Destiny Doll (20 page)

TWENTY-FOUR

In the morning we found Tuck's doll, where it had been dropped beside the trail. It was in plain view, not more than six feet off the path. How we'd missed it before was hard to understand. I tried to pinpoint the place, wondering if this were in the area where we had hunted for him. But there was no landmark that stood out in my mind.

I had not really had a chance to take a good look at it before. The only time I had really seen it had been that night when we had been penned inside the red-stone edifice at the outskirts of the city. Now I did have a chance to look at it, to absorb the full impact of the sorrow that lay on the rudely carven face. Either, I thought, the one who'd carried it had been a primitive who, by sheer chance, had fashioned the sorrow in it, or a skilled craftsman who, with a few simple strokes, evoked the hopelessness and anguish of an intellectual being facing the riddle of the universe and overwhelmed by it.

The face was not entirely humanoid, but human enough so that one could equate it with humanity—a human face twisted out of shape by some great truth that it had learned—surely no truth that it had sought, but rather one that had been thrust upon it.

Having picked it up, I tried to throw it away, but could not throw it away. It had put roots into me and would not let me go. It haunted me and would not forego its haunting. I stood with one hand clutching it and tried to toss it to one side, but my fingers would not loosen their grip nor my arms make a throwing motion.

That had been the way it had been with Tuck, I thought, except that Tuck had been a willing captive of it, finding in it some attraction and significance that I did not find. Perhaps because it said to him a thing he found inside himself. Because, perhaps, he saw within it a condition from which he was seeking to escape. A madonna, Sara had said, and it could have been, but I saw no madonna in it.

So I went marching down the trail, like Tuck, hanging onto that damn thing, raging at myself—not so much for being unable to let go of it, as for the fact that it made me, after a fashion, a blood brother of the vanished Tuck. Sore that I should be even in the slightest way like him, for if there ever had been a man I had despised it had been Tuck.

We moved across the great blue plateau and behind us the purple mountains lost detail and resolved into a purple cloud. I wondered if Knight's fascination with blueness, as revealed in those first few paragraphs of his manuscript, might not be an echo of this blue land which he had crossed to reach the mountains and the valley, leaving Roscoe at the gate, with Roscoe later blundering down the trail to finally reach the city where, in his stupidity, he'd become a captive of the gnome.

After several days, from boredom rather than from curiosity, I opened the box again and took out the manuscript. Starting at the very beginning of it, I read it carefully—not all at once, of course, for it was slow going and tightly written and hard to decipher and there were many pages of it. I studied it as a scholar in some time-droning monastery might have studied some arcane roll of parchment, seeking, I think, not so much information as an understanding of the kind of mind that would write such a mass of garbage, trying to look through the vapid wanderings of that mind to a kernel of truth that still might dwell subconsciously in the man.

But there was nothing there, or at least nothing I could find. It was totally unintelligible and most of it inconceivable to anyone but an utter moron overflowing with words that must be gotten out of him, no matter what they meant.

It was not until the tenth night or so, when we were only two days march from the beginning of the desert, that I finally reached a portion of the manuscript that seemed to make some sense:

 . . . And these ones seek blue and purple knowledge. From all the universe they seek it. They trap all that may be thought or known. Not only blue and purple, but all spectra of knowing. They trap it on lonely planets, far lost in space and deep in time. In the blue of time. With trees they trap it and trapped, it is stored and kept against a time of golden harvest. Great orchards of mighty trees that tower into the blue for miles. Soaking in the thought and knowledge. As other planets soak in the gold of sun. And this knowledge is their fruit. Fruit is many things. It is sustenance of body and for brain. It is round and long and hard and soft. It is blue and gold and purple. Sometimes red. It ripens and it falls. It is harvested. For harvesting is a gathering and fruiting is a growing. Both are blue and gold . . .

And he was off again into his nonsensical ramblings in which color and shape and size, as it had all through the manuscript, played a major role.

I went back and read the single paragraph again and went back carefully over the preceding page to find some indication of who "these ones" might be, but there was nothing that could help me.

I put the manuscript away and sat late beside the fire, thinking furiously. Was that one paragraph no more than the disordered meandering of a half-mad mind, as must be all the rest of it? Or did it, perchance, represent a single lucid moment during which he'd written down some fact, couched in his disjointed, mystic style, that he knew might be important? Or could it be that Knight was less crazy than I thought and that all the gibberish of the manuscript was no more than a camouflage in which might be concealed a message that he wanted to transmit to whoever might somehow get his hands upon it? That this might be the case seemed farfetched. If he had been clear enough in mind to do a thing like that he would have long since quit the valley and come pelting down the trail, hoping against hope that he might find some way to flee the planet and carry what he knew back to the galaxy.

