small slice of roast, half of the potato. You must
realize that your gut has been inactive for hundreds of years.
Frozen, certainly, and subject to no deterioration, but, even so,
it must be given an opportunity to get into tone again. In a few
days you can resume normal eating habits.”
Horton eyed the food, “Where did you get this
fare?” he demanded. “Certainly it was not carried from
Earth.”
“I forget,” said Nicodemus. “Of course you wouldn’t know. We have
on board the most efficient model of a matter converter that had
‘been manufactured up to the time of our departure.”
“You mean you just shovel in some sand?”
“Well, not exactly that. It isn’t quite that simple. But you have
the right idea.”
“Now wait a minute,” said Horton. “There is something very wrong. I
don’t remember any matter converters. They were talking about them,
of course, and there seemed some hope-that one could be put
together, but to the best of my recollection . . .“
“There are certain things, sir,” said Nicodemus, rather hurriedly,
“with which you are not acquainted. One of them is that once you
went into cold-sleep, we did not leave immediately.”
“You mean there was some delay?”
“Well, yes. As a matter of fact, quite a bit of delay.”
“For Christ’s sake, don’t try to be mysterious about it. How
long?”
“Well, fifty years or so.”
“Fifty years! Why fifty years? Why put us into cold-sleep and then
wait fifty years?”
“There was no real urgency,” said Nicodemus. “The time span of the
project was estimated to run over so long a time, a couple of
hundred years or perhaps slightly more before a ship returned with
news of habitable planets, that a delay of fifty years did not seem
excessive if in that length of time it was possible to develop
certain systems that would give a better chance of
success.”
“Like a matter converter, for example.”
“Yes, that was one of the things. Not absolutely necessary, of
course, but convenient and adding a certain margin. There were,
more importantly, certain ship engineering features which, if they
could be worked out. . .”
“And they were worked out?”
“Most of them,” said Nicodemus.
“They never told us there would be such delay,” said Horton.
“Neither us nor any of the other crews that were in training at the
time. If any of the other crews had known, they’d gotten the word
to us.”
“There was,” said Nicodemus, “no need for you to know. There might
have been some illogical objection on your part if you had been
told. And it was important that the human crews be ready when the
ships were set to go. You see, all of you were very special people.
Perhaps you remember with what great care you were
chosen.”
“God, yes. We were run through computers for calculations of
survival factors. Our psychological profiles were measured time and
time again. They damn near wore us out with physical testing. And
they implanted that telepathic dingus in our brains so we could
talk with Ship, and that was the most bothersome of all. I seem to
recall it took months to learn how to use it properly. But why do
all this, then rush us to cold storage? We could simply have stood
by.”
“That could have been one approach,” said Nicodemus, “with you
growing older by the year. Not exactly youth, but not too great an
age, was one of the factors that went into the selection of the
crews. There’d be little sense in sending oldsters out. Placed in
cold-sleep, you did not age. Time was not a factor to you, for in
cold-sleep time is not a factor. Doing it the way it was done, the
crews were standing by, their faculties and abilities undimmed by
the time it took to get other bugs ironed out. The ships could have
gone when you were frozen, but by waiting fifty years, the ships’
chances and your chances were considerably enhanced. The
life-support systems for the brains were perfected to a point that
would have been thought impossible fifty years before, the linkage
between brains and ship were made more efficient and sensitive and
almost foolproof. The cold-sleep systems were improved.”
“I have divided feelings about it,” said Horton. “However, I guess
it personally makes no difference to me. If you can’t live out your
life in your own time, I suppose it becomes immaterial when you do
live it out. What I do regret is that I am left alone. Helen and I
had something going for us, and I liked the other two. I suppose,
as well, there is some guilt because they died and I lived on. You
say you saved my life because I was in cubicle number one. If I’d
not been in it, one of the others would have lived and I would now
be dead.”
“You must feel no guilt,” Nicodemus told him. “If there is anyone
who should feel the guilt, I am the one, but I feel no guilt, for
reason tells me I was capable and performed to the limit of current
technology. But you—you had no part in it. You did nothing; you
shared in no decision.”
“Yes, I know. But, even so, I can’t avoid thinking. . .“ “Eat your
soup,” said Nicodemus. “The roast is growing cold.”
Horton had a spoonful of the soup. “It is good,” he said.
“Of course it is. I told you I can be an accomplished
chef.”
“Can be,” said Horton. “That’s a strange way of putting it. You
either are a chef, or you aren’t. But
you say you can be one. That was what
you said about being an engineer. Not that you were one, but that
you could be one. It seems to me, my friend, you can be too many
things. A moment ago you implied that you were, as well, a good
cold-sleep technician.
“But the way I say it is precisely right,” protested Nicodemus.
“That is the way it is. I am a chef right now and can be an
engineer or a mathematician or astronomer or geologist. .
.“
“There’s no need for you to be a geologist. I’m the’ geologist of
this expedition. Helen was the biologist and chemist.”
“Some day,” said Nicodemus, “there might be need of two
geologists.”
“This is ridiculous,” said Horton. “No man or no robot could be as
many things as you say you are or could be. It would take years of
study, and in the process of learning each new specialty or
discipline, you’d lose some of the previous training you had taken.
Furthermore, you’re simply a service robot, not specialized at all.
Let’s face it, your brain capacity is small, and your reaction
system is comparatively insensitive. Ship said that you were chosen
deliberately because of your simplicity—because there was very
little that could go wrong with you.”
“Which is all true enough,” Nicodemus admitted. “I am what you say
I am. A runner-of-errands and a fetcher-of-objects and good for
little else. My brain capacity is small. But when you have two
brains or three. . .“
Horton threw down his spoon on the table. “You are mad!” he said.
“No one has two brains.”
“I have,” said Nicodemus calmly. “I have two brains right now—the
old standard, stupid robot brain and a chef-brain and if I wanted,
I could add another brain, although I do not know what kind of
brain would supplement a chef-brain. A nutritionist-brain, perhaps,
although the kit doesn’t have that kind of brain.”
With an effort, Horton controlled himself. “Now let’s start over,”
he said. “Let’s take it from the top and go slow and easy so that
this stupid human brain of mine can follow what you’re
saying.”
“It was those fifty years,” said Nicodemus.
“What fifty years, goddammit?”
“Those fifty years they took after you were frozen. A lot of good
research and development can be done in fifty years if a lot of
humans put their minds to it. You trained, did you not, with a most
accomplished robot—the finest piece of humanoid machinery that had
ever been built.”
