Shakespeare's Planet

  The answer is no, said the scientist. Much as we may regret it, the answer must be no. Carter may think harshly of us. He may say we’ve lost our humanity with our bodies, that we retain only the coldness of our intellect. But that will be his softness speaking, forgetting that we must be hard, that softness has but little part to play out here, away from our own conditioned planet. And, furthermore, it would be no kindness to the Carnivore. He’d drag out his weary life within this metal cage, with Nicodemus hating him and him hating Nicodemus—perhaps afraid of Nicodemus—and that would be heaping coals upon his shame, that he, a warrior of repute who has killed many evil monsters, should be reduced to fearing a spindly mechanism such as Nicodemus.

  With reason, said the monk, for Nicodemus undoubtedly, in time, would kill him.

  He is so uncouth, said the grande dame, a shudder in her thought. So lacking in sensibilities, with none of the niceties nor considerations …

  Which do you mean? asked the monk. Carnivore or Nicodemus?

  Oh, not Nicodemus. I think he is cute.

  26

  Pond cried out in terror.

  Hearing it with the far edges of his mind, Horton stirred in the warmth and nearness, the intimacy and the nakedness, clinging to the closeness of another human—a woman, but with the humanity as important as the woman, for in this place, they were the only humans.

  Pond cried out again, a shrill ripple of alarm, slicing through Horton’s brain. He sat up in the blanket.

  “What is it, Carter Horton?” Elayne asked sleepily.

  “It’s Pond,” he said. “There is something wrong.”

  The first flush of dawn ran up the eastern sky, shedding a ghostly half-light in which the trees and the Shakespeare house stood out hazily. The fire had burned low, into a bed of coals that winked with blood-red eyes. Beyond the fire Nicodemus stood, facing in the direction of the Pond. He stood stiff and straight, alert.

  “Here are your pants,” said Elayne. Horton reached out a hand and took them.

  “What is it, Nicodemus?” he asked.

  “Something screamed,” said the robot. “Not so you could hear it. But I could sense the screaming.”

  Struggling into his trousers, Horton shivered in the dawn chill.

  The cry came again, more urgent than it had been before.

  “Look what’s coming up the path,” said Elayne, her voice tight.

  Horton turned to see and gulped. There were three of them. They were white and smooth and looked like upended slugs, greasy and repulsive things such as might be found beneath a rock that had been overturned. They came rapidly, hopping on the lower, tapered end of their bodies. They had no feet but that didn’t seem to bother them. They had no arms nor faces—they were just fat, happy slugs, skipping rapidly up the path that led down to the tunnel.

  “Three more who are marooned,” said Nicodemus. “We’re getting to be quite a colony. How do you think it happens that so many are coming through that tunnel?”

  Carnivore came stumbling through the door of Shakespeare House. He stretched and scratched himself.

  “Who the hell are them?” he asked.

  “They haven’t introduced themselves,” said Nicodemus. “They just now showed up.”

  “Funny-looking, are they not?” said Carnivore. “They haven’t got no feet, they just hippety along.”

  “There is something happening,” said Elayne. “Something dreadful. I felt it last night, remember, that something was about to happen and now it’s happening.”

  The three slugs came up the path, paying no attention to those who stood about the fire, brushing past them to take the path that led to the Pond.

  The light in the east had brightened, and from far off in the forest something made a sound that sounded like someone dragging a stick along a picket fence.

  Another cry from Pond slashed through Horton’s mind. He started running down the path that led to the Pond and Carnivore swung in beside him, running with a loping stride.

  “Would you disclose to me,” he asked, “what has transpired to bring about excitement and so much running?”

  “Pond’s in some kind of trouble.”

  “How could Pond be in trouble? Someone throwing rocks at him?”

  “I don’t know,” said Horton, “but he’s screaming plenty loud.”

  The path curved as it crossed the ridge. Below them lay the Pond and beyond the Pond, the conical hill. Something was happening to the hill. It was thrusting up and breaking apart, and out of it was rising something dark and horrible. The three slugs were huddled together, crouching, on the shore.

