Shakespeare's Planet (15 page)

“Cold-sleep is tailor-made for humans,” said the robot. “How it would work with another species, I have no idea. I would suspect not too well, perhaps not at all. First of all, the anesthetic that shocks the cells into momentary suspension until the cold can take effect. Almost foolproof for humans because it is designed for humans. To work with some other form of life, there might have to be a change. The change might be small and rather subtle, I imagine. And I'm not equipped to change it.”

“You mean he'd be dead even before he had a chance of freezing?”

“I would suspect that would be the case.”

“But you can't just leave him here,” said Elayne. “You can't go off and leave him.”

“We could put him on board,” said Horton.

“Not with me you can't,” siad Nicodemus. “I'd kill him in the first week out. He's sandpaper on my nerves.”

“Even if he escaped your homicidal tendencies,” said Horton, “what would be the purpose? I don't know what Ship has in mind, but it could be centuries before we made planetfall again.”

“You could stop and drop him off.”

“You could,” said Horton. “I could. Nicodemus could. But not Ship. Ship, I would suspect, takes a longer view. And what makes you think we'd find another planet that he could survive on—a dozen years from now, a hundred years from now? Ship spent a thousand years in space before we found this one. You must remember that Ship is an under-light-speed vessel.”

“You are right,” said Elayne. “I keep forgetting. During the time of the depression, when the humans fled from Earth, they went out in all directions.”

“Using faster-than-light.”

“No, not faster-than-light. Time-jump ships. Don't ask me how they worked. But you get the idea …”

“A glimmer,” Horton said.

“And even so,” she said, “they traveled many light-years to find terrestrial planets. Some disappeared—into vast distances, into time, out of this universe, there is no way to know. They've not been heard of since.”

“So you see,” said Horton, “how impossible this matter of Carnivore becomes.”

“Perhaps we still can solve the tunnel problem. That is what Carnivore really wants. That is what I want.”

“I'm out of all approaches,” said Nicodemus. “I have no new ideas. We are not dealing with a simple situation of someone simply closing a world. They went to a lot of work to keep it closed. The hardness of this rock isn't natural. No rock could be that hard. Someone made it hard. They recognized that someone might try to tamper with the panel and took steps against it.”

“There must be something here,” said Horton. “Some reason for blocking the tunnel off. A treasure, perhaps.”

“Not a treasure,” said Elayne. “They'd have taken a treasure with them. A danger, more than likely.”

“Someone who hid something here for safekeeping.”

“I don't think so,” said Nicodemus. “Someday they'd want to recover it. They could reach it, of course, but how would they get it out?”

“They could come by ship,” said Horton.

“That would be unlikely,” said Elayne. “The better answer is they'd know how to bypass the block.”

“You think there's a way to do it, then?”

“I'm inclined to think there might be, but that doesn't mean that we can find it.”

“Then, again,” said Nicodemus, “it may be a simple matter of blocking the tunnel so that something that is here cannot get out. Penning it in from the rest of the tunnel planets.”

“But if that's the case,” asked Horton, “what could it be? Would you think our creature in the cube?”

“That might be it,” she said. “Imprisoned not only in the cube, but restricted to the planet. A second defense against it if it ever was able to escape the cube. Although it is hard, somehow, to think so. It is such a pretty thing.”

“It could be pretty and still be dangerous.”

“What's this cube creature?” asked Nicodemus. “I've not heard of it.”

“Elayne and I found it in a building in the city. Some sort of thing enclosed in a cube.”

“Alive?”

“We can't be certain, but I think it is. I had the feeling that it is. Elayne was able to sense it.”

“And the cube? What is the cube made of?”

“A strange material,” said Elayne, “if it is a material. It stops you, but you can't feel it. It's as if it weren't there.”

Nicodemus began to pick up the tools scattered on the flat rock floor of the path.

“You're giving up,” said Horton.