“Yes, we did,” said Horton. “I can remember him as if it were only
yesterday. . .“
“To you,” said Nicodemus, “it would be only yesterday. The thousand
years since then are as nothing to you.”
“He was a little stinker,” Horton said. “He was a martinet. He knew
three times more than we did and was ten times as capable. He
rubbed it into us in his suave, sleek, nasty way. So slick about it
you could never peg him. All of us hated the little
sonofabitch.”
“There, you see,” said Nicodemus triumphantly. “That could not
continue. It was a situation that could not be tolerated. If he’d
been sent with you, think of all the friction, the clash of
personalities. That is why you have me. They couldn’t use a thing
like him. They had to use a simple, humble clod like me, the kind
of robot you were accustomed to ordering around and who would not
resent the ordering around. But a simple, humble clod like me would
be incapable on his own to rise to the occasions that necessity
sometimes might demand. So they hit upon the idea of auxiliary
brains that could be plugged into place to supplement a cloddish
brain like mine.”
“You mean you have a box full of auxiliary brains that you just
plug in!”
“Not really brains,” said Nicodemus. “They are called transmogs,
although I’m not sure why. Someone once told me the term was short
for transmogrification. Is there such a word?”
“I don’t know,” said Horton.
“Well, anyhow,” said Nicodemus, “I have a chef transmog and a
physician transmog and a biochemist transmog—well, you get the
idea. A full college course encoded in each of them. I counted them
once, but now I have forgotten. A couple of dozen, I would
guess.”
“So you actually might be able to fix this tunnel of the
Carnivore’s.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” said Nicodemus. “I don’t know what the
engineer transmog contains. There are so many different kinds of
engineering—chemical, mechanical, electrical.”
“At least you’ll have an engineering background.”
“That’s right. But the tunnel the Carnivore talked about probably
wasn’t built by humans. Humans wouldn’t have had the time
…”
“It could be human-built. They’ve had almost a thousand years to do
a lot of things. Remember what the fifty years you’ve been talking
about accomplished.”
“Yeah, I know. You could be right. Relying on ships might not have
been good enough. If the humans had relied on ships, they wouldn’t
have gotten out this far by now and…”
“They could have if they developed faster-than-light. Maybe once
you develop that, there would be no natural limit. Once you break
the light barrier, there might be no limit to how much faster than
light you could go.”
“Somehow I don’t think they developed faster-than-light ships,”
said Nicodemus. “I listened to a lot of talk about it during that
period after I was drafted into this project. No one seemed to have
any real starting point, no real appreciation of what is involved.
What more than likely happened is that humans landed on a planet
not nearly as far out as we are now and found one of the tunnels
and are now using the tunnels.”
“But not only humans.”
“No, that’s quite apparent from Carnivore. How many other races may
be using them we can have no idea. What about Carnivore? If we
don’t get the tunnel operating, he’ll want to ship with
us.”
“Over my dead body.”
“You know, I feel pretty much the same. He’s a rather uncouth
personage and it might be quite a problem to put him into
cold-sleep. Before we tried that, we’d have to know his body
chemistry.”
“Which reminds’ me that we’re not going back to Earth. What is the
scoop? Where does Ship intend to go?”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Nicodemus. “We talked off and on, of
course. Ship, I am sure, tried to hold nothing back from me. I have
the feeling Ship doesn’t quite know itself what it intends to do.
Just go, I suppose, and see what it can find. You realize, of
course, that Ship, if it wishes to, can listen in on anything we
say.”
“That doesn’t bother me,” said Horton. “As it stands, we’re all
tied up in the same can of worms. You for much longer than will be
the case with me. Whatever the situation, I suppose I’ll have to
stand upon it, for I have no other base. I’m close to a thousand
years away from home, and a thousand years behind the Earth of this
moment. Ship undoubtedly is right in saying that if I went back I
would be a misfit. You can accept all of this intellectually, of
course, but it gives you a strange feeling in the gizzard. If the
other three were here, I imagine it would be different. I have the
sense of being horribly alone.”
“You aren’t alone,” said Nicodemus. “You have Ship and
me.”
“Yes, I suppose so. I seem to keep forgetting.”
He pushed back from the table. “That was a fine dinner,” he said.
“I wish you could have eaten with me. Before I go off to bed, do
you think it would disaccommodate my gut if I had a slice of that
roast, cold?”
“For breakfast,” said Nicodemus. “If you want a slice for
breakfast.”
“All right, then,” said Horton. “There’s still one thing that
bothers me. With the setup that you have, you don’t really need a
human on this expedition. At the time I took the training, a human
crew made sense. But not any longer. You and Ship could do the job
alone. Given the situation as it is, why didn’t they just junk us?
Why did they bother putting us on board?”
“You seek to mortify yourself and the human race,” said Nicodemus.
“It is no more than shock reaction to what you have just learned.
To start with, the idea was to put knowledge and technology on
board, and the only way it could be put on board was in the persons
of humans who had that knowledge and technology. By the time the
ships took off, however, another means of supplying technology and
knowledge had been found in the transmogs which could make even
such simple robots as myself into multispecialists. But even so
there would be, in us, still one factor lacking— that strange
quality of humanness, the biological human condition which we still
lack and which no roboticist has as yet been able to build into us.
You spoke of your training robot and your hatred of him. This is
what happens when you go beyond a certain point in robotic
improvement. You gain good capability, but the humanity to balance
the capability is lacking and the robot, instead of becoming more
humanlike, becomes arrogant and insufferable. It may always be so.
Humanity may be a factor that cannot be arrived at artificially. An
expedition to the stars, I suppose, could function efficiently with
only robots and their transmog kits aboard, but it would not be a
human expedition, and that is what this and the other expeditions
were all about—to seek out planets where the people of Earth could
live. Certainly the robots could make observations and reach
decisions and nine times out of ten the observations would be
accurate and the decisions quite correct, but in that tenth time,
one or both could be wrong because the robots would be looking at
the problem with robotic eyes and making the decisions with robotic
brains that lacked that all important factor of the human
quality.”
“Your words are comforting,” said Horton. “I only hope you are
right.”
“Believe me, sir, I am.”
Ship said, Horton, you’d better get to bed
now. The Carnivore will be coming to meet you in the morning and
you should get some sleep.
8
BUT sleep came hard.
Lying on his back, staring up into the blackness, the strangeness
and the loneliness came pouring
in upon him, the strangeness and the
loneliness that had been held off till now.
