Shakespeare's Planet (10 page)

If it were in hiding, you would not see it. You must remain alert
.

The pond, perhaps
, said Horton.
There may be something living in the pond. Carnivore seems to think there is. He thinks it eats the meat he throws in the pond
.

Perhaps
, said Ship.
We seem to remember Carnivore saying the pond was not really water, more like soup. You've not been near it?

It stinks,
said Horton.
One does not go near it
.

We cannot pinpoint the intelligence
, said Ship,
except that we know it's in your general area. Not too far away. Perhaps hidden. Take no chances. You wear your sidearms?

Yes, of course we do
, said Nicodemus.

That is good
, said Ship.
Stay watchful
.

All right
, said Horton.
Good night, Ship
.

Not yet
, said Ship.
There is one thing. When you read the book, we tried to follow you, but could not make out all of what you read. This Shakespeare
—
Carnivore's friend, not the ancient playwright
—
what about him?

A human
, said Horton.
There can't be any doubt of that. His skull, at least, is human and his writing seems to be authentic human writing. But there was a madness in him. Perhaps engendered by malignancy, a brain tumor, more than likely. He wrote of an inhibitor, a cancer inhibitor, I suppose, but said he was running out of it and knew that once he did, he would die in terrible pain. That's why he tricked Carnivore into killing him, laughing all the while
.

Laughing?

He laughed all the time at Carnivore. Letting Carnivore know he was laughing at him. Carnivore speaks of it often. He was deeply hurt by it and it weighs upon his mind. I thought at first that this Shakespeare was a smart-ass
—
you know, someone with an inferiority complex which demanded that somehow, at no danger to himself, he must continually feed his ego. One way to do that is to engage in secret laughter at others, bearing out the fiction of a self-conceived and illusory superiority. I thought that at first, I say. Now I think the man was mad. He was suspicious of Carnivore. He thought Carnivore was about to kill him. Convinced that Carnivore would finally do him in
.

And Carnivore? What do you think?

He's all right
, said Horton.
There's no great harm in him
.

Nicodemus, what do you think?

I agree with Carter. He's no threat to us. I been meaning to tell you
—
we found an emerald mine
.

We know
, said Ship.
Note has been made of it. Although we suspect there'll be nothing come of it. We are not now concerned with emerald mines. Although, once this is done, it might do no harm to bring back a bucketful of them. No one knows. They might, somewhere, sometime come in handy
.

We'll do that
, Nicodemus said.

And now
, said Ship,
good night, Carter Horton. Nicodemus, you keep good watch while he sleeps
.

I intend to
, said Nicodemus.

Good night, Ship
, said Horton.

15

Nicodemus shook Horton awake. “We have a visitor.”

Horton reared upright out of the sleeping bag. He rubbed his sleep-smeared eyes to be sure of what he saw. A women stood off a pace or two, close beside the fire. She wore a pair of yellow shorts and white boots that reached halfway to her knees. She had on nothing else. A deep red rose was tatooed on one naked breast. She stood tall and had a willowy look about her. Strapped about her waist was a belt that supported a weird sort of handgun. A knapsack was slung across one shoulder.

“She came walking up the path,” said Nicodemus.

The sun was not up yet, but the first dawn light had come. There was a wet, wispy, soft quality to the morning.

“You came up the path,” said Horton, speaking fuzzily, still only half-awake. “Does that mean you came through the tunnel?”

She clapped her hands in pleasure. “How wonderful,” she said. “You speak the elder tongue as well. How delightful to find the two of you. I studied your speech, but until now have never had a chance to use it. As I suspected, I realize now that the pronunciation we were taught had lost something through the years. I was astonished; and gratified as well, when the robot spoke it, but I could not hope that I'd find others …”

“It's passing strange, this thing she says,” said Nicodemus. “Carnivore speaks the same tongue, and he learned it from Shakespeare.”

