Destiny Doll

by Clifford D. Simak

  We had made a good day's journey when we stopped for the night. Going through the pack to get out food, I found the box I'd stolen from Knight. I put it to one side to look at after I had eaten. Roscoe gathered wood and I built a fire and cooked myself a meal while that great stupid hulk hunkered down across the blaze from me and chattered conversationally—and this time not rhyming words nor equation gibberish.

  "One eye thou hast," he told me, glibly, "to look to Heaven for grace. The sun with one eye vieweth all the world."

  I stared at him, amazed, wondering hopefully if he'd snapped out of it and could finally talk some sense—either that, or gone completely off his rocker.

  "Roscoe," I said, as quietly as I could, not wishing to startle him out of any new-found sense, "I wasn't listening. I was thinking of something else. I wonder . . ."

  "They can be meek," he told me, "that have no other cause. A wretched soul, bruised with adversity, we bid be quiet when we hear it cry; but were we burdened with like weight of pain, as much, or more, we should ourselves complain."

  "Poetry!" I yelled. "Poetry, for the love of God! As if equations and senseless rhyming weren't enough . . ."

  He clambered to his feet and danced a merry, clanking jig and sang: "The capon burns, the pig falls from the spit. The clock hath strucken twelve upon the bell; my mistress made in one upon my cheek. She is so hot because the meat is cold; the meat is cold because you came not home; you came not home because you have no stomach; you have no stomach, having broke your fast . . ."

  He stopped in mid-caper and stared wonderingly at me. "Fast," he said. "Last, mast, cast."

  At least he was back to normal.

  He hunkered down by the fire again, no longer talking to me, but mumbling to himself.

  The twilight deepened and the galaxy blossomed in the sky, first the brilliance of the central core, hanging just above the eastern horizon, and then, as night came on, the wispy filaments of the spiral arms became apparent, first as a structure of silvery mist, which brightened as the darkness grew. Wind whispered overhead and the campfire smoke, after rising vertically for a short distance, leaned over and slanted off into the darkness as it met the wind. Far off something was chuckling softly to itself and tiny forms of life scurried in the grass and brush just beyond the circle of firelight.

  Shakespeare? I wondered. Had it been Shakespeare he had spouted? The words had sounded like it, but I could not be sure; it had been many years since I'd even thought of Shakespeare. And if it were, how had Roscoe known of Shakespeare? In the long flight out from the galaxy, on the long march up the trail, had Knight read it aloud beside the nightly campfire? Had he carried in his knapsack or in a sagging pocket of his jacket a copy of that ancient, almost forgotten writer?

  I finished my meal and washed the dishes in the stream beside which we were camped, and set them aside for morning. Roscoe still squatted at the fire, writing with an outstretched finger on a piece of ground he'd smoothed.

  I picked up Knight's wooden box and opened it. Inside lay a thick sheaf of paper, almost filling it. Lifting out the first page, I held it so it was lighted by the fire and read:

  Blue and high. Clean. Upstanding blue. Water sound. Stars ahead. Ground unbare. Laughter high above and blue. Blue laughter. We move unwise. Think unhard.

  The writing was in a crabbed hand and the characters were cramped and small. Slowly I picked the words apart:

  . . . and thin. No end to start, no end to come. Foreverness and more. Blue foreverness. Runners after nothingness. Nothingness in emptiness. Emptiness is bare. Talk is nothingness. Deeds are emptiness. Where to find but empty? Nowhere, comes the answer. High and blue and empty.

  It was gibberish, worse than the gibberish of Roscoe. I glanced down the page and the gibberish went on. Lifting a handful of pages from the box, I extracted another one. Page 52, it said in the upper right hand corner. And the text:

  . . . far is distant. Distances are deep. Neither short nor long, but deep. Some without a bottom. And cannot be measured. No stick to measure with. Purple distances are deepest ones of all. No one walks a purple distance. Purple leads to nowhere. There is nowhere to lead to.

