Shakespeare's Planet (19 page)

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, perhaps, 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.

One of the many planets in the diagram zoomed toward him until it was larger than all the others and he saw that it was not a planet, but was Ship, still lopsided, but Ship undeniably, with one of the lightning bolts shattering against it. The lightning bolt bounced off Ship and came streaking straight toward him. He ducked instinctively, but was not quick enough and it struck him straight between the eyes. He seemed to shatter and was flung across the universe and was stripped naked and laid open. And as he spattered across the universe, a great peace came out of somewhere and settled softly on him. In that instant, for a flaring second, he saw and understood. Then it all was gone and he was back again, in his own body, on the rocky shelf beside the Pond.

The god-hour, he thought—it's unbelievable. Yet, as he thought more upon it, it gained belief and logic. The human body—all sophisticated, biologic bodies—had a nervous system that was, in effect, a communication network. Why, knowing this, should he balk at the thought of another communication network, operating across the light-years, to tie together the many scattered segments of another intelligence? A signal to remind each scattered colony that it still was a part and would remain a part of the organism, that it was, in fact, the organism.

A shotgun effect, he had earlier told himself—caught in the spray of pellets that had been aimed at something else. That something else, he now knew, was Pond. But if it had been only a shotgun effect, why should Pond now want to include him and Ship in that spray of god-hour pellets? Why did it want him to take on board a bucket of itself to provide a target that would include him and Ship in the god-hour? Or had he misunderstood?

“Have I misunderstood?” he asked the Pond and in answer, he felt again the scattering, the opening-out and the peace that came with it. Funny, he thought, he had not known the peace before, but only fright and befuddlement. The peace and understanding, although this time there had only been the peace and none of the understanding, and that was just as well, he thought, for even as he'd sensed it, he had gained no idea of the understanding, of what kind of understanding it might be, but simply the knowledge, the impression, that there was an understanding and that, in time, it might be grasped. To him, he realized, the understanding had been as befuddling as all the rest of it. Although not to everyone, he told himself; Elayne, for an instant, had seemed to grasp the understanding—grasping it in one instinctive instant, then losing it again.

Pond was offering him something—him and Ship—and it would be boorish and ungracious to see in what it offered anything but the wish of one intelligence to share with another something of its knowledge and its insight. As he had told Pond, there should be no conflict between two such dissimilar life-forms. By the very nature of their differences, there should be no competition nor antagonism between them. And yet, far in the back of his mind, he heard the tinny ringing of the alarm bells that were built into every human brain. That was wrong, he told himself, fiercely, that was unworthy; but the ringing of the bells went on and on. You do not make yourself vulnerable, chimed the bells, you do not expose your soul, you trust nothing until proven tests—proven many times—you can be triply certain that no harm will come.

Although, he told himself, the offering by Pond might not be totally selfless. There might be some part of humanity—some knowledge, some perspective or viewpoint, some ethical judgment, some historical evaluation—that Pond could use. Thinking this, he felt a surge of pride that there might be something humankind could contribute to this unsuspected intelligence, giving some evidence that intelligent entities, no matter how dissimilar they might be, could find a common ground, or learn a common ground.

Apparently Pond was offering, for whatever reason, a gift which had great value in its scale of values—no gaudy trinket such as a greater, arrogant civilization might offer a barbarian. Shakespeare had written that the god-hour might be a teaching mechanism and it could be that, of course. But it could be, as well, he thought, a religion. Or simply no more than a recognition signal, a clan call, a convention to remind Pond and all the other Ponds throughout the galaxy of the unity, the I-ness, of all of them with one another and their parent planet. A sign of brotherhood, perhaps—and if this were the case, then he, and through him, the human race, was being offered at least a provisional position in the brotherhood.

But it was more, he was certain, than a mere recognition signal. On the third time it had come to him, he had not been triggered to the symbolic experience he had lived through the times before, but to a scene out of his own childhood and to a quite human fantasy in which he had talked with Shakespeare's clacking skull. Was that mere triggering or had it happened because the mechanism (the mechanism?) responsible for the god-hour had wormed its way into his mind and soul, in fact examining and probing and analyzing him as it, those first two times, had appeared to do. Something of the sort, he remembered, apparently had been experienced by Shakespeare.

“Is there something that you want?” he asked. “You do this for us—what can we do for you?”

He waited for the answer, but there was no answer. Pond lay dark and placid, with the starlight freckling its surface.

You do this for us, he'd said; what can we do for you? Making it sound as if what Pond had offered was something of great value, something that was needed. Was it? he asked himself. Was it something that was needed, that was even wanted? Was it not, perhaps, something they could do without, most happily without?

And was ashamed. First contact, he thought. Then knew he was wrong. First contact for him and Ship, but perhaps not first contact for Pond or the many other Ponds on many other planets. Nor first contact for many other humans. Since Ship had left the Earth, man had spread across the galaxy, and these splinters of humanity must have made many other first contacts with creatures strange and wonderful.