Shakespeare's Planet (16 page)

So I became aware that somehow the god-hour had become aware of me—perhaps not actually of me as a person, but as some fleck of obscene and disgusting matter and had flicked at me in irritation that such a thing as I should be there, not taking the time to really do me any harm, not squashing me as I might squash an insect, but simply brushing me, or trying to brush me, to one side. And I took some courage, strangely, from this, for if the god-hour is only marginally aware of me, then I told myself I stand in no actual danger from it. And if it pays so slight attention to me, then surely it must be seeking bigger game than I and the terrifying part of this is that it seemed to me that this bigger game must be here, upon this planet. Not on this planet only, but on this particular segment of the planet—it must be very near to us.

I have wracked my brains in an effort to imagine what it might be and if it still is here. Was the god-hour intended for the people who inhabited the now-deserted city, and if this should be the case, how is it that the agency which is responsible for the god-hour does not know that they are gone? The more I think of it, the more convinced I become that the people of the city did not supply the target, that the god-hour still is aimed at something that is still here. I look for what it may be, and I have no idea. I am haunted by the feeling that I look upon the target day after day and do not recognize it. It is frustrating and an eerie sensation to be thinking this. One feels out of touch and stupid and, at times, more than a little frightened. If a man can be so out of touch with reality, so blind to actuality, so insensitive to his surroundings, then the human race, in all truth, is more unfit and feeble than we have sometimes thought.

As she came to the end of what Shakespeare had written, Elayne raised her head from the page and looked at Horton. “Do you agree?” she asked. “Did you have some of the same reactions?”

“I've gone through it only twice,” Horton told her. “The sum total of my reactions so far is a vast bewilderment.”

“Shakespeare says it is inescapable. He says there is no way to hide from it.”

“Carnivore hides from it,” said Nicodemus. “He gets under cover. He says it's not so bad when you are under cover.”

“You'll know in a few hours more,” said Horton. “I have a hunch it's easier if you don't try to fight it. There is no way it can be described. You must experience it to know.”

Elayne laughed, a little nervously. “I can hardly wait,” she said.

21

Carnivore came clumping in an hour before sunset. Nicodemus had cut steaks and was squatting, broiling them. He motioned at a huge chunk of meat he had laid upon a bed of leaves pulled off a nearby tree.

“That's for you,” he said. “I picked a choicest cut.”

“Nourishment,” said Carnivore, “is a thing I stand in need of. I thank you from my gut.”

He picked up the chunk of meat in both his hands and hunkered down in front of the woodpile on which the other two were seated. He lifted it to his face and bit vigorously into it. Blood spouted on his whiskers.

Chomping vigorously, he looked up at his two companions.

“I do not bother you, I hope,” he said, “with my unseemly eating. I hunger greatly. Perhaps I should have waited.”

“Not at all,” said Elayne. “Go ahead and eat. Ours will be ready in a little time.” She gazed in sick fascination at his bloody chops, the blood running down his tentacles.

“You like good red meat?” he asked.

“I'll get used to it,” she said.

“You don't really have to,” said Horton. “Nicodemus could find you something else.”

She shook her head. “When you travel world to world, you find many customs that are strange to you. Some that may even be a shock to your prejudice. But, in my way of life, there can be no prejudice. Your mind must stay open and receptive—you must force it to stay open.”

“And this is what you're doing by eating meat with us?”

“Well, it was to start with and I suppose it is still a little. But without half trying, I think I could develop a fondness for the flesh.” She said to Nicodemus, “Could you make sure that mine is on the well-done side?”

“I already have,” said Nicodemus. “I started yours well ahead of Carter's.”

“I have been told many times by my old friend Shakespeare,” said Carnivore, “that I am an unmitigated slob, with no manners worth the mentioning, and dripping, filthy habits. I am, to tell you truth, devastated at such evaluation, but I am too long in the tooth to change my way of life, and I would, on no account, become a mincing dandy. If I be a slob, I shall enjoy being one, for slobbishness is a comfortable situation in which to find oneself.”