If the words should be a hidden message, how had he found out? Was there a record somewhere in the city that would tell the story? Or had he talked to someone or something that had seized the chance to pass on the knowledge of why this planet should be a planted orchard? Or had it, perhaps, been Roscoe who had learned the truth? There might be ways, I thought, that Roscoe could find out, for Roscoe was, of all things, a telepathic robot. Although right now he didn't look like one. He squatted beside me and once again he had smoothed out a slate upon the ground and was writing symbols, softly jabbering to himself.

I almost asked him and then decided not to try. There was nothing, I was convinced, that anyone could learn from this battered robot.

The next morning we went on and on the second day we came to the cache we'd made, filled one of the water tins and retrieved some food. With the water and the supplies on Roscoe's back, we faced the desert.

We made good time. We passed the field where I had fought the centaurs and came to, and went on without stopping, the gully where we'd found Old Paint. We stumbled on old campfires where we'd spent a night, we recognized certain landmarks and the land was red and yellow and honkers hooted in the distances and we glimpsed at times some of the other strange denizens of the place. But nothing interfered with us and we drove on down the frail.

Now the others came out to travel with us, a shadowy, ghostly company—Sara riding on Old Paint, Tuck tripping in his long brown robe and leading the stumbling, fumbling George Smith by the hand, Hoot ranging far ahead, always ranging far ahead to spy out the trail, and I found myself shouting to him, a, foolish thing to do, for he was too far ahead of us to hear me. There were times, I think, when I believed they were really with us, and other times when I knew they weren't. But even when I knew they weren't, it was a comfort to imagine that I saw them. There was one, thing that perplexed me. Tuck carried the doll clutched tight against his breast and at the same time I carried the selfsame doll in the pocket of my jacket.

The doll no longer was glued to my hand. I could let loose of it, but I kept on carrying it. I don't know why I did. Somehow I just had to. At nights I'd sit and look at it, half-repelled, half-fascinated, but night by night, it seemed, the repulsion wore away and the fascination won. I either sat looking at the doll, hoping that some day I might encompass within my mind all I saw upon its face and then be done with it. Either that or read the manuscript, which continued on its witless way until near the very end when this occurred:

 . . . Trees are tallness. Trees reach high. Never satisfied. Never fulfilled. What I write about trees and trapped knowledge being true. Tops are' vapory, blue vapor . . .

What I say about trees and trapped knowledge being true . . .

Was that single sentence tucked in among the gibberish put there to fortify and reaffirm what he had written many pages back? Another flash of lucidity in the midst of all his foolishness? One was tempted to believe so, but there was no way to know.

The next night I finished reading the manuscript. There was nothing more.

And the third day after that we sighted the city, far off, like a snowy mountain thrusting up into the sky.

TWENTY-FIVE

The tree still lay where I had chopped it down with the raking laser beam, its jagged stump like a massive spear stabbing at the sky. The bole stretched for miles along the ground, its vegetation shriveled brown, revealing its woody skeleton.

Beyond it loomed the bulk of the red-stone edifice in which the tree had penned us with its bombardment, and looking at, it, I could hear again, in memory and imagination, the sound of millions of invisible wings flying underneath its roof, beating their way out of nowhere into nowhere.

A foul and bitter stench blew from the free and as we approached it I could see that the circular, lawnlike area which had surrounded the stump had caved in upon itself and become a pit. Out of the pit rose the stench and from the knoll on which we stood I caught a glimpse of slimy skeletons— strangely wrought but undeniably skeletons—floating in the oily liquid that half filled the pit.

Not just one life, I told myself, not the life of the free alone, but an entire community of life—the little, crying, mewling creatures that had swarmed out to cry their denunciations of us and now this, another community of life which had existed in a fluid reservoir underneath the tree. Life that in some way was intimately bound up with the free, that could no longer live once the tree was dead, that may have lived only so that the tree might live. I looked for some evidence of the mewling creatures which, by now, must be dead as well. There was no sign of them. Had they in death, I wondered, dried up into almost weightless nothingness, and been scattered by the wind.

