Graveyard of Dreams.
by Henry Beam Piper.
_Despite Mr. Shakespeare, wealth and name are both dross compared with the theft of hope-- and Maxwell had to rob a whole planet of it!_
Standing at the armor-gla.s.s front of the observation deck and watching the mountains rise and grow on the horizon, Conn Maxwell gripped the metal hand-rail with painful intensity, as though trying to hold back the airship by force. Thirty minutes--twenty-six and a fraction of the Terran minutes he had become accustomed to--until he"d have to face it.
Then, realizing that he never, in his own thoughts, addressed himself as "sir," he turned.
"I beg your pardon?"
It was the first officer, wearing a Terran Federation s.p.a.ce Navy uniform of forty years, or about ten regulation-changes, ago. That was the sort of thing he had taken for granted before he had gone away. Now he was noticing it everywhere.
"Thirty minutes out of Litchfield, sir," the ship"s officer repeated.
"You"ll go off by the midship gangway on the starboard side."
"Yes, I know. Thank you."
The first mate held out the clipboard he was carrying. "Would you mind checking over this, Mr. Maxwell? Your baggage list."
"Certainly." He glanced at the slip of paper. Valises, eighteen and twenty-five kilos, two; trunks, seventy-five and seventy kilos, two; microbook case, one-fifty kilos, one. The last item fanned up a little flicker of anger in him, not at any person, even himself, but at the situation in which he found himself and the futility of the whole thing.
"Yes, that"s everything. I have no hand-luggage, just this stuff."
He noticed that this was the only baggage list under the clip; the other papers were all freight and express manifests. "Not many pa.s.sengers left aboard, are there?"
"You"re the only one in first-cla.s.s, sir," the mate replied. "About forty farm-laborers on the lower deck. Everybody else got off at the other stops. Litchfield"s the end of the run. You know anything about the place?"
"I was born there. I"ve been away at school for the last five years."
"On Baldur?"
"Terra. University of Montevideo." Once Conn would have said it almost boastfully.
The mate gave him a quick look of surprised respect, then grinned and nodded. "Of course; I should have known. You"re Rodney Maxwell"s son, aren"t you? Your father"s one of our regular freight shippers. Been sending out a lot of stuff lately." He looked as though he would have liked to continue the conversation, but said: "Sorry, I"ve got to go.
Lot of things to attend to before landing." He touched the visor of his cap and turned away.
The mountains were closer when Conn looked forward again, and he glanced down. Five years and two s.p.a.ce voyages ago, seen from the afterdeck of this ship or one of her sisters, the woods had been green with new foliage, and the wine-melon fields had been in pink blossom. He tried to picture the scene sliding away below instead of drawing in toward him, as though to force himself back to a moment of the irretrievable past.
But the moment was gone, and with it the eager excitement and the half-formed antic.i.p.ations of the things he would learn and accomplish on Terra. The things he would learn--microbook case, one-fifty kilos, one.
One of the steel trunks was full of things he had learned and accomplished, too. Maybe they, at least, had some value....
The woods were autumn-tinted now and the fields were bare and brown.
They had gotten the crop in early this year, for the fields had all been harvested. Those workers below must be going out for the wine-pressing.
That extra hands were needed for that meant a big crop, and yet it seemed that less land was under cultivation than when he had gone away.
He could see squares of low brush among the new forests that had grown up in the last forty years, and the few stands of original timber looked like hills above the second growth. Those trees had been standing when the planet had been colonized.
That had been two hundred years ago, at the middle of the Seventh Century, Atomic Era. The name of the planet--Poictesme--told that: the Surromanticist Movement, when the critics and professors were rediscovering James Branch Cabell.
Funny how much was coming back to him now--things he had picked up from the minimal liberal-arts and general-humanities courses he had taken and then forgotten in his absorption with the science and tech studies.
The first extrasolar planets, as they had been discovered, had been named from Norse mythology--Odin and Baldur and Thor, Uller and Freya, Bifrost and Asgard and Niflheim. When the Norse names ran out, the discoverers had turned to other mythologies, Celtic and Egyptian and Hindu and a.s.syrian, and by the middle of the Seventh Century they were naming planets for almost anything.
Anything, that is, but actual persons; their names were reserved for stars. Like Alpha Gartner, the sun of Poictesme, and Beta Gartner, a buckshot-sized pink glow in the southeast, and Gamma Gartner, out of sight on the other side of the world, all named for old Genji Gartner, the scholarly and half-piratical adventurer whose ship had been the first to approach the three stars and discover that each of them had planets.
Forty-two planets in all, from a couple of methane-giants on Gamma to airless little things with one-sixth Terran gravity. Alpha II had been the only one in the Trisystem with an oxygen atmosphere and life. So Gartner had landed on it, and named it Poictesme, and the settlement that had grown up around the first landing site had been called Storisende. Thirty years later, Genji Gartner died there, after seeing the camp grow to a metropolis, and was buried under a ma.s.sive monument.
