“Remember how we wondered why the dragon was encased in time,” said Horton, “if it were encased in time. Writing our own scenario to push back the fact that we knew exactly nothing. Creating our own little human fable to give some meaning and some explanation to an event that was beyond our understanding.”
“To me,” she said, “it seems quite apparent now why it was left here. It was left here to wait until the monster hatched, to kill the monster when it hatched. By some means, the hatching of the monster would trigger the time trap to turn the dragon loose, and it did turn the dragon loose, for all the good it did.”
Horton said, “They—whoever they might be—chained the dragon in time against the day when the monster hatched. They must have known the egg had been laid and if they knew that, why didn’t they seek and destroy the egg—if it was an egg—or whatever it might be? Why all the dramatic mumbo-jumbo?”
“Maybe they knew only that the egg had been laid, but had no idea where.”
“But the dragon was located less than a mile …”
“Maybe they knew the general area. Even so, finding the egg would be like sifting through acres of sandy beach, looking for an object that might have been hard to distinguish even should it be uncovered—so camouflaged that even if you looked directly at it, you might not recognize it. And they might not have had the time to look. They had to leave here for some reason, perhaps rather quickly, so they installed the dragon in the vault and when they left the planet, closed down the tunnel so that if something happened and the dragon failed to kill the monster, the monster couldn’t leave the planet.
“And the hatching. We talk about the monster hatching, but I don’t think the term is quite correct. Whatever brought the monster into being must have taken a long time. The monster must have undergone a long period of development before it broke from the hill. Like the old seventeen-year locust out of Earth, or at least the old story about the seventeen-year locust. Except that the monster took much longer than seventeen years.”
“What puzzles me,” said Horton, “is why whoever laid the trap for the monster by putting the dragon into time should have feared the monster so greatly to go to such great pains. The monster was big, sure, and an unlovely thing, but Carnivore ripped his throat out with one stroke, and that was the end of him.”
Elayne shuddered. “He was evil. You could feel the evil pouring out of him. You felt it, didn’t you?”
“I felt it,” Horton said.
“Not just a little evil, as so much of life displays a little evil, or is capable of a little evil. Rather, there was a depth of evil in him that could not be measured. It was an absolute negation of everything that is good and decent. Carnivore caught it by surprise, before it had a chance to bring all its evil into focus. It was new-hatched, barely aware, when he came upon it. That is the only reason, I am sure, that he was able to do what he did.”
By now they had rounded the curve of the Pond below the height of land on which the ruined houses stood.
“I think it’s up there,” said Elayne. “Just up the hill.”
Leading the way, she began to climb. Looking back, Horton saw Nicodemus, reduced to toy proportion by distance, standing on the opposite shore. It was only with some difficulty that he could make out Carnivore’s body, which tended to blend in with the barren shelf of rock on which it lay.
Elayne had reached the crest of the hill and halted. When he climbed up beside her, she pointed. “There,” she said. “There it is.”
A million jewels were sparkling in the underbrush. The dragon could not be seen because of the intervening vegetation, but the rainbowed reflection of its body showed where it had fallen.
“It’s dead,” said Elayne. “It’s not moving.”
“Not necessarily dead,” said Horton. “It could be injured, but alive.”
Together they went plunging through the brush and when they were past a massive tree with low-hanging branches, they could see the dragon.
It was a thing of breath-catching beauty. Each of the tiny scales that covered the body was a point of gemlike light, little exquisitely colored jewels glinting in the sunlight. When Horton moved forward a step the entire body seemed to flare, the angle of the scales acting as a reflector that threw back the brightness of the day full into his face. But as he made another step, changing the angle of the scales in relation to himself, the flare came to an end and the sparkling came back, as if it were a tinseled Christmas tree entirely covered and obscured by little flashing lights, but lights far more colorful than a Christmas tree could ever wear. Deep blues and ruby reds, greens shading from the paleness of an evening springtime sky to the deep green of an angry sea, living yellow, the sunlit shine of topaz, the pink of apple blossoms, the autumn gleam of pumpkins—and all the colors frosted over with the kind of scintillation that one might see on a frosty winter morning when everything was diamonds.
Elayne drew in her breath. “How beautiful!” she gasped. “More beautiful than we guessed when we saw it in the time vault.”
It was smaller than it had seemed when glimpsed flying in the air and it was lying very quietly. One gossamer wing thrust out from the slender body and sagged to lie upon the ground. The other was crumpled underneath it. The long neck was twisted so that the head rested with one cheek upon the ground. Seen close, the head still bore the look of a helmet. On the head the scales that covered the rest of the body were lacking. The helmet was shaped of hard structures that resembled polished metal plates. The massive beak, thrust out from the helmet mask, also had a look of metal.
Still lying quietly, unstirring, the eye in that part of the head that lay uppermost came open—a blue eye, a gentle eye, clear and limpid and unfrightened.
“It’s alive!” cried Elayne and started toward it. With a cry of warning, Horton put out a hand to stop her, but ducking past him, she dropped to her knees beside the cruel head, reached out and took it in her arms and lifting it, held it close against her breast.