I had been the one, I thought. It had been my hand that had loosed the death. I had intended to kill the tree alone; I had killed much else besides. I wondered what had come over me that I should be thinking this. They'd had it coming, hadn't they? The tree had attacked us and I had had every moral reason and every legal right to fight back. That much at least was gospel, a personal and very intimate gospel built up through the years. Nothing acted tough toward me that I didn't act tough right back. And it worked, I told myself grimly. Throughout our long trek to the mountains and the long trek back, no tree had made a pass at us. The word somehow had been passed along: Leave this guy alone; he's pure poison if you mess around with him. Not knowing I no longer had a laser gun, apparently not wanting to take the chance of finding out.

I felt Roscoe pawing at my shoulder and turned to see what it was he wanted. He pointed back the way we'd come.

And there they were, a herd of them. There was no mistaking them. They were, in flesh, the kind of monstrous beasts that had left their skeletons piled in a windrow back in the gorge where we had rescued Paint. They were massive things, running on great hind legs, with tails thrust out behind them to balance the great bulk of their bodies and their gigantic heads. With poised front legs armed with sharp and gleaming talons. The heads grinned at us and even from that distance there was evil in the faces. They might have been following us for a long time, but this was the first time they had shown themselves.

They were big and ugly and they were coming fast. I had seen what they could do and I wasn't about to wait and let them get to work on me. I lit out of there, heading for the trail that led toward the city. The shield weighed me down and I threw it away. The scabbarded sword banged against my knees and I tried to get the belt unbuckled, and while I was doing this the sword tripped me and I went sprawling like a cartwheel. Just before I came out of my spin and was falling flat upon my face, a hand reached out and grabbed me by the sword belt and held me high enough so that I cleared the ground, just barely. I hung there, swaying back and forth and watched the ground jerk by underneath my nose and out of one corner of my eyes I saw Roscoe's feet moving like a blur.

My God, how he could run.

I tried to angle my head around to see where we might be, but I was so near the ground I couldn't see a thing. It wasn't comfortable and it was embarrassing, but I wasn't beefing any. Roscoe was covering the ground in a satisfactory manner, much faster than if he'd had to wait for me.

Then finally I saw pavement underneath my face and Roscoe jerked me up and set me on my feet. I was a little dizzy and inclined to stagger, but I saw we were in the narrow city street we'd traveled days before, with the straight white walls arrowing up into the sky above us.

Angry snarling and vicious trumpeting sounded behind me and when I spun around I saw the pursuing beasts throwing their bodies into the narrow cleft of street, throwing them ferociously and vainly, fighting to get at us, fighting to get in. But we were safe. Finally I had an answer as to why the streets should be so narrow.

TWENTY-SIX

The ghostly ships still stood upon the whiteness of the landing field with the great white cliffs of the city rising up like the inner sides of a gigantic cup. The field was as clean as ever and there was a deathly silence over everything. Nothing stirred; there was no breath of wind.

The shriveled, shrunken body of the gnome hung limp and listless at the end of a rope tied to a rafter in the storeroom. The storeroom looked as it had before, with boxes, bales and bundles piled high. There was no sign of the hobbies.

In that great room to which the ramp led up from the street the slabs of stone were still in place, with the circular control dial to one side of them. One of the slabs was glowing and in the glow was a nightmare world of what seemed a brand-new planet, its half-molten, half-crystallized surface heaving in a slow pulsation, pitted with craters of red-hot slag, steam vents sending out slender plumes of smoke and superheated water. In the distance volcanoes belched flame and heavy clouds of smoke.

Roscoe had unloaded his packs and the water tin just inside the door that opened on the ramp and now was hunkered down, scratching at the floor, but making no marks upon it, and for once he wasn't mumbling to himself.

I went on breaking up the wooden bench I'd taken from the storeroom, feeding the fire I'd built upon the floor. And here I was, I thought, a latter-day barbarian camping in the deserted city of a vanished race, with another barbarian swinging at the end of a rope in the next door and a mechanical intelligence working on a problem that no one knew, perhaps least of all himself.

It was incredible that Roscoe could know what he was doing. There would have been no need to program him for the kind of calculations that he seemed to be engaged in working out. Was it possible, I wondered, that the beating his brain case had taken while being used as a polo ball had not only knocked out of him all ordinary sense, but had knocked genius into him?

The sun had passed its zenith and the lower part of the street outside lay in darkness, but by craning my neck, I could see the sunlight on the upper storeys of the soaring buildings. And from that upper part of the city came the faint, far-off sound of wind funneling through the higher levels. Down in the lower levels there was no hint of breeze.

