Galactic Pot-Healer (9 page)

“But it’s true,” Mali said. “A person doesn’t normally use the SSA machine unless he’s serious. To the other person, in this case I.” She seated herself on the couch of the lounge and reached up her arms toward him.

He locked the lounge door first. It seemed, all circumstances considered, a reasonable thing to do.

Joys too fierce, he thought, too fierce to be expressed. Whoever said that understood.

In orbit around Plowman’s Planet, the ship began firing its retrorockets, cutting its velocity. They would be landing in half an hour.

Meanwhile, Joe Fernwright amused himself in a mordant way: by reading
The Wall Street Journal;
he had found over the years that this newspaper, out of all of them, contained the most chilling and the most recent oddities. Reading the
Journal
was like taking a little trip into the future—six months or so.

He ceased reading, tossed down the newspaper. We must be better off out here, he decided. If that’s what they’ve got planned for us back on Earth.

“I’ve verified our reservations,” Mali said matter-of-factly. “We all have rooms at the Olympia Hotel in the largest city on the planet; Diamond Head, it’s called, because it’s on a winding prominence that goes fifty milies out into Mare Nostrum.”

“What’s ‘Mare Nostrum’?” Joe asked.

“‘Our Ocean.’”

He showed the item in the
Journal
to her and then, silently, to the rest of the passengers. They all read it and then they all looked at one another for sign of a reaction.

“We made the right choice,” Harper Baldwin said. The others nodded. “That’s good enough for me,” Baldwin said. He shook his head and scowled, disgust and anger contorting his face. “And we built such a society,” he rasped.

Strong-armed members of the ship’s crew manually unscrewed the hatch; outside air eddied in, smelling odd and cold. It seemed to Joe that the ocean was close; he sensed it in the air. Shielding his eyes he gazed out against a weak sun; he distinguished the outline of a reasonably modern-looking city, and, past it, hills in a mixture of brown and gray. But the ocean is somethere nearby, he said to himself. Mali is right; this is a planet dominated by an ocean. And it is in the ocean that we will find everything that matters.

Smiling with mechanical courtesy, the stewardesses escorted them to the open hatch and the flight of stairs which led down to the damp surface of the field. Joe Fernwright took Mali by the arm and led her down; neither of them spoke for a time—Mali seemed absorbed in herself, taking no notice of the other people or the spaceport buildings. Bad memories, Joe reflected. Maybe what happened to her happened here.

And for me, he thought; look what this is for me. The first interplanetary or intersystem flight in my life. This ground
under me is not Earth. A very strange and important thing is happening to me. He smelled the air. Another world and another atmosphere. It feels strange, he decided.

“Don’t say,” Mali said, “that you find this place ‘unearthly.’ Please, for my sake.”

“I don’t get it,” Joe said. “It is unearthly. It’s completely different.”

“Never mind,” Mali said. “A little game Ralf and I had. A long time ago. Thingisms, we called them. Let’s see if I can remember some of them. He thought all of them up. ‘The book business is hidebound.’ That’s one. ‘Plants are taking over the world sporadically.’ Let’s see. ‘The operator let me off the hook.’ I always liked that; it made me think of a giant hook, in fact a whole giant phone. ‘In 1945 the discovery of atomic energy electrified the world.’ Do you see?” She glanced at him. “You don’t,” she said. “Never mind.”

“They’re all true statements,” Joe said. “As far as I can make out. What’s the game part?”

“‘The senate inquiry into modern use of side arms was muzzled.’ How do you like that one? I saw that in a newspaper. I think Ralf found the others in newspapers or heard them over TV; I think all they were real.” She added somberly, “Everything about Ralf was real. For the beginning. But then later, no.”

A careful, brown, large creature resembling a rat approached Joe and Mali. It held what appeared to be an armload of books.

