Shakespeare's Planet

by Clifford D. Simak

  Although, so far as she could recall, she had never thought of it as a sacrifice. She had been quite willing, she remembered, to let others think so, at times had even encouraged such belief. For it seemed a very noble act to sacrifice oneself, and she wanted to be remembered for her noble acts, this final one the greatest of them all. Nobility and honor, she thought; those had been what she prized the most. But not, she was forced to agree, a quiet nobility and a silent honor, for if that had been the case she’d have not been noticed. That, for her, would have been unthinkable, for she needed notice and acclaim. Chairwoman, president, past president, national representative, secretary, treasurer—all of these and more—organization piled upon organization, until she had no time to think, with every moment occupied, always on the go.

  No time to think? she asked herself. Was that the reason behind all her frantic effort? Not the honor and the glory, but so she wouldn’t have to think? So she wouldn’t have to think of the ruined marriages, of the men who turned away, of the emptiness she felt as the years went on?

  That was why she was here, she knew. Because she had been a failure—because she had failed not only others, but herself as well, and in the end had recognized herself as a woman who sought frantically for something she had missed, missing it, perhaps, because she did not recognize the value of it until it was too late.

  And, in view of this, she knew, this present venture had turned out all right, although there had been many times when she had doubted it.

  There has never been a time when I doubted it, said the scientist. I was always sure.

  You peeked, said the grande dame, bitterly. You peeked into my thoughts. Is there no privacy at all? One’s own personal thoughts should be private. It is bad manners, peeking.

  We are one, said the scientist, or we should be one. No longer three personalities, no longer one woman and two men. But a mind, one mind. Yet we stay apart. We stand apart more often than we are together. And in that way we have failed.

  We have not failed, said the monk. We have only started. We have eternity and I am the one who can define eternity. All my life I lived for eternity, suspecting even as I lived for it that for me there would be no eternity. Not for me or for anyone. But now I know that I was wrong. We’ve found eternity, the three of us—or if not actual eternity, what could be eternity. We have changed and we will change and in the aeons before this materialistic ship has powdered into dust, we undoubtedly will become an eternal mind that will have no need of Ship nor even the biologic brains that now house our minds. We will become a single free agent that can roam forever across all infinity. But I think I told you I had a definition for eternity. Not a definition, really, but a pretty tale. The Church, you must understand, formulated through the years many pretty tales. This one has to do with a mile-high mountain and a bird. Every thousand years the bird, which for the purpose of the story, was extremely long-lived, would fly above the mountain and, in doing so, one of its wings would touch the mountain and wear away an infinitesimal segment of it. Each thousand years the bird did this and eventually wore the mountain, with the impact of its wing, down to a level plain. And this, you say, this wearing down of a mountain by the scraping of a bird’s wing every thousand years, would be eternity. But you would be wrong. It would be no more than the beginning of eternity.

  It is a silly tale, said the scientist. Eternity is not a term that lends itself to definition. It is a catch-all vagueness to which we cannot assign a value, any more than a value can be assigned to infinity.

  I liked the story, said the grande dame. It has a pretty ring to it. It is the kind of simple story that I found so telling in the speeches that I made to many different groups in many different causes. But if you should ask me now to name those groups and the causes, I should find it difficult to list them. I wish, Sir Monk, that I had known your story. I would, I am sure, have found occasion to use it. It would have been most fetching. It would have brought the house down.

  The story is silly, said the scientist, because long before your long-lived bird could have made even a tiny mark upon the mountain, the natural forces of erosion would have reduced it to a peneplain.

  You have the advantage over the other two of us, said the Monk disapprovingly. You have a specific logic by which to guide your thoughts and interpret your experiences.

  The logic of mankind, said the scientist, is a poor reed to lean upon. It is a logic dictated by observation and despite our many marvelous instruments, our observations were severely restricted. Now the three of us must formulate a new logic based upon our current observations. We will find, I am sure, much error in our earthly logic.

  I know but little of logic other than the logic I studied as a churchman, said the monk, and that logic was more often based upon obscure intellectual gymnastics than on scientific observation.

  And I, said the grande dame, operated on logic not at all, but upon certain techniques used to advance certain activities to which I had become committed, although I’m not sure that committed is the proper word to use. I have a hard time recalling now just how committed I might have been to the causes that I worked for. In all frankness, I think it was not so much the causes that motivated me as the opportunity which they gave me to hold and exercise certain positions of power. Thinking on it now, those positions of power which seemed so desirable and exhilarating, sink to nothing now. But I must, in all truth, have distinguished myself in the public mind, for how otherwise would I have been offered the honor bestowed upon the three of us when it was decided that one of us must be a woman. So I would suppose that heading numerous committees, serving upon many commissions, involved in sundry study groups upon subjects of which I knew next to nothing, and speaking to both small and large assemblies, must have seemed worthwhile. And after all this time, trying to make up my mind as to whether it is right for me to be here, I am glad they did. I am glad I’m here. If I were not, I would be nowhere, Sir Monk, for I don’t think I was ever able to convince myself to believe in your construction of an immortal soul.