Horton stood petrified, afraid to move, afraid to make a single sound. A wounded, hurting creature, one thrust, one chop of that wicked beak …
But nothing happened. The dragon did not move. Tenderly, Elayne let the head back to the ground, reached out a hand to stroke the jeweled neck. The dragon blinked a long, slow blink, its one eye fastened on her.
“It knows that we are friends,” she said. “It knows that we won’t hurt it.”
The dragon blinked again and this time the eye stayed shut. Elayne went on stroking the creature’s neck, crooning quietly to it. Horton stood where he was, listening to the soft crooning, the only sound (scarcely a sound) in a terrible quietness that had settled on the hilltop. Below him and across the Pond the toy that was Nicodemus still stood upon the shore beside the blotch that was Carnivore. Farther up the shore he could make out the larger blotch that was the shattered hill from which the monster had emerged. Of the monster there was no sign at all.
He had known, he thought, about the monster—or he should have known. Only yesterday he had climbed the hill, going on hands and knees because that was the only way one could climb its steepness. Short of the top he had stopped and rested, lying flat upon his belly, and had sensed a vibration in the hill, like the beating of a heart. But he’d told himself, he recalled, that it was no more than his own heart beating, thumping with the exhaustion of the climb, and had thought no more of it.
He looked back at the dragon and sensed the wrongness in it, but it took some time, even so, to know what the wrongness was.
“Elayne,” he said, softly. “Elayne.”
She looked up at him.
“The dragon’s dead,” he said. “The color is fading.”
As they watched, the fading continued. The tiny scales lost their sparkle and the beauty went away. No longer a thing of wonder, it because a great gray beast and to one watching, there could be no doubt that it had died.
Slowly Elayne got to her feet, wiped her tear-wet face with balled fists.
“But why?” she asked, wildly. “Why? If it were encased in time—if time had been stopped for it—it should have been as fresh and strong as the moment that it was placed in time. Time simply would not have existed for it. There would have been no change.”
“We don’t know about time,” said Horton. “Maybe those who put it into time didn’t know as much about it as they thought they did. Perhaps time can’t be controlled as easily and as reliably as they thought it could. There still could have been bugs in what they might have considered a perfect technique.”
“You’re saying that something went wrong with the time vault. That there could have been a leakage.”
“There is no way that we can know,” said Horton. “Time is still the great mystery to us. It is no more than a concept; we don’t know if it even exists. The vault could have had unsuspected effects on living tissue or on mental processes. Life energy could have been drained away, metabolic poisons could have built up. Perhaps the length of duration was longer than the people who put the dragon into time had calculated. Some factor may have held up the hatching of the monster far beyond the usual length of time such a hatching should have taken.”
“It is strange,” she said, “how events work out. If Carnivore had not been trapped upon this planet, the monster might be loose.”
“And Pond,” said Horton. “If Pond had not alerted us, had not let out its shriek of warning …”
“So that is what it was. That is how you knew. Why should Pond have been afraid?”
“It probably sensed the evil of the monster. Pond, perhaps, is not immune from evil.”
She came up the little slope and stood close beside Horton. “The beauty of it gone,” she said. “That’s a terrible thing. There is so little beauty in the universe; we can spare none of it. Maybe that’s why death is so horrible; it takes away the beauty.”
“The twilight of the gods,” said Horton.
“The twilight …”
“Another old Earth story,” he said. “The monster, the dragon and Carnivore. All of them dead. A great final reckoning.”
She shivered in the warmth of the blazing sun.
“Let’s go back.” she said.
28
They sat about the dying campfire.
“Is there anyone,” asked Nicodemus, “who feels like having breakfast?”
Elayne shook her head.
Horton rose slowly to his feet. “It’s time to go,” he said. “There’s nothing more to keep us here. I know that and yet I seem to feel a strange reluctance to leave. We’ve been here only three days, but it seems much longer. Elayne, you are going with us?”
“Of course,” she said. “I thought you knew.”
“I suppose I did. Just asking to make sure.”
“If you want me and there’s room.”
“We want you and there’s room. There is a lot of room.”
“We’ll want to take along Shakespeare’s book,” said Nicodemus. “I guess that’s all. On the way back we could stop and pick up a pocket full of emeralds. I know that to us they may be worthless, but I can’t get out of the habit of regarding them as valuable.”
“There’s one other thing,” said Horton. “I promised Pond I’d take some of him along. I’ll get one of the bigger jugs Shakespeare collected from the city.”
Elayne spoke quietly. “Here come the slugs. We’d forgotten all about them.”
“They’re easy things to forget,” said Horton. “They slither in and out. They’re unreal somehow. They’re hard to keep in mind, almost as if they intend not to be kept in mind.”
“I wish we had the time,” said Elayne, “to find out what they are. It couldn’t have been just coincidence that they turned up exactly when they did. And they did thank Carnivore, or it looked as if they were thanking him. I have a feeling they played a greater part in all of this than we can ever guess.”
The foremost slug had grown a tentacle and was waving it at them.