Some of the other planets had been rich in metals, and mines had been opened, and atmosphere-domed factories and processing plants built. None of them could produce anything but hydroponic and tissue-culture foodstuffs, and natural foods from Poictesme had been less expensive, even on the planets of Gamma and Beta. So Poictesme had concentrated on agriculture and grown wealthy at it.
Then, within fifty years of Genji Gartner"s death, the economics of interstellar trade overtook the Trisystem and the mines and factories closed down. It was no longer possible to ship the output to a profitable market, in the face of the growing self-sufficiency of the colonial planets and the irreducibly high cost of s.p.a.ce-freighting.
Below, the brown fields and the red and yellow woods were merging into a ten-mile-square desert of crumbling concrete--empty and roofless sheds and warehouses and barracks, brush-choked parade grounds and landing fields, airship docks, and even a s.p.a.ceport. They were more recent, dating from Poictesme"s second brief and hectic prosperity, when the Terran Federation"s Third Fleet-Army Force had occupied the Gartner Trisystem during the System States War.
Millions of troops had been stationed on or routed through Poictesme; tens of thousands of s.p.a.cecraft had been based on the Trisystem; the mines and factories had reopened for war production. The Federation had spent trillions of sols on Poictesme, piled up mountains of stores and arms and equipment, left the face of the planet cluttered with installations.
Then, ten years before anybody had expected it, the rebellious System States Alliance had collapsed and the war had ended. The Federation armies had gone home, taking with them the clothes they stood in, their personal weapons and a few souvenirs. Everything else had been left behind; even the most expensive equipment was worth less than the cost of removal.
Ever since, Poictesme had been living on salvage. The uniform the first officer was wearing was forty years old--and it was barely a month out of the original packing. On Terra, Conn had told his friends that his father was a prospector and let them interpret that as meaning an explorer for, say, uranium deposits. Rodney Maxwell found plenty of uranium, but he got it by taking apart the warheads of missiles.
The old replacement depot or cla.s.sification center or training area or whatever it had been had vanished under the ship now and it was all forest back to the mountains, with an occasional cl.u.s.ter of deserted buildings. From one or two, threads of blue smoke rose--bands of farm tramps, camping on their way from harvest to wine-pressing. Then the eastern foothills were out of sight and he was looking down on the granite spines of the Calder Range; the valley beyond was sloping away and widening out in the distance, and it was time he began thinking of what to say when he landed. He would have to tell them, of course.
He wondered who would be at the dock to meet him, besides his family.
Lynne Fawzi, he hoped. Or did he? Her parents would be with her, and Kurt Fawzi would take the news hardest of any of them, and be the first to blame him because it was bad. The hopes he had built for Lynne and himself would have to be held in abeyance till he saw how her father would regard him now.
But however any of them took it, he would have to tell them the truth.
The ship swept on, tearing through the thin puffs of cloud at ten miles a minute. Six minutes to landing. Five. Four. Then he saw the river bend, glinting redly through the haze in the sunlight; Litchfield was inside it, and he stared waiting for the first glimpse of the city.
Three minutes, and the ship began to cut speed and lose alt.i.tude. The hot-jets had stopped firing and he could hear the whine of the cold-jet rotors.
Then he could see Litchfield, dominated by the Airport Building, so thick that it looked squat for all its height, like a candle-stump in a puddle of its own grease, the other buildings under their carapace of terraces and landing stages seeming to have flowed away from it. And there was the yellow block of the distilleries, and High Garden Terrace, and the Mall....
At first, in the distance, it looked like a living city. Then, second by second, the stigmata of decay became more and more evident. Terraces empty or littered with rubbish; gardens untended and choked with wild growth; windows staring blindly; walls splotched with lichens and grimy where the rains could not wash them.
For a moment, he was afraid that some disaster, unmentioned in his father"s letters, had befallen. Then he realized that the change had not been in Litchfield but in himself. After five years, he was seeing it as it really was. He wondered how his family and his friends would look to him now. Or Lynne.
The ship was coming in over the Mall; he could see the cracked paving sprouting gra.s.s, the statues askew on their pedestals, the waterless fountains. He thought for an instant that one of them was playing, and then he saw that what he had taken for spray was dust blowing from the empty basin. There was something about dusty fountains, something he had learned at the University. Oh, yes. One of the Second Century Martian Colonial poets, Eirrarsson, or somebody like that:
_The fountains are dusty in the Graveyard of Dreams; The hinges are rusty and swing with tiny screams._
There was more to it, but he couldn"t remember; something about empty gardens under an empty sky. There must have been colonies inside the Sol System, before the Interstellar Era, that hadn"t turned out any better than Poictesme. Then he stopped trying to remember as the ship turned toward the Airport Building and a couple of tugs--Terran Federation contragravity tanks, with derrick-booms behind and push-poles where the guns had been--came up to bring her down.