“Spiddles,” Mali said, pointing to the careful ratlike creature, and to a second one which had accosted Harper Baldwin. “One of the native life-forms, here. Unlike Glimmung. You will find—let me see.” She counted on her fingers. “Spiddles, wubs, werjes, klakes, trobes, and printers. Left over from the old days … all of them older species, when the Fog-Things of antiquity passed away. It wants you to buy a book.”

The spiddle touched a tiny tape recorder mounted on its belt; the tape began to speak for the spiddle. “Fully documented history of a fascinating world” it said in English, and then evidently repeated this in a variety of other tongues; anyhow it had stopped speaking in English.

“Buy it,” Mali said.

“Pardon?” Joe said.

“Buy its book.”

“You know this book? What book is it?”

Mali said, with rigorous patience, “There is only one book. In this world.”

“By ‘world,’” Joe said, “you mean ‘planet,’ or in the larger sense—”

“On Plowman’s Planet,” Mali said, “there is just this one book.”

“Don’t the people get tired of reading it?”

“It changes,” Mali said. She handed the spiddle a dime, which it accepted gratefully; a copy of the book was passed to her and she in turn passed it to Joe.

Examining it, Joe said, “It has no title. And no author.”

“It is written,” Mali said, as they walked on toward the spaceport buildings, “by a group of creatures or entities—I don’t the English know—that records everything that passes on Plowman’s Planet. Everything. Great and small.”

“Then it’s a newspaper.”

Mali halted; she turned to face him, her eyes burning with exasperation.
“It is recorded first,”
she said, as steadily as she could manage. “The Kalends spin the story; they enter it in the ever-changing book without a title, and it comes to about, finally.”

“Precognitive,” Joe said.

“That raises a question. Which is cause? Which is effect? The Kalends wove in their altering, evolving script that the Fog-Things would pass away. They did pass away. Did then the Kalends
make
them pass away? The spiddles think so.”
She added, “But the spiddles are very superstitious. They naturally believe that.”

Joe opened the book at random. The text was not in English; he did not recognize the language or even the letters of its alphabet. But then, as he leafed through it, he came to a short section in English, embedded in the mass of alien-looking entries.

At that point the text lapsed into another language; he shut the book, pondered. “Maybe I’m mentioned in here somewhere,” he said, as they reached the moving sidewalk leading to the concourse sections of the spaceport terminal building-complex.

“Of course,” Mali said calmly. “If you long look enough you will find it. How will you make it—pardon. How will it make
you
feel?”

“Eerie,” he said, still pondering.

A surface car, acting as a taxi, transported them to their hotel. Joe Fernwright, on the short trip, continued to examine the untitled book; it preoccupied him, preempting the colorful shops which the taxi passed, and the several life-forms bustling about here and there—he was aware of the city street, its people, and buildings, but only dimly. Because he had already found another passage in English.

And then, once again, the text lapsed into a foreign script resembling dots and dashes, a sort of binary system of annotation.

Joe said to the girl beside him in the taxi, “The people who are writing this book know about the raising of Heldscalla.”

“Yes,” Mali said shortly.

“But where’s the precognition?” Joe demanded. “This is remarkably up to date—right up to this minute, give or take an hour—but that’s all.”

“You will find it,” Mali said, “when you have looked a long time. It is buried. Among the different texts, which are all translations of one primary text, one line like a thread. The thread of the past entering the present, then entering the future. Somewhere in that book, Mr. Fernwright, the future of Heldscalla is written. The future of Glimmung. The future of us. We are all woven in by the yarn of the Kalends’ time, their time-outside-of-time.”

Joe said, “And you already knew about this book, before the spiddle sold it to you.”

“I saw it before when Ralf and I were here. The SSA machine extrapolated we’d be joyous, and the Kalends’ book, this book, said Ralf would—” She paused. “He killed himself. First he tried to kill me. But—he wasn’t able to.”

“And the Kalends’ book said that.”