Only yesterday, Nicodemus had said to
him. It was only yesterday that you went into
cold-sleep, because all the centuries that have come and gone since
then mean less than nothing to you.
It had been, he thought, with some surprise and bitterness, only yesterday. And now alone, to remember and to mourn. To mourn, here in the darkness of a planet far from Earth, arrived at, so far as he was concerned, in the twinkling of an eye, to find the home planet and the people of that yesterday sunk in the depths of time.
Helen dead, he thought. Dead and lying underneath the steely glitter of stranger stars on an unknown planet of an unrecorded sun, where the glaciers of frozen oxygen reared their bulk against the black of space and the primal rock lay uneroded through millennia piled upon millennia, a planet as unchanging as was death itself.
The three of them together—Helen, Mary, Tom. Only he was missing—missing because he had been in cubicle number one, because a stupid, flat-footed, oafish robot could think of no other system than doing a task by numbers.
Ship, he whispered
in his mind.
Go to sleep, said Ship.
To hell with you, said Horton.
You can’t baby me. You can’t tell me what to
do. Go to sleep, you
say. Take a leak, you say. Forget it all, you say.
We do not tell you to forget, said Ship. The memory is a precious one, and while you must mourn, hold the memory fast. When you mourn, know that we mourn with you. For we remember Earth as well.
But you won’t go back to
it. You plan to go on. After this planet, you plan to go on. What
do you expect to find? What are you looking for?
There is no way of knowing. We have no
expectations.
And l go with you?
Of course, said Ship. We are a company, and you are part of it.
The planes? We’ll take time to look it
over?
There is no hurry, said Ship.
We have all the time there
is.
What we felt this evening? That’s a part of
it? A part of this unknown that we’re going to?
Good night, Carter Horton, said Ship.
We will talk again. Think of pleasant things
and try to go to sleep.
Pleasant things, he thought. Yes, there had been pleasantness back
where the sky was blue, with white clouds floating in it, with a
picture-ocean running its long fingers up and down a picturebeach,
with Helen’s body whiter than the sands they lay upon. There had
been picnic fires with the night-wind moving through the half-seen
trees. There had been candlelight upon a snow-white cloth, with
gleaming china and sparkling glass set upon the table, with music
in the background and contentment everywhere.
Somewhere in the outer darkness, Nicodemus moved clumsily about,
trying to be quiet, and through the open port came a far-off
strident fiddling of what he told himself were insects. If there
were insects here, he thought.
He tried to think of the planet that lay beyond the port, but it
seemed he could not think of it. It was too new and strange for him
to think of it. But he found that he could conjure up the
frightening concept of that vast, silent depth of space that lay
between this place and Earth, and he saw in his mind’s eye the tiny
mote of Ship floating through that awesome immensity of
nothingness. The nothingness translated into loneliness, and with a
groan, he turned over and clutched the pillow tight about his
head.
9
CARNIVORE showed up shortly after morning light.
“Good,” he said. “You’re ready. We travel in no hurry. Is not far
to go. I checked the tunnel
before I left. It had not fixed itself.”
He led the way, up the sharp pitch of the hill, then down into a valley that lay so deep between the hills and was so engulfed in forest that the darkness of the night had not been dispelled entirely. The trees stood tall, with few branches for the first thirty feet or so, and Carter noted that while in general structure they were much like the trees of Earth, the bark tended to have a scaly appearance and the leaves mostly merged toward black and purple rather than to green. Underneath the trees, the forest floor was fairly open, with only an occasional scattering of spindly and fragile shrubs. At times, tiny skittering creatures scampered across the ground, which was littered with many fallen branches, but at no time did Carter manage to get a good look at them.
Here and there rock outcroppings thrust out of the hillside and when they descended another hill and crossed a small but brawling stream, low cliffs rose on the opposite bank. Carnivore led the way to where a path went up through a break in the wall of rock and they scrambled up the steep incline. Carter noted that the cliffs were pegmatite. There was no sign of sedimentary strata.
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 genuine, although his
talk of eating Shakespeare still rankled. His non-recognition 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 of
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 that 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
other-where. 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.”
“I would suspect,” said Horton, “that it was built millennia ago
and has, for centuries, been abandoned by the ones who built it.
Without proper maintenance, it has broken down.”
“But that is not the point,” protested Carnivore. “Point is, can
you fix it?”
Nicodemus had moved over to the panel set into the rock beside the
tunnel. “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t even read the
instruments, if they are instruments. Some of them look like
manipulative gadgets, but I can’t be sure.”
“It wouldn’t harm to try and see what happens,” Horton said. “You
can’t make the situation worse.”
“But I can’t,” said Nicodemus. “I can’t even reach them. There
seems to be some sort of force field. Paper thin, perhaps, I can
put my fingers on the instruments, or rather I think I have my
fingers on them, but there’s no contact. I don’t really touch them.
I can feel them underneath my fingers, but I’m not in actual
contact with them. It is as if they were coated with a slippery
grease.”
He held up one hand and looked closely at it. “But there’s not any
grease,” he said.
“The damn thing works one way,” bawled Carnivore. “It should work
two ways.”
“Keep your shirt on,” said Nicodemus shortly.
“You think you can do something with it?” asked Horton. “There’s a
force field there, you said. You could get yourself blown up. Do
you know anything about force fields?”
“Not a thing,” said Nicodemus cheerfully. “I didn’t even know there
could be such a thing. I just called it that. The term popped into
my head. I don’t know what it is.”
He set down the toolbox he’d been carrying and knelt to open it. He
began laying out tools on the rocky path.
“You got things to fix him with,” crowed Carnivore. “Shakespeare
had no tools. I have no goddamn tools, he’d say.”
“A fat lot of good they’d done him even if he had them,” said
Nicodemus. “Even if you have them, you have to know how to use
them.”
“And you know how?” asked Horton.
“You’re damn right I do’,” said Nicodemus. “I’m wearing this
engineering transmog.”
“Engineers don’t use tools. It’s mechanics who use
tools.”
“Don’t bug me,” said Nicodemus. “At the sight and feel of tools, it
all falls into place.”
“I can’t bear to watch this,” said Horton. “I think that I will
leave. Carnivore, you spoke of a ruined city. Lets have a look at
it.”
Carnivore fidgeted; “But if he should need some help. Someone to
hand him tools, perhaps. If he needs moral support. . .“
“I’ll need more than moral support,” said the robot. “I’ll need
great chunks of luck, and some divine intervention wouldn’t hurt at
all: Go and see your city.”
