Book: Graveyard of Dreams
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Henry Beam Piper >> Graveyard of Dreams
Transcriber's note: This etext was produced from Galaxy
Magazine February 1958. Extensive research did not uncover
any evidence that the copyright on this publication was
renewed.
Graveyard of Dreams
By H. 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-glass 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 Space 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 passengers left
aboard, are there?"
"You're the only one in first-class, 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 space 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 anticipations 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 Assyrian, 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 massive 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 space-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 spaceport. 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 spacecraft 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 classification 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 cluster 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 altitude. 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 grass, 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.
He walked along the starboard promenade to the gangway, which the first
mate and a couple of airmen were getting open.
* * * * *
Most of the population of top-level Litchfield was in the crowd on the
dock. He recognized old Colonel Zareff, with his white hair and
plum-brown skin, and Tom Brangwyn, the town marshal, red-faced and
bulking above the others. It took a few seconds for him to pick out his
father and mother, and his sister Flora, and then to realize that the
handsome young man beside Flora was his brother Charley. Charley had
been thirteen when Conn had gone away. And there was Kurt Fawzi, the
mayor of Litchfield, and there was Lynne, beside him, her red-lipped
face tilted upward with a cloud of bright hair behind it.
He waved to her, and she waved back, jumping in excitement, and then
everybody was waving, and they were pushing his family to the front and
making way for them.
The ship touched down lightly and gave a lurch as she went off
contragravity, and they got the gangway open and the steps swung out,
and he started down toward the people who had gathered to greet him.
His father was wearing the same black best-suit he had worn when they
had parted five years ago. It had been new then; now it was shabby and
had acquired a permanent wrinkle across the right hip, over the
pistol-butt. Charley was carrying a gun, too; the belt and holster
looked as though he had made them himself. His mother's dress was new
and so was Flora's--probably made for the occasion. He couldn't be sure
just which of the Terran Federation services had provided the material,
but Charley's shirt was Medical Service sterilon.
Ashamed that he was noticing and thinking of such things at a time like
this, he clasped his father's hand and kissed his mother and Flora.
Everybody was talking at once, saying things that he heard only as happy
sounds. His brother's words were the first that penetrated as words.
"You didn't know me," Charley was accusing. "Don't deny it; I saw you
standing there wondering if I was Flora's new boy friend or what."
"Well, how in Niflheim'd you expect me to? You've grown up since the
last time I saw you. You're looking great, kid!" He caught the gleam of
Lynne's golden hair beyond Charley's shoulder and pushed him gently
aside. "Lynne!"
"Conn, you look just wonderful!" Her arms were around his neck and she
was kissing him. "Am I still your girl, Conn?"
He crushed her against him and returned her kisses, assuring her that
she was. He wasn't going to let it make a bit of difference how her
father took the news--if she didn't.
She babbled on: "You didn't get mixed up with any of those girls on
Terra, did you? If you did, don't tell me about it. All I care about is
that you're back. Oh, Conn, you don't know how much I missed you ...
Mother, Dad, doesn't he look just splendid?"
Kurt Fawzi, a little thinner, his face more wrinkled, his hair grayer,
shook his hand.
"I'm just as glad to see you as anybody, Conn," he said, "even if I'm
not being as demonstrative about it as Lynne. Judge, what do you think
of our returned wanderer? Franz, shake hands with him, but save the
interview for the _News_ for later. Professor, here's one student
Litchfield Academy won't need to be ashamed of."
He shook hands with them--old Judge Ledue; Franz Veltrin, the newsman;
Professor Kellton; a dozen others, some of whom he had not thought of in
five years. They were all cordial and happy--how much, he wondered,
because he was their neighbor, Conn Maxwell, Rodney Maxwell's son, home
from Terra, and how much because of what they hoped he would tell them?
Kurt Fawzi, edging him out of the crowd, was the first to voice that.
"Conn, what did you find out?" he asked breathlessly. "Do you know where
it is?"
Conn hesitated, looking about desperately; this was no time to start
talking to Kurt Fawzi about it. His father was turning toward him from
one side, and from the other Tom Brangwyn and Colonel Zareff were
approaching more slowly, the older man leaning on a silver-headed cane.