“I might as well. There's no more I can do. No tool I have will touch the stone. I can't lift off the panel's protective covering, be it force field or something else. I'm done until someone else comes up with a good idea.”

“Perhaps if we had a look through Shakespeare's book, we'd come up with something new,” said Horton.

“Shakespeare never came close,” said Nicodemus. “The best that he could do was kick the tunnel and do a lot of cussing.”

“I didn't mean we'd find any worthwhile ideas,” said Horton. “At the best, an observation, the implications of which slipped past Shakespeare.”

Nicodemus was doubtful. “Maybe so,” he said. “But we can't do much reading with Carnivore around. He'll want to know what Shakespeare wrote, and some of the things that Shakespeare wrote were not too complimentary to his old pal.”

“But Carnivore's not here,” Elayne pointed out. “Did he say where he was going when you chased him off?”

“He said a walkabout. He mumbled something about magic. I gained the impression, none too clearly, that he wanted to collect certain magic stuff—leaves, roots, barks.”

“He spoke of magic earlier,” said Horton. “Some idea that we could combine our magics.”

Elayne asked, “Have you any magics?”

“No,” Horton said, “we haven't.”

“Then you must not sneer at those who have.”

“You mean you believe in magic?”

Elayne crinkled her brow. “I'm not sure,” she said, “but I have seen a magic work, or seem to work.”

Nicodemus finished with his toolbox and closed it.

“Let's get up to the house and see about that book,” he said.

20

“This Shakespeare of yours,” said Elayne, “seems to have been a philosopher, but a rather shaky one. Not at all well grounded.”

“He was a lonely and an ill and frightened man,” said Horton. “He wrote whatever came into his head, without examining the logic or the fitness of it. He was writing for himself. Never for a moment did he think anyone else would ever read what he was scribbling. If he had thought so, he probably would have been more circumspect in what he wrote.”

“At least he was honest about it,” she said. “Listen to this:

Time has a certain smell. This may be no more than a conceit of mine, but I am sure it has. Old time would be sour and musty and new time, at the beginning of creation, must have been sweet and heady and exuberant. I wonder if, as events proceed toward their unknowable end, we may not become polluted with the acrid scent of ancient time, in the same manner and to the same end as olden Earth was polluted by the spew of factory chimneys and the foulness of toxic gases. Does the death of the universe lie in time pollution, in the thickening of old time smell until no life can exist upon any of the bodies that make up the cosmos, perhaps eroding the very matter of the universe itself into a foul corruption? Will this corruption so clog the physical processes operative in the universe that they will cease to function and chaos will result? And if this should be the case, what would chaos bring? Not necessarily the end of the universe since chaos in itself is a negation of all physics and all chemistry, perhaps allowing for new and unimaginable combinations which would violate all previous conceptions, giving rise to a disorderliness and an imprecision which would make possible certain events that science now tells us are unthinkable.

“And he goes on:

This may have been the situation—I was first inclined to say a time and that would have been a contradiction in terms—when, before the universe came into being, there was neither time nor space and, as well, no referrents for that great mass of somethingness waiting to explode so our universe could come into existence. It is impossible, of course, for the human mind to imagine a situation where there'd have been neither time nor space except as each potentially existed in that cosmic egg, itself a mystery that is impossible for one to visualize. And yet, intellectually, one does know a situation such as this did exist if our scientific thinking is correct. Still, the thought occurs—if there were neither time nor space, in what sort of medium did the cosmic egg exist?

“Provocative,” said Nicodemus, “but still it gives us no information, nothing that we need to know. The man writes as if he were living in a vacuum. He could write that sort of drivel anywhere at all. Only occasionally does he mention this planet, with parenthetical dirty digs at the Carnivore.”

“He was trying to forget this planet,” said Horton, “trying to retire within himself so that he could disregard it. He was, in effect, attempting to create a pseudo-world that would give him something other than this planet.”

