Tales From Planet Earth Read online

  “Oh, very well!” said Brant weakly, wondering if he was making a fool of himself. But he might as well go on now he had started.

  “You know, some day you’ll have to decide between us. If you keep putting it off, perhaps you’ll be left high and dry like those two aunts of yours.”

  Yradne gave a tinkling laugh and tossed her head with great amusement at the thought that she could ever be old and ugly.

  “Even if you’re too impatient,” she replied. “I think I can rely on Jon. Have you seen what he’s given me?”

  “No,” said Brant, his heart sinking.

  “You are observant, aren’t you! Haven’t you noticed this necklace?”

  On her breast Yradne was wearing a large group of jewels, suspended from her neck by a thin golden chain. It was quite a fine pendant, but there was nothing particularly unusual about it, and Brant wasted no time in saying so. Yradne smiled mysteriously and her fingers flickered toward her throat. Instantly the air was suffused with the sound of music, which first mingled with the background of the dance and then drowned it completely.

  “You see,” she said proudly, “wherever I go now I can have music with me. Jon says there are so many thousands of hours of it stored up that I’ll never know when it repeats itself. Isn’t it clever?”

  “Perhaps it is,” said Brant grudgingly, “but it isn’t exactly new. Everyone used to carry this sort of thing once, until there was no silence anywhere on Earth and they had to be forbidden. Just think of the chaos if we all had them!”

  Yradne broke away from him angrily.

  “There you go again—always jealous of something you can’t do yourself. What have you ever given me that’s half as clever or useful as this? I’m going—and don’t try to follow me!”

  Brant stared open-mouthed as she went, quite taken aback by the violence of her reaction. Then he called after her, “Hey, Yradne, I didn’t mean . . .” But she was gone.

  He made his way out of the amphitheater in a very bad temper. It did him no good at all to rationalize the cause of Yradne’s outburst. His remarks, though rather spiteful, had been true, and sometimes there is nothing more annoying than the truth. Jon’s gift was an ingenious but trivial toy, interesting only because it now happened to be unique.

  One thing she had said still rankled in his mind. What was there he had ever given Yradne? He had nothing but his paintings, and they weren’t really very good. She had shown no interest in them at all when he had offered her some of his best, and it had been very hard to explain that he wasn’t a portrait painter and would rather not try to make a picture of her. She had never really understood this, and it had been very difficult not to hurt her feelings. Brant liked taking his inspiration from Nature, but he never copied what he saw. When one of his pictures was finished (which occasionally happened), the title was often the only clue to the original source.

  The music of the dance still throbbed around him, but he had lost all interest; the sight of other people enjoying themselves was more than he could stand. He decided to get away from the crowd, and the only peaceful place he could think of was down by the river, at the end of the shining carpet of freshly planted glow-moss that led through the wood.

  He sat at the water’s edge, throwing twigs into the current and watching them drift downstream. From time to time other idlers strolled by, but they were usually in pairs and took no notice of him. He watched them enviously and brooded over the unsatisfactory state of his affairs.

  It would almost be better, he thought, if Yradne did make up her mind to choose Jon, and so put him out of his misery. But she showed not the slightest sign of preferring one to the other. Perhaps she was simply enjoying herself at their expense, as some people—particularly Old Johan — maintained; though it was just as likely that she was genuinely unable to choose. What was wanted, Brant thought morosely, was for one of them to do something really spectacular which the other could not hope to match.

  “Hello,” said a small voice behind him. He twisted around and looked over his shoulder. A little girl of eight or so was staring at him with her head slightly on one side, like an inquisitive sparrow.

  “Hello,” he replied without enthusiasm. “Why aren’t you watching the dance?”

  “Why aren’t you in it?” she replied promptly.

  “I’m tired,” he said, hoping that this was an adequate excuse. “You shouldn’t be running around by yourself. You might get lost.”

  “I am lost,” she replied happily, sitting down on the bank beside him. “I like it that way.” Brant wondered which of the other villages she had come from; she was quite a pretty little thing, but would look prettier with less chocolate on her face. It seemed that his solitude was at an end.

  She stared at him with that disconcerting directness which, perhaps fortunately, seldom survives childhood. “I know what’s the matter with you,” she said suddenly.

  “Indeed?” queried Brant with polite skepticism.

  “You’re in love!”

  Brant dropped the twig he was about to throw into the river, and turned to stare at his inquisitor. She was looking at him with such solemn sympathy that in a moment all his morbid self-pity vanished in a gale of laughter. She seemed quite hurt, and he quickly brought himself under control.

  “How could you tell?” he asked with profound seriousness.

  “I’ve read all about it,” she replied solemnly. “And once I saw a picture play and there was a man in it and he came down to a river and sat there just like you and presently he jumped into it. There was some awful pretty music then.”

  Brant looked thoughtfully at this precocious child and felt relieved that she didn’t belong to his own community.

  “I’m sorry I can’t arrange the music,” he said gravely, “but in any case the river isn’t really deep enough.”

