Shakespeare's Planet (18 page)

“Once again,” Elayne told him, “I am very sorry. I wish, for your sake, I did have the magic. But we are here and it is somewhere else, and even if I could go in search of it, to find those who could manipulate it, I am not sure that I could interest them in such a project. For they, undoubtedly, would be very supercilious people and no easy folks to talk with.”

“No one,” said Carnivore, with feeling, “really gives a damn. You, all three of you, can go back to the ship …”

“We could go back to the tunnel in the morning,” said Nicodemus, “and have another look at it. We might see something we have missed. After all, I spent all my time on the control panel, and no one paid attention to the tunnel itself. We might find something there.”

“You'd do this?” asked Carnivore. “You'd really do it for good old Carnivore?”

“Yes,” said Nicodemus. “For good old Carnivore.”

And now
, thought Horton,
this is the end of it. They'd go out tomorrow morning and inspect the tunnel once again. Finding nothing, there'd be no more they could do
—
although, come to think of it, that was wrongly phrased; up to the moment, they'd done exactly nothing. After several thousand years, if one took Elayne's dates at face value, they had finally reached a planet where a man could live, and then had gone rushing off on a rescue mission which had come to nothing. It was illogical for him to be thinking this, he told himself, but it was the truth. The only thing of value they had found had been the emeralds and, in their situation, the emeralds were not worth the picking off the ground. Although, perhaps, on second thought, they had found something that might be worth the time expended. But it was something, on the face of it, to which they could lay no claim. By all that was right and proper, Canivore must be the heir of Shakespeare, and this would mean that the Shakespeare volume must belong to him
.

He glanced up at the skull affixed above the door.
I would like that book
, he told the skull, speaking in his mind.
I'd like to settle down and read it, try to live the days of your exile, to judge the madness and the wisdom in you, finding, no doubt, more wisdom than madness, for even in madness there may, at times, be wisdom, try to correlate chronologically the paragraphs and snatches that you wrote so haphazardly, to find the kind of man you were and how you came to terms with loneliness and death
.

Did I really talk with you?
he asked the skull.
Did you reach out beyond the death-dimension to establish contact with me, perhaps specifically to tell me about the Pond? Or was it simply a reaching out to anyone, any other intellectual blob, that was in a position to suspend a natural disbelief and to thus be able to talk with you? Ask the Pond, you said. And how do you ask the Pond? Do you walk up to the Pond and say, Shakespeare said I could talk with you
—
so go ahead and talk? And what do you really know about the Pond? Could there have been more than you wished to tell me, but did not have the time to do it? It is safe to ask you all this now, for you cannot answer. Although, it helps one to believe that he talked with you by now bombarding you with a flurry of questions that one knows will not be answered, not by a thing of weathering bone pegged above a doorway
.

You told Carnivore none of this, but then you'd not have told Carnivore; for in your madness, you must have feared him even more than you allowed your writing to reveal. You were a strange man, Shakespeare, and I'm sorry that I could not know you, but perhaps I know you now. Perhaps I know you better than I would have known you in the flesh. Perhaps even better than Carnivore could have known you, for I'm a human and Carnivore was not
.

And Carnivore? Yes, what of Carnivore? For now it was at an end and someone must make some decision on what they were to do for Carnivore. Carnivore
—
the poor damn slob, the unlovable and disgusting, and yet something must be done for him. After raising up his hopes, they could not simply walk away and leave him here. Ship
—
he should have asked Ship about it, but he had been afraid to. He'd not even tried to contact Ship, for if he did, when he did, the matter of Carnivore would come up and he knew the answer. It was an answer that he didn't want to hear, one that he couldn't bear to hear
.

“That pond stinks hard tonight,” said Carnivore. “There are times when it stinks more than others, and when the wind is right, there is no living with it.”

As the words penetrated his consciousness, Horton again became aware of the others seated about the fire, with the Shakespeare skull no more than a splotch of whiteness hung above the door.

