Cemetery World Page 5

  “He said something about treasure …”

  “I suppose,” she said, “I’d better tell it all. Because you have a right to know. And I wouldn’t want you to think I was a simple adventuress. There is something rather shoddy about an adventuress. Do you want to listen?”

  “We might as well,” said Elmer.

  She was silent for a moment and you could sense her sort of settling down, getting a good grip on herself, as if she faced a difficult task and was determined that she would do it well.

  “I am an Alden native,” she began. “My ancestors were among the first to settle there. The family history—perhaps a better way to say it is the family legend, for it’s not documented—runs back to their first arrival. But you won’t find the Lansing name listed among the First Families—the First Families, capitalized. The First Families are those that prospered. My family didn’t prosper. Bad management, pure laziness, lack of ambition, bad luck—I don’t know what it was, but they stayed poor as church mice. There is a little place, way back in the outland country, that is called Lansing Corners, but that’s all there is, that is the only mark my family made on Alden or on Alden history. They were farmers, small tradesmen, labourers; they had no political aspirations; no genius blossomed in them. They were content to do a good day’s work and at the end of it to sit on the doorstep of their cottage and drink their beer, chatting with their neighbours, or alone, watching the fabulous Alden sunsets. They were simple people. Some of them, I guess a lot of them, went off-planet with the years, seeking fortunes that I imagine they never found. If they had, the Alden Lansings would have heard of it and the family legends make no mention of it. I imagine those who were left stayed on simply because they hated to leave; there wasn’t much there for them, but Alden is a lovely planet.”

  “It is that,” I said. “I came there to attend university. Until now I never quite worked up the nerve to leave.”

  “Where did you come from, Fletcher?”

  “Rattlesnake,” I told her. “You have heard of it?”

  She shook her head.

  “You’re lucky, then,” I said. “Don’t ask. And please go on.”

  “Myself, I suppose,” she said. “A little background on myself. I set out to make something of myself. I would imagine that through the years many of the Lansings did the same, but it came to nothing. As I may come to nothing. It is a little late in the day to do much for the Lansing image. My father died when I was young. He owned a fairly prosperous farm—not an outstanding farm, but one that made a living and a little more. My mother managed it after his death and there was enough to send me to the university. My interest was history. I dreamed that in time I might hold a chair in history and do learned research and write penetrating papers. I did well in my studies. I should have. I spent all my time at them. I missed many of the other things that college life can give you. I recognize that now, but I didn’t mind. There was nothing in the world that fascinated me like history. I simply wallowed in it—far places and far people and far times. At night when I was in bed, in the dark, I’d imagine a time machine and travel through far time to those distant places to observe those ancient people. I’d lie there in the dark and imagine that I was lying in my time machine, in those far lands and times and that just beyond the wall of darkened time moved and lived and breathed those people I had come to spy upon and that all about me those great events were happening that form the tide of history. When the time came to specialize, to follow one specific line of study, I found myself drawn irresistibly to the study of the ancient Earth. My adviser warned me against it. He pointed out that the field was narrow and the resource material very limited. I knew that he was right and I tried to reason with myself, but it did no good. I was obsessed with Earth.

  “My obsession with the Earth,” she said, “I am quite certain, was in part a rapport with the past, a deep concern for the old beginnings. My father’s farm was only a few miles from the locality where the first Lansings had settled on Alden, or so the legend ran. Nestled in a little rocky canyon, at a point where it opened on what at one time must have been a wide, rich valley suitable for farming, was an old stone house, or what at one time had been a stone house. Large parts of it had crumbled, the very stones weathering away with time, disturbed by the small shiftings of the ground that would become significant only after many centuries. There were no stories about it. It was not a haunted house. It was too old to be a haunted house. It simply stood there. Time had made it a part of the landscape. It was not noticed. It was too old and self-effacing to attract human notice, although many little wild creatures, I found when I went to visit it, had made it their home. The land on which it stood and the land around it was so poor and worthless that it interfered with nothing, so it had escaped the tearing down and razing that is so common a fate of many ancient things. The area, in fact, is so worn out for any economic use, ruined by centuries of forgotten farming, that it is seldom visited. Legend said—I must admit, a very shaky legend—that it had been, at one time, the residence of a very early Lansing.

  “I visited it, I suppose, because of its very oldness. Not because it may have been Lansing, but simply because it was so old—old beyond the memory of man, a structure from the deeper past. I expected nothing from it. The visit, you must understand, was just a holiday, the filling of an empty day. I had known of it, of course, for a long time, and like all the rest, had ignored it. There were many others who knew of its existence and accepted that existence as they would the existence of a tree or boulder. There was nothing to recommend it, nothing at all. Perhaps I would never have thought of it except in passing, or would never have visited it if it had not been for a gradual sharpening of my concern for olden things. Can you understand what I’m saying?”

  “I think,” I said, “I understand it far better than you may suspect. I recognize the symptoms. I have suffered most acutely from them.”