  I put the pages back into the box and closed the lid and held my hand hard against the lid to prevent the pages getting out. Mad, I thought; living out a life of gentle madness in a Grecian valley of a strange enchantment. And that was where Sara was at this very moment. Not knowing. Not caring, even if she knew.

  I fought to keep from jumping up and screaming. I held as hard a hand against myself as I held against the lid to keep from leaping to my feet and go running back the way we'd come.

  Because, I told myself, I had no right to do it. For once in my life, I had to think of someone other than myself. She had chosen to go back to the valley. There was something that drew her there. Happiness, I wondered, and asked myself what was happiness and how much did it count?

  Knight was happy, writing his drivel, not knowing it was drivel, not caring it was drivel. Wrapped in a cocoon of happiness, in the sense of having reached a devoutly sought and lifelong goal, he was content, not knowing and not caring that the goal might be delusion.

  If only Hoot were here, I thought. Although I knew what he would have told me. You cannot interfere, he'd say, you must not interfere. He'd talked of destiny. And what was destiny? Was it something not written in the stars, but in the genes of men that said how they would act, what they would want, how they would set about to get what they wanted most?

  The loneliness came on me and I crouched close against the fire, as if its light and heat might be protection against the loneliness. Of all the ones I'd traveled with, there was only Roscoe left and in Roscoe there was nothing that would counter loneliness. In his own way, he was as lonely as I.

  All the others had reached that half-seen, half-guessed vision they had followed. Perhaps because they had known, deep inside themselves, what they might be seeking. And me, what was I seeking? I tried to figure what thing I wanted most and, for the life of me, I could think of nothing.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  In the morning we found Tuck's doll, where it had been dropped beside the trail. It was in plain view, not more than six feet off the path. How we'd missed it before was hard to understand. I tried to pinpoint the place, wondering if this were in the area where we had hunted for him. But there was no landmark that stood out in my mind.

  I had not really had a chance to take a good look at it before. The only time I had really seen it had been that night when we had been penned inside the red-stone edifice at the outskirts of the city. Now I did have a chance to look at it, to absorb the full impact of the sorrow that lay on the rudely carven face. Either, I thought, the one who'd carried it had been a primitive who, by sheer chance, had fashioned the sorrow in it, or a skilled craftsman who, with a few simple strokes, evoked the hopelessness and anguish of an intellectual being facing the riddle of the universe and overwhelmed by it.

  The face was not entirely humanoid, but human enough so that one could equate it with humanity—a human face twisted out of shape by some great truth that it had learned—surely no truth that it had sought, but rather one that had been thrust upon it.

  Having picked it up, I tried to throw it away, but could not throw it away. It had put roots into me and would not let me go. It haunted me and would not forego its haunting. I stood with one hand clutching it and tried to toss it to one side, but my fingers would not loosen their grip nor my arms make a throwing motion.

  That had been the way it had been with Tuck, I thought, except that Tuck had been a willing captive of it, finding in it some attraction and significance that I did not find. Perhaps because it said to him a thing he found inside himself. Because, perhaps, he saw within it a condition from which he was seeking to escape. A madonna, Sara had said, and it could have been, but I saw no madonna in it.

  So I went marching down the trail, like Tuck, hanging onto that damn thing, raging at myself—not so much for being
unable to let go of it, as for the fact that it made me, after a fashion, a blood brother of the vanished Tuck. Sore that I should be even in the slightest way like him, for if there ever had been a man I had despised it had been Tuck.

  We moved across the great blue plateau and behind us the purple mountains lost detail and resolved into a purple cloud. I wondered if Knight's fascination with blueness, as revealed in those first few paragraphs of his manuscript, might not be an echo of this blue land which he had crossed to reach the mountains and the valley, leaving Roscoe at the gate, with Roscoe later blundering down the trail to finally reach the city where, in his stupidity, he'd become a captive of the gnome.