The stench was there, the foul rottenness of the Pond, and out beyond the circle of the campfire-light came a swishing sound. The others heard it and their heads turned to stare in the direction from which the sound had come. Listening hard for the sound to repeat itself, no one spoke.

The sound came again and now there was a sense of movement in the outer darkness, as if a part of the darkness had moved, not a movement one could see, but a sense of movement. A small part of the darkness took on a sheen, as if one small facet of the darkness had become a mirror and was reflecting back the firelight.

The sheen grew larger and there was now an unmistakable movement in the darkness—a sphere of deeper dark that was rolling closer, swishing as it came.

First there had been only a hint of it, then a sensing of it, and now, quite suddenly and unmistakably, it revealed itself—a sphere of darkness, two feet or so in diameter, that came rolling from the night into the circle of the firelight. The stench came with it—a deepening stench that seemed, however, as the sphere came closer, to lose some of its pungency.

Ten feet from the fire, it stopped and waited, a black ball that held within itself an oily gleam. It simply sat there. It was motionless. There was no quiver, no pulsation, no sign that it had ever moved or was capable of movement.

“It's the Pond,” said Nicodemus, speaking quietly as if he did not wish to disturb or frighten it. “It's from the Pond. A part of the Pond come visiting.”

There was tension and fear within the group, but not, Horton told himself, an overriding fear—rather a shocked and wondering fear. Almost, he thought, as if the sphere was being very circumspect to hold down their fear.

“It's not water,” said Horton. “I was there today. It is heavier than water. Like mercury, but it isn't mercury.”

“Then a part of it could make itself into a ball,” said Elayne.

“Alive the damn thing is,” squeaked Carnivore. “It lies there, knowing of us, spying on us. Shakespeare say something wrong with Pond. He afraid of it. He go nowhere near it. Shakespeare be most accomplished coward. He say at times that in cowardliness lies a depth of wisdom.”

“There is a lot going on,” said Nicodemus, “that we don't understand. The blocked tunnel, the creature encased in time, and now this. I have a feeling that something is about to happen.”

“How about it?” Horton asked the sphere. “Is there something that is about to happen? Have you come to tell us?”

The sphere made no sound. It did not stir. It simply sat and waited.

Nicodemus took a step toward it.

“Leave it alone,” said Horton, sharply.

Nicodemus halted.

The silence held. There was nothing to be done, nothing to be said. The Pond was here; the next move was up to it.

The sphere stirred, quivering, and then it was retreating, rolling back into the darkness until there was no sign of it, although long after it had disappeared, it seemed to Horton that he could still see it. It sloshed and rustled as it moved and this sound finally died out with distance and the stench, to which they had grown somewhat accustomed, began to clear away.

Nicodemus came back to the fire and squatted down beside it.

“What was that all about?” he asked.

“A look it wanted of us,” wailed Carnivore. “It came to have a look.”

“But why?” asked Elayne. “Why would it want to have a look at us?”

“Who can know what a Pond may want,” said Nicodemus.

“There's one way to find out,” said Horton. “I'll go and ask the Pond.”

“That's the craziest thing I have ever heard,” said Nicodemus. “This place must be getting to you.”

“I don't think it's crazy,” said Elayne. “The Pond came visiting. I'll go with you.”

“No, you won't,” said Horton. “I'm the only one to go. You all stay here. No one goes with me and no one follows. Is that understood?”

“Now, look, Carter,” said Nicodemus, “you can't just go rushing off …”

“Let him go,” growled Carnivore. “It is nice to know that all humans aren't like my cowardly friend there above the door.”

He lurched to his feet and threw a rough, almost mocking salute to Horton. “Go, my warrior friend. Go to meet the foe.”

24

He got lost twice, missing turns in the path, but finally reached the pond, clambering down the steep incline above its edge, the light of the torch reflecting off the hard polish of its surface.

