Shakespeare's Planet (11 page)

“Shakespeare, from his skull, is human.”

“Yes, but we know little more of him than we do of Carnivore. Although we may be able to learn more. He carried a volume of the complete Shakespeare, and he filled the book with writing, scribbling on the margins and end papers. Every place where there was white space left.”

“You have read some of this scribbling?”

“Some of it. There's a lot yet to read.”

“The meat is done,” said Nicodemus. “There is only the one plate and the one set of silver. You will not mind, Carter, if I give them to the lady?”

“Not at all,” said Horton. “I am handy with my hands.”

“Okay, then,” said Nicodemus. “I'm off to the tunnel.”

“As soon as I have eaten,” said Elayne, “I'll drop by to see how you're getting on.”

“I wish you would,” said the robot. “I can't make head nor tail of it.”

“It's fairly simple,” said Elayne. “There are two panels, one smaller than the other. The small one controls the shield over the larger panel, the control panel.”

“There's not two panels,” said Nicodemus.

“There should be.”

“Well, there's not. There is just the one with the force shield over it.”

“That means, then,” said Elayne, “that it's not a mere malfunction. Someone closed the tunnel.”

“The thought had been in my mind,” said Horton. “A closed world. But why should it be closed?”

“I hope,” said Nicodemus, “that we don't find out.” He picked up his tool kit and left.

“Why, this is tasty,” exclaimed Elayne. She wiped grease off her lips. “My people do not eat flesh. Although we know of those who do and have despised them for it as a mark of barbarity.”

“We are all barbarians here,” said Horton, shortly.

“What was all that about cold-sleep for the Carnivore?”

“The Carnivore loathes this planet. He wants to get off it. That's why he wants so badly for the tunnel to be opened. If the tunnel can't be opened, he'd like to leave with us.”

“Leave with you? Oh, yes, you have a ship. Or do you?”

“We do. Out on the plain.”

“Wherever that is.”

“Just a few miles from here.”

“So you'll be leaving. May I ask where you'll be headed?”

“Damned if I know,” said Horton. “That is Ship's department. Ship says we can't go back to Earth. We've been gone too long, it seems. Ship says we'd be obsolescent if we did go back. That they wouldn't want us back, that we'd embarrass them. And from what you tell me, I guess there's no point in going back.”

“Ship,” said Elayne. “You talk as if the ship's a person.”

“Well, in a way, it is.”

“That's ridiculous. I can understand how, over a long period of time, you'd develop a feeling of affection for it. Men have always personalized their machines and tools and weapons, but …”

“Damn it,” Horton told her, “you don't understand. Ship really is a person. Three persons, actually. Three human brains …”

She reached out a greasy hand and grasped his arm. “Say that again,” she said. “Say it very slowly.”

“Three brains,” said Horton. “Three brains from three different people. Tied in with the ship. The theory was …”

She let loose of his arm. “So it is true,” she said. “It wasn't legend. There really were such ships.”

“Hell, yes. There were a number of them. I don't know how many.”

“I talked about legends earlier,” she said. “How you couldn't tell the difference between legend and history. How you couldn't be sure. And this was one of the legends—ships that were part human, part machine.”

“It was nothing wonderful,” he told her. “Oh, yes, I suppose wonderful, at that. But it tied in with our kind of technology—a melding of the mechanical and biological. It was in the realm of the possible. In the technological climate of our day, it was acceptable.”

“A legend come to life,” she said.

“I feel a little funny being pegged a legend.”

“Well, not really you,” she said, “but the entire story. It seemed incredible to us, one of those kind of things you can't quite believe.”

“Yet you said better ways were found.”

“Different ways,” she said. “Faster-than-light ships, based on new principles. But tell me about yourself. You're not the only human on the ship, of course. They would not have sent out a ship with just one man aboard.”

“There were three others, but they died. An accident, I'm told.”

“Told? You didn't know about it?”