  After several days, from boredom rather than from curiosity, I opened the box again and took out the manuscript. Starting at the very beginning of it, I read it carefully—not all at once, of course, for it was slow going and tightly written and hard to decipher and there were many pages of it. I studied it as a scholar in some time-droning monastery might have studied some arcane roll of parchment, seeking, I think, not so much information as an understanding of the kind of mind that would write such a mass of garbage, trying to look through the vapid wanderings of that mind to a kernel of truth that still might dwell subconsciously in the man.

  But there was nothing there, or at least nothing I could find. It was totally unintelligible and most of it inconceivable to anyone but an utter moron overflowing with words that must be gotten out of him, no matter what they meant.

  It was not until the tenth night or so, when we were only two days march from the beginning of the desert, that I finally reached a portion of the manuscript that seemed to make some sense:

  . . . And these ones seek blue and purple knowledge. From all the universe they seek it. They trap all that may be thought or known. Not only blue and purple, but all spectra of knowing. They trap it on lonely planets, far lost in space and deep in time. In the blue of time. With trees they trap it and trapped, it is stored and kept against a time of golden harvest. Great orchards of mighty trees that tower into the blue for miles. Soaking in the thought and knowledge. As other planets soak in the gold of sun. And this knowledge is their fruit. Fruit is many things. It is sustenance of body and for brain. It is round and long and hard and soft. It is blue and gold and purple. Sometimes red. It ripens and it falls. It is harvested. For harvesting is a gathering and fruiting is a growing. Both are blue and gold . . .

  And he was off again into his nonsensical ramblings in which color and shape and size, as it had all through the manuscript, played a major role.

  I went back and read the single paragraph again and went back carefully over the preceding page to find some indication of who "these ones" might be, but there was nothing that could help me.

  I put the manuscript away and sat late beside the fire, thinking furiously. Was that one paragraph no more than the disordered meandering of a half-mad mind, as must be all the rest of it? Or did it, perchance, represent a single lucid moment during which he'd written down some fact, couched in his disjointed, mystic style, that he knew might be important? Or could it be that Knight was less crazy than I thought and that all the gibberish of the manuscript was no more than a camouflage in which might be concealed a message that he wanted to transmit to whoever might somehow get his hands upon it? That this might be the case seemed farfetched. If he had been clear enough in mind to do a thing like that he would have long since quit the valley and come pelting down the trail, hoping against hope that he might find some way to flee the planet and carry what he knew back to the galaxy.

  If the words should be a hidden message, how had he found out? Was there a record somewhere in the city that would tell the story? Or had he talked to someone or something that had seized the chance to pass on the knowledge of why this planet should be a planted orchard? Or had it, perhaps, been Roscoe who had learned the truth? There might be ways, I thought, that Roscoe could find out, for Roscoe was, of all things, a telepathic robot. Although right now he didn't look like one. He squatted beside me and once again he had smoothed out a slate upon the ground and was writing symbols, softly jabbering to himself.

  I almost asked him and then decided not to try. There was nothing, I was convinced, that anyone could learn from this battered robot.

  The next morning we went on and on the second day we came to the cache we'd made, filled one of the water tins and retrieved some food. With the water and the supplies on Roscoe's back, we faced the desert.

  We made good time. We passed the field where I had fought the centaurs and came to, and went on without stopping, the gully where we'd found Old Paint. We stumbled on old campfires where we'd spent a night, we recognized certain landmarks and the land was red and yellow and honkers hooted in the distances and we glimpsed at times some of the other strange denizens of the place. But nothing interfered with us and we drove on down the frail.