"Don't bother him about it now, Kurt," Rodney Maxwell scolded the mayor.
"He's just gotten off the ship; he hasn't had time to say hello to
everybody yet."
"But, Rod, I've been waiting to hear what he's found out ever since he
went away," Fawzi protested in a hurt tone.
Brangwyn and Colonel Zareff joined them. They were close friends,
probably because neither of them was a native of Poictesme.
The town marshal had always been reticent about his origins, but Conn
guessed it was Hathor. Brangwyn's heavy-muscled body, and his ease and
grace in handling it, marked him as a man of a high-gravity planet.
Besides, Hathor had a permanent cloud-envelope, and Tom Brangwyn's skin
had turned boiled-lobster red under the dim orange sunlight of Alpha
Gartner.
Old Klem Zareff never hesitated to tell anybody where he came from--he
was from Ashmodai, one of the System States planets, and he had
commanded a division that had been blasted down to about regimental
strength, in the Alliance army.
"Hello, boy," he croaked, extending a trembling hand. "Glad you're home.
We all missed you."
"We sure did, Conn," the town marshal agreed, clasping Conn's hand as
soon as the old man had released it. "Find out anything definite?"
Kurt Fawzi looked at his watch. "Conn, we've planned a little
celebration for you. We only had since day before yesterday, when the
spaceship came into radio range, but we're having a dinner party for you
at Senta's this evening."
"You couldn't have done anything I'd have liked better, Mr. Fawzi. I'd
have to have a meal at Senta's before really feeling that I'd come
home."
"Well, here's what I have in mind. It'll be three hours till dinner's
ready. Suppose we all go up to my office in the meantime. It'll give the
ladies a chance to go home and fix up for the party, and we can have a
drink and a talk."
"You want to do that, Conn?" his father asked, a trifle doubtfully. "If
you'd rather go home first..."
Something in his father's voice and manner disturbed him vaguely;
however, he nodded agreement. After a couple of drinks, he'd be better
able to tell them.
"Yes, indeed, Mr. Fawzi," Conn said. "I know you're all anxious, but
it's a long story. This'll be a good chance to tell you."
Fawzi turned to his wife and daughter, interrupting himself to shout
instructions to a couple of dockhands who were floating the baggage off
the ship on a contragravity-lifter. Conn's father had sent Charley off
with a message to his mother and Flora.
Conn turned to Colonel Zareff. "I noticed extra workers coming out from
the hiring agencies in Storisende, and the crop was all in across the
Calders. Big wine-pressing this year?"
"Yes, we're up to our necks in melons," the old planter grumbled.
"Gehenna of a big crop. Price'll drop like a brick of collapsium, and
this time next year we'll be using brandy to wash our feet in."
"If you can't get good prices, hang onto it and age it. I wish you could
see what the bars on Terra charge for a drink of ten-year-old
Poictesme."
"This isn't Terra and we aren't selling it by the drink. Only place we
can sell brandy is at Storisende spaceport, and we have to take what the
trading-ship captains offer. You've been on a rich planet for the last
five years, Conn. You've forgotten what it's like to live in a
poorhouse. And that's what Poictesme is."
"Things'll be better from now on, Klem," the mayor said, putting one
hand on the old man's shoulder and the other on Conn's. "Our boy's home.
With what he can tell us, we'll be able to solve all our problems. Come
on, let's go up and hear about it."
They entered the wide doorway of the warehouse on the dock-level floor
of the Airport Building and crossed to the lift. About a dozen others
had joined them, all the important men of Litchfield. Inside, Kurt
Fawzi's laborers were floating out cargo for the ship--casks of brandy,
of course, and a lot of boxes and crates painted light blue and marked
with the wreathed globe of the Terran Federation and the gold triangle
of the Third Fleet-Army Force and the eight-pointed red star of Ordnance
Service. Long cases of rifles, square boxes of ammunition, machine guns,
crated auto-cannon and rockets.
"Where'd that stuff come from?" Conn asked his father. "You dig it
up?"
His father chuckled. "That happened since the last time I wrote you.
Remember the big underground headquarters complex in the Calders?