11
BY no stretch of the imagination was it a city. No more than a couple of dozen buildings, none of them large. They were oblong stone structures and had the look of barracks. The site lay half a mile or so from the building to which Shakespeare’s skull was fastened, and stood on a slight rise of ground above a stagnant pond. Heavy brush and a scattering of trees had grown up between the buildings. In several instances, trees encroaching against the walls or corners of a building had dislodged or shifted some of the masonry. While most of the buildings were engulfed in the heavy growth, paths wandered here and there.
“Shakespeare chopped out the paths,” said Carnivore. “He explored here and brought a few things home. Not much, only something now and then. Something that caught his fancy. He say we not disturb the dead.”
“Dead?” asked Horton.
“Well, maybe too dramatic I make it sound. The
gone, then, those who went away. Although that does not sound right
either. How can one disturb those who have gone away?”
“The buildings all look alike,” said Horton. “They look to me like
barracks.”
“Barracks is a word I do not have.”
“A place to house a number of people.”
“House? To live in?”
“That is right. At one time a number of people lived here. A
trading post, perhaps. Barracks and warehouses.”
“No one here to trade with.”
“Well, okay, then—trappers, hunters, miners. There are the emeralds
Nicodemus found. This place may be packed with gem-bearing
formations or gravels. Or fur-bearing animals. . .“
“No fur-bearers,” said Carnivore, positively. “Meat animals, that
is all. Some low-grade predators. Nothing we must fear.”
Despite the whiteness of the stone of which the buildings had been
constructed, they gave the impression of dinginess, as if the
buildings were no more than shacks. At the time they had been
built, it was quite apparent that a clearing had been made, for
despite the trees that had crept into the erstwhile clearing, the
heavier forest still stood back. But, even with the sense of
dinginess, there was a feel of solidity in the
structures.
“They built to last,” said Horton. “It was a permanent settlement
of some sort, or intended to be permanent. It’s strange that the
building you and Shakespeare used was set apart from all the
others. It could, I suppose, have been a guardhouse to keep an eye
on the tunnel. Have you investigated these buildings?”
“Not me,” said Carnivore. “They repel me. There is nastiness about
them. Unsafeness. To enter one of them islike entering a trap.
Close up on me, I would expect it, so I could not get out.
Shakespeare poked around in them, to my nervousness. He bring a few
small objects out of which he was fascinated. Although, as I tell
you, he disturb but little. He said it should be left for others of
his kind who knew such things.”
“Archaeologists.”
“That’s the word I search for. It escape my tongue. Shakespeare
said shameful thing to mess up for archaeologists. They learn much
from it where he learn nothing.”
“But you said . . .“
“A few small objects only. Easy to the hand. Small, he said, to
carry and perhaps of value. He say you must not spit in the eye of
fortune.”
“What did Shakespeare think this place might be?”
"He had many thoughts about it. Mostly, he wonders after heavy
thought, if it not be place for malefactors.”
“You mean a penal colony.”
“He did not, to my remembrance, use the word you say. But he
speculate a place to keep those not wanted other-where. He figure
maybe tunnel never meant to operate but one way. Never two-way,
always one-way tunnel. So those sent here never could go
back.”
“It makes sense,” said Horton. “Although it wouldn’t have to be. If
the tunnel were abandoned in the ancient past, it would have been a
long time without maintenance and would progressively have broken
down. What you say about not knowing where you’re going when you
enter a tunnel and two people entering it and winding up at
different destinations sounds wrong, too. A haphazard
transportation system is impractical. Under a condition such as
that, it seems unlikely the tunnel would have been widely used.
What I can’t understand is why people such as you and Shakespeare
should have used the tunnels.”
“Tunnels only used,” Carnivore said blithely, “by those who do not
give a damn. Only by those who have no really choice. Go to places
that make no sense to go to. All planet tunnels lead to are planets
you can live on. Air to breathe. Not too hot, too cold. Not kind of
places that kill you dead. But many worthless places. Many places
where there is no one, maybe never been anyone.”
“The people who built the tunnels must have had a reason to go to
so many planets, even to those planets you call worthless. It would
be interesting to find out their reasons.”
“Only ones can tell you,” said Carnivore, “are the ones who
fabricate the tunnels. They gone. They somewhere else or nowhere at
all. No one knows who they were or where to look for
them.”
“But some of the tunnel worlds are inhabited. Inhabited by people,
I mean.”
“Is so if definition of people is a very broad one and not too
fussy. On many tunnel planets, trouble can come fast. Last one I
was on, next to this, trouble comes not only fast, but
big.”
They had been walking slowly down the paths that wound among the
buildings. Ahead of them the heavy underbrush closed in to
obliterate the path. The path ended just beyond a door that opened
into one of the structures.
“I’m going in,” said Horton. “If you don’t want to, wait outside
for me.”
“I’ll wait,” said Carnivore. “Inside of them makes a crawling on my
spine, a jumping in my belly.”
The inside of the place was dark. There was a dampness and a
mustiness in the air and a chill that struck to the bone. Tensed,
Horton felt the urge to leave, to duck back into sunlight once
again. There was an alienness here that could be felt, but not
defined—the feeling of being in a place where he had no right to
be, a sense of intruding on something that should be kept darkly
hidden. Consciously planting his feet firmly, he stayed, although
he felt the beginning of shivers up and down his back. Gradually
his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom and he could make out shapes.
Against the wall to his right stood what could be nothing else but
a wooden cupboard. It was rickety with age. Horton had the feeling
that if it were bumped, it would come tumbling down. The doors were
held dosed by wooden buttons. Beside the cupboard stood a wooden
four-legged bench with great cracks running across its top. On the
bench stood a piece of pottery—a water jug, perhaps, with a
triangular piece broken from the rim. On the opposite end stood
what looked like a vase. It certainly wasn’t pottery. It looked
like glass, but the layer of fine dust that covered everything made
it impossible to tell with any surety. And beside the bench stood
what had to be a chair. There were four legs, a seat, a slanted
back. Hanging on one of the uprights of the back was a piece of
fabric that could have been a hat. On the floor in front of the
chair lay what seemed to be a plate—an oval of ceramic whiteness,
and upon the plate, a bone.
