For the first time, squatting there, Horton really saw and appreciated the somber beauty of the forest. The trees were thick and, even in the full sunlight, dark. While the trees were not conifers, the forest reminded him of the dark pine forests in the northlands of the Earth. Growing around the spring and extending up the slope down which they had come were clumps of shrubs, three feet or so in height, all blood-red in color. He could not recall that he had seen, anywhere, a single flower or blossom. He made a mental note to ask about that later.
Halfway up the path, Horton finally saw the building that Carnivore had attempted to point out to him. It stood upon a knoll in a small clearing. It did have a Grecian look about it, although he had no background on Grecian or any other type of architecture. Small and constructed of white stone, its lines were severe and simple, but somehow it seemed to have a boxlike appearance. There was no portico, no fanciness at all—just four walls, an unadorned door, and a gable, not too high, with very little pitch.
“Shakespeare lived there when I come,” said Carnivore. “I settled in with him. We spend happy time here. Planet is tail-end of nowhere, but happy comes inside you.”
They crossed the clearing and came up to the building, walking three abreast. When they were a few feet from it, Horton glanced up and saw something he had missed before, the bleached whiteness of it lost in the whiteness of the stone. He stopped dead in horror. Affixed above the door was a human skull, grinning down at them.
Carnivore saw him staring at it. “Shakespeare bids us welcome,” he said. “That is Shakespeare’s skull.”
Staring in fascination and horror, Horton saw that Shakespeare had two missing front teeth.
“Hard it was to fasten Shakespeare up there,” Carnivore was saying. “Bad place to put him, for bone soon weather and be gone, but that was what he asked. Skull above the door, he told me, bones hung in sacks inside. I do it as he ask me, but it was sorrowful task. I do it with no liking, but a sense of duty and friendship.”
“Shakespeare asked you to do this?”
“Yes, of course. You think I did it on my own?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“Way of death,” he said. “Eat him even as he dies. Priestly function, he explained. I do it as he say. I promise not to gag, and I do not gag. I harden me and eat him, bad as he might taste, down to last scrap of gristle. I polish off his bones meticulously until none but bone remain. More than I want to eat. Belly full to bursting, but I keep on eating, never stopping until he all is gone. I do it right and proper. I do it with all holiness. I do not shame my friend. I was only friend he had.”
“It could be,” said Nicodemus. “The human race can come up with some peculiar notions. One friend ingesting another friend as a gesture of respect. Among prehistoric people, there was ritual cannibalism—doing a true friend or a great man a special honor by the eating of him.”
“But what was prehistoric,” Horton objected. “I never heard of a modern race …”
“A thousand years,” said Nicodemus, “since we were upon the Earth. Plenty of time for the development of very strange beliefs. Maybe those prehistoric people knew something that we didn’t. Maybe there was a logic to ritualistic cannibalism, and that logic was rediscovered in the last thousand years or so. Twisted logic, probably, but with appealing factors.”
“You say,” Carnivore asked, “that your race do not do this? I do not understand.”
“A thousand years ago they didn’t, but perhaps they do it now.”
“Thousand years ago?”
“We left Earth a thousand years ago. Perhaps a great deal more than a thousand years ago. We do not know the mathematics of time dilation. It could be a lot more than a thousand years.”
“But no human lives a thousand years.”
“True, but I was in cold-sleep. My body was frozen.”
“Frozen and you die.”
“Not the way we did it. Someday I’ll explain.”
“You think not ill of me for the eating of the Shakespeare?”
“No, of course we don’t,” said Nicodemus.
“That is well,” said Carnivore, “for if you did you would not take me with you when you leave. Dearest wish I have is to get off this planet as soon as possible.”
“We may be able to fix the tunnel,” said Nicodemus. “If we are able to, you can leave by tunnel.”
10
The tunnel was a ten-foot square of mirrored blackness set into the face of a small dome of rock which thrust itself upward out of the underlying rock a short distance down the hill from the Grecian building. Between the building and the dome of rock ran a path worn down to rock and even, it seemed, worn into the very rock. There had been, at some time in the past, heavy traffic there.
Carnivore gestured at the mirrored blackness. “When it is working,” he said, “it is not black, but shiny white. You walk into it, and on second step somewhere else you are. Now you walk into it and it shove you back. You cannot approach it. There is nothing there, but the nothing shove you back.”
“But when it takes you somewhere,” asked Horton, “when it’s working, I mean, and will take you somewhere, how do you know where it is about to take you?”
“You don’t,” said Carnivore. “At one time, maybe, you say where you want to go, but not now. That machinery over there,” he waved his arm, “that panel set beside the tunnel—it is possible, at one time, with it you could select your destination, but no one knows now how it operates. But it makes small difference, really. If you do not like the place you get to, you step back into it again and go otherwhere. You always, after many times, perhaps, find some place that you like. For me, I’d be happy to go anywhere from here.”
“That doesn’t sound quite right,” said Nicodemus.
“Of course it’s not,” said Horton. “The entire system must be out of kilter. No one in their right mind would build a nonselective transportation system. This way it could take you centuries to reach your destination—if you ever reached it.”