  Not my construction, said the monk. I did not believe, either, in everlasting life. I tried to make myself believe, because in my business it was basic that I should believe. And there was, as well, my fear of death, and I suppose, life as well.

  You accepted your post here with us, said the grande dame, because of your fear of death, and I because of honor—because it was not in me to reject the honor and esteem. I felt I might be being conned into something I’d regret, but I had sought the limelight too long to be constitutionally capable of rejecting it. At the very least, I told myself, it was a way of going out in a greater flare of publicity than I had ever dreamed.

  And now, said the scientist, it seems all right to you? You are satisfied your acceptance was correct?

  I am satisfied, she said. I am even beginning to forget, which I find to be a blessing. There was Ronny and Doug and Alphonse …

  Who were they? asked the monk.

  The men I was married to. They and a couple of others whose names I can’t recall. I don’t mind telling you, although there was a time I would have, that I was something of a bitch. A rather queenly bitch, perhaps, but still a dirty bitch.

  It seems to me, said the scientist, that we are working out as it was intended. Taking somewhat longer, more than likely, than had been intended. But in another thousand years, perhaps, we may be able to become what we were meant to be. We are being honest with ourselves and with one another, and I imagine that must be a part of it. We cannot entirely slough off our humanity in so short a time. The human race spent two million years or so in developing that humanity and it’s not something that can be peeled off as one would take off his clothes.

  And you, Sir Scientist?

  Me?

  Yes, what about yourself? The other two of us are finally honest. What about yourself?

  Me? I’ve never thought of it. There’s never been a doubt. Any scientist, especially an astronomer like myself, would have sold his
soul to go. Come to think of it, figuratively, I may have sold my soul. I connived to be named to this conglomerate of intellectuality, or whatever you may call it. I connived to be named. I would have fought for it. I implored certain friends, most privately and discreetly, to second my nomination. I would have done anything at all. I did not think of my selection as an honor. I did not act as did the two of you, from fear, and yet, in a way, I may have. I was growing old, you know, and I was beginning to get that frantic feeling that little time was left, that the sands were running out. Yes, come to think of it, there may have been some fear, a subconscious fear. But, basically, it was the feeling that I could not afford to go down into the final dark with so much still to do. Not that what I observe now or what I deduce now will have any earthly impact, for I am no longer part of Earth.

  But, in the final reckoning, I don’t think that ever mattered. My work was not for Earth nor for my fellow-men, but for myself—for my own personal satisfaction and gratification. I did not look for plaudits. Unlike you, dear lady, I hid myself away. I shunned publicity. I gave no interviews and I wrote no books. Papers, certainly, to share my findings with my fellow workers, but nothing for the man in the street to read. I think, if you summed it up, that I am, or was, an extremely selfish man. I cared for no one but myself. I now am glad to tell you that my position with the two of you I find very comfortable. As if we were old friends, although we were never friends before, nor perhaps are any of the three of us really friends to the other two in the classical definition of friendship. But if we can get along, I think that under the circumstances, we can call that friendship.

  What a crew we turn out to be, said the monk. A selfish scientist, a glory-hunting woman, and a monk who was afraid.

  Was?

  I’m afraid no longer. There is nothing that can touch me or either one of you. We have got it made.

  We still have a way to go, said the scientist. Here there is no place nor time for gloating. Humble, humble, humble.

  I’ve been humble all my earthly life, said the monk. I’m through with being humble.

  18

  “There is something wrong,” said Elayne. “Something out of place. No, maybe that’s not it. But there is a somethingness that we haven’t found. There is a situation waiting here—perhaps not for us, but waiting.”

  She was tensed, almost rigid, and into Horton’s mind came the remembrance of that old setter with which, at times, he had hunted quail. A sense of expectancy, a knowing and a not-quite-knowing, a standing on tiptoe with acute awareness.

  He stayed, waiting, and finally, with a seeming effort, she relaxed.

  Elayne looked at him with begging eyes, begging to be believed. “Don’t laugh at me,” she said. “I know there’s something here—something most unusual. I don’t know what it is.”

  “I’m not laughing at you,” he told her. “I’ll take your word for it. But how …”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Once, in a situation such as this, I would have distrusted myself. But not any longer. It has happened before, many times before. Almost like a certain knowing. Like a warning.”

  “You think it might be dangerous.”

  “There is no way to know,” she said. “Just that sense of somethingness.”

