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 alienlooking entries.
The girl Mali Yojez is an expert at removing coral deposits from submerged artifacts. Other individuals brought from various systems throughout the galaxy include geologists, structural engineers, hydraulic engineers, seismologists; one specializes in underwater robot operations and another, an archaeologist, is a master at locating buried, ancient cities. A peculiar many-armed bivalve lives in a tank of salt water and functions well in supervising the raising of sunken ships for salvage purposes. A gastropod, capable of
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 lifeforms 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.
Obviously, the Undertaking involves the locating of and the raising and repair of an underwater structure, probably—due to the number of engineers involved—of great magnitude. Almost certainly an entire city or even an entire civilization, very likely of some remote past age.
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.”