Graveyard of Dreams | Page 2

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