“You're a slob, all right,” said Horton, “but if it makes you happy, pay us no attention.”

“Thankful I am for your graciousness,” said Carnivore, “and happy I do not have to change. Change is hard for me to do.” He said to Nicodemus, “You have the tunnel nearly done?”

“Not only is it not nearly done,” said Nicodemus, “but now I'm fairly sure it will not be done.”

“You mean fix it you cannot?”

“That's exactly what I mean unless someone comes up with a bright idea.”

“Oh, well,” said Carnivore, “while hope forever springs inside the gut, I am not surprised. I walked for long today with myself communing, and I told myself too much I should not expect. I say to myself that life has not been hard on me and many happinesses I've had, and that in view of this, I should not gag at some wrong events. And I sought within my mind alternatives. It seemed to me that magic might be a way to try. You say to me, Carter Horton, that you do not trust nor understand the magic. You and Shakespeare are the same. He make heavy fun of magic. He say it no damn good. Perhaps our newest compatriot may not think so strongly.” He looked appealingly at Elayne.

She asked, “Have you tried your magic?”

“That I have,” he told her, “but against Shakespeare's scornful hooting. The hooting, I tell myself, take the edge off it, reduce it down to nothing.”

“I don't know about that,” said Elayne, “but I'm sure it would do no good.”

Carnivore nodded sagely, “Then I say to myself, if magic fails, if the robot fails, if all else fails, what am I to do? Remain upon this planet? Surely not, I say. Surely these new friends of mine will find a place for me when off this world they fly into deeper space.”

“Now you're leaning on us,” Nicodemus said. “Go ahead and bawl. Roll on the ground and kick your heels and scream. It won't do you any good. We can't put you in cold-sleep and …”

“At least,” said Carnivore, “I am with friends. Until I die, I am with friends and away from here. I take little space. I huddle in one corner. I eat very little. I am not in the way. I will keep my mouth shut.”

“That will be the day,” said Nicodemus.

“It's up to Ship,” said Horton. “I will talk with Ship about it. But I can hold out no hope.”

“You comprehend,” said Carnivore, “that I am a warrior. There is but one way for a warrior to die, in the bloodiness of fighting. That is how I want to die. But that may not be the way of it with me. To fate, I bow my head. What I do not want is die here, with no one to see me die, to think poor Carnivore, he is gone, to crawl out my last days in the loathesome nothingness of this place passed by in time …”

“That's it,” said Elayne, suddenly. “Time. That is what I should have thought of right at first.”

Horton looked at her in astonishment. “Time? What are you talking about? What has time to do with it?”

“The cube,” she said. “The cube we found in the city. With the creature in it. That cube is frozen time.”

“Frozen time!” said Nicodemus. “Time can't be frozen. You freeze people and food and other things. Time you do not freeze.”

“Arrested time,” she said. “There are stories—legends—that it can be done. Time flows. It moves. Stop its flow and movement. No past, no future, just the present. An everlasting present. A present existing from the past and embedded in the future that now has become the present.”

“You sound like the Shakespeare,” grumbled Carnivore. “Always spouting foolishness. Always yak, yak, yak. Saying things with no sense in them. Just to hear his talk.”

“No, it's not that at all,” insisted Elayne. “I tell you the truth. There are stories on many planets that time can be manipulated, that there are ways to do it. No one can say who does it …”

“Perhaps the tunnel people.”

“There never is a name. Just that it can be done.”

“But why here? Why with the creature frozen into time?”

“Perhaps to wait,” she said. “Perhaps so it will be here when the need for it arises. Perhaps the ones who put the creature into time could not know when that need would come …”

“So it's waited through the centuries,” said Horton, “with millennia still to wait …”

“But don't you see,” she said. “Centuries or millennia, it would be all the same. Frozen as it is, it has no time experience. It exists and continues to exist within that frozen microsecond …”

The god-hour struck.