  Carnivore sped up, loping swiftly down the path. Horton yelled at him. “Come back, you fool! Come back, you crazy fool!”

  “Horton, look,” cried Elayne. “Not at the hill. Up on the city ridge.”

  One of the buildings, Horton saw, had shattered, its masonry wrenched apart, and out of it was emerging a creature that glittered in the morning sun.

  “It’s our time creature,” said Elayne. “The one we found.”

  Looking at it in the block of frozen time, Horton had been unable to discern its shape, but now, unfolded from its prison, it seemed a thing of glory.

  Great wings were stretching out, and the light flared off them in a rainbow of many colors, as if they were constructed of many tiny prisms. A savage beaked head was poised on a longish neck and the head, Horton thought, looked as if it might wear a helmet set with precious stones. Curved, gleaming talons extended from the heavy claws and the long tail was barbed with sharp and glistening spines.

  “A dragon,” Elayne said, softly. “Like the dragons out of the old legends of the Earth.”

  “Perhaps,” said Horton. “No one knows what a dragon was, if there was a dragon.”

  But the dragon, if it was a dragon, was in trouble. Free of the stout stone house in which it had been imprisoned, it beat its way into the air, its huge wings flapping awkwardly to drive it upward. Flapping awkwardly, Horton thought, when it should be skimming into the sky with wings that were strong and sure, climbing the staircase of the air as a fleet-footed being would run joyously up a hill, exulting in the strength of legs, the capacity of lungs.

  Remembering Carnivore running down the path, he turned his head to see where he might be. While he did not immediately catch sight of Carnivore, he saw that the hill just beyond the Pond had rapidly broken up, shattered and fragmented by the creature that was clawing its way from it. Great slabs and broken chunks of the hill were rolling down the steepness of its sides and a large amount of debris—stone and soil—had accumulated about its foot. The lower reaches of the hill, still intact, bore cracks that ran in jagged lines, the kind of cracks that an earthquake might open up.

  But while he saw all this, it was the emerging creature that claimed his attention.

  It dripped with filthiness, great patches of foulness scaling off it. Its head was a blob and the rest of it as well—a great blob that had a semblance of being humanoid, but was not. The kind of horrible travesty of humanity that some barbaric witch doctor, drooling venom, would fashion out of clay and straw and dung to represent an enemy that he sought to torture and destroy—lumpy, misshapen, lopsided, but with an evil in it, a vicious, drooling evil borrowed from the one who made it and magnified by the ineptness of itself. The evil rose from it as a poisonous vapor might rise from a murky swamp.

  The hill was almost leveled now, and as Horton watched in fascination, the monster tore itself free and took a stride forward, covering a good twelve feet in that single stride.

  Horton’s hand drove down, clawing for his gun, realizing even as he did that he did not have the gun—that it was back at camp, that he had forgotten to fasten on his gunbelt, cursing himself for his forgetfulness, for there could be no question, not a shred of doubt, that an evil thing such as the creature that had hatched from out the hill could not be allowed to live.

  It was not until this moment that he sighted Carnivore.

  ?
??Carnivore!” he shouted.

  For the demented fool was running straight toward the creature, running on all fours for better speed. He was charging with his head held low, and even from where he stood, Horton could see the smooth flow of his mighty muscles as he drove himself along.

  Then he leaped for the monster and was swarming up its massive body, the momentum of his charge carrying him up the body toward the short length of neck that tied the blob of the head to the lump that was the body.

  “NO! NO!” Nicodemus was crying back of him. “Leave it to Carnivore.”

  Horton swung his head about and saw that Nicodemus had one metal claw wrapped about the wrist of the hand in which Elayne held her gun.

  Then he turned his head back swiftly to see Carnivore swing his tiger-head in a slashing, chopping blow. The gleaming tusks sliced into the monster’s throat and tore through it. A gush of blackness came out of the throat, spouting, covering Carnivore’s body with a dark substance that, for an instant, seemed to blend him with the dark body of the monster. One of the monster’s clublike hands reached up, as if in reflex action, and closed on Carnivore, plucking him from its body, lifting him and hurling him away. The monster took another step and began to fall, crashing forward slowly, as a tree might fall to the final ax-stroke, reluctant to fall, striving to stay erect.

