Chapter Fourteen
“...ruins of a farmhouse could be made out.”
Whether this structure resembles the homes built by the robot-teams mentioned in chapter nine or not is never specified.
“‘...he made the settlers go away.’”
By mentioning settlers, one would assume the spiddle is speaking of earthlings being driven away by Glimmung.
“‘...years back.’”
This statement brings up an important question; when did humans first begin settling on Plowman’s Planet? Assuming an alternate history of the space race between the USA and the USSR, beginning around 1966, where faster-than-light travel is invented, the first settlers may have reached Plowman’s Planet by the late 1980s at the earliest but more likely somewhere closer to the turn of the millennium. But this is merely speculation.
“‘...stiff and brittle, like parched bone.’”
It appears that this spiddle had either witnessed this man and woman’s plight or was given a detailed account of it.
“‘...they always leave.’”
We are not specifically told how many more people tried to farm here but they must have come and gone close together in quick succession given the current condition of the farmhouse.
“...perhaps for decades, perhaps as much as a thousand years...”
This is quite a range of time. Keep this quote in mind for the next note.
“‘...Glimmung first appeared on this world.’”
This explains Nick’s guess of a millennium.
With this information and how shockingly close this landing spot is from the decimated farm, it is curious, and unlikely, that Glimmung would leave such land untouched until only recently.
Looking towards Galactic Pot-Healer, there was another race that populated Plowman’s Planet, one humanoid in appearance. The Earth phone encyclopedia identifies them as “‘the once-ruling master species,’” the fog-things (not to be confused with the father-things).1
In the same encyclopedia, in fact in the same passage, the fog-things were driven, or “‘passed away’” as it describes it, sometime before Glimmung arrived on the planet, but, interesting to note, after the printers had come.2 The Book of the Kalends uses the word “‘vanished’” in relation to the fate of the fog-things.3
It is possible that Glimmung’s gradual materializing before he fully arrived may have been a contributor to the decline of the fog-things.
According to Mali Yojez, the fog-things perished because they “‘challenged the Book of the Kalends.’”4 If we take what she means as the book One Summer Day then the fog-things knew of the book before Glimmung arrived. More than likely the printers, arriving from the same planet Glimmung had came from, informed the fog-things as a warning and the latter either did not believe the former’s claims or believed they could deal with Glimmung themselves.
In fact Yojez even states that spiddles believe that the kalends, when they wrote of the fog-things passing away in their Book of the Kalends, caused the fog-things to pass away/vanish.5 Again if we assume we are talking about One Summer Day, then it is possible that it is the kalends who created the book in the first place.
Another detail to take into account is that the one fog-thing that appears in Galactic Pot-Healer, named Questobar, in an ethereal form at the bottom of Mare Nostrum, Glimmung recognizes upon sight. Though Glimmung declares him dead Questobar replies that “‘[n]othing on the Planet completely dies.’”6
Whether Glimmung knew of Questobar from One Summer Day and/or spied on him as his consciousness slowly materialized on Plowman’s Planet is never confirmed.
“‘...searching for living things to infest with its weight.’”
This sensation of fatigue that Nick and the spiddles feel as they travel this area must be the same oppressive sensation that caused the fog-things to pass from the planet and, later on, drive the human settlers away.
“‘...a fair number of them, in fact.’”
The place where the printers reside may be the most densely settled area that humans are populating in Nick and the Glimmung.
“...shapeless cone which radiated wet, dull colours, a mound of immense size which pulsed, ebbed and flowed and then reformed itself.”
Consider this description of the printers when reading the notes for the next chapter.
“‘...intelligent and kind, full of wise goodwill and the determination to help all who come to it.’”
This description of the collective character of the printers seems to bolster the earlier theory that they must have attempted to assist the fog-things in combating Glimmung.
In addition, the characteristic of the printers is shared by what are called the biltong in Dick’s short story Pay for the Printer. There, the people of Earth struggle to survive in a post-nuclear war world that has left civilization on the edge of total collapse. The biltong have been assisting in making copies, or “prints” as they are called, of technology and objects necessary for humanity’s daily life for, at the very least, a century and a half before the beginning of the story. The evidence to support this time frame being that one of the biltong is specified to be around that age.7
As to whether this short story is a part of the Glimmung continuity is a bit up to interpretation. The narrator specifically states that “[p]robably [the biltong] were indigenous to the Centaurus system.”8 Now on the face of it, that contradicts where Plowman’s Planet is, the Sirius star-system, but there are two points in response to the narrator’s statement.
First, the word “probably” casts a bit of doubt. The narrator is not revealed to be any of the characters in the story. The use of “probably” leads the reader to conclude that the narrator is not omniscient.
Second, supposing the narrator’s guess is correct, the printers in Nick and the Glimmung, as has been hinted at in earlier chapters, are not indigenous to Plowman’s Planet. The Centaurus system might be where the planet the printers, and by extension Glimmung, came from.
If one were to assume the biltong never lived on Plowman’s Planet it is also possible that, just as Glimmung was able to split his consciousness across multiple star-systems, the biltong may well have been a group who parted ways with the printers heading to Plowman’s Planet. There may have been multiple groups of biltong/printers who went off in different directions than just those two.
“...produced from itself a reproduction of the object.”
For the notes for the next chapter, also consider this ability of the printers.
“...their weariness, their age, their inability to keep their reproductions...”
This observation may be a clue to the origin of the conflict between Glimmung and the printers.
“...a portion of him came loose, forming a separate, small mound.”
Another detail to keep in mind for the next chapter.
“...solidified into black and white chessmen.”
In Pay for the Printer the biltong’s biological process of recreating objects is specified as producing a fluid from a “front orifice” before forming its “print” with its pseudopodia.9
Also in the short story, additional information is given about biltong biology. They are hatched from what it says are “basketball-sized” eggs, that these eggs taste good to Earth animals.10 In addition, when it is threatened it will make “a defensive shield” around itself.11
“‘...do so much better; even last month, in fact.’”
The biltong are also struggling to keep the quality of their object replicas up in Pay for the Printer.12
“‘Won’t you try again?’”
This insistence from the settler to keep trying to produce another better copy of her object is another possible clue for the eons long conflict.
“‘...Glimmung’s book.’ the woman behind Nick cried.”
So, there are people who have seen One Summer Day. One wonders how this lady found herself in such circumstances.
1) Galactic Pot-Healer (Vintage Books, 1994), pg. 26
2) Ibid
3) Ibid, pgs. 76-77
4) Ibid, pg. 78
5) Ibid, pg. 72-73
6) Ibid, pg. 171
7) The Philip K. Dick Reader (Citadel Press, 1997) pg. 240
8) Ibid, pg. 241
9) Ibid, pg. 248
10) Ibid, pgs. 245-246
11) Ibid, pg. 251
12) Ibid, pgs. 242-243, 246, 252
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