A deserted city and why had it been deserted? What had happened to drive its people from it Or had they been driven? Perhaps they had accomplished their purpose and the city had served its purpose and they had simply left, for there may have been other planets where they could carry out other purposes, or maybe the same purpose as they had followed here. And could that purpose have been solely the planting of the trees—the planting of them and their careful nurturing until they had reached a size where they no longer needed care? It would have taken centuries, perhaps millennia, before the trees could be left on their own. The surveying to determine where they should be planted and the planting of them, the preliminary task alone would have required many years. And after that the building of the pits to store the seeds and the raising of the little rodents that collected them—there would be much to do.

But it would have been worth the work and time if the trees, indeed, were planted for the purpose hinted in Knight's manuscript. Each tree a receiving station that picked up information by a means that I could not imagine (the interception of mental waves, perhaps?) that filtered out from the galaxy. Millions of receivers hanging above the expanse of the galaxy, picking up the knowledge radiations, processing and enhancing them and storing them against a time when the planters could come at periodic intervals and extract the knowledge which had been thus collected. And where would the knowledge thus derived be stored? Certainly not in the trees themselves, but in the seeds, perhaps, storing it in a complicated DNA-RNA complex altering the purely biological characteristics of the nucleic acids so that instead of biological information alone many other kinds of information also might be stored.

I sweated, thinking of it. In the pits and bins in which the rodents dropped the seeds rested a treasure greater than anyone could dream. Anyone who could gather the seeds and crack the technique and the code to give up the knowledge they contained would have the intellectual resources of the galaxy at their fingertips. If one could beat the planters of this planetary orchard to the harvest, there would be rich pickings to be had. The planters, well aware of such a danger, had taken extraordinary precautions against word of the planet and its purpose ever leaking out. Outsiders could come here, were even encouraged to come here once they were in range, but once here there was, it seemed, no way to leave and carry back to the galaxy news of what they'd found.

How often did the planters come, I wondered. Every thousand years, perhaps. In each thousand years, most certainly, there'd be new galactic knowledge worthy of acquiring. Or did they come no longer? Had something happened to them that had stopped their harvest trips? Or could they have abandoned the entire project as no longer worth the effort? In the millennia which may have passed since this city had been built and this planet planted, had there been a shift in values and in viewpoint so that now to them, now either a more mature or a senile race, this planting of the planet (or, perhaps, of many planets) might seem no more than a childish program performed in the mistaken enthusiasm of their youth.

My legs were getting cramped from crouching and I put out a hand to rest, palm down, on the floor, preparatory to changing my position and as I reached out, my hand came down upon the doll. I didn't pick it up; I didn't want to look at it. I simply ran my fingers over the carven planes of that saddened face and I thought, as I did this, that the planters of the planet, the builders of the city, had not been the first. Before they had arrived there had been another race, the one that had built the churchlike edifice at the city's edge. One of them had carved the doll and it might be, I told myself, that the carving of the doll had been a greater feat, a more intellectual, certainly a more emotional, accomplishment than the building of the city and the planting of the trees.

But now neither race was here. I, a member of another race, perhaps not so great but as weasel-motivated as any race in the galaxy, was here. I was here and I knew the story and the treasure, and the treasure was a very solid thing, much more valuable than that haunted myth which Knight had hunted. It was something that could be sold and in that context I could understand it better than I could understand a myth. Knight may have known—he must have known to write of it as he had—but by the time he knew he probably had become so committed, so immersed in the phantom that he hunted that he would have passed it by as worthless.

Poor fool, I thought, to pass up a chance like this. Although, I realized, he may have passed it up only after he had realized there was no way off the planet.

I was not convinced, I told myself. There had to be a way. There always was a way if you worked hard enough at it. No gang of stupid orchardists could keep me here.

First something to eat and a little rest and I'd get at those other worlds. Despite what Sara had said about the chance that all of them would be isolated worlds, it did not stand to reason that there'd not be one of them that had some space-capable intelligence. And that was all I asked. Just to get my hands, by any means, upon a ship, any kind of a ship.

I wondered what I should do with the gnome and decided that I'd leave him hanging there, dangling from his beam. Even if I took him down I'd not know what to do with him; I could not know what he might have wished for me to do with him. Hanging from the beam had been the way he'd wanted it and that's the way he had it and I'd not interfere. Although I wondered why he did it. And recognized the fact that the way he'd done it emphasized that he was humanoid. Nothing other than a humanoid ever hanged itself.

I glanced over at Roscoe. He had quit his ciphering and now was sitting flat upon his bottom, with his feet stuck out before him staring into space. As if he had suddenly struck upon some astounding truth and had frozen into immobility to consider it.