  “We’ve found nothing so far,” he said, and that was true enough. In the three buildings they had explored, there had been nothing but the dust, the rotting furniture, the ceramics, and the glass. To an archaeologist, there might have been significance, Horton told himself, but to the two of them, there had been simply oldness—a musty, dusty, repetitive oldness that was at once futile and depressive. At some time in the distant past intelligent beings had lived here, but there was, to his untrained eyes, no indication of their purpose here.

  “I’ve often thought about it,” she said. “Wondered about it. For I’m not the only one who has it. There are others. A new ability, an acquired instinct—there is no way of telling. When men went into space and landed on other planets, they were forced to adapt to—what would you call it?—the unlikely, perhaps. They had to develop new survival techniques, new habits of thinking, new insights and senses. Maybe that’s what we have, a new kind of sense, a new awareness. The pioneers of Earth, when they pushed out into unknown areas, developed something of the sort. Primitive man had it, perhaps, as well. But back on old settled and civilized Earth, there came a time when there was no longer any need of it and it was lost. In a civilized environment there were few surprises. One knew fairly well what he might expect. But when he went out to the stars, he found a new need of this old awareness.”

  “Don’t look at me,” said Horton. “I’m one of those people from what you call civilized Earth.”

  “Was it civilized?”

  “To answer that, you must define the term. What is civilized?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” she said. “I have never seen a completely civilized world—not in the sense that Earth was civilized. Or I don’t think I have. These days you can’t be sure. You and I, Carter Horton, come from different ages. There may be times when the only proper course will be for each of us to be patient with the other.”

  “You sound as if you’ve seen a lot of worlds.”

  “I have,” she said. “On this mapping job. You reach a place, stay a day or two—well, maybe more than that, but never very long. Only long enough to make some observations and jot down some notes, to, get an impression of what kind of world it is. So you’ll be able to recognize it, you see, if you come back to it again. For it’s important to know if the tunnel system ever brings you back to a place you’ve been before. Some places you’d like to stay awhile. Once in a great while, you find a really pleasant place. But there are few of these. Mostly you are glad to leave.”

  “Tell me one thing,” Horton said. “I’ve been wondering about it. You are on this mapping expedition. That is what you call it. It sounds to me more like a wild-goose chase. Your chances can’t be more than one in a million and yet …”

  “I told you there are others.”

  “But even if there were a million of you, there’d be only one of you who has any chance of returning to a world that has been visited before. And just one of you finding their way back would be a waste of time. There’d have to be a number of you who succeeded before there could be any statistical probability the tunnels could be mapped, or even started to be mapped.”

  She stared coldly at him. “Back there where you came from, you, of course, had heard of faith.”

  “Certainly I have heard of faith. Faith in one’s self, faith in one’s country, faith in one’s religion. What has that got to do with it?”

  “Faith is often all that one possesses.”

  “Faith,” he said, “is thinking something’s possible when you’re quite sure it’s not.”

  “Why so cynical?” she asked. “Why so short of vision? Why so materialistic?”

  “I’m not cynical,” he said. “I just take the odds into some account. And we were not short of vision. We were the ones, remember, who first went to the stars and we were able to go, to persuade ourselves to go, because of the materialism you seem so much to scorn.”

  “That is true,” she agreed, “but that’s not what I am talking about. Earth was one thing; the stars are another. When you get out among the stars, the values change, the viewpoints shift. There’s an ancient phrase—it’s a different ball game—can you tell me what that phrase means?”

  “I suppose it alludes to some sort of sports event.”

  “You mean those silly exercises that once were held on Earth?”

  “You don’t hold them any more? No sports events at all?”

  “There is too much to do, too much to learn. We no longer need to seek artificial amusement. We haven’t got the time, and even if we had, no one would be interested.”

  Elayne pointed at a building almost engulfed by brush and trees. “I think that’s the one,” she said.

  “The one?”

&
nbsp; “The one where the strangeness is. The somethingness that I have been talking about.”

  “Should we go and see?”

  “I’m not entirely sure,” she said. “To tell you the truth, I’m a little frightened. By what we might find, you know.”

  “You have no idea? You say you can sense this somethingness. Does your perception extend far enough to give you at least some hint?”

  Elayne shook her head. “Only that it’s strange. Something out of the ordinary. Perhaps frightening, although I feel no actual fright. Just a tugging at my mind, a fear of the unusual, of the unsuspected. Just this terrible sense of strangeness.”

  “It’s going to be tough getting there,” he said. “That growth is fairly dense. I could go back to camp and get a machete. I think that we brought one along.”

  “No need,” she said. She unholstered the weapon on her belt.

  “This will burn a path,” she said. It was larger than it had looked when holstered, needle-nosed and a bit cumbersome.

  He eyed it. “A laser?”