Shakespeare's Planet

by Clifford D. Simak

  “My name is Elayne,” she said, “and I am glad to meet you.”

  “My name is Horton,” said Horton. “Carter Horton. You may call me either one or both.”

  He crawled out of the sleeping bag and got to his feet.

  “Carnivore said ‘meat,’” she said. “Could he be talking about flesh?”

  “That’s what he means,” said Horton.

  Carnivore thumped his chest. “Meat is good for you,” he said. “It gives you blood and bone. It tones up the muscles.”

  She shuddered delicately. “Meat is all you have?”

  “We could manage something else,” said Horton. “Food that we packed in. Dehydrated, mostly. Not the best to taste.”

  “Oh, the hell with it,” she said. “I’ll eat meat with you. It is only prejudice that has kept me from it all these years.”

  Nicodemus, who had gone into the Shakespeare house, now came out of it. He held a knife in one hand and a slab of meat in the other. He cut off a large chunk of the meat and handed it to Carnivore. Carnivore squatted on his heels and began tearing at the meat, blood running down his muzzle.

  Horton saw the look of horror on her face. “We’ll cook ours,” he said. He walked over to a pile of firewood and sat down upon it, patting a place beside him. “Join me,” he said. “Nicodemus will do the cooking. It will take a while.” He said to Nicodemus, “You’d better cook hers well. I’ll take mine rare.”

  “I’ll start hers first,” said Nicodemus.

  Hesitantly, she came over to the woodpile and sat down next to Horton.

  “This,” she said, “is the strangest situation I have ever encountered. A man and his robot talking the elder tongue. A carnivore who talks it as well, and a human skull nailed above a doorway. The two of you must be from one of the backwoods planets.”

  “No,” said Horton. “We come straight from Earth.”

  “But that can’t be,” she said. “No one now is straight from Earth. And I doubt that even there they speak the elder tongue.”

  “But we are. We left Earth in the year …”

  “No one has left Earth for more than a thousand years,” she said. “Earth now has no base for far traveling. Look, how fast were you traveling?”

  “At near light-speed. With a few stops here and there.”

  “And you? You were, perhaps, in sleep?”

  “Of course, I was in sleep.”

  “At near the speed of light,” she said, “there is no way to calculate. I know there were early calculations, mathematical calculations, but they were, at best, rough approximations, and the human race did not travel at the speed of light for a sufficient length of time to arrive at any true determination of the time dilation effect. Only a few interstellar ships traveling at the speed of light or less were sent out, and fewer of them returned. Before they did return, there were better systems for far traveling and, in the meantime, Old Earth had stumbled into a catastrophic economic collapse and a war situation—not a single, all-engulfing war, but many mean little wars—and in the process, Earth’s civilization was virtually destroyed. Old Earth is still there. Its remaining population may be climbing back again. No one seems to know; no one really cares; no one ever goes back to Old Earth. I can see you know nothing of all this.”

  Horton shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “That means you were on one of the early light-ships.”

  “One of the first,” said Horton, “In 2455. Or there-abouts. Maybe the first of the twenty-sixth century. I don’t really know. We were put into cold-sleep; then there was a delay.”

  “You were put on standby.”

  “I guess that’s what you’d call it.”

  “We aren’t absolutely sure,” she said, “but we think this is the year 4784. There is no certainty, really. Somehow history got all bollixed up. Human history, that is. There are a lot of other histories than Earth history. There was a time of confusion. There was an era of outpouring into space. Once there was a reasonable way to get into space, no one who could afford the going stayed on Earth. It required no great analytical ability to see what was happening to Earth. No one wanted to be caught in the crunch. For a great many years, there were not too many records. Those that did exist may have been erroneous; others were lost. As you might imagine, the human race passed through crisis after crisis. Not only on Earth, but in space as well. Not all the colonies survived. Some survived, but later failed, for one reason or another, to establish contact with other colonies, so were considered lost. Some still are lost—either lost or dead. The people went out into space in all directions—most of them without any actual plans, hoping that in time they’d find a planet where they could settle. They went out not only into space, but into time as well, and no one understood time factors. We still don’t. Under those conditions, it would be easy to gain a century or two or lose a century or two. So don’t ask me to swear what year it is. And history. That is even worse. We don’t have history; we have legend. Some of the legend probably is history, but we can’t be sure which is history and which is not.”

  “And you came here by tunnel?”

  “Yes. I am a member of a team that is mapping the tunnels.”

  Horton looked at Nicodemus, who was crouched beside the fire, watching the cooking steaks. “Did you tell her?” Horton asked.

  “I never had a chance,” said Nicodemus. “She never gave me a chance. She was so excited about me talking what she called the ‘elder tongue.’”

  “Tell me what?” asked Elayne.

  “The tunnel’s closed. It’s inoperative.”

  “But it brought me here.”

  “It brought you here. It won’t take you back. It’s out of order. It works only one way.”

  “But that’s impossible. There is a control panel.”

  “I know about the control panel,” Nicodemus told her. “I’m working on it. Trying to fix it.”

  “And how are you doing?”

  “Not too well,” said Nicodemus.

  “We are trapped,” said Carnivore, “unless the goddamn tunnel can be fixed.”

  “Maybe I can help,” said Elayne.

  “If you can,” said Carnivore, “I implore you do your utmost. Hope I had that if tunnel not fixed, I could join ship with Horton and the robot, but I think it over and it does not seem so. This sleep you talk about, this freezing frightens me. Have no wish to be frozen.”

  “We have worried about that,” Horton told him. “Nicodemus knows about the freezing. He has a sleep-technician transmog. But he only knows how to freeze humans. You might be different—a different body chemistry. We have no way to determine your body chemistry.”

  “So that is out,” said Carnivore. “So tunnel must be fixed.”

  Horton said to Elayne, “You don’t seem too upset.”

  “Oh, I suppose I am,” she said. “But my people do not rail against fate. We accept life as it comes. Good and bad. We know there will be each.”

  Carnivore, finished eating, reared up, scrubbing at his bloodied muzzle with his hands. “I go hunting now,” he said. “Bring home fresh meat.”

  “Wait until we’ve eaten,” suggested Horton, “and I’ll go along with you.”

  “Best not,” said Carnivore. “You scare the game away.”

  He started walking off, then turned around. “One thing you can do,” he said. “You can throw old meat in pond. But hold your nose while doing.”

  “I’ll manage it,” said Horton.

  “So good,” said Carnivore, and went stalking off, eastward along the path to the abandoned settlement.

  “How did you fall in with him?” asked Elayne. “And what, actually, is he?”

  “He was waiting for us when we landed,” said Horton. “We don’t know what he is. He said that he was trapped here, along with Shakespeare …”

  “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. H
e 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.”