“Shakespeare,” said the woman. “Shakespeare was an ancient …”

Nicodemus jerked a thumb upward toward the skull. “Meet Shakespeare,” he said, “or what is left of him.”

She looked in the direction of his thumb. She clapped her hands again. “How charmingly barbaric!”

“Yes, isn't it?” said Horton.

Her face was thin to the point of boniness, but it was of an aristocratic cast. Her silver hair was skinned back from her face into a little topknot on the nape of her neck. The skinning back of the hair served to emphasize the boniness of her face. Her eyes were piercing blue and her lips were thin, with no color in them and without a trace of smile. Even when she had clapped her hands in joy, there had not been a smile. Horton found himself wondering if a smile was possible for her.

“You travel in strange company,” she said to Horton.

Horton looked around. Carnivore was emerging from the doorway. He looked like an unmade bed. He stretched, thrusting his arms far above his head. He yawned, his fangs gleaming in full splendor.

“I'll get breakfast,” said Nicodemus. “Are you hungry, ma'am?”

“Ravenous,” she said.

“Meat we have,” said Carnivore, “although not freshly killed. I make haste to welcome you to our small encampment. I am Carnivore.”

“But a carnivore is a thing,” she objected. “A classification. It is not a name.”

“He is a carnivore and proud of it,” said Horton. “That's what he calls himself.”

“Shakespeare name me it,” said Carnivore. “I hold another name, but it is not important.”

“My name is Elayne,” she said, “and I am glad to meet you.”

“My name is Horton,” said Horton. “Carter Horton. You may call me either one or both.”

He crawled out of the sleeping bag and got to his feet.

“Carnivore said ‘meat,'” she said. “Could he be talking about flesh?”

“That's what he means,” said Horton.

Carnivore thumped his chest. “Meat is good for you,” he said. “It gives you blood and bone. It tones up the muscles.”

She shuddered delicately. “Meat is all you have?”

“We could manage something else,” said Horton. “Food that we packed in. Dehydrated, mostly. Not the best to taste.”

“Oh, the hell with it,” she said. “I'll eat meat with you. It is only prejudice that has kept me from it all these years.”

Nicodemus, who had gone into the Shakespeare house, now came out of it. He held a knife in one hand and a slab of meat in the other. He cut off a large chunk of the meat and handed it to Carnivore. Carnivore squatted on his heels and began tearing at the meat, blood running down his muzzle.

Horton saw the look of horror on her face. “We'll cook ours,” he said. He walked over to a pile of firewood and sat down upon it, patting a place beside him. “Join me,” he said. “Nicodemus will do the cooking. It will take a while.” He said to Nicodemus, “You'd better cook hers well. I'll take mine rare.”

“I'll start hers first,” said Nicodemus.

Hesitantly, she came over to the woodpile and sat down next to Horton.

“This,” she said, “is the strangest situation I have ever encountered. A man and his robot talking the elder tongue. A carnivore who talks it as well, and a human skull nailed above a doorway. The two of you must be from one of the backwoods planets.”

“No,” said Horton. “We come straight from Earth.”

“But that can't be,” she said. “No one now is straight from Earth. And I doubt that even there they speak the elder tongue.”

“But we are. We left Earth in the year …”

“No one has left Earth for more than a thousand years,” she said. “Earth now has no base for far traveling. Look, how fast were you traveling?”

“At near light-speed. With a few stops here and there.”

“And you? You were, perhaps, in sleep?”

“Of course, I was in sleep.”

“At near the speed of light,” she said, “there is no way to calculate. I know there were early calculations, mathematical calculations, but they were, at best, rough approximations, and the human race did not travel at the speed of light for a sufficient length of time to arrive at any true determination of the time dilation effect. Only a few interstellar ships traveling at the speed of light or less were sent out, and fewer of them returned. Before they did return, there were better systems for far traveling and, in the meantime, Old Earth had stumbled into a catastrophic economic collapse and a war situation—not a single, all-engulfing war, but many mean little wars—and in the process, Earth's civilization was virtually destroyed. Old Earth is still there. Its remaining population may be climbing back again. No one seems to know; no one really cares; no one ever goes back to Old Earth. I can see you know nothing of all this.”