“Maybe,” said Elayne, “they’ve just found out that the tunnel’s closed.”
“They want us to go with them,” said Nicodemus.
“They probably want to show us that the tunnel’s closed,” said Horton. “As if we didn’t know.”
“Even so,” said Elayne, “we probably should go with them and find out what they want.”
“If we can,” said Nicodemus. “The communication is not too good.”
Horton led the way, with Elayne and Nicodemus following close behind. The slugs disappeared around the bend that hid the tunnel from view and Horton hurried after them. He rounded the bend and came to a sudden halt.
The tunnel mouth was no longer dark; it gleamed with milky whiteness.
Behind Horton, Nicodemus said, “Poor Carnivore. If he could only be here.”
“The slugs,” said Elayne. “The slugs …”
“The people of the tunnel, could that be it?” asked Horton.
“Not necessarily,” said Nicodemus. “The keepers of the tunnels, maybe. The guardians of the tunnels. Not the builders, necessarily.”
The three slugs were hopping down the path. They did not stop. They reached the tunnel mouth and hopped into it, disappearing.
“The control panel has been replaced,” said Nicodemus. “The slugs must have been the ones who did it. But how could they have known that something was about to happen that would enable them to open the tunnel? Somehow, someone must have known that the hatching was about to occur and that the planet could be opened.”
“It was Carnivore who made it possible,” said Horton. “He pestered us, he breathed on us, he kept prodding us to get the tunnel open. But, in the end, he was the one who finally got it open, who made it possible. And too late to do him any good. Although we can’t feel sorry for him. He got what he wanted. He carried out his purpose and there are few who do. His glory-search is over, and he’s a great folk hero.”
“But he’s dead,” said Nicodemus.
“Tell me,” said Horton, rmemebering his talk with Shakespeare. “First tell me what is death.”
“It’s an end,” said Nicodemus. “It’s like turning out a light.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Horton. “Once I would have agreed with you, but now I’m not quite sure.”
Elayne spoke in a small-girl voice. “Carter.” she said. “Carter listen to me, please.”
He turned to face her.
“I can’t go with you,” she said. “It all is changed. It is different now.”
“But you said …”
“I know, but that was when the tunnel still was closed, when there seemed no chance of it being opened. I want to go with you. There’s nothing I want more. But now …”
“But now the tunnel’s open.”
“It’s not only that. Not only that I have a job to do and now can continue with that job. It’s the slugs. Now I know what I am looking for. I have to find the slugs. Find them, somehow talk with them. They can tell us what we need to know. No more blind probing to learn the secret of the tunnels. Now we know who can tell us what we need to know about them.”
“If you can find them. If you can talk with them. If they will talk with you.”
“I’ll have to try,” she said. “I’ll leave word along the way, messages at many other tunnels, hoping they will be found by many other searchers, so that if I fail, there’ll be others who will know and carry on the hunt.”
“Carter,” said Nicodemus, “you know she has to do it. Much as we might want her with us, we must recognize …”
“Yes, of course,” said Horton.
“I know you won’t, you can’t, but I have to ask.” she said. “If you’d come with me—”
“You know I can’t,” said Horton.
“Yes, I know you can’t.”
“So it all comes down to this,” said Horton. “There’s no way we can change it. Our commitments—both our commitments—are too deep. We meet, then go our separate ways. It is almost as if this meeting
never happened.”
“That’s not right,” she said, “and you know it isn’t Our lives, each of our lives, have been changed a little. We shall remember one another.”
She lifted her face. “Kiss me once.” she said. “Kiss me very quickly so there is no time to think, so I can walk away …”
29
Horton knelt beside the Pond and lowered the jug into the liquid. The liquid gurgled as it flowed into the jug. Displaced air made bubbles on the surface.
When the jug was filled he rose and tucked it underneath his arm.
“Good-bye, Pond,” he said, feeling silly as he said it, for it was not good-bye. Pond was going with him.
That was one of the advantages to a thing like Pond, he thought. Pond could go many places, yet never leave where it had been to start with. As if, he thought, he could have gone with Elayne and could as well have gone with Ship—and, come to think of it, have stayed on Earth and been dead these many centuries.
“Pond,” he asked, “what do you know of death? Do you die? Will you ever die?”
And that was silly, too, he thought, for everything must die. Someday, perhaps, the universe would die when the last flicker of energy had been expended and, when that happened, time would be left alone to brood over the ashes of a phenomenon that might never come again.
Futile, he wondered. Was it all futility?
He shook his head. He could not bring himself to think so.
Perhaps the god-hour had an answer. Perhaps that great blue planet knew. Someday, perhaps millennia from now, Ship, in the black reaches of some distant sector of the galaxy, would be told or would ferret out the answer. Perhaps somewhere in the context of that answer there might be an explanation of the purpose of life, that feeble lichen which clung, sometimes despairingly, to the tiny flecks of matter floating in an inexplicable immensity that did not know nor care that there was such a thing as life.
30
The grande dame said, So now the play is done. The drama is run out and we can leave this cluttered, messy planet for the cleanness that is space.
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