Shakespeare's Planet (17 page)

Earth had been too sick, he thought, too debased, too exploited, too polluted by the errors of mankind to survive.

He felt the soil between his toes and the little whiff of breeze that came across the field to blow against his sweat-soaked, sun-warmed back. He dropped the handful of beans that he had picked into the basket and pushed it ahead of him, hunching along the row to reach other bushes in the seemingly never-ending row of bushes. The basket, he saw, was almost full. Just ahead of him was an empty basket.

He was getting tired. Glancing at the sun, he saw that it was still an hour or more till noon when the lunch wagon would come driving down the rows. A half hour for lunch, he thought, and then he'd be back at the picking until the sun went down. He stretched out the fingers of his right hand, flexing them to take away the cramp and tired. He saw that the fingers were stained green.

Tired and hot and beginning to get hungry and a long day yet ahead, but he had to keep on picking, as hundreds of others were picking—the very young and the very old—doing jobs that they could do, leaving other more capable workers free to do other jobs. He squatted on his heels and stared out across the greenness. Not only beans, he thought, but many other crops in season, produce that when the time came must be harvested to feed the people of the tower.

To feed the people of the tower, thought Horton (the insubstantial, invisible Horton), to feed the tribe, the clan, the commune. My people. Our People. One for all and all for one. The tower built high, above the clouds, so that it would take little ground space, piling a city perpendicularly so that the land would be left to grow the food to feed the people of the piled-up city. People crowded into a tower because the tower, huge as it was, must be as small as possible.

Make do. Make last. Get along without. Grow and harvest food with stoop labor because there was little fuel. Eat carbohydrates because they took less energy to grow than protein. Build and manufacture for permanence and not for obsolescense; with the profit system swept away, obsolescence had become not only criminal, but ridiculous.

With industry gone, he thought, we grew our food, we took in one another's washing. We got along—we got along. We went back to tribal patterns, living in a monolith rather than a collection of rude huts. In time, we sneered at the olden times, at the profit system, at the work ethic, at private enterprise and all the time we sneered, there was a sickness in us—the sickness of humankind. No matter what we tried, he told himself, there was a sickness in us. Must it be that the human race cannot live in harmony with its environment? Must it, to survive, have new planets to rape each few millennia? Are we doomed to move like an invading swarm of locust across the galaxy, across the universe? Is the galaxy, the cosmos, doomed to us? Or will the day come when the universe will rise up in annoyance and slap us down—not in anger, but in annoyance? There is, he thought, a certain greatness in us, but a destructive and a selfish greatness. Earth lasted for a matter of two million years after our species first arose, but during most of those years, we were not effective as we now are effective—it took us a time to grow up to our full potential for destruction. But starting, as we are now, on other planets, how long would it take to introduce that deadly virus of mankind—how long will it take the disease to run its course?

The boy parted the bushes and was reaching out to pick the beans thus exposed. A worm which had been clinging to the leaves lost its footing and dropped off. Striking the ground, it rolled itself into a ball. Scarcely without thinking, scarcely pausing in his work, the boy shifted a foot, lifting it to come down on the worm, grinding it deep into the soil.

A gray mist came creeping to blot out the bean field, and the great monolithic building that loomed mile-high in the distance and there, hanging in the sky, surrounded by the misty fog that swept about it in streaming tendrils was the skull of Shakespeare, looking down at Horton—not leering down at him, not grinning down at him, but regarding him most companionably, as if the flesh might still exist, as if the barrier line of death did not exist at all.

Horton found himself speaking to the skull. “How now, old companion?” And that was strange, for Shakespeare had never been his companion save in the general companionship of humanity, the two of them belonging to that strange and awesome race of creatures which had proliferated on one planet and then, in desperation rather than adventurously, had gone storming out into the galaxy—going only God knew how far, for certainly, at this moment, no member of the race might know with any certainty how far the others may have gone.

“How now, old companion?” And that was strange as well, for Horton knew that it was not the manner in which he'd ordinarily speak—almost as if he were speaking in a sort of Mother Goose adaptation of the kind of speech the original Shakespeare had used to pen his plays. As if he were not the original Carter Horton, but, as well, another Mother Goose adaptation mouthing rote sentiments to some symbolism that he once had dreamed. He raged inwardly at himself for being what he was not; but try as he could, he could not find himself again. His psyche was so entangled with the boy who crushed a worm and with a dried-bone skull case that there was no way he could find the path back to his normal self.

“How now, old companion?” he asked. “You say we all are lost. But where lost? How lost? Why lost? Have you dug down to the basics of our lostness? Is it carried in our genes, or did something happen to us? Are we the only lost ones, or are there others like us? Is lostness an innate characteristic of intelligence?”

The skull said to him, clattering its bony jaws, “We are lost. That is all I said. I did not go digging into the philosophy of it. We are lost because we lost the Earth. We are lost because we do not know where we are. We are lost because we can't find the way back home. There now is no place for us. We walk strange roads in stranger lands and along the way, there is nothing that makes sense. Once we knew some answers because we knew the questions to be asked, but now we can find no answers because we do not know the questions. When others in the galaxy reach out to make contact with us, we do not know what to say. We are, in such a situation, gibbering idiots who have not only lost our way, but our sense as well. Back there in your precious bean field, even at the age of ten, you had some sense of your purpose and where you might be going, but you do not have that same sense now.”

“No,” said Horton, “I don't suppose I have.”

“You're damned right you haven't. You want some answers, do you?”

“What kind of answers?”

“Any kind of answers. Any kind at all are better than no answers. Go and ask the Pond.”

“The Pond? What could the Pond tell me? It's just a glob of dirty water.”

“It's not water. You know it isn't water.”

“That's right. It isn't water. Do you know what it is?”

“No, I don't,” said Shakespeare.