“I was in cold-sleep,” he said.

“In that case, if we can't get the tunnel fixed, there is room aboard.”

“For you,” Horton said. “For Carnivore, as well, I suppose, if we faced the choice of taking him or leaving him behind. I don't mind telling you, however, that we don't feel quite easy with him. And there is the problem of his body chemistry.”

“I don't know,” she said. “If there were nothing else that could be done, I suppose I'd rather leave with you than to stay here forever. It does not seem a charming planet.”

“I have that feeling, too,” said Horton.

“But it would mean giving up my work. You must be wondering why I came through the tunnel.”

“I've not had the time to ask. You said mapping. After all, it's your concern.”

She laughed. “Nothing secretive about it. Nothing mysterious. A team of us are mapping the tunnels—or, rather, trying to.”

“But Carnivore told us they are random.”

“That's because he knows nothing of them. A lot of uninformed creatures probably use them, and, of course, for them they're random. The robot said there was only one box here?”

“That is right,” said Horton. “A single oblong box. It looked like a control panel. With some sort of cover over it. Nicodemus thought the cover might be a force shield.”

“Ordinarily there are two,” she said. “To select your destination, you activate the first box. It requires placing three fingers in three holes and depressing the activation triggers. That causes your so-called force field to disappear from the selection panel. You then depress the destination button. Take your fingers out of the first box and the protection shield reappears on the panel. To get at the selection panel, you must activate the first box. After you have selected your destination, you go through the tunnel.”

“But how do you know where you are going? Are there symbols on the panel that tell you which button you should push?”

“That's the trick,” she said. “There are no destination symbols, and you don't know where you are going. I suppose the tunnel builders had some way of knowing where they were going. They may have had a system that could allow them to pick a correct destination, but, if so, we have failed to find it.”

“Then you are pushing buttons in the dark.”

“The idea,” she said, “is that while there are many tunnels and many destinations for each tunnel, neither the tunnels nor the destinations can be infinite. If you travel for a sufficient length of time, one of the tunnels is bound to bring you back to a place you've been before, and if you keep precise record of the button you pushed on each panel of each tunnel that you traveled and if enough of you do this, each of you leaving a record-communication at each panel before you go through another tunnel, so that if one of your teammates should pass the same way … I explain it badly, but you can see how, after many trials and errors, in a few instances tunnel and panel relationships can be worked out.”

Horton looked doubtful. “The odds sound long to me. Have you ever come back, as yet, to any place you've been?”

“Not as yet,” she said.

“How many of you are there? On the team, I mean.”

“I'm not sure. They keep adding members all the time. Recruiting them and adding them. It's a sort of patriotic thing to do. Insofar, of course, as any of us are patriotic. The word doesn't mean, I'm sure, what it did at one time.”

“How do you get your information back to base? To headquarters? To wherever you are supposed to deliver it? That is, if you get any information.”

“You don't seem to understand,” she said. “Some of us—perhaps many of us—never will get back, with or without information. We knew, when we took on the work, that we were expendable.”

“You don't sound as if you really care.”

“Oh, we care, all right. At least I do. But the work is important. Can't you see how important? It's an honor to be allowed to search. Not everyone can go. There are requirements that each of us must meet before we are accepted.”

“Like not giving a damn if you ever get back home again.”

“Not that,” Elayne said, “but a sense of self-worth that is sufficiently strong to maintain you anywhere, no matter what sort of situation you may get yourself into. Not having to be home to be yourself. Sufficient to one's self. Not dependent upon any specific environment or relationship. Do you understand?”

“I think I catch the edge of it.”

“If we can work out a map of the tunnels, if we can establish the relationship of the various tunnels, then they can be used intelligently. Not just going blind in them as we must go now.”

“But Carnivore used them. And so did Shakespeare. You said you have to pick a destination, even if you don't know what that destination may be.”