Something, Horton told himself, had sat in the chair— how many
years ago?—with a plate upon its lap, eating a joint of meat,
perhaps holding the joint in its hands, or whatever served it for
hands, chewing off the bone, with the water jug close at hand,
although perhaps not water, but a jug of wine. And having finished
with the joint, or eaten all it wanted of it, had placed the plate
upon the floor, perhaps, as it did so, settling back and patting
the fullness of its belly with some satisfaction. Putting the plate
with the joint upon it down upon the floor, but then never coming
back to pick up the plate. With no one ever coming back to pick up
the plate.
He stood in fascination, staring at the bench, the chair, the
plate. Some of the alienness seemed to have gone away, for here was
a set piece snatched out of the past of a people who, whatever may
have been their shape, held some of the elements of a common
humanity that might extend throughout the universe. A midnight
snack, perhaps—and what had happened once the midnight snack were
eaten?
The chair to sit in, the bench to hold the jug, the plate to hold
the joint—and the vase, what about the vase? It consisted of a
globular body, a long neck, and a broad base for sitting. More like
a bottle than a vase, he thought.
He stepped forward and reached out for it and as he reached brushed
against the hat, if it were a hat, that hung upon the chair. At his
touch, the hat disintegrated. It disappeared in a small puff of
dust that floated in the air.
His hand grasped the vase or bottle and he lifted it and saw that
the globular body of it was incised with pictures and symbols.
Holding it by the neck, he brought it close up to his face so that
he could see the decorations.
A strange creature stood within an enclosure that had a peaked roof
with a little ball on top the roof. It looked for all the world, he
thought, as if the creature stood inside a kitchen canister that
might be used for storing tea. And the creature—was it humanoid or
simply an animal standing on two sticklike hind legs? It had only
one arm and it bore a heavy tail which extended at an upward angle
to its upright body. The head was a blob, but extending upward and
outward from it were six straight lines; three to the left, two to
the right and one extending straight upward.
Twirling the bottle (or the vase?), other etchings came into
view—horizontal lines formed within two lines, one above the other
and seemingly attached to one another by vertical lines. Buildings,
he wondered, with the vertical lines representing pillars
supporting the roof? There were many squiggles and lopsided ovals
and some irregular markings in short rows that could have been
words in an unknown language. And what could have been a tower,
from the top of which emerged three figures that had the look of
foxes snatched from some old legend out of Earth.
From the path outside, Carnivore was calling to him, “Horton, all
goes well with you?”
“Very well,” said Horton.
“I apprehensive for you,” said Carnivore. “Please, will you not
come out? You make me nervous staying.”
“All right,” said Horton, “since it makes you nervous.” He turned
about and went out the door, still carrying the bottle.
“You find a receptacle of interest,” said Carnivore, eyeing it with
some misgiving.
“Yes, look here.” Horton lifted the bottle, turning it slowly.
“Representations of some sort of life, although I’m hard put to
tell exactly what they are:”
“Shakespeare found a couple similar. With markings on them also,
but not exact as yours. He also puzzled hard over what they
were.”
“They could be representations of the people who lived
here.”
“Shakespeare said the same, but qualified his saying to their being
only myths of people who were here. He explain that myths are
racial rememberings, things that memory, often faulty, says
happened in the past.” He fidgeted nervously. “Leave us return,” he
said. “My belly growls for nourishment.”
“And so does mine,” said Horton.
“I have meat. Killed only yesterday. You will join me at my
meat?”
“Most gladly,” Horton said. “I have rations, but not as good as
meat.”
“Meat is not as yet too high,” said Carnivore. “But I kill again
tomorrow. Like meat on the fresh side. Eat it high only in
emergency. I suppose you subject your meat to fire, same as
Shakespeare did.”
“Yes, I like it cooked.”
“Dry wood there is in plenty for the fire. Stacked outside the
house and waiting for the blaze. Have a hearth for fire out front.
I suppose you saw it.”
“Yes, I saw the hearth.”
“The other. Does he eat meat as well?”
“He does not eat at all.”
“Unbelievable,” said Carnivore. “How does he keep his
strength?”
“He has what you call a battery. It supplies him food of a
different sort.”
“You think this Nicodemus not fix tunnel right away? Back there,
you seem to be saying that.”
“I think it might take a while,” said Horton. “He has no idea what
it is about and neither of us can help him.”
They went back along the winding path they’d followed. “What is
that smell?” asked Horton. “Like something dead, or
worse.”
“It is the pond,” said Carnivore. “The pond you must have
noticed.”
“I saw it coming in.”
“It smell most obnoxiously,” said Carnivore. “Shakespeare call it
Stinking Pond.”
12
HORTON squatted before the fire, superintending the cut of meat roasting over the coals. Carnivore sat across the fire from him, tearing with his teeth at the slab of raw meat he held. Blood smeared his muzzle and ran down his face.
“You do not mind?” he asked. “My stomach aches
exceedingly for filling.”
“Not at all,” said Horton. “Mine will be just a minute
more.”
The sun of late afternoon was warm against his back. The heat of
the fire beat against his face and
he found himself exulting in the comfort of the camp. The fire was placed directly in front of the snow-white building, with Shakespeare’s skull grinning down upon them. Heard in the silence was the gurgle of the stream that ran below the spring.
“Once we are done,” said Carnivore, “I show to
you the possessions of the Shakespeare. I have them all neatly
bagged. You have interest in them?”
“Yes, of course,” said Horton.
“In many ways,” said Carnivore, “the Shakespeare was an aggravating
human, although I like him dearly. I never really knew if he liked
me or not - although I think he did. We got along together. We work
very well together. We talk a lot together. We tell each other many
things. But I never can erase the feeling he was laughing at me,
although why he should I do not understand. Do you find me funny,
Horton?”
“Not in the least,” said Horton. “You must have
imagined.”
“Can you tell me what goddamn means?
The Shakespeare always using it and I fall into habit with him. But
I never knew what it means. I ask him what is it and he would not
tell. He only laugh at me, deep inside himself.”
“It has no real meaning. Ordinarily, I mean. It is used for
emphasis, with no real import of meaning. It is a saying only. Most
people do not use it habitually. Only some of them. Others use it
sparingly and only under emotional provocation.”
“It means nothing then. Only way of speaking.”
“That is right,” said Horton.
“When I talk of magic, he call it goddamn foolishness. It does not
mean, then, any special kind of foolishness.”
“No, he just meant foolishness.”
“You think magic foolishness?”
“I am not prepared to say. I guess I’ve never thought too much
about it. I would suggest that magic lightly used might be
foolishness. Perhaps magic is something no one understands. Do you
have faith in magic? Do you practice magic?”