“Very good,” said Carnivore, placidly, “for being on the dodge. No one—not even self—knows where you will wind up. Maybe if pursuer sees you ducking into tunnel and ducks in after you, it may not take him to same place as you.”
“You know this, or are you just guessing?”
“Guessing, I suppose. How is one to know?”
“The entire system’s haywire,” said Nicodemus, “if it works at random. You do not travel in it. You play a game with it, and the tunnel always wins.”
“But this one takes you nowhere,” wailed Carnivore. “I’m not picky where I go—anywhere but here. My fervent hope is that you can fix it so it takes me anywhere.”
“I would suspect,” said Horton, “that it was built millennia ago and has, for centuries, been abandoned by the ones who built it. Without proper maintenance, it has broken down.”
“But that is not the point,” protested Carnivore. “Point is, can you fix it?”
Nicodemus had moved over to the panel set into the rock beside the tunnel. “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t even read the instruments, if they are instruments. Some of them look like manipulative gadgets, but I can’t be sure.”
“It wouldn’t harm to try and see what happens,” Horton said. “You can’t make the situation worse.”
“But I can’t,” said Nicodemus. “I can’t even reach them. There seems to be some sort of force field. Paper thin, perhaps, I can put my fingers on the instruments, or rather I think I have my fingers on them, but there’s no contact. I don’t really touch them. I can feel them underneath my fingers, but I’m not in actual contact with them. It is as if they were coated with a slippery grease.”
He held up one hand and looked closely at it. “But there’s not any grease,” he said.
“The damn thing works one way,” bawled Carnivore. “It should work two ways.”
“Keep your shirt on,” said Nicodemus shortly.
“You think you c
an do something with it?” asked Horton. “There’s a force field there, you said. You could get yourself blown up. Do you know anything about force fields?”
“Not a thing,” said Nicodemus cheerfully. “I didn’t even know there could be such a thing. I just called it that. The term popped into my head. I don’t know what it is.”
He set down the toolbox he’d been carrying and knelt to open it. He began laying out tools on the rocky path.
“You got things to fix him with,” crowed Carnivore. “Shakespeare had no tools. I have no goddamn tools, he’d say.”
“A fat lot of good they’d done him even if he had them,” said Nicodemus. “Even if you have them, you have to know how to use them.”
“And you know how?” asked Horton.
“You’re damn right I do,” said Nicodemus. “I’m wearing this engineering transmog.”
“Engineers don’t use tools. It’s mechanics who use tools.”
“Don’t bug me,” said Nicodemus. “At the sight and feel of tools, it all falls into place.”
“I can’t bear to watch this,” said Horton. “I think that I will leave. Carnivore, you spoke of a ruined city. Let’s have a look at it.”
Carnivore fidgeted. “But if he should need some help. Someone to hand him tools, perhaps. If he needs moral support …”
“I’ll need more than moral support,” said the robot. “I’ll need great chunks of luck, and some divine intervention wouldn’t hurt at all. Go and see your city.”
11
By no stretch of the imagination was it a city. No more than a couple of dozen buildings, none of them large. They were oblong stone structures and had the look of barracks. The site lay half a mile or so from the building to which Shakespeare’s skull was fastened, and stood on a slight rise of ground above a stagnant pond. Heavy brush and a scattering of trees had grown up between the buildings. In several instances, trees encroaching against the walls or corners of a building had dislodged or shifted some of the masonry. While most of the buildings were engulfed in the heavy growth, paths wandered here and there.
“Shakespeare chopped out the paths,” said Carnivore. “He explored here and brought a few things home. Not much, only something now and then. Something that caught his fancy. He say we not disturb the dead.”
“Dead?” asked Horton.
“Well, maybe too dramatic I make it sound. The gone, then, those who went away. Although that does not sound right either. How can one disturb those who have gone away?”
“The buildings all look alike,” said Horton. “They look to me like barracks.”
“Barracks is a word I do not have.”
“A place to house a number of people.”
“House? To live in?”
“That is right. At one time a number of people lived here. A trading post, perhaps. Barracks and warehouses.”
“No one here to trade with.”
“Well, okay, then—trappers, hunters, miners. There are the emeralds Nicodemus found. This place may be packed with gem-bearing formations or gravels. Or fur-bearing animals …”
“No fur-bearers,” said Carnivore, positively. “Meat animals, that is all. Some low-grade predators. Nothing we must fear.”
Despite the whiteness of the stone of which the buildings had been constructed, they gave the impression of dinginess, as if the buildings were no more than shacks. At the time they had been built, it was quite apparent that a clearing had been made, for despite the trees that had crept into the erstwhile clearing, the heavier forest still stood back. But, even with the sense of dinginess, there was a feel of solidity in the structures.
“They built to last,” said Horton. “It was a permanent settlement of some sort, or intended to be permanent. It’s strange that the building you and Shakespeare used was set apart from all the others. It could, I suppose, have been a guardhouse to keep an eye on the tunnel. Have you investigated these buildings?”