22

For a moment, Horton was spattered across the universe, with the same sickening sense of endlessness that he had felt before; then the spattering came together and the universe was narrowed, and all sense of strangeness ceased. There was coordinated time and space again, neatly tied together, and he knew where he was, except there seemed to be two of him, although the twoness of him seemed not inconvenient and even natural.

He crouched in the warm black loam between two rows of vegetables. Ahead of him, the two rows went on and on, two green lines with a strip of black between them. To the left and right, there were innumerable other parallel green lines with the black lines between them—although he had to imagine the black lines, for the greenness of the green lines merged together and on either side, there was only a dark green carpet.

Squatting on his heels, feeling the warmth of the soil against his bare feet, he looked back over his shoulder and behind him the green carpet ended, very far away, against the uplift of a structure that towered so high its top was lost in a white puffy cloud pegged against the blueness of the sky.

He reached out his little boy's hands and picked the beans that hung heavily on the plants, using his left hand to pull the bushes apart so he could reach the pods entangled in the foliage, picking them with his right hand and dropping them into a half-filled basket sitting in the black loam strip just in front of him.

Now he saw what he had not seen before, that at regular intervals between rows, ahead of him other baskets waited, empty baskets waiting to be filled, placed there by rough calculation of when one basket would be filled and another needed. And back of him other baskets, already filled and waiting for the vehicle which later on would move along the rows to collect the baskets filled with beans.

Something else he had not realized before—that he was not alone in the field, but that there were many others with him, most of them children, although some were old men and women. Some of them were ahead of him, being faster, or perhaps less careful, pickers, others behind him.

Clouds flecked the sky, fleecy, lazy clouds, but at the moment none covered the sun and it shone down with a fierce warmth that he could feel striking through the thinness of his shirt. He crawled along the row, picking as he went, being conscientious in his work, leaving some of the smaller pods to mature for another day or two, picking all the others—with the sun upon his back, sweat starting in his armpits and running down his ribs, the softness and the warmth of the well-broken, cultivated soil pressing on his feet. His mind held in neutral, clinging to the present, neither moving back nor forth in time, content in the present moment, as if he were a simple organism which absorbed the warmth and in some strange way drew nourishment from the soil, as had the beans he picked.

But there was more than that. There was the boy, perhaps nine or ten, and there was, as well, the present Carter Horton, a seemingly invisible second person, who stood to one side, or was positioned somewhere else, who watched the boy he once had been, feeling and thinking and experiencing what he once had known, almost as if he were the boy. But knowing more than the boy knew, knowing what the boy could not even guess, aware of the years and events which lay between this expansive bean field and a time a thousand light-years into space. Knowing, as the boy could not know, that men and women in the great distant structure which rose at one end of the field, and in many other similar structures in the world, had recognized the seeds of another crisis-point and, even then, were planning its solution.

Strange, he thought, that even given a second chance, the human race still must come upon its crisis-points and realize at last that the only solution lay in other possible planets in other hypothetical solar systems, where men once more could make other starts, some of these starts failing, but some, perhaps, succeeding.

Less than five centuries before this morning in the bean patch, the Earth had faltered to a halt, not in war, but in worldwide economic collapse. With the profit and free-enterprise system finally buckling under the cracks which had begun to be apparent early in the twentieth century, with a large fraction of the world's more basic natural resources gone, with population soaring, with industry introducing more and more technological labor-saving devices, with food surpluses no longer stretching far enough to feed the people of the world—with all of these, famine, unemployment, inflation, and a lack of confidence in world leadership had resulted. Government had disappeared; industry, communications and trade had ground to a halt and, for a time, there had been anarchy and chaos.

Out of this anarchy had risen another way of life, put together, not by politicians and statesmen, but by economists and sociologists. But in a few hundred years, this new society had exhibited symptoms which had sent the scientists to their laboratories and engineers to their drafting boards to design the starships that would transplant the human race to space. The symptoms had not been misread, the second, the invisible Horton told himself, for on this very day (which day? this day or another day?) Elayne had told him of the final collapse of the way of life the economists and sociologists had carpentered so carefully.