“For some reason,” said Elayne, “he was concerned about pollution. Here is something else he wrote about it:

The emergence of intelligence, I am convinced, tends to unbalance the ecology. In other words, intelligence is the great polluter. It is not until a creature begins to manage its environment that nature is thrown into disorder. Until that occurs, there is a system of checks and balances operating in a logical and understandable manner. Intelligence destroys and modifies the checks and balances even as it tries very diligently to leave them as they were. There is no such thing as an intelligence living in harmony with the biosphere. It may think and boast it is doing so, but its mentality gives it an advantage, and the compulsion is always there to employ this advantage to its selfish benefit. Thus, while intelligence may be an outstanding survival factor, the factor is short-term, and intelligence turns out instead to be the great destroyer.

She flipped the pages, eyeing the entries briefly. “It's so much fun reading the elder tongue,” she said. “I was not sure I could.”

“Shakespeare's penmanship was not of the best,” said Horton.

“Still good enough to read,” she said, “once you get the hang of it. Here's something strange. He's writing about the god-hour. That's a strange expression.”

“It's real enough,” said Horton. “At least here it's real. I should have told you of it. It is something that reaches out and grabs you and lays you absolutely open. Except for Nicodemus. Nicodemus barely reacts to it. It seems to originate elsewhere than this planet. Carnivore said that Shakespeare thought it came from some point far in space. What does he say about it?”

“Apparently he was writing about it after a long experience with it,” she said. “Here is what he writes:”

I feel that I may finally have come to terms with this phenomenon that I have termed, for lack of a better description, the god-hour. Carnivore, poor soul, still resents and fears it, and I suppose I fear it, too, although by this time, having lived with it for many years and learning that there is no way one may hide from it or insulate oneself from it, I have reached some acceptance of it as something from which there is no escape, but likewise as something that can, for a time, take a man outside himself and expose him to the universe, although, truth to tell, if it were optional, one would hesitate to thus have himself exposed too often.

The trouble is, of course, that one sees and experiences too much, most of which—nay, all of which—he does not understand and is left, after the event, holding onto only the ragged edge of it, with the horrifying wonderment as to whether a human mentality is equipped and capable of understanding more than a modicum of that to which he has been exposed. I have wondered at times if it could be a deliberate teaching mechanism, but if it is, it is an over-education, a throwing of massive scholarly texts at a stupid student who has not been grounded in the basic fundamentals of what he is being taught and thus incapable of even feebly grasping at the principles which are necessary for even a shadowy understanding.

I have wondered, I say, but wonder is about as far as this particular thought has ever gotten. As time went on, I became more and more of the opinion that in the god-hour I was experiencing something that was not intended for me at all, nor for any human—that the god-hour, whatever it may be, emanates from some sort of entity that is entirely unaware that such a thing as a human may exist, which might be caught up in cosmic laughter were it to learn that such a thing as I am did exist. I am, I had become convinced, simply caught up in the shotgun effect of it, sprayed by some stray pellets that were aimed at bigger game.

But no sooner had I become convinced of this than I was made acutely aware that the source of the god-hour somehow had at least marginally become aware of me and had somehow managed to dig deep into my memory or my psyche, for at times, instead of being laid open to the cosmos, I was laid open to myself, laid open to the past, and for a period of unknown duration lived over again, with certain distortions, events of the past which almost invariably were distasteful in the extreme, moments snatched out of the muck of my mind, where they had lain deeply buried, where in shame and regret I would have wished to keep them buried, but now dug up and spread out before me while I squirm in embarrassment and indignity at the sight of them, forced to live again certain parts of my life that I had hid away, not only from the ken of others, but of myself as well. And even worse than that, certain fantasies that in unguarded moments I had dreamed in my secret soul and been horrified when I found what I had been dreaming. And these, too, are dragged squealing from my subconscious and paraded in an unpitying light before me. I don't know which is worse, the opening to the universe, or the unlocking of the secrets of myself.