“They can be used without destination selection. You can, with the exception of the tunnel on this planet, simply walk into them and go where the tunnel takes you. Under these conditions, the tunnels are truly random. Our guess is that if no destination is chosen, there is a calculated randomness, some sort of preset randomness. No three users—perhaps no hundred users—using the tunnels in this manner, will ever arrive at the same destination. We think it was a calculated means to discourage use of the tunnels by unauthorized persons.”

“And the builders of the tunnels?”

Elayne shook her head. “No one knows. Who they were or where they came from or how the tunnels are constructed. No hint of the underlying principles. Some people think that somewhere in the galaxy the builders still live on and that portions of the tunnels still may be in use. What we have here may be only abandoned sections of the tunnel systems, a part of an ancient transportation system for which there is now no need. Like an abandoned road that is no longer used because it leads to places no one now wants to go to, places where all purpose of going has long since disappeared.”

“There are no indications of what kind of creatures the builders were?”

“A few,” she said. “We know they must have had hands of sorts. Hands with at least three fingers, or some sort of manipulatory organs with the equivalent of at least three fingers. They had to have that many to work the panels.”

“Nothing else?”

“Here and there,” she said, “I have found representations. Paintings, carvings, etchings. In old buildings, on walls, on pottery. The representations are of many different life-forms, but seemingly one particular life-form is always there.”

“Wait a minute,” said Horton. He rose from the woodpile and went into the Shakespeare building, coming back with the bottle he had found the day before. He handed it to her.

“Like this?” he asked.

She rotated the bottle slowly, then stopped and placed a finger on it. “This is the one,” she said.

Her finger rested on the creature that stood inside the canister. “This one is poorly executed,” she said. “And done at a different angle. In other representations, you can see more of the body, more details. These things sticking from its head …”

“They look like the antennae the Earth people of an ancient day used to pick up signals for their TV sets,” said Horton. “Or it might represent a crown.”

“They are antennae,” said Elayne. “Biological antennae, I am sure. Perhaps sense organs of some sort. The head here looks to be a blob. All I've ever seen were blobs. No eyes, no ears, no mouth, no nose. Perhaps they have no need of these. The antennae may give them all the sensory input of which they have any need. Their heads may be no more than blobs, a thing to anchor the antennae. And the tail. You can't tell here, but the tail is bushy. The rest of the body, or what I could make of it in the other representations I have seen, is always vague as to detail—a sort of generalized body. We can't be sure they really look like this, of course. The whole thing may be no more than symbolic.”

“The art execution is poor,” said Horton. “Crude and primitive. Wouldn't you think that the people who could construct the tunnels could draw better pictures of themselves?”

“I've thought of that, too,” Elayne said. “Maybe it's not they who draw the pictures. Maybe they have no sense of art at all. Maybe the art is done by other peoples, inferior people, perhaps. They may not draw from actual knowledge, but from myth. Perhaps the myth of the tunnel builders survives throughout a good part of the galaxy, shared in common by many different people, many different racial memories persisting through the ages.”

16

The stench of the pond was horrifying, but as Horton approached it seemed to lessen. The first faint whiff of it had been worse than down here near the water's edge. Perhaps, he told himself, it smelled worse when it began to break up and dissipate. Here, where it lay heavy, the foulness of it was suppressed and masked by its other components, the nonstench components that went to make it up.

The pond, he saw, was somewhat larger than it had appeared when he first had seen it from the ruined settlement. It lay placid, without a ripple on it. The shoreline was clean; no underbrush or reeds or any other kind of vegetation encroaching on it. Except for occasional small runlets of sand brought down off the hillside by runoff water, the shore was granite. The pond apparently lay in a hollowed bowl in the underlying rock. And, as the shore was clean, so was the water. There was no scum upon it as might be expected in a body of stagnant water. Apparently no vegetation, perhaps no life of any sort, could exist within the pond. But despite its cleanliness, it was not clear. It seemed to hold within itself a dark murkiness. It was neither blue nor green—it was almost black.