Destiny Doll

TWENTY-SIX

The ghostly ships still stood upon the whiteness of the landing field with the great white cliffs of the city rising up like the inner sides of a gigantic cup. The field was as clean as ever and there was a deathly silence over everything. Nothing stirred; there was no breath of wind.

The shriveled, shrunken body of the gnome hung limp and listless at the end of a rope tied to a rafter in the storeroom. The storeroom looked as it had before, with boxes, bales and bundles piled high. There was no sign of the hobbies.

In that great room to which the ramp led up from the street the slabs of stone were still in place, with the circular control dial to one side of them. One of the slabs was glowing and in the glow was a nightmare world of what seemed a brand-new planet, its half-molten, half-crystallized surface heaving in a slow pulsation, pitted with craters of red-hot slag, steam vents sending out slender plumes of smoke and superheated water. In the distance volcanoes belched flame and heavy clouds of smoke.

Roscoe had unloaded his packs and the water tin just inside the door that opened on the ramp and now was hunkered down, scratching at the floor, but making no marks upon it, and for once he wasn’t mumbling to himself.

I went on breaking up the wooden bench I’d taken from the storeroom, feeding the fire I’d built upon the floor. And here I was, I thought, a latter-day barbarian camping in the deserted city of a vanished race, with another barbarian swinging at the end of a rope in the next door and a mechanical intelligence working on a problem that no one knew, perhaps least of all himself.

It was incredible that Roscoe could know what he was doing. There would have been no need to program him for the kind of calculations that he seemed to be engaged in working out. Was it possible, I wondered, that the beating his brain case had taken while being used as a polo ball had not only knocked out of him all ordinary sense, but had knocked genius into him?

The sun had passed its zenith and the lower part of the street outside lay in darkness, but by craning my neck, I could see the sunlight on the upper storeys of the soaring buildings. And from that upper part of the city came the faint, far-off sound of wind funneling through the higher levels. Down in the lower levels there was no hint of breeze.

A deserted city and why had it been deserted? What had happened to drive its people from it Or had they been driven? Perhaps they had accomplished their purpose and the city had served its purpose and they had simply left, for there may have been other planets where they could carry out other purposes, or maybe the same purpose as they had followed here. And could that purpose have been solely the planting of the trees-the planting of them and their careful nurturing until they had reached a size where they no longer needed care? It would have taken centuries, perhaps millennia, before the trees could be left on their own. The surveying to determine where they should be planted and the planting of them, the preliminary task alone would have required many years. And after that the building of the pits to store the seeds and the raising of the little rodents that collected them-there would be much to do.

But it would have been worth the work and time if the trees, indeed, were planted for the purpose hinted in Knight’s manuscript. Each tree a receiving station that picked up information by a means that I could not imagine (the interception of mental waves, perhaps?) that filtered out from the galaxy. Millions of receivers hanging above the expanse of the galaxy, picking up the knowledge radiations, processing and enhancing them and storing them against a time when the planters could come at periodic intervals and extract the knowledge which had been thus collected. And where would the knowledge thus derived be stored? Certainly not in the trees themselves, but in the seeds, perhaps, storing it in a complicated DNA-RNA complex altering the purely biological characteristics of the nucleic acids so that instead of biological information alone many other kinds of information also might be stored.

I sweated, thinking of it. In the pits and bins in which the rodents dropped the seeds rested a treasure greater than anyone could dream. Anyone who could gather the seeds and crack the technique and the code to give up the knowledge they contained would have the intellectual resources of the galaxy at their fingertips. If one could beat the planters of this planetary orchard to the harvest, there would be rich pickings to be had. The planters, well aware of such a danger, had taken extraordinary precautions against word of the planet and its purpose ever leaking out. Outsiders could come here, were even encouraged to come here once they were in range, but once here there was, it seemed, no way to leave and carry back to the galaxy news of what they’d found.

How often did the planters come, I wondered. Every thousand years, perhaps. In each thousand years, most certainly, there’d be new galactic knowledge worthy of acquiring. Or did they come no longer? Had something happened to them that had stopped their harvest trips? Or could they have abandoned the entire project as no longer worth the effort? In the millennia which may have passed since this city had been built and this planet planted, had there been a shift in values and in viewpoint so that now to them, now either a more mature or a senile race, this planting of the planet (or, perhaps, of many planets) might seem no more than a childish program performed in the mistaken enthusiasm of their youth.

My legs were getting cramped from crouching and I put out a hand to rest, palm down, on the floor, preparatory to changing my position and as I reached out, my hand came down upon the doll. I didn’t pick it up; I didn’t want to look at it. I simply ran my fingers over the carven planes of that saddened face and I thought, as I did this, that the planters of the planet, the builders of the city, had not been the first. Before they had arrived there had been another race, the one that had built the churchlike edifice at the city’s edge. One of them had carved the doll and it might be, I told myself, that the carving of the doll had been a greater feat, a more intellectual, certainly a more emotional, accomplishment than the building of the city and the planting of the trees.

But now neither race was here. I, a member of another race, perhaps not so great but as weasel-motivated as any race in the galaxy, was here. I was here and I knew the story and the treasure, and the treasure was a very solid thing, much more valuable than that haunted myth which Knight had hunted. It was something that could be sold and in that context I could understand it better than I could understand a myth. Knight may have known-he must have known to write of it as he had-but by the time he knew he probably had become so committed, so immersed in the phantom that he hunted that he would have passed it by as worthless.

Poor fool, I thought, to pass up a chance like this. Although, I realized, he may have passed it up only after he had realized there was no way off the planet.

I was not convinced, I told myself. There had to be a way. There always was a way if you worked hard enough at it. No gang of stupid orchardists could keep me here.

First something to eat and a little rest and I’d get at those other worlds. Despite what Sara had said about the chance that all of them would be isolated worlds, it did not stand to reason that there’d not be one of them that had some space-capable intelligence. And that was all I asked. Just to get my hands, by any means, upon a ship, any kind of a ship.

I wondered what I should do with the gnome and decided that I’d leave him hanging there, dangling from his beam. Even if I took him down I’d not know what to do with him; I could not know what he might have wished for me to do with him. Hanging from the beam had been the way he’d wanted it and that’s the way he had it and I’d not interfere. Although I wondered why he did it. And recognized the fact that the way he’d done it emphasized that he was humanoid. Nothing other than a humanoid ever hanged itself.

I glanced over at Roscoe. He had quit his ciphering and now was sitting flat upon his bottom, with his feet stuck out before him staring into space. As if he had suddenly struck upon some astounding truth and had frozen into immobility to consider it.