  Carnivore had fallen on the rocky shore of the Pond and was not rising. Charging down the path, Horton ran to him, brushing past the three slugs still crouched upon the shore.

  Carnivore was lying face down and, kneeling beside him, Horton slowly turned him on his back. He was limp and sacklike. His eyes were closed and blood was running from his nostrils and the corner of his mouth. His body was befouled by the sticky black substance that had gushed from the monster’s severed throat. Splintered, jagged bone thrust out of his chest.

  Nicodemus trotted up and knelt beside Horton. “How is he?” he asked.

  “He’s alive,” said Horton, “but maybe not for long. You don’t happen to have a surgeon’s transmog in that kit of yours?”

  “A simple one,” said the robot. “Knowledge of simple illnesses, how to deal with them. Some of the principles of medicine. Nothing that could take care of that rib cage.”

  “You shouldn’t have stopped me,” Elayne said to Nicodemus, speaking bitterly. “I could have killed that monster before it laid a hand on Carnivore.”

  “You don’t understand,” said Nicodemus. “Carnivore needed it.”

  “You don’t make sense,” she said.

  “What he means,” said Horton, “is that Carnivore’s a warrior. He specialized in killing monsters. He went from world to world, seeking out the most deadly species. It was a cultural thing. He got high points for doing it. He was very near the top killer of his people. This one, more than likely, will make him the greatest killer ever. It will give him a sort of cultural immortality.”

  “But what’s the use of it?” she asked. “His people will never know.”

  “Shakespeare wrote about that very thing,” said Nicodemus. “He gained the impression that somehow they would.”

  One of the slugs, hopping gently, came up and crouched opposite Horton, Carnivore between them. A tentacle extruded from his soft, pulpy body and the tip of it felt carefully over Carnivore’s body. Horton looked up, expecting to look into the face of the slug, not remembering that there was no face. The blunt upper end of the body looked back at him—looked back as if there had been eyes. No eyes, and yet the sense of looking. He felt a tingling in his brain, a faint, eerie tingling as if a weak electrical current might be running through it, a sensation that was queasily unpleasant.

  “It’s trying to talk with us,” said Nicodemus. “Do you feel it, too?”

  “What is it you want?” asked Horton of the slug. When he spoke, the electric tingling in his brain made a little jump—a jump of recognition?—then went on tingling. Nothing further happened.

  “I don’t think there’s any use,” said Nicodemus. “It’s trying to tell us something, but there is no way it can. It can’t reach us.”

  “Pond could talk to us,” said Horton. “Pond talked with me.”

  Nicodemus made a shrug of resignation. “These things are different. A different kind of mind, a different kind of signal.”

  Carnivore’s eyes fluttered open.

  “He’s coming to,” said Nicodemus. “He’s going to be hurting. I’ll go back to camp. I think I have a hypodermic.”

  “No,” said Carnivore, speaking feebly. “No needle in the butt. I hurt. It not for long. The monster, it is dead?”

  “Very dead,” said Horton.

  “Is good,” said Carnivore. “I cut its goddamn throat. I be very good at that. I am good at monsters.”

  “You’ll have to take it easy,” said Horton. “In a little while, we’ll try to move you. Get you back to camp.”

  Carnivore closed his eyes wearily. “No camp,” he said. “Here as good as anywhere.”

  He coughed, choking on the new blood that splashed out of his mouth and ran across his chest.

  “What happened to the dragon?” asked Horton. “Is it anywhere about?”

  “It crashed across the Pond,” said Elayne. “There was something wrong with it. It couldn’t fly. It tried to fly and fell.”

  “Too long in time,” said Nicodemus.