  “It is farther along,” came the helpful reply. “This is only a baby river here—it doesn’t grow up until it leaves the woods. I saw it from the flyer.”

  “What happens to it then?” asked Brant, not in the least interested, but thankful that the conversation had taken a more innocuous turn. “I suppose it reaches the sea?”

  She gave an unladylike sniff of disgust.

  “Of course not, silly. All the rivers this side of the hills go to the Great Lake. I know that’s as big as a sea, but the real sea is on the other side of the hills.”

  Brant had learned very little about the geographical details of his new home, but he realized that the child was quite correct. The ocean was less than twenty miles to the north, but separated from them by a barrier of low hills. A hundred miles inland lay the Great Lake, bringing life to lands that had been desert before the geological engineers had reshaped this continent.

  The child genius was making a map out of twigs and patiently explaining these matters to her rather dull pupil.

  “Here we are,” she said, “and here’s the river, and the hills, and the lake’s over there by your foot. The sea goes along here—and I’ll tell you a secret.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’ll never guess!”

  “I don’t suppose I will.”

  Her voice dropped to a confidential whisper. “If you go along the coast—it isn’t very far from here—you’ll come to Shastar.”

  Brant tried to look impressed, but failed.

  “I don’t believe you’ve ever heard of it!” she cried, deeply disappointed.

  “I’m sorry,” replied Brant. “I suppose it was a city, and I know I’ve heard of it somewhere. But there were such a lot of them, you know—Carthage and Chicago and Babylon and Berlin—you simply can’t remember them all. And they’ve all gone now, anyway.”

  “Not Shastar. It’s still there.”

  “Well, some of the later ones are still standing, more or less, and people often visit them. About five hundred miles from my old home there was quite a big city once, called . . .”

  “Shastar isn’t just any old city,” interrupted th
e child mysteriously. “My grandfather told me about it: he’s been there. It hasn’t been spoiled at all and it’s still full of wonderful things that no one has any more.”

  Brant smiled inwardly. The deserted cities of Earth had been the breeding places of legends for countless centuries. It would be four—no, nearer five—thousand years since Shastar had been abandoned. If its buildings were still standing, which was of course quite possible, they would certainly have been stripped of all valuables ages ago. It seemed that Grandfather had been inventing some pretty fairy stories to entertain the child. He had Brant’s sympathy.

  Heedless of his skepticism, the girl prattled on. Brant gave only half his mind to her words, interjecting a polite “Yes” or “Fancy that” as occasion demanded. Suddenly, silence fell.

  He looked up and found that his companion was staring with much annoyance toward the avenue of trees that overlooked the view.

  “Goodbye,” she said abruptly. “I’ve got to hide somewhere else—here comes my sister.”

  She was gone as suddenly as she had arrived. Her family must have a busy time looking after her, Brant decided: but she had done him a good turn by dispelling his melancholy mood.

  Within a few hours, he realized that she had done very much more than that.

  Simon was leaning against his doorpost watching the world go by when Brant came in search of him. The world usually accelerated slightly when it had to pass Simon’s door, for he was an interminable talker and once he had trapped a victim there was no escape for an hour or more. It was most unusual for anyone to walk voluntarily into his clutches, as Brant was doing now.

  The trouble with Simon was that he had a first-class mind, and was too lazy to use it. Perhaps he might have been luckier had he been born in a more energetic age; all he had ever been able to do in Chaldis was to sharpen his wits at other people’s expense, thereby gaining more fame than popularity. But he was quite indispensable, for he was a storehouse of knowledge; the greater part of it perfectly accurate.

  “Simon,” began Brant without any preamble. “I want to learn something about this country. The maps don’t tell me much—they’re too new. What was here, back in the old days?”

  Simon scratched his wiry beard.

  “I don’t suppose it was very different. How long ago do you mean?”

  “Oh, back in the time of the cities.”

  “There weren’t so many trees, of course. This was probably agricultural land, used for food production. Did you see that farming machine they dug up when the amphitheater was being built? It must have been old; it wasn’t even electric.”

  “Yes,” said Brant impatiently. “I saw it. But tell me about the cities around here. According to the map, there was a place called Shastar a few hundred miles west of us along the coast. Do you know anything about it?”

  “Ah, Shastar,” murmured Simon, stalling for time. “A very interesting place; I think I’ve even got a picture of it around somewhere. Just a moment while I go and see.”

  He disappeared into the house and was gone for nearly five minutes. In that time he made a very extensive library search, though a man from the age of books would hardly have guessed this from his actions. All the records Chaldis possessed were in a metal case a meter on a side; it contained, locked perpetually in subatomic patterns, the equivalent of a billion volumes of print. Almost all the knowledge of mankind, and the whole of its surviving literature, lay here concealed.