  Now the others came out to travel with us, a shadowy, ghostly company—Sara riding on Old Paint, Tuck tripping in his long brown robe and leading the stumbling, fumbling George Smith by the hand, Hoot ranging far ahead, always ranging far ahead to spy out the trail, and I found myself shouting to him, a, foolish thing to do, for he was too far ahead of us to hear me. There were times, I think, when I believed they were really with us, and other times when I knew they weren't. But even when I knew they weren't, it was a comfort to imagine that I saw them. There was one, thing that perplexed me. Tuck carried the doll clutched tight against his breast and at the same time I carried the selfsame doll in the pocket of my jacket.

  The doll no longer was glued to my hand. I could let loose of it, but I kept on carrying it. I don't know why I did. Somehow I just had to. At nights I'd sit and look at it, half-repelled, half-fascinated, but night by night, it seemed, the repulsion wore away and the fascination won. I either sat looking at the doll, hoping that some day I might encompass within my mind all I saw upon its face and then be done with it. Either that or read the manuscript, which continued on its witless way until near the very end when this occurred:

  . . . Trees are tallness. Trees reach high. Never satisfied. Never fulfilled. What I write about trees and trapped knowledge being true. Tops are' vapory, blue vapor . . .

  What I say about trees and trapped knowledge being true . . .

  Was that single sentence tucked in among the gibberish put there to fortify and reaffirm what he had written many pages back? Another flash of lucidity in the midst of all his foolishness? One was tempted to believe so, but there was no way to know.

  The next night I finished reading the manuscript. There was nothing more.

  And the third day after that we sighted the city, far off, like a snowy mountain thrusting up into the sky.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The tree still lay where I had chopped it down with the raking laser beam, its jagged stump like a massive spear stabbing at the sky. The bole stretched for miles along the ground, its vegetation shriveled brown, revealing its woody skeleton.

  Beyond it loomed the bulk of the red-stone edifice in which the tree had penned us with its bombardment, and looking at, it, I could hear again, in memory and imagination, the sound of millions of invisible wings flying underneath its roof, beating their way out of nowhere into nowhere.

  A foul and bitter stench blew from the free and as we approached it I could see that the circular, lawnlike area which had surrounded the stump had caved in upon itself and become a pit. Out of the pit rose the stench and from the knoll on which we stood I caught a glimpse of slimy skeletons— strangely wrought but undeniably skeletons—floating in the oily liquid that half filled the pit.

  Not just one life, I told myself, not the life of the free alone, but an entire community of life—the little, crying, mewling creatures that had swarmed out to cry their denunciations of us and now this, another community of life which had existed in a fluid reservoir underneath the tree. Life that in some way was intimately bound up with the free, that could no longer live once the tree was
dead, that may have lived only so that the tree might live. I looked for some evidence of the mewling creatures which, by now, must be dead as well. There was no sign of them. Had they in death, I wondered, dried up into almost weightless nothingness, and been scattered by the wind.

  I had been the one, I thought. It had been my hand that had loosed the death. I had intended to kill the tree alone; I had killed much else besides. I wondered what had come over me that I should be thinking this. They'd had it coming, hadn't they? The tree had attacked us and I had had every moral reason and every legal right to fight back. That much at least was gospel, a personal and very intimate gospel built up through the years. Nothing acted tough toward me that I didn't act tough right back. And it worked, I told myself grimly. Throughout our long trek to the mountains and the long trek back, no tree had made a pass at us. The word somehow had been passed along: Leave this guy alone; he's pure poison if you mess around with him. Not knowing I no longer had a laser gun, apparently not wanting to take the chance of finding out.

  I felt Roscoe pawing at my shoulder and turned to see what it was he wanted. He pointed back the way we'd come.

  And there they were, a herd of them. There was no mistaking them. They were, in flesh, the kind of monstrous beasts that had left their skeletons piled in a windrow back in the gorge where we had rescued Paint. They were massive things, running on great hind legs, with tails thrust out behind them to balance the great bulk of their bodies and their gigantic heads. With poised front legs armed with sharp and gleaming talons. The heads grinned at us and even from that distance there was evil in the faces. They might have been following us for a long time, but this was the first time they had shown themselves.