  “I went there,” she said, “and I ran my hands along the old, roughly hewn stones and I thought of how human hands, long gone in dust, had shaped them and piled them atop another as a refuge against the night and storm, as a home on a newfound planet. Looking through the ancient eyes of the builders, I was able to understand the attraction of the place of building, knowing why they might have chosen this particular place for the building of a house. Protection of the canyon walls from the sweeping winds, the quiet and dramatic beauty of the place, the water from the spring that still ran in a trickle from underneath a hillside rock, the wide and fertile valley (no longer fertile now) spreading just beyond the doorstep. I stood there in their stead and felt as they would have felt. I was, for a moment, them. And it didn’t really matter whether they were Lansings or not; they were people, they were the human race.

  “I would have been richly repaid for my time in going there if I had walked away right then. The touching of the stone, the evidence of the past would have been quite enough, but I went into the house …”

  She stopped and waited a moment, as if gathering herself for the telling of the rest of it.

  “I went into the house,” she said, “and it was a foolhardy thing to do, for at any moment a part of it might have come crashing down upon me. Some of the stones were balanced most precariously and the entire thing was unstable. I don’t remember that at the time, however, I gave any thought to this. I walked softly, not because of any danger, but because of the sanctity of time that hovered in that space. It was strange, the feeling that I had—or, rather, the conflicting feelings. When I first went into it I felt that I was an invader, an outsider who had no right of being there. I was intruding on old memories, on old lives, on old emotions that should have been left alone in peace, that had been there so long that they had earned the right to be left alone. I went inside, into what had been a rather large room, perhaps what you might call a living room. There was thick dust upon the floor and the dust was marked by the tracks of wild and small things and there was the odour of wild things having lived there th
rough millennia. Insects had spun webs of silk in the corners and some of the older webs were as dusty as the floor. But as I stood there, just inside the doorway, a strange thing happened—a feeling that I had the right to be there, that I belonged there, that I was coming back after a long, long time on a family visit and was a welcome visitor. For blood of my blood had lived there, bone of my bone, and the right of blood and bone is not erased by time. There was a fireplace in one corner. The chimney was gone, fallen long before, but the fireplace’s remained. I walked over to it and, kneeling down, touched the hearthstone with my fingers, feeling the texture of its surface through the dust. I could see the fireplace’s blackened throat, blackened by the old home fires; the soot—still there, resisting time and weather, and there was a moment when it seemed I could see the piled logs and the flame. And I said—I don’t know if I said it aloud or only in my mind—I said it is all right, I have come back to tell you; the Lansings still persist. Never for a moment confused as to whom I might be saying it. I waited for no answer. I did not expect an answer. There was no one there to answer. It was enough that I should say it. It was a debt I owed them.”

  She looked at me with frightened eyes. “I don’t know why I tell all this,” she said. “I did not intend to tell it. There is no reason I should tell you; no reason you should hear it. The facts—the facts I could tell in just a few sentences, but it seemed that they must be told in context.”

  I reached and touched her arm. “There are some facts that can’t be stated simply,” I told her. “You are doing fine.”

  “You are certain you don’t mind?”

  “Not at all,” said Elmer, speaking for me. “I am fascinated.”

  “There’s not much more,” she said. “There was a doorway, still intact, leading out of the room into the interior of the house and when I went into this room beyond, I saw that it once must have been a kitchen, although only part of it was there. There was a second story to the house, a part of it still standing, although all the roof was gone, having long since caved in on the rest of the structure. But above the kitchen there was no second story. Apparently the eaves of the house had extended over the kitchen and there was a pile of weathered debris lying along what had been the kitchen’s outside wall, the debris from the caving eaves. I don’t know how I happened to notice it—it was not easily detectable—but extending for a short distance out of one section of the debris was a squareness. It looked wrong; it didn’t have the look of debris. It was dust-covered, as was everything in the house. There was no way to know that it was metal. It had no gleam. I guess it must have been the squareness of it. Debris isn’t square. So I went over and tugged it out. It was a box, corroded, but still intact—the metal at no point had been broken or worn through. I squatted there on the floor beside it and I tried to reconstruct what had happened to it and it seemed to me that at some time it had been tucked away underneath the eaves, up in the attic, and then somehow was forgotten and that it had fallen when the eaves had fallen, perhaps crashing through the kitchen roof, or perhaps, by that time the kitchen had no roof.”

  “So that’s the story,” I said. “A box with a treasure clue …”

  “I suppose so,” she said, “but not quite the way you think. I couldn’t get the box open, so I carried it back to my apartment and got some tools and opened it. There wasn’t much in it. An old deed to a small parcel of land, a promissory note marked paid, a couple of old envelopes with no letters in them, a cancelled check or two, and a document acknowledging the loan of some old family papers to the manuscript department of the university. Not a permanent gift; they were just on loan. The next day I went to Manuscripts and made inquiry. You know how manuscript departments are …”

  “Indeed I do,” I said.