“My people have great magic through the years. Sometimes it works,
sometimes not. I say to the Shakespeare let us put our magic
together, maybe it will work to open up the tunnel. Shakespeare
then say magic goddamn foolishness. He said that he had none. He
said no such thing as magic.”
“I suspect,” said Horton, “that he spoke from prejudice. You can’t
condemn something you know nothing of.”
“Yes,” said Carnivore, “the Shakespeare would do a thing like that.
Although I think he lied to me. I think he used his magic. He had a
thing that he called book, he said it
Shakespeare book. It could talk to him. What is that but
magic?”
“We call it reading,” Horton
said.
“He held the book and it talked to him. Then he talked to it. He
makes little marks upon it with a special stick he have. I ask him
what he do and he grunt at me. He was always grunting at me. Grunt
meant leave him be, do not pester him.”
“You have this book of his?”
“I’ll show it to you later.”
The steak was done, and Horton fell to eating.
“This is good,” he said. “What kind of animal?”
“Not too big,” said Carnivore. “Not hard to kill. Does not try to
fight. Get away is all. But toothsome. Many animals for meat, but
this one most tasty of them all.”
Nicodemus came stumping up the path, toolbox clutched in hand. He
sat down beside Horton.
“Before you ask,” he said, “I haven’t got it fixed.”
“But progress made?” asked Carnivore.
“I don’t know,” said Nicodemus. “I think I know how I may be able
to get the force field disconnected, although I can’t be sure. It
is worth at least a try. Mostly I’ve been trying to figure out
what’s behind that force field. I drew all sorts of sketches and I
tried some diagramming to gain an understanding of what it’s all
about. I have some ideas there, as well, but it all goes for
nothing if I can’t get the force shield off. And I may be wrong, of
course, about everything.”
“Not discouraged though?”
“No, I’ll keep on trying.”
“That is good,” said Carnivore.
He swallowed the last hunk of his dripping gob of meat.
“I go down to spring,” he said, “and wash my face. I am sloppy
eater. You wish I wait for you?”
“No,” said Horton. “I’ll go down a little later. I still have eaten
only half the steak.”
“You excuse me, please,” said Carnivore, getting to his feet. The
other two sat watching him as he went loping down the
trail.
“How did it go?” asked Nicodemus.
Horton shrugged. “There’s a deserted village of sorts just east of
here. Stone buildings overgrown with brush. No one’s been there for
centuries, from the looks of it. Nothing to show why they might
have been here, or why they might have left. Carnivore says
Shakespeare thinks it may have been a penal colony. If so, a neat
way of doing it. With the tunnel inoperative, there’d be no need to
fret about escapes.”
“Does Carnivore know what kind of people?”
“He doesn’t know. I don’t think he cares. He has no real curiosity.
The here and now is all that interests him. Besides, he’s afraid of
it. The past seems to terrify him. My guess is they were
humanoids—not necessarily people as we think of them. I went into
one of the buildings and found some kind of bottle. Thought it was
a vase at first, but I guess it is a bottle.”
He reached down beside him and handed the bottle to Nicodemus. The
robot turned it over and over in his hands.
“Crude,” he said. “The pictures may be only approximately
representational. Hard to tell what they represent. Some of this
stuff looks like writing.”
• Horton nodded. “All true, but it means they had some idea of art.
That could argue a culture on the move.”
“Not good enough,” said Nicodemus, “to account for the
sophisticated technology of the tunnels.”
“I didn’t mean to imply these were the people who built the
tunnels.”
“Has Carnivore said anything further about joining us when we
leave?”
“No. Apparently he is confident you can fix the tunnel.”
“Perhaps it’s best not to tell him, but I’m not. I never saw such a
mess as that control panel.”
Carnivore came waddling up the path.
“All clean now,” he said. “I see you’re finished. How did you like
the meat?”
“It was excellent,” said Horton.
“Tomorrow we’ll have fresh meat.”
“We’ll bury the meat left over while you are on the hunt,” said
Horton.
“No need to bury it. Dump it in the pond. Holding nose most
securely in process of doing it.”
“That’s what you’ve been doing with it?”
“Sure,” said Carnivore. “Easy way to do it. Something in the pond
that eats it up. Probably glad I throw it meat.”
“You ever see this thing that eats the meat?”
“No, but meat is gone. Meat floats in water. Meat thrown in pond
never floats. Must be eaten.”
“Maybe your meat is what makes the pond stink.”
“Not so,” said Carnivore. “Always stink like that. Even before the
throwing of the meat. The Shakespeare here before me and he was
throwing of no meat. Yet he said it stinks from the time he
come.”
“Stagnant water can smell pretty bad,” said Horton, “but I never
smelled it this bad.”
“It may not be really water,” said Carnivore. “It is thicker than
water. Runs like water, looks like water, but not as thin as water.
Shakespeare called it soup.”
Long shadows, extending from the stand of trees to the west, had
crept across the camp. Carnivore cocked his head, squinting at the
sun.
“The god-hour is almost here,” he said. “Leave us go inside.
Beneath a stout stone roof it is not too bad. Not like in the open.
Still feel it, but stone filters out the worst.”
The interior of the Shakespeare house was simple. The floor was
paved with slabs of stone. There was no ceiling; the single room
was open to the roof. In the center of the room stood a large stone
table and around the room ran a chair-high ledge of
stone.
Carnivore gestured at it. “For sitting and for sleeping. Also place
to put things.”
The ledge in the rear of the room was crowded with jars and vases,
weird pieces of what seemed to be small statuary, and other pieces
for which, at first glance, there seemed to be no name.
“From the city,” said Carnivore. “Objects that Shakespeare brought
back from the city. Curious, perhaps, but of value
slight.”
A misshapen candle stood on one end of the table, stuck to the
stone by its own drippings. “It gives the light,” said Carnivore.
“Shakespeare fashioned it of fat of the meat I killed so he could
use it to pore over book—sometimes it talking to him, sometimes,
with his magic stick, he talking back to it…”
“This was the book,” asked Horton, “that you told me I could
see.”
“Most certainly,” said Carnivore. “You may, perhaps, explain it to
me. Tell me what it is. I ask the Shakespeare many times but the
explanation that he gave me was no really explanation. I sit and
eat my heart out to know and he would never tell. But tell me one
thing, please. Why did he need a light to talk with
book?”
“It’s called reading,” Horton said.
“The book talks by the marks upon it. You must have light to see
the marks. For it to talk, the marks must be plainly
seen.”