“Did you talk with it?”

“I never dared. Basically, I'm a coward.”

“You were afraid of the Pond?”

“Not that. Afraid of what it might tell me.”

“But you knew something about the Pond. You figured it could talk with you. And yet you never wrote about it.”

“How can you know?” asked Shakespeare. “You have not read everything I wrote. But you are right; I never wrote about it except to say it stank. And I never wrote about it because I did not want to think about it. It gave rise to great unease in me. It was more than just a pond. Even had it been no more than water, it would have been more than just a pond.”

“But why unease?” asked Horton. “Why did you feel that way about it?”

“Man prides himself upon his intellect,” said Shakespeare. “He glorifies in his reason and his logic. But these are new things, very lately come by. Before that, he had something else. It was this something else that told me. Call it a gut feeling; call it intuition; call it any fancy name you wish. Our prehistoric ancestors had it, and it served them well. They knew, but could not tell you how they knew. They knew what to be afraid of and that, at the bottom of it, is what any species must have if it is to survive. What to be afraid of, what to walk around, what to leave alone. If you have that, you'll live; if you don't, you won't.”

“Is this your spirit talking to me? Your shade? Your ghost?”

“First tell me this,” said the skull, clattering its jaws with the two teeth missing. “First tell me what is life and what is death, and then I'll answer you about the spirit and the shade.”

23

The Shakespeare skull hung above the doorway, grinning down at them—and a moment before, Horton told himself, it had not been grinning. It had been talking with him as another man might talk. It had been strange, but it had not been horrible, and it had not grinned. Its two missing teeth had been no more than missing teeth, but now they had about them a macabre quality that was unsettling. Evening dusk had fallen, and the flicker of the fire reflecting off the polished bone made it seem that the jaws might still be moving and lent a blinking to the deep darkness of the sockets where once the eyes had been.

“Well,” said Nicodemus, staring at the steaks, “this business of the god-hour has messed my cooking most atrociously. These slabs of meat are burned almost to a crisp.”

“It's all right,” said Horton. “I like my eating rare, but it doesn't matter that much.”

Beside Horton, Elayne seemed to be emerging from a trance. “Why didn't you tell me?” she asked, accusingly. “Why didn't you let me in on what it would be like?”

“There is no way,” said Carnivore. “How can you tell the shriveling of the gut …”

“What was it like?” asked Horton.

“Frightening,” she said. “But wonderful as well. As if someone had taken you to some great cosmic mountaintop, with the universe all spread out before you—all the glory and the wonder, all the sadness. All the love and hate, all the compassion and not-caring. You stand there, frail and blown by the wind that sweeps the worlds and, at first, you are lonely and confused and you feel as if you are someplace you are not meant to be, but you remember then that you did not aspire to be there, but were somehow brought there and then it seems all right. You know what you are looking at, and it does not look anyway at all the way you would have imagined that it would—if, in fact, you ever had imagined that you'd see it, which you never did, of course. You stand and stare at it, at first with no comprehension and then, slowly, you begin to comprehend just a little, as if someone were telling you what it was all about. And, at last, you begin to understand, using truths you had not known existed, and you're about ready to say to yourself so that's the way it is and then, before you can say it to yourself, it all is gone. Just when you feel that you are ready to grasp some meaning of it, then it all is gone.”

That was the way it was, thought Horton—or at least that was the way it had been. But this time, for him, it had been different, as Shakespeare had written; it could be different. And the logic of that difference, the reason for that difference?

“I timed it this time,” said Nicodemus. “It ran slightly under a quarter of an hour. Did it seem that long?”

“Longer,” said Elayne. “It seemed to last forever.”

Nicodemus looked questioningly at Horton. “I don't know,” said Horton. “I had no very clear impression of time.”

The conversation with Shakespeare had not lasted too long, but when he tried to calculate, in memory, how long he had been in the bean field, he could not even make a guess.

“It was the same for you?” asked Elayne. “You saw much the same I did? This was what you could not describe to me?”

“This time it was different. I went back to my boyhood.”

“And that was all?” asked Elayne. “Just back to your boyhood?”

“That was all,” said Horton. He could not bring himself to tell of his conversation with the skull. It had an odd sound to it and more than likely, Carnivore would panic at the telling. It was better, he decided, to simply let it lie.

“The thing I want,” said Carnivore, “is this god-hour to tell us how to fix the tunnel. You are quite sure,” he said to Nicodemus, “that no farther you can go.”

“I can't imagine what,” said Nicodemus. “I tried to get the cover off the control, and that seems impossible. I tried to chisel out the control, and that rock is hard as steel. The chisel bounces off it. It's not just ordinary rock. In some way, it has been metamorphosed.”

“Magic we could try. Among the four of us …”

“I know no magic,” Nicodemus told him.

“Nor do I,” said Horton.

“I know some,” said Carnivore, “and perhaps m'lady.”

“What kind of magic, Carnivore?”

“Root magic, herb magic, dancing magic.”

“Those all are primitive,” said Elayne. “They have but small effect.”

“By the very nature of it, all magic is primitive,” said Nicodemus. “It is the appeal of the ignorant to powers that are suspected, but of which no one is sure.”

“Not necessarily so,” said Elayne. “I know of peoples who have workable magic—magic you can count on. Based, I think, on mathematics.”

“But not our kind of mathematics,” said Horton.

“That is right. Not our kind of mathematics.”

“But you don't know this magic,” said Carnivore. “The mathematics you don't have.”

“I'm sorry, Carnivore. I have no inkling of them.”

“You put down my magic,” howled Carnivore. “You, all of you, put me down most snottily. At my simple magic, of roots and leaves and barks, you sneer with quiet accomplishment. Then you tell me of other magic that might have a chance to work, that might open wide the tunnel, but you do not know this magic.”