Horton shook his head. “Nothing.”

“That means you were on one of the early light-ships.”

“One of the first,” said Horton, “In 2455. Or there-abouts. Maybe the first of the twenty-sixth century. I don't really know. We were put into cold-sleep; then there was a delay.”

“You were put on standby.”

“I guess that's what you'd call it.”

“We aren't absolutely sure,” she said, “but we think this is the year 4784. There is no certainty, really. Somehow history got all bollixed up. Human history, that is. There are a lot of other histories than Earth history. There was a time of confusion. There was an era of outpouring into space. Once there was a reasonable way to get into space, no one who could afford the going stayed on Earth. It required no great analytical ability to see what was happening to Earth. No one wanted to be caught in the crunch. For a great many years, there were not too many records. Those that did exist may have been erroneous; others were lost. As you might imagine, the human race passed through crisis after crisis. Not only on Earth, but in space as well. Not all the colonies survived. Some survived, but later failed, for one reason or another, to establish contact with other colonies, so were considered lost. Some still are lost—either lost or dead. The people went out into space in all directions—most of them without any actual plans, hoping that in time they'd find a planet where they could settle. They went out not only into space, but into time as well, and no one understood time factors. We still don't. Under those conditions, it would be easy to gain a century or two or lose a century or two. So don't ask me to swear what year it is. And history. That is even worse. We don't have history; we have legend. Some of the legend probably is history, but we can't be sure which is history and which is not.”

“And you came here by tunnel?”

“Yes. I am a member of a team that is mapping the tunnels.”

Horton looked at Nicodemus, who was crouched beside the fire, watching the cooking steaks. “Did you tell her?” Horton asked.

“I never had a chance,” said Nicodemus. “She never gave me a chance. She was so excited about me talking what she called the ‘elder tongue.'”

“Tell me what?” asked Elayne.

“The tunnel's closed. It's inoperative.”

“But it brought me here.”

“It brought you here. It won't take you back. It's out of order. It works only one way.”

“But that's impossible. There is a control panel.”

“I know about the control panel,” Nicodemus told her. “I'm working on it. Trying to fix it.”

“And how are you doing?”

“Not too well,” said Nicodemus.

“We are trapped,” said Carnivore, “unless the goddamn tunnel can be fixed.”

“Maybe I can help,” said Elayne.

“If you can,” said Carnivore, “I implore you do your utmost. Hope I had that if tunnel not fixed, I could join ship with Horton and the robot, but I think it over and it does not seem so. This sleep you talk about, this freezing frightens me. Have no wish to be frozen.”

“We have worried about that,” Horton told him. “Nicodemus knows about the freezing. He has a sleep-technician transmog. But he only knows how to freeze humans. You might be different—a different body chemistry. We have no way to determine your body chemistry.”

“So that is out,” said Carnivore. “So tunnel must be fixed.”

Horton said to Elayne, “You don't seem too upset.”

“Oh, I suppose I am,” she said. “But my people do not rail against fate. We accept life as it comes. Good and bad. We know there will be each.”

Carnivore, finished eating, reared up, scrubbing at his bloodied muzzle with his hands. “I go hunting now,” he said. “Bring home fresh meat.”

“Wait until we've eaten,” suggested Horton, “and I'll go along with you.”

“Best not,” said Carnivore. “You scare the game away.”

He started walking off, then turned around. “One thing you can do,” he said. “You can throw old meat in pond. But hold your nose while doing.”

“I'll manage it,” said Horton.

“So good,” said Carnivore, and went stalking off, eastward along the path to the abandoned settlement.

“How did you fall in with him?” asked Elayne. “And what, actually, is he?”

“He was waiting for us when we landed,” said Horton. “We don't know what he is. He said that he was trapped here, along with Shakespeare …”