“Yes. Exactly that. I remember it, Ralf and I reading in the text about ourselves and not believing. Still under the idea that the SSA mechanism was scientific data-analysis and this book was tale by old wife, a lot of old wives, seeing doom when we and the SSA machine saw happihood.”

“Why did the SSA machine miss?”

“It missed because it didn’t have one datum. Whitney’s Syndrome. Psychotic reaction to amphetamines by Ralf. Paranoia and murderous hostility. He thought himself overweight; he took them as—” She hunted for the word.

“Appetite suppressants,” Joe said. “Like alcohol.” Good for some people, he thought; lethal for others. And Whitney’s Syndrome didn’t require overdoses; even a small amount triggered it off. If the latent illness was already there. Just as, for an alcoholic, the smallest drink meant defeat and bitter, utter, final destruction. “Too bad,” he murmured.

The taxi pulled up to the curb. Its driver, a beaverlike creature with wicked, cutting teeth, said several words in a language which Joe did not understand; Mali, however, nodded and gave the beaverish individual a sum of metal money from her purse, and then she and Joe stepped from the taxi onto the sidewalk.

Joe, looking around him, said, “It’s like going back a hundred and fifty years.” Surface cars, carbon arc lighting…this could be Earth in the days of President Franklin Roosevelt, he thought to himself, both enticed and amused. He liked it. The pace, he realized; it’s slower. And the density of population—relatively few organisms propelled themselves up and down the street, either on foot (or a reasonable substitute) or in cars.

“You can see why I got angry at you,” Mali said, catching his reaction. “For your defaming Plowman’s Planet, my home for six years. And now—” She gestured. “I’m back. And doing again what I did then: believing faith in a SSA mechanism.”

“Let’s go inside the hotel,” Joe said, “and have a drink.”

Together, they passed through the revolving door, into the Olympia Hotel, with its wooden floors, carved hardwood decorations, polished brass doorknobs and railings, and thick red carpet. And its antique elevator, which Joe had already
caught sight of. Nonautomatic, he discovered. The elevator required an attendant.

In his hotel room, with its dresser, splotched mirror, iron bed, and canvas windowshade elegance, Joe Fernwright sat on an overstuffed, faded chair and studied The Book.

Not long ago he had been preoccupied with The Game. And now—The Book. But this consisted of something quite different, and the more he read of The Book the more he realized it. Gradually, as he nosed among its pages, he began to assemble, in his mind, the totality of the English text; he had begun to put the separate bits in superimposition over one another.

“I’m going to take a bath,” Mali said. She had already opened her suitcase and had laid most of her clothes out on the bed in her room. “Isn’t it strange, Joe Fernwright?” she called. “That we have to keep two rooms. Like a century ago.”

“Yes,” he said.

She entered the room, wearing only her tight pants; bare from the waist up, he saw. Small-breasted but dense and tall, with fine muscle tone. The body of a dancer, he said to himself, or—a Cro-Magnon female, a hunter, an astute, supple person accustomed to long, lean, even fruitless marches. There was not a gram of useless flesh on her, as he had already discovered in the locked lounge of the ship. He had clutched it then; now he saw it. However, he thought morbidly, Kate had—actually still has—as good a figure. That made him depressed. He returned to reading The Book.

“Would you have wanted to go to sleep with me,” Mali said, “if I were a cyclops?” She pointed to a spot above her nose. “One eye there. Polyphemus; the cyclops in
The Odyssey
. They put his one eye out with a burning stick, I think.”

Joe said, “Listen to this.” He read aloud from The Book. “‘The current, dominant species on the planet consists of what is called a Glimmung. This shadowy, enormous entity
is not native to the planet; it migrated here several centuries ago, taking over from the weak species left over when the once-ruling master species, the so-called Fog-Things of antiquity, vanished.’” Joe waved her to come and look. “‘Glimmung’s power, however, is sharply curtailed by a mysterious book in which, it is alleged, everything which has been, is, and will be is recorded.’” He snapped the book shut. “It’s talking about itself.”