Shakespeare's Planet (5 page)

“This is ridiculous,” said Horton. “No man or no robot could be as many things as you say you are or could be. It would take years of study, and in the process of learning each new specialty or discipline, you'd lose some of the previous training you had taken. Furthermore, you're simply a service robot, not specialized at all. Let's face it, your brain capacity is small, and your reaction system is comparatively insensitive. Ship said that you were chosen deliberately because of your simplicity—because there was very little that could go wrong with you.”

“Which is all true enough,” Nicodemus admitted. “I am what you say I am. A runner-of-errands and a fetcher-of-objects and good for little else. My brain capacity is small. But when you have two brains or three …”

Horton threw down his spoon on the table. “You are mad!” he said. “No one has two brains.”

“I have,” said Nicodemus calmly. “I have two brains right now—the old standard, stupid robot brain and a chef-brain and if I wanted, I could add another brain, although I do not know what kind of brain would supplement a chef-brain. A nutritionist-brain, perhaps, although the kit doesn't have that kind of brain.”

With an effort, Horton controlled himself. “Now let's start over,” he said. “Let's take it from the top and go slow and easy so that this stupid human brain of mine can follow what you're saying.”

“It was those fifty years,” said Nicodemus.

“What fifty years, goddammit?”

“Those fifty years they took after you were frozen. A lot of good research and development can be done in fifty years if a lot of humans put their minds to it. You trained, did you not, with a most accomplished robot—the finest piece of humanoid machinery that had ever been built.”

“Yes, we did,” said Horton. “I can remember him as if it were only yesterday …

“To you,” said Nicodemus, “it would be only yesterday. The thousand years since then are as nothing to you.”

“He was a little stinker,” Horton said. “He was a martinet. He knew three times more than we did and was ten times as capable. He rubbed it into us in his suave, sleek, nasty way. So slick about it you could never peg him. All of us hated the little sonofabitch.”

“There, you see,” said Nicodemus triumphantly. “That could not continue. It was a situation that could not be tolerated. If he'd been sent with you, think of all the friction, the clash of personalities. That is why you have me. They couldn't use a thing like him. They had to use a simple, humble clod like me, the kind of robot you were accustomed to ordering around and who would not resent the ordering around. But a simple, humble clod like me would be incapable on his own to rise to the occasions that necessity sometimes might demand. So they hit upon the idea of auxiliary brains that could be plugged into place to supplement a cloddish brain like mine.”

“You mean you have a box full of auxiliary brains that you just plug in!”

“Not really brains,” said Nicodemus. “They are called transmogs, although I'm not sure why. Someone once told me the term was short for transmogrification. Is there such a word?”

“I don't know,” said Horton.

“Well, anyhow,” said Nicodemus, “I have a chef transmog and a physician transmog and a biochemist transmog—well, you get the idea. A full college course encoded in each of them. I counted them once, but now I have forgotten. A couple of dozen, I would guess.”

“So you actually might be able to fix this tunnel of the Carnivore's.”

“I wouldn't count on it,” said Nicodemus. “I don't know what the engineer transmog contains. There are so many different kinds of engineering—chemical, mechanical, electrical.”

“At least you'll have an engineering background.”

“That's right. But the tunnel the Carnivore talked about probably wasn't built by humans. Humans wouldn't have had the time …”

“It could be human-built. They've had almost a thousand years to do a lot of things. Remember what the fifty years you've been talking about accomplished.”

“Yeah, I know. You could be right. Relying on ships might not have been good enough. If the humans had relied on ships, they wouldn't have gotten out this far by now and …”

“They could have if they developed faster-than-light. Maybe once you develop that, there would be no natural limit. Once you break the light barrier, there might be no limit to how much faster than light you could go.”

“Somehow I don't think they developed faster-than-light ships,” said Nicodemus. “I listened to a lot of talk about it during that period after I was drafted into this project. No one seemed to have any real starting point, no real appreciation of what is involved. What more than likely happened is that humans landed on a planet not nearly as far out as we are now and found one of the tunnels and are now using the tunnels.”

“But not only humans.”

“No, that's quite apparent from Carnivore. How many other races may be using them we can have no idea. What about Carnivore? If we don't get the tunnel operating, he'll want to ship with us.”

“Over my dead body.”

“You know, I feel pretty much the same. He's a rather uncouth personage and it might be quite a problem to put him into cold-sleep. Before we tried that, we'd have to know his body chemistry.”

“Which reminds me that we're not going back to Earth. What is the scoop? Where does Ship intend to go?”

“I wouldn't know,” said Nicodemus. “We talked off and on, of course. Ship, I am sure, tried to hold nothing back from me. I have the feeling Ship doesn't quite know itself what it intends to do. Just go, I suppose, and see what it can find. You realize, of course, that Ship, if it wishes to, can listen in on anything we say.”

“That doesn't bother me,” said Horton. “As it stands, we're all tied up in the same can of worms. You for much longer than will be the case with me. Whatever the situation, I suppose I'll have to stand upon it, for I have no other base. I'm close to a thousand years away from home, and a thousand years behind the Earth of this moment. Ship undoubtedly is right in saying that if I went back I would be a misfit. You can accept all of this intellectually, of course, but it gives you a strange feeling in the gizzard. If the other three were here, I imagine it would be different. I have the sense of being horribly alone.”

“You aren't alone,” said Nicodemus. “You have Ship and me.”

“Yes, I suppose so. I seem to keep forgetting.”

He pushed back from the table. “That was a fine dinner,” he said. “I wish you could have eaten with me. Before I go off to bed, do you think it would disaccommodate my gut if I had a slice of that roast, cold?”

“For breakfast,” said Nicodemus. “If you want a slice for breakfast.”