The night was deathly quiet. The Pond lay flat and dead. A scattering of unfamiliar stars dusted the sky. Looking behind him, Horton could see the glow of the campfire lighting up a tall treetop.

He planted his heels on the shelving stone that led down to the Pond and hunkered low.

“All right,” he said, speaking both with tongue and mind, “let's have it.”

He waited and it seemed to him there was a slight stirring in the Pond, a rippling that was not quite a ripple and from the farther shore came a whisper like wind blowing gently in a patch of reeds. He felt as well a stirring in his mind, a sense that there was something building in it.

He waited and now the thing was no longer in his brain, but by some shifting of certain coordinates of which he had no knowledge, aside from thinking that there must be coordinates involved, he seemed to become displaced. He was hanging, it seemed, as a disembodied being, in some unknown emptiness which contained a single object, a blue sphere that gleamed in the glare of sunlight that came over his left shoulder, or where his left shoulder should have been, for he could not be certain he even had a body.

The sphere was either moving toward him or he was falling toward it—which it was, he could not be certain. But, in any case, it was growing larger. As it grew, the blueness of its surface became mottled with ragged patches of whiteness, and he knew the sphere to be a planet with parts of its surface obscured by clouds which until now had been masked by the intense blueness of its surface.

Now there was no question he was falling through the atmosphere of the planet, although the fall seemed so controlled that he felt no apprehension. It was not like a fall, but rather a wafting downward, like a thistledown floating in the air. The sphere as such had disappeared, its disc become so large that it filled and overran his field of vision. Below him now lay the great plain of blueness with the brushed-in whiteness of the clouds. Clouds, but no other pattern, no sign of a continental mass.

He was moving faster now, plunging downward, but the illusion of thistledown still held. As he came closer to the surface, he could see that the blueness was ruffled—water set in motion by the raging wind that swept across it.

Not water, something said to him. Liquid, but not water. A world of liquid, a thalasso-planet, a liquid world with no continents nor islands.

Liquid?

“So that is it,” he said, speaking with his mouth in his head in his body crouching on the shore of the Pond. “So that is where you came from. That is what you are.”

And he was back again, a puff of thistledown hung above a planet, watching, below him, a great upheaval in the ocean, with the liquid humping up and out, rounding and shaping itself into a sphere, perhaps many miles across, but, otherwise, quite like that other sphere that had come on a visit to the campfire. The sphere, he saw, was lifting, rising in the air, rising slowly at first, then gathering speed until it was coming at him like an outsize cannonball shot directly at him. It did not hit him, but it didn't miss him by too great a margin. His thistledown self was seized and buffeted by the turbulence of air disrupted by the passage of the liquid sphere. Far behind it, he could hear the long rumbling of the thunder as the split atmosphere came crashing back into the vacuum that had been created by the passage of the sphere.

Looking back, he saw that the planet was receding swiftly, plummeting backward into space. That was strange, he thought—that this should be happening to the planet. But, almost immediately, he realized it was not the planet to which it was happening, but to himself. He had been captured by the attraction of the massive liquid cannonball and, bouncing up and down, fluttered by its gravity, he was going along with it into the depths of space.

Nothing seemed to make any sense. He seemed to have lost all orientation. Except for the liquid cannon-ball and the distant stars, there were no reference points and even these reference points seemed to have but little meaning. He had, it seemed, lost all measurement of time and space appeared to have no yardstick quality and while he retained something of his personal identity, it had dimmed to only a flicker of identity. That's what happens, he told himself, complacently, when you haven't any body. A million light-years could be no more than a step away, and a million years no more than the ticking of a second. The one thing of which he was aware was the sound of space, which was like an ocean plunging over a waterfall a thousand miles in height—and another sound, a high singsong, a cricket noise almost too high for his auditory sense to catch, and that, he told himself, was the sighing of the heat lightning which flared just this side of infinity and the flaring of the lightning, he knew, was the signature of time.