Everybody thought it had been all cleaned out years ago. You know, it's
never a mistake to take a second look at anything that everybody
believes. I found a lot of sealed-off sections over there that had never
been entered. This stuff's from one of the headquarters defense
armories. I have a gang getting the stuff out. Charley and I flew in
after lunch, and I'm going back the first thing tomorrow."
"But there's enough combat equipment on hand to outfit a private army
for every man, woman and child on Poictesme!" Conn objected. "Where are
we going to sell this?"
"Storisende spaceport. The tramp freighters are buying it for newly
colonized planets that haven't been industrialized yet. They don't pay
much, but it doesn't cost much to get it out, and I've been clearing
about three hundred sols a ton on the spaceport docks. That's not bad,
you know."
Three hundred sols a ton. A lifter went by stacked with cases of M-504
submachine guns. Unloaded, one of them weighed six pounds, and even a
used one was worth a hundred sols. Conn started to say something about
that, but then they came to the lift and were crowding onto it.
He had been in Kurt Fawzi's office a few times, always with his father,
and he remembered it as a dim, quiet place of genteel conviviality and
rambling conversations, with deep, comfortable chairs and many ashtrays.
Fawzi's warehouse and brokerage business, and the airline agency, and
the government, such as it was, of Litchfield, combined, made few
demands on his time and did not prevent the office from being a favored
loafing center for the town's elders. The lights were bright only over
the big table that served, among other things, as a desk, and the walls
were almost invisible in the shadows.
As they came down the hallway from the lift, everybody had begun
speaking more softly. Voices were never loud or excited in Kurt Fawzi's
office.
Tom Brangwyn went to the table, taking off his belt and holster and
laying his pistol aside. The others, crowding into the room, added their
weapons to his.
That was something else Conn was seeing with new eyes. It had been five
years since he had carried a gun and he was wondering why any of them
bothered. A gun was what a boy put on to show that he had reached
manhood, and a man carried for the rest of his life out of habit.
Why, there wouldn't be a shooting a year in Litchfield, if you didn't
count the farm tramps and drifters, who kept to the lower level or
camped in the empty buildings at the edge of town. Or maybe that was it;
maybe Litchfield was peaceful because everybody was armed. It certainly
wasn't because of anything the Planetary Government at Storisende did to
maintain order.
After divesting himself of his gun, Tom Brangwyn took over the
bartending, getting out glasses and filling a pitcher of brandy from a
keg in the corner.
"Everybody supplied?" Fawzi was asking. "Well, let's drink to our
returned emissary. We're all anxious to hear what you found out, Conn.
Gentlemen, here's to our friend Conn Maxwell. Welcome home, Conn!"
"Well, it's wonderful to be back, Mr. Fawzi--"
"No, let's not have any of this mister foolishness! You're one of the
gang now. And drink up, everybody. We have plenty of brandy, even if we
don't have anything else."
"You telling us, Kurt?" somebody demanded. One of the distillery
company; the name would come back to Conn in a moment. "When this crop
gets pressed and fermented--"
"When I start pressing, I don't know where in Gehenna I'm going to vat
the stuff till it ferments," Colonel Zareff said. "Or why. You won't be
able to handle all of it."
"Now, now!" Fawzi reproved. "Let's not start moaning about our troubles.
Not the day Conn's come home. Not when he's going to tell us how to find
the Third Fleet-Army Force Brain."
"You _did_ find out where the Brain is, didn't you, Conn?" Brangwyn
asked anxiously.
That set half a dozen of them off at once. They had all sat down after
the toast; now they were fidgeting in their chairs, leaning forward,
looking at Conn fixedly.
"What did you find out, Conn?"
"It's still here on Poictesme, isn't it?"
"Did you find out where it is?"
He wanted to tell them in one quick sentence and get it over with. He
couldn't, any more than he could force himself to squeeze the trigger of
a pistol he knew would blow up in his hand.
"Wait a minute, gentlemen." He finished the brandy, and held out the
glass to Tom Brangwyn, nodding toward the pitcher. Even the first drink
had warmed him and he could feel the constriction easing in his throat
and the lump at the pit of his stomach dissolving. "I hope none of you
expect me to spread out a map and show you the cross on it, where the
Brain is. I can't. I can't even give the approximate location of the
thing."