  The slug lifted its tentacle and touched Horton’s shoulder to gain his attention. It gestured up the shore where the monster lay, a black lump on the land. Then it tapped Carnivore three times and tapped itself three times. It grew another tentacle, and with the two of them made a motion as if to pick up Carnivore and hold him tight against itself, cradling him, holding him with tenderness.

  “It’s trying to say thank you,” Nicodemus said. “Trying to thank Carnivore.”

  “Maybe trying to tell us it can help him,” said Elayne.

  His eyes still closed, Carnivore said, “There’s nothing that can help me. Just leave me here. Don’t move me till I’m dead.”

  He coughed again.

  “And don’t, in kindness, tell me I’m not dying. You’ll stay with me until it’s done?”

  “We’ll stay with you,” said Elayne.

  “Horton?”

  “Yes, my friend.”

  “If this hadn’t happened, you would have taken me? You’d not have left me here. You would have taken me when you left the planet?”

  “We’d have taken you,” said Horton.

  Carnivore closed his eyes. “I knew you would,” he said. “I always knew you would.”

  By now it was full day, the sun a hand’s-breadth above the horizon. The slanting sunlight glittered off the Pond.

  And now, thought, Horton, it didn’t really matter about the tunnel’s being closed. Carnivore no longer would be marooned in this place he hated. Elayne would leave in the Ship, and there would be no need of staying longer. Whatever had been meant to transpire upon this planet was done and ended now. And, he thought, I wish that I could know, perhaps not now, but some day, what it was all about.

  “Carter, look!” said Nicodemus in a quiet, tense tone. “The monster …”

  Horton jerked up his head and looked, gagging at the sight. The monster, lying just a few hundred feet away, was melting. It was falling in upon itself, a putrescent mess. It writhed in seeming life as it sank into a stinking, obscene puddle, with little streams of steaming nastiness flowing from the puddle.

  He watched in horrified, offended fascination as it went down to an oily, nauseous scum and the unbidden thought came across his mind that now he could never fix quite straight in mind the shape that it had held. The only impression that he had gained in that moment before Carnivore had slashed the life from it was a lumpiness, a distorted lumpiness that really was no shape at all. That might be the way with evil, he thought—it had no shape at all. It was a lumpiness and a puddled pool of filth and you never knew quite what it was, so that you were left quite free to imagine what it was, driven by the f
ear of the unknown to clothe it in whatever fashion seemed most horrible to you. So that evil might take on as many guises as there were men to clothe it—each man’s evil would be a little different from every other man’s.

  “Horton.”

  “Yes, Carnivore, what is it?”

  The voice was low and raspy and Horton went on his knees beside him, bending close so that he could hear.

  “When it’s done,” said Carnivore, “you’ll leave me here. Leave me in the open where I can be found.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Horton. “Found by what?”

  “The scavengers. The cleaners-up. The morticians. Little hungry skitterers that will ingest anything at all. Insects, birds, small animals, worms, bacteria. You will do it, Horton?”

  “Of course I’ll do it if you wish. If that’s what you really want.”

  “A giving back,” said Carnivore. “A final giving back. Not begrudging the little hungry things my flesh. Making myself an offering to many other lives. One great final sharing.”

  “I understand,” said Horton.

  “A sharing, a giving back,” said Carnivore. “Those are important things.”

  27

  As they made their way around the Pond, Elayne said, “The robot is not with us.”

  “He’s back there with Carnivore,” said Horton. “He’s keeping one last vigil. It’s his way of doing things. A sort of Irish wake. But you’d not know of Irish wakes.”

  “No, I wouldn’t. What’s an Irish wake?”

  “Sitting with the dead. Posting vigil over them. Nicodemus did it with the other humans who were on the ship with me. On a lonely planet of an unknown sun. He wanted to pray for them; he tried to pray and couldn’t. He thought it was not proper for a robot to try to say a prayer. So he did something else for them. He stayed awhile with them. He did not hurry off.”

  “How beautiful of him. It was better than a prayer.”

  “I think so, too,” said Horton. “You’re sure you know where the dragon fell? There’s still no sign of it.”

  “I watched it fall,” she said. “I think I know the place. It’s just over there.”