Shakespeare's Planet

by Clifford D. Simak

  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 thistled
own 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.

  Suddenly, while he looked away a moment, he became aware that the sphere he trailed through space had found a solar system and was streaking down through dense atmosphere to circle one of the planets. Even as he watched, the sphere bulged out on one side and humped up to form another smaller sphere, which fell away from it and began an orbit of the planet, while the larger parent sphere curved outward to plunge into space again. As it curved, it shook him loose and spun him out and he was free, tumbling toward the dark surface of the unknown planet. Fear dug deep claws into him and he opened his mouth to scream, astonished that he had a mouth to scream.

  But before he could get the scream out, there was no need to scream, for he was back inside his body crouched beside the Pond.

  His eyes were screwed tight shut and he opened them, with the feeling that he had to pry them open rather than merely open them. He could see fairly well despite the darkness of the night. The Pond lay placid in its rocky bowl, an unrippling mirror glittering with the light of the stars that hung in the sky above. To the right, the mound reared up, a conelike shadow in the darkness of the land, and, to the left, the ridge upon which the ruined city stood was a black beast crouching.

  “So that is how it is,” he said, speaking softly to the Pond, no more than a whisper, as if it were a secret they must keep between themselves. “A colony from that liquid planet. One, perhaps, of many colonies. But why colonies? What does the planet derive from colonies? A living ocean that sends out small segments of itself, small buckets of itself, to seed other solar systems. And seeding them, what does it gain? What does it hope to gain?”

  He quit his speaking and crouched in the midst of silence, a silence so profound that it was unnerving. A silence so deep and uncompromising that it seemed to him he could still hear the high singsong hiss of time.

  “Speak to me,” he pleaded. “Why don’t you speak to me? You can show-and-tell; why can’t you speak?”

  For this was not enough, he told himself. Not enough to know what the Pond might be or how it had gotten there. This was a beginning only, a basic background fact, saying nothing of motive or hope or purpose and those three were important.

  “Look,” he said, still pleading, “you’re one life and I’m another life. By our very natures we cannot harm one another, have no reason to wish harm for one another. So there is nothing for either of us to fear. Look, I’ll put it this way—is there something that I can do for you? Is there something you want to do for me? Or lacking that, which well might be the case since we operate on such different planes, why don’t we try to tell each about the other, get to know one another better. You must have some intelligence. Surely this seeding of the planets is more than just instinctive behavior, more than a plant broadcasting its seeds to take root in other soil, even as our coming here is more than a blind sowing of our cultural seed.”

  He sat, waiting, and again there was a stirring in his mind, as if something had entered it and was striving to form a message there, to draw a picture there. Slowly, by painful degrees, the picture grew and built, at first a shifting, then a blur, and, finally, hardening into a cartoonlike representation that changed and changed again and yet again, becoming clearer and more definitive with each change until it seemed that there were two of him—two hims squatting there beside the Pond. Except that one of him was not simply squatting there, but held in its hand a bottle—the very bottle he’d brought back from the city—and was stooping to dip the bottle into the liquid of the Pond. Fascinated, he watched—the both of him watched—as the neck of the bottle gurgled, sending up a spray of breaking bubbles as the liquid of the Pond, filling the bottle, forced out the air within it.

  “All right,” said the one of him. “All right and then what do I do?”

  The picture changed and the other of him, carrying the bottle carefully, was walking up the ramp into the Ship, although Ship came off rather badly, for it was lopsided and distorted, as bad a representation of the Ship as the etchings on the bottle must have been bad representations of the creatures they were intended to depict.

  The figure of his second self by now had entered the Ship and the ramp was rising and the Ship was lifting off the planet, heading into space.

  “So you want to go along,” said Horton. “For the love of God, is there anything on this planet that doesn’t want to go with us? But so little of you, just a jugful of you.”

  This time the image in his mind formed swiftly—a diagram that showed that far-distant liquid planet and many other planets with globes of the liquid either heading for them or leaving them, with little drops shaken off the spheres falling on the planets the parent spheres were seeding. The diagram changed, and lines were drawn from all the seeded planets and the liquid planet itself into a point in space where all the lines came together with a circle drawn around that point where the lines converged. The lines disappeared but the circle stayed and again the lines were swiftly drawn to converge with the circle.

  “You mean—?” asked Horton and the same thing took place again.

  “Inseparable?” asked Horton. “Are you saying there is only one of you? That there are not many of you, but only the one of you? That there’s just one I? No we, but a single I? That you here before me is only an extension of one single life?”

  The square of the diagram went white.

  “You mean that’s right?” asked Horton. “That’s what you did mean?”

  The diagram faded from his mind and in its place came a feeling of strange happiness, of satisfaction, of a problem solved. No word, no sign. Just the sense of being right, of having caught the meaning.

  “But I talk with you,” he said, “and you seem to understand. How come you understand?”

  There was a squirming in his mind again, but this time no picture formed. There were flutterings and vague shapes and then it all was gone.

  “So,” he said, “there’s no way you can tell me.” But, p
erhaps, he thought, there was no need to tell him. He should know himself. He could talk with Ship, through the contraption, whatever it might be, that had been grafted on his brain, and perhaps here the same sort of principle was involved. He and Ship talked in words, but that was because they both knew the words. They had a common medium of communication, but with Pond that medium did not exist. So Pond, grasping some meaning from the thoughts he’d formed inside his mind when he spoke—the thoughts that were brother to his words—had fallen back upon the most basic of all forms of communications, pictures. Pictures painted on a cave wall, etched on pottery, drawn on paper—pictures in the mind. The acting-out of thought processes.

  I guess it doesn’t matter, he told himself. Just so we can communicate. Just so ideas can cross the barrier between us. But it was so insane, he thought—a biologic construct of many different tissues talking to a mass of biologic liquid. And not only the few gallons of liquid lying in this rocky bowl, but the billions upon billions of gallons of liquid on that distant planet.

  He stirred, shifting his position, the muscles of his legs cramped with squatting.

  “But why?” he asked. “Why would you want to go with us? Surely not to plant another tiny colony—a bucket colony on some other planet that we may reach in time, perhaps centuries from now. Such a purpose makes no sense. You have far better ways to plant your colonies.”

  Swiftly the picture formed inside his mind—the liquid planet shimmering in its devastating blueness against the jet backdrop of space, and spearing out from it thin, jagged lines, many thin, jagged lines aimed at other planets. And even as he saw the lines snake out across the diagram, Horton seemed to know that the other planets at which the lines were aimed were those planets upon which the liquid planet had established colonies. Strangely, he told himself, those jagged lines bore some resemblance to the human-conventional sign for thunderbolts, realizing that Pond had borrowed from him certain conventionalities to implement its communication with him.