Carnivore shook his head. “Strange goings-on,” he said. “You humans
are strange business. The Shakespeare strange. He always laughing
at me. Not outside laughter, inside laughter. I like him, but he
laugh. He makes laughter so he be better than I am. He laugh most
secretly, but he lets me know he laughs.”
He strode to a corner and picked up a bag fashioned out of an
animal skin. He hoisted it in one fist and shook it and a dry
rustling and scraping came out of it.
“His bones!” he shouted. “He laughs now only with his bones. Even
the bones still laugh. Listen and you hear them.”
He shook the bag viciously. “Do you not hear the
laughter?”
The god-hour struck.
It still was a monstrous thing. Despite the thick stone walls and
the ceiling, its force was not greatly diminished. Once again,
Horton found himself seized and laid bare and open, to be explored
and this time, it seemed, more than explored, but absorbed as well,
so that it seemed, even as he struggled to remain himself, he
became one with whatever it was that had seized upon him. He felt
the fusing with it, the becoming part of it and when he knew there
was no way to fight against the fusing, tried despite his
humiliation at being made a part of something else to do some
probing of his own and thus find out what it was he was being made
a part of. For an instant he thought he knew; for a single,
fleeting instant, the thing that he had been absorbed by, the thing
that he had become, seemed to reach out to take in the universe,
everything that ever had been, or was, or would be, showing it to
him, showing him the logic, or the non-logic, the purpose, the
reason and the goal. But in that instant of knowing, his human mind
rebelled against the implication of the knowing, aghast and
outraged that there could be such a thing as this, that the showing
of the universe and the understanding of it might be possible. His
mind and body wilted, preferring not to know.
How long it lasted he had no way of gauging. He hung limply in the
grasp of it and it seemed to absorb not only him but his sense of
time as well—as if it could manipulate time in its own fashion and
for its own purposes, and he had a fleeting thought that if it
could do this, there might be nothing that could stand against it,
since time was the most elusive factor in the universe.
Finally it was over, and Horton was surprised to find himself
crouched upon the floor, his arms up to cover his head. He felt
Nicodemus lifting him, putting him on his feet and holding him
erect. In anger at his helplessness, he struck the robot’s hands
away and staggered to the great stone table, clutching at it
desperately.
“It was bad again,” said Nicodemus.
Horton shook his head, trying to clear his brain. “Bad,” he said.
“As bad as it was before. And you?”
“The same as before,” said Nicodemus. “A glancing mental blow was
all. It works its will more harshly upon a biologic
brain.”
Through a fog, Horton heard Carnivore declaiming. “Something up
there,” he was saying, “seems interested in us.”
18
HORTON opened the book to the title page. Beside his elbow the homemade candle guttered smokily, throwing a flickering and uncertain light. He bent close to read. The typeface was unfamiliar, and the words seemed wrong.
“What is it?” Nicodemus asked.
“I think it’s Shakespeare,” Horton told him. “What else could it
be? But the spelling is all different. Strange abbreviations. And
some of the letters wrong. Yes, look here—that would be it.
The Complete Works of William
Shakespeare. That’s how I make it out. Do you agree with
me?”
“But there’s no publication date,” said Nicodemus, leaning over
Horton’s shoulder.
“After our time, I would imagine,” Horton said. “Language and
spelling change as time goes on. No date, but published at—can you
make out the word?”
Nicodemus bent his head closer. “London. No, not London. Someplace
else. No place I ever heard of. Maybe not on Earth.”
“Well, we know it’s Shakespeare, anyhow,” said Horton. “That’s how
come his name. He meant it as a joke.”
Carnivore grumbled at them from across the table. “The Shakespeare
full of jokes.”
Horton turned the page, to a blank page filled with crabbed pencil
script. He bent above the page, puzzling it out. It was composed,
he saw, of the same odd spelling and word arrangement that he’d
found on the title page. Tortuously, he made out the first few
lines, translating them almost as he would have a foreign
language:
If you are reading this, there is a probability you may have fallen in with that great monster, Carnivore. If such should be the case, don’t, for an instant, trust the miserable sonofabitch. I know he intends to kill me, but I shall have the last laugh on him. The last laugh is an easy thing for one who knows that, in any case, he is about to die. The inhibitor I carried with me is all but gone by now, and once I have no more of it, the malignancy will continue to eat into my brain. And I am convinced, before the final killing pain sets in, it would be an easier death for this slobbering monster to kill me than it would be to die in pain . .
“What does it say?” asked Nicodemus.
“I’m not sure,” said Horton. “I have difficulty with it.”
He pushed the book aside.
“He talked to book,” said Carnivore, “with his magic stick. He
never tell me what he said. You
cannot tell me, either?”
Horton shook his head.
“Able you should be,” insisted Carnivore. “You human just like he.
What one says with stickmarks the other one should know.”
“It’s the time factor,” said Horton. “We’ve been upon our way at least a thousand years to reach here. Perhaps a great deal more than a thousand years. In a thousand years or less there would be many changes in the symbols that the marking stick would make. Also his inscription of the symbols are not of the best. He writes a shaky hand.”
“You will try again? Great curiosity to know
what the Shakespeare say, especially what he say of me.”
“I will keep on trying,” Horton said.
He pulled the book back in front of him.
die in pain. He pretends great friendship for me, and he carries his role so well that it requires considerable analytical effort to discern his actual attitude. To arrive at an understanding of him, one must first learn what kind of thing he is and gain an acquaintance of his background and his motivation. It was only slowly that I came to a realization that he is, in truth, what he seems to be and what he boasts he is—not only a confirmed carnivore, but a predator as well. Killing is not only a way of life for him; it is a passion and religion. Not he alone, but his very culture, is based upon the art of killing. Bit by bit I have been able, through a deep insight gained from living with him, to piece together the story of his life and background. If you should ask him, I should imagine that he would tell you, proudly, he is of a warrior race. But that does not tell the entire story. He is, among his race, a very special creature, by his own light perhaps a legendary hero— or at least about to become a legendary hero. Hislife profession, as I understand it (and I am sure my understanding is correct), is to travel world to world and on each world challenge and kill the most deadly species that has evolved upon it. In the manner of the legendary North American Indians of Old Earth, he counts symbolic coup for each adversary that he kills and, as I understand it, he now is runner-up in the entire history of his race and yearns most worthily to become the alltime champion, the greatest killer of them all. What this will gain him I’m not certain, but can only speculate—perhaps the immortality of racial memory, being enshrined forever in his tribal pantheon...
“Well?” asked Carnivore.
“Yes?”