  “It took a while, but my status as a graduate student in Earth history and the fact that the papers, after all, were my family’s papers finally did the trick. They expected I simply wanted to study them, but by the time they were produced—I think that they had probably been misplaced and may have been difficult to locate—I was so fed up that I filed notice that I was revoking the loan and walked out with them. Which was no way for a devoted history student to behave, of course, but by that time I’d had it. The department threatened me with court action and if they had started action it would have been a lovely mess for someone to untangle, but they never did. Probably they considered the papers worthless, although how they would have known I had no idea. They were a small batch of papers, pretty small potatoes in a place like that. They had been placed in a single envelope and sealed. There was no evidence they had ever been examined; they were all haphazard and mixed up. If they had been examined, they would have been sorted and labelled, but it was fairly evident the original seal never had been broken. The whole bunch of papers had been simply filed away and forgotten.”

  She stopped talking and looked hard at me. I said nothing. In her own time, she’d get around to it. Maybe she had a reason for telling it like this. Maybe she had to live it all over again, to re-examine it all again, to be certain (once again? How many times again?) that she had not erred in judgement, that what she had done was right. I was not about to hurry her, although, God knows, I was a bit impatient.

  “There wasn’t much,” she said. “A series of letters that shed a little light on the first human colonization of Alden—nothing startling, nothing new, but they gave one the feeling of the times. A small sheaf of rather amateurish poems written by a girl in her teens or early twenties. Invoices from a small business firm that might have been of some slight interest to an economic historian, and a memorandum written in rather ponderous language by an old man setting down a story that he had been told by his grandfather, who had been one of the original settlers from Earth.”

  “And the memorandum?”

  “It told a strange story,” she said. “I took it to Professor Thorndyke and told him what I’ve just told you and asked him to read the memo and after he had read it he sat there for a time, not looking at me or the memo or anything at all and then said a word I’d never heard before—Anachron.”

  “What is Anachron?” asked Elmer.

  “It’s a mythical planet,” I said, “a sort of never-never land. Something the archaeologists dreamed up, a place they theorize …”

  “A coined word,” said Cynthia. “I didn’t ask Dr. Thorndyke, but I suspect it comes from anachronism—something out of place in time, very much out of place. You see, for years the archaeologists have been finding evidence of an unknown race that left their inscriptions on a number of other planets, perhaps on many more other planets than they know, for their fragmentary inscriptions have been found only in association with the native artifacts …”

  “As if they were visitors,” I said, “who had left behind a trinket or two. They could have visited many planets and their trinkets would be found only on a few of them, by sheer chance.”

  “You said there was a memo?” Elmer asked.

  “I have it here,” said Cynthia. She reached into the inside pocket of her jacket and brought out a long billfold. From it she took a sheaf of folded paper. “Not the original,” she said. “A copy. The original was old and fragile. It would not take much handling.”

  She handed the papers to Elmer and he unfolded them, took a quick look at them, and handed them to me. “I’ll poke up the fire,” he said, “so there will be light. You read it aloud so we all can hear it.”

  The memo was written in a crabbed hand, the hand, most likely, of an old and feeble man. In places the writing was a little blurred, but was fairly. legible. There was a number at the top of the first page—2305.

  Cynthia was watching me. “The year date,” she said. “That is what I took it for and Professor Thorndyke thought the same. It would be about right if the man who wrote it is who I think he was.”

  Elmer had poked up the fire, pushing the wood and coals together, and the light was good. Elmer said, “All right, Fletch. Why don’t you begin?” So
I began:

  Chapter 6

  2305 … To my grandson, Howard Lansing: My grandfather, when I was a young man, told me of an event which he experienced when he was a young man of about my age and now that I am as old as he was when he told me of it, or older, I pass it on to you, but because you are still a youngster, I am writing it down so that when you have grown older you may read it and understand it and the implications of it the better.

  At the time he related the happening to me he was of sound mind, with no mental and only those physical infirmities which steal upon a man as the years go by. And strange as the tale may be, there is about it, or so it has always seemed to me, a certain logical honesty that marks it as the truth.

  My grandfather, as you must realize, was born on Earth and came to our planet of Alden in his middle age. He was born into the early days of the Final War when two great blocs of nations loosed upon the Earth a horror and destruction that can scarcely be imagined. During the days of his youth he took part in this war—as much a part as a man could take, for in truth it was not a war in which men fought one another so much as a war in which machines and instruments fought one another with a mindless fury that was an extension of their makers’ fury. In the end with all his family and most of his friends either dead or lost (I don’t know which and I’m not sure that he did, either), he finally was among that contingent of human beings, a small fraction of the hordes that once had peopled Earth, that went out in the great starships to people other planets.

  But the story he told me had nothing to do with either the war or the going out in space, but with an incident that he did not place at all in time and only approximately in space. I have the impression that it happened when he was still a comparatively young man, although I cannot remember now if he actually told me this or if I have conjectured it from some now forgotten details of the tale itself. I freely admit that there are many parts of it that I have forgotten through the years, although the major facts of it are still sharp within my mind.