  It was not merely a passive storehouse of wisdom, for it possessed a librarian. As Simon signaled his request to the tireless machine, the search went down, layer by layer, through the almost infinite network of circuits. It took only a fraction of a second to locate the information he needed, for he had given the name and the approximate date. Then he relaxed as the mental images came flooding into his brain, under the lightest of self-hypnosis. The knowledge would remain in his possession for a few hours only—long enough for his purpose—and would then fade away. Simon had no desire to clutter up his well-organized mind with irrelevancies, and to him the whole story of the rise and fall of the great cities was a historical digression of no particular importance. It was an interesting, if a regrettable, episode, and it belonged to a past that had irretrievably vanished.

  Brant was still waiting patiently when he emerged, looking very wise.

  “I couldn’t find any pictures,” he said. “My wife has been tidying up again. But I’ll tell you what I can remember about Shastar.”

  Brant settled himself down as comfortably as he could: he was likely to be here for some time.

  “Shastar was one of the very last cities that man ever built. You know, of course, that cities arose quite late in human culture—only about twelve thousand years ago. They grew in number and importance for several thousand years, until at last there were some containing millions of people. It is very hard for us to imagine what it must have been like to live in such places—deserts of steel and stone with not even a blade of grass for miles. But they were necessary, before transport and communication had been perfected, and people had to live near each other to carry out all the intricate operations of trade and manufacture upon which their lives depended.

  “The really great cities began to disappear when air transport became universal. The threat of attack in those far-off, barbarous days also helped to disperse them. But for a long time . . .”

  “I’ve studied the history of that period,” interjected Brant, not very truthfully. “I know all about . . .”

  “. . . for a long time there were still many small cities which were held together by cultural rather than commercial links. They had populations of a few score thousand and lasted for centuries after the passing of the giants. That’s why Oxford and Princeton and Heidelberg still mean something to us, while far larger cities are no more than names. But even these were doomed when the invention of the integrator made it possible for any community, however small, to manufacture without effort everything it needed for civilized living.

  “Shastar was built when there was no longer any need, technically, for cities, but before people realized that the culture of cities was coming to its end. It seems to have been a conscious work of art, conceived and designed as a whole, and those who lived there were mostly artists of some kind. But it didn’t last very long; what finally killed it was the exodus.”

  Simon became suddenly quiet, as if brooding on those tumultuous centuries when the road to the stars had been opened up and the world was torn in twain. Along that road the flower of the race had gone, leaving the rest behind; and thereafter it seemed that history had come to an end on Earth. For a thousand years or more the exiles had returned fleetingly to the solar system, wistfully eager to tell of strange suns and far planets and the great empire that would one day span the galaxy. But there are gulfs that even the swiftest ships can never cross; and such a gulf was opening now between Earth and her wandering children. They had less and less in common; the returning ships became ever more infrequent, until at last generations passed between the visits from outside. Simon had not heard of any such for almost three hundred years.

  It was unusual when one had to prod Simon into speech, but presently Brant remarked: “Anyway, I’m more interested in the place itself than its history. Do you think it’s still standing?”

  “I was coming to that,” said Simon, emerging from his reverie with a start. “Of course it is; they built well in those days. But why are you so interested, may I ask? Have you suddenly developed an overwhelming passion for archaeology? Oh, I think I understand!”

  Brant knew perfectly well the uselessness of trying to conceal anything from a professional busybody like Simon.

  “I was hoping,” he said defensively, “that there might still be things there worth going to find, even after all this time.”

  “Perhaps,” said Simon doubtfully. “I must visit it one day. It’s almost on our doorstep, as it were. But how are you going to manage? The village will hardly let you borrow
a flyer! And you can’t walk. It would take you at least a week to get there.”

  But that was exactly what Brant intended to do. As, during the next few days, he was careful to point out to almost everyone in the village, a thing wasn’t worth doing unless one did it the hard way. There was nothing like making a virtue out of a necessity.

  Brant’s preparations were carried out in an unprecedented blaze of secrecy. He did not wish to be too specific about his plans, such as they were, in case any of the dozen or so people in Chaldis who had the right to use a flyer decided to look at Shastar first. It was, of course, only a matter of time before this happened, but the feverish activity of the past months had prevented such explorations. Nothing would be more humiliating than to stagger into Shastar after a week’s journey, only to be coolly greeted by a neighbor who had made the trip in ten minutes.

  On the other hand, it was equally important that the village in general, and Yradne in particular, should realize that he was making some exceptional effort. Only Simon knew the truth, and he had grudgingly agreed to keep quiet for the present. Brant hoped that he had managed to divert attention from his true objective by showing a great interest in the country to the east of Chaldis, which also contained several archaeological relics of some importance.

  The amount of food and equipment one needed for a two or three weeks absence was really astonishing, and his first calculations had thrown Brant into a state of considerable gloom. For a while he had even thought of trying to beg or borrow a flyer, but the request would certainly not be granted—and would indeed defeat the whole object of his enterprise. Yet it was quite impossible for him to carry everything he needed for the journey.

  The solution would have been perfectly obvious to anyone from a less-mechanized age, but it took Brant some little time to think of it. The flying machine had killed all forms of land transport save one, the oldest and most versatile of all—the only one that was self-perpetuating and could manage very well, as it had done before, with no assistance at all from man.