“The book now talks to you. You move the finger, line by
tine.”
“Nothing,” said Horton. “Really nothing. Mostly prayers and
incantations.”
“I knew it,” rasped Carnivore. “I knew it. He say my magic goddamn
foolishness, and yet he
practice of his own. He does not mention me? You sure he does not mention me?” “Not yet. Perhaps a little farther on.”
But in this abomination of a planet he is trapped with me. He is barred, as I am, from those other worlds wherein he could seek out and battle and destroy, to the eternal glory of his race, the most puissant life-forms he can ferret out. In consequence, I am sure I can detect in the great warrior mentality of him a quietly growing desperation, and I feel certain that the time will come when all hope is gone of other worlds, that he will make me the last name on his victory roll; although, God knows, the killing of me will be small credit to him, for I would be hopelessly outmatched. By indirection, I have done my best to impress upon him, in many subtle ways, what a frail and feeble opponent I would be. In my weakness, I had thought, lay my only hope. But now I know I am wrong. I can see the madness and the desperation grow upon him. If it goes on, I know one day he will kill me. At that time when his madness serves to magnify me into a foeman worthy of him, he’ll have at me. Just what this will profit him, I do not know. It would seem there would be little point in killing when others of his race will not, cannot, know of it. But I somehow gain the impression, from what I do not know, that even in his present situation of being lost among the stars, the killing would be known and celebrated by others of his race. This is far beyond my understanding, and I have given up trying for an understanding of it.
He sits across the table from me as I write and I can see him measuring me, knowing full well, of course, that I am no worthy subject of his ritualistic killing pattern, but still trying to psych himself into believing that I am. Someday he will do it, and that will be the day. But I have him beat hands down. I have an ace tucked up my sleeve. He does not know that within me lies a death that has only a short time now to run. I shall be ripe to die before he is ready for the killing. And since he is a sentimental slob—all killers are sentimental slobs—I shall talk him into killing me as a priestly office, for the performance of which I turn to him in my greatest need as the only one who can perform this deed of ultimate compassion. So I shall do two things: I shall use him to cut short the final agony which I know must come, and I shall rob him of his final killing since killing done in mercy will not count for him. He shall not count coup upon me. Rather, I’ll count coup on him. And as he kills me, mercifully, I shall laugh full in his face. For laughter is the final victory. Killing for him, laughter for me. This is the measurement between us.
Horton lifted his head and sat in stunned silence. The man was mad, he told himself. Mad, with a cold, icy, congealed madness that was far worse than raving madness. Not mere madness of the mind, but madness of the soul.
“So,” said Carnivore, “he finally mentioned
me.”
“Yes. He said you are a sentimental slob.”
“That do not sound so good.”
“It is,” said Horton, “a term of great affection.”
“You are sure of that?” asked Carnivore.
“Very sure,” said Horton.
“Then the Shakespeare really loved me.”
“I am certain that he did,” said Horton.
He went back to the book, rifling through the pages. Richard III. The Comedy of Errors. The
Taming of the Shrew. King
John. Twelfth Night. Othello, King Lear, Hamlet. They all
were there.
And scribbled on the margins, inscribed on the partially blank
pages where plays came to an end, was the crabbed writing.
“He talked to it a lot,” said Carnivore.
“Almost every night. Sometimes on rainy days when we stayed
inside.”
All’s Well That Ends Well, page 1038,
scribbled on the left-hand margin:
The pond stinks the worst today I’ve ever
smelled it. It is an evil smell. Not just a bad smell, but an evil
smell. As if it were alive, exuding evil. As if it hid in its depth
some obscenity.
King Lear, page 1143, the right-hand
margin this time:
I found emeralds, weathered out of a ledge a mile or so below the spring. Just lying there, waiting to be picked up I filled my pockets with them. I don’t know why I bothered. Here I am, a rich man, and it doesn’t mean a thing...
Macbeth, page
1207, bottom margin:
There is something in the houses. Something to be found. A riddle
to be answered. I don’t know what it is, but I feel it
there.
Pericles, page 1381, on the lower half
of the page left blank as the text came to an end:
We all are lost in the immensity of the universe. Having lost our home, we have no place to go or, what is worse, too many places to go. We are lost not only in the depths of our universe, but in the depths of our minds as well. When men stayed on one planet, they knew where they were. They had yardsticks for measurement and thumbs to test the weather. But now, even when we think we know where we are, we still are lost; for there is either no path to lead us home, or, in many cases, we have no home to which it is worth our while returning.
No matter where home may be, men today, at least intellectually, are footloose wanderers. Even though we may call a planet ‘home,’ even the few who still remain who can call the Earth their home, there is now no such thing as home. The human race now is fragmented to the stars, still scattering to the stars. We, as a race, are impatient with the past, and many of us with the present and we have only one direction, futureward, which takes us ever farther from the concept of home. As a race, we are incurable wanderers and we want nothing that will tie us down and nothing to hang onto—until that day which must come at some time to each of us, when we realize we’re not as free as we think we are, but, rather, lost. It is only when we try to recall, with our racial memory, where we’ve been and why we’ve been there, that we realize the full measure of our lostness.
On one planet, or even in a single solar system, we could orient ourselves at the psychological center of the universe. For we had values then, values that we now see were limited, but at least values that provided a human framework within which we moved and lived. But that framework now is shattered, and our values have been splintered so many times by the different worlds we have trod upon (for each new world would give us either new values or negate some of the old ones to which we’d clung) that we have no basis upon which to form and exercise our judgments. We now have no scale upon which we can agree to delineate our losses or our aspirations. Even infinity and eternity have become concepts that differ in certain important ways. Once we used our science to structure the place in which we lived, to give it shape and reason; now we are confused because we have learned so much (although only a little of what there is to learn) that we cannot bring human scientific viewpoints to bear upon the universe as we see it now. We have more questions now than we ever had before, and less chance of finding answers. Provincial we may have been; there is no one who will deny that. But it must occur to many of us that in provincialism we found a comfort and a certain sense of safety. All life is set within an environment that is far greater than life itself, but given a few million years any kind of life can gain from its environment enough familiarity that it can live with its surroundings. But we, in leaving Earth, in spurning the planet of our birth for brighter, farther stars, have enlarged our environment enormously, and we do not have those few million years; in our haste we have no time at all.
The writing came to an end. Horton closed the
book and shoved it to one side. “Well?” asked Carnivore.
“Nothing,” Horton said. “Just endless incantations. I do not
understand them.”