“All right, then,” said Horton. “There's still one thing that bothers me. With the setup that you have, you don't really need a human on this expedition. At the time I took the training, a human crew made sense. But not any longer. You and Ship could do the job alone. Given the situation as it is, why didn't they just junk us? Why did they bother putting us on board?”

“You seek to mortify yourself and the human race,” said Nicodemus. “It is no more than shock reaction to what you have just learned. To start with, the idea was to put knowledge and technology on board, and the only way it could be put on board was in the persons of humans who had that knowledge and technology. By the time the ships took off, however, another means of supplying technology and knowledge had been found in the transmogs which could make even such simple robots as myself into multispecialists. But even so there would be, in us, still one factor lacking—that strange quality of humanness, the biological human condition which we still lack and which no roboticist has as yet been able to build into us. You spoke of your training robot and your hatred of him. This is what happens when you go beyond a certain point in robotic improvement. You gain good capability, but the humanity to balance the capability is lacking and the robot, instead of becoming more humanlike, becomes arrogant and insufferable. It may always be so. Humanity may be a factor that cannot be arrived at artificially. An expedition to the stars, I suppose, could function efficiently with only robots and their transmog kits aboard, but it would not be a human expedition, and that is what this and the other expeditions were all about—to seek out planets where the people of Earth could live. Certainly the robots could make observations and reach decisions and nine times out of ten the observations would be accurate and the decisions quite correct, but in that tenth time, one or both could be wrong because the robots would be looking at the problem with robotic eyes and making the decisions with robotic brains that lacked that all important factor of the human quality.”

“Your words are comforting,” said Horton. “I only hope you are right.”

“Believe me, sir, I am.”

Ship said,
Horton, you'd better get to bed now. The Carnivore will be coming to meet you in the morning, and you should get some sleep
.

8

But sleep came hard.

Lying on his back, staring up into the blackness, the strangeness and the loneliness came pouring in upon him, the strangeness and the loneliness that had been held off till now.

Only yesterday
, Nicodemus had said to him.
It was only yesterday that you went into cold-sleep, because all the centuries that have come and gone since then mean less than nothing to you
.

It had been, he thought, with some surprise and bitterness, only yesterday. And now alone, to remember and to mourn. To mourn, here in the darkness of a planet far from Earth, arrived at, so far as he was concerned, in the twinkling of an eye, to find the home planet and the people of that yesterday sunk in the depths of time.

Helen dead, he thought. Dead and lying underneath the steely glitter of stranger stars on an unknown planet of an unrecorded sun, where the glaciers of frozen oxygen reared their bulk against the black of space and the primal rock lay uneroded through millennia piled upon millennia, a planet as unchanging as was death itself.

The three of them together—Helen, Mary, Tom. Only he was missing—missing because he had been in cubicle number one, because a stupid, flat-footed, oafish robot could think of no other system than doing a task by numbers.

Ship
, he whispered in his mind.

Go to sleep
, said Ship.

To hell with you
, said Horton.
You can't baby me. You can't tell me what to do. Go to sleep, you say. Take a lead, you say. Forget it all, you say
.

We do not tell you to forget
, said Ship.
The memory is a precious one, and while you must mourn, hold the memory fast. When you mourn, know that we mourn with you. For we remember Earth as well
.

But you won't go back to it. You plan to go on. After this planet, you plan to go on. What do you expect to find? What are you looking for?

There is no way of knowing. We have no expectations
.

And I go with you?

Of course
, said Ship.
We are a company, and you are part of it
.

The planet? We'll take time to look it over?

There is no hurry
, said Ship.
We have all the time there is
.

What we felt this evening? That's a part of it? A part of this unknown that we're going to?

Good night, Carter Horton
, said Ship.
We will talk again. Think of pleasant things and try to go to sleep
.

Pleasant things, he thought. Yes, there had been pleasantness back where the sky was blue, with white clouds floating in it, with a picture-ocean running its long fingers up and down a picture-beach, with Helen's body whiter than the sands they lay upon. There had been picnic fires with the night-wind moving through the half-seen trees. There had been candlelight upon a snow-white cloth, with gleaming china and sparkling glass set upon the table, with music in the background and contentment everywhere.

Somewhere in the outer darkness, Nicodemus moved clumsily about, trying to be quiet, and through the open port came a far-off strident fiddling of what he told himself were insects. If there were insects here, he thought.

He tried to think of the planet that lay beyond the port, but it seemed he could not think of it. It was too new and strange for him to think of it. But he found that he could conjure up the frightening concept of that vast, silent depth of space that lay between this place and Earth, and he saw in his mind's eye the tiny mote of Ship floating through that awesome immensity of nothingness. The nothingness translated into loneliness, and with a groan, he turned over and clutched the pillow tight about his head.

9

Carnivore showed up shortly after morning light.

“Good,” he said. “You're ready. We travel in no hurry. Is not far to go. I checked the tunnel before I left. It had not fixed itself.”

He led the way, up the sharp pitch of the hill, then down into a valley that lay so deep between the hills and was so engulfed in forest that the darkness of the night had not been dispelled entirely. The trees stood tall, with few branches for the first thirty feet or so, and Carter noted that while in general structure they were much like the trees of Earth, the bark tended to have a scaly appearance and the leaves mostly merged toward black and purple rather than to green. Underneath the trees, the forest floor was fairly open, with only an occasional scattering of spindly and fragile shrubs. At times, tiny skittering creatures scampered across the ground, which was littered with many fallen branches, but at no time did Carter manage to get a good look at them.

Here and there rock outcroppings thrust out of the hillside and when they descended another hill and crossed a small but brawling stream, low cliffs rose on the opposite bank. Carnivore led the way to where a path went up through a break in the wall of rock and they scrambled up the steep incline. Carter noted that the cliffs were pegmatite. There was no sign of sedimentary strata.