“Not me,” said Carnivore. “They repel me. There is nastiness about them. Unsafeness. To enter one of them is like entering a trap. Close up on me, I would expect it, so I could not get out. Shakespeare poked around in them, to my nervousness. He bring a few small objects out of which he was fascinated. Although, as I tell you, he disturb but little. He said it should be left for others of his kind who knew of such things.”
“Archaeologists.”
“That’s the word I search for. It escape my tongue. Shakespeare said shameful thing to mess up for archaeologists. They learn much from it where he learn nothing.”
“But you said …”
“A few small objects only. Easy to the hand. Small, he said, to carry and perhaps of value. He say you must not spit in the eye of fortune.”
“What did Shakespeare think this place might be?”
“He had many thoughts about it. Mostly, he wonders after heavy thought, if it not be place for malefactors.”
“You mean a penal colony.”
“He did not, to my remembrance, use the word you say. But he speculate a place to keep those not wanted otherwhere. He figure maybe tunnel never meant to operate but one way. Never two-way, always one-way tunnel. So those sent here never could go back.”
“It makes sense,” said Horton. “Although it wouldn’t have to be. If the tunnel were abandoned in the ancient past, it would have been a long time without maintenance and would progressively have broken down. What you say about not knowing where you’re going when you enter a tunnel and two people entering it and winding up at different destinations sounds wrong, too. A haphazard transportation system is impractical. Under a condition such as that, it seems unlikely the tunnel would have been widely used. What I can’t understand is why people such as you and Shakespeare should have used the tunnels.”
“Tunnels only used,” Carnivore said blithely, “by those who do not give a damn. Only by those who have no really choice. Go to places that make no sense to go to. All planet tunnels lead to are planets you can live on. Air to breathe. Not too hot, too cold. Not kind of places that kill you dead. But many worthless places. Many places where there is no one, maybe never been anyone.”
“The people who built the tunnels must have had a reason to go to so many planets, even to those planets you call worthless. It would be interesting to find out their reasons.”
“Only ones can tell you,” said Carnivore, “are the ones who fabricate the tunnels. They gone. They somewhere else or nowhere at all. No one knows who they were or where to look for them.”
“But some of the tunnel worlds are inhabited. Inhabited by people, I mean.”
“Is so if definition of people is a very broad one and not too fussy. On many tunnel planets, trouble can come fast. Last one I was on, next to this, trouble comes not only fast, but big.”
They had been walking slowly down the paths that wound among the buildings. Ahead of them the heavy underbrush closed in to obliterate the path. The path ended just beyond a door that opened into one of the structures.
“I’m going in,” said Horton. “If you don’t want to, wait outside for me.”
“I’ll wait,” said Carnivore. “Inside of them makes a crawling on my spine, a jumping in my belly.”
The inside of the place was dark. There was a dampness and a mustiness in the air and a chill that struck to the bone. Tensed, Horton felt the urge to leave, to duck back into sunlight once again. There was an alienness here that could be felt, but not defined—the feeling of being in a place where he had no right to be, a sense of intruding on something that should be kept darkly hidden.
Consciously planting his feet firmly, he stayed, although he felt the beginning of shivers up and down his back. Gradually his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom and he could make out shapes. Against the wall to his right stood what could be nothing else but a wooden cupboard. It was rickety with age. Horton had the feeling that if it were bumped, it would come tumbling down. The doors were held closed by wooden buttons. Beside the cupboard stood a wooden four-legge
d bench with great cracks running across its top. On the bench stood a piece of pottery—a water jug, perhaps, with a triangular piece broken from the rim. On the opposite end stood what looked like a vase. It certainly wasn’t pottery. It looked like glass, but the layer of fine dust that covered everything made it impossible to tell with any surety. And beside the bench stood what had to be a chair. There were four legs, a seat, a slanted back. Hanging on one of the uprights of the back was a piece of fabric that could have been a hat. On the floor in front of the chair lay what seemed to be a plate—an oval of ceramic whiteness, and upon the plate, a bone.
Something, Horton told himself, had sat in the chair—how many years ago?—with a plate upon its lap, eating a joint of meat, perhaps holding the joint in its hands, or whatever served it for hands, chewing off the bone, with the water jug close at hand, although perhaps not water, but a jug of wine. And having finished with the joint, or eaten all it wanted of it, had placed the plate upon the floor, perhaps, as it did so, settling back and patting the fullness of its belly with some satisfaction. Putting the plate with the joint upon it down upon the floor, but then never coming back to pick up the plate. With no one ever coming back to pick up the plate.
He stood in fascination, staring at the bench, the chair, the plate. Some of the alienness seemed to have gone away, for here was a set piece snatched out of the past of a people who, whatever may have been their shape, held some of the elements of a common humanity that might extend throughout the universe. A midnight snack, perhaps—and what had happened once the midnight snack were eaten?
The chair to sit in, the bench to hold the jug, the plate to hold the joint—and the vase, what about the vase? It consisted of a globular body, a long neck, and a broad base for sitting. More like a bottle than a vase, he thought.
He stepped forward and reached out for it and as he reached brushed against the hat, if it were a hat, that hung upon the chair. At his touch, the hat disintegrated. It disappeared in a small puff of dust that floated in the air.