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Graveyard of Dreams
Henry Beam Piper
Graveyard of Dreams
Table of Contents
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Graveyard of Dreams
Henry Beam Piper
This page formatted 2005 Blackmask Online.
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Produced by Greg Weeks, Tom Owens, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
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."
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Graveyard of Dreams
"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
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Graveyard of Dreams
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.
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