Norstrilia

NEARBY EXILE

Rod woke with a strange feeling of well-being. In a corner of his mind there were memories of pandemonium — knives, blood, medicine, a monkey working as surgeon. Rum dreams! He glanced around and immediately tried to jump out of bed.

The whole world was on fire!

Bright blazing intolerable fire, like a blowtorch.

But the bed held him. He realized that a loose comfortable jacket ended in tapes and that the tapes were anchored in some way to the bed.

“Eleanor!” he shouted, “Come here.”

He remembered the mad bird attacking him, Lavinia transporting him to the cabin of the sharp Earthman, Lord Redlady. He remembered medicines and fuss. But this — what was this?

When the door opened, more of the intolerable light poured in. It was as though every cloud had been stripped from the sky of Old North Australia, leaving only the blazing heavens and the fiery sun. There were people who had seen that happen, when the weather machines occasionally broke down and let a hurricane cut a hole in the clouds, but it had certainly not happened in his time, or in his grandfather’s time.

The man who entered was pleasant, but he was no Norstrilian. His shoulders were slight, he did not look as though he could hit a cow, and his face had been washed so long and so steadily that it looked like a baby’s face. He had an odd medical-looking suit on, all white, and his face combined the smile and the ready professional sympathy of a good physician.

“We’re feeling better, I see,” said he.

“Where on Earth am I?” asked Rod. “In a satellite? It feels odd.”

“You’re not on Earth, man.”

“I know I’m not. I’ve never been there. Where’s this place?”

“Mars. The Old Star Station. I’m Jean-Jacques Vomact.” Rod mumbled the name so badly the other man had to spell it out for him. When that was straightened out, Rod came back to the subject.

“Where’s Mars? Can you untie me? When’s that light going to go off?”

“I’ll untie you right now,” said Doctor Vomact, “but stay in bed and take it easy until we’ve given you some food and taken some tests. The light — that’s sunshine. I’d say it’s about seven hours, local time, before it goes off. This is late morning. Don’t you know what Mars is? It’s a planet.”

“New Mars, you mean,” said Rod proudly, “the one with the enormous shops and the zoological gardens.”

“The only shops we have here are the cafeteria and the PX. New Mars? I’ve heard of that place somewhere. It does have big shops and some kind of an animal show. Elephants you can hold in your hand. They’ve got those too. This isn’t that place at all. Wait a sec, I’ll roll your bed to the window.”

Rod looked eagerly out of the window. It was frightening. A naked, dark sky did not have a cloud in sight. A few holes showed in it here and there. They almost looked like the “stars” which people saw when they were in spaceship transit from one cloudy planet to another. Dominating everything was a single explosive horrible light, which hung high and steady in the sky without ever going off. He found himself cringing for the explosion, but he could tell, from the posture of the doctor next to him, that the doctor was not in the least afraid of that chronic hydrogen bomb, whatever it might turn out to be. Keeping his voice level and trying not to sound like a boy he said,

“What’s that?”

“The Sun.”

“Don’t cook my book, mate. Give me the straight truth. Everybody calls his star a sun. What’s this one?”

“The Sun. The original Sun. The Sun of Old Earth itself. Just as this is plain Mars. Not even Old Mars. Certainly not New Mars. This Earth’s neighbor.”

“That thing never goes off, goes up — boom! — or goes down?”

“The Sun, you mean,” said Doctor Vomact. “No, I should think not. I suppose it looked that way to your ancestors and mine half a million years ago, when we were all running around naked on Earth.” The doctor busied himself as he talked. He chopped the air with a strange-looking little key, and the tapes fell loose. The mittens dropped off Rod’s hands. Rod looked at his own hands in the intense light and saw that they seemed strange. They looked smooth and naked and clean, like the doctor’s own hands. Weird memories began to come back to him, but his handicap about spieking and hiering telepathically had made him cautious and sensitive, so he did not give himself away.

“If this is old, old Mars, what are you doing, talking the Old North Australian language to me? I thought my people were the only ones in the universe who still spoke Ancient Inglish.” He shifted proudly but clumsily over to the Old Common Tongue: “You see, the Appointed Ones of my family taught me this language as well. I’ve never been offworld before.”

“I speak your language,” said the doctor, “because I learned it. I learned it because you paid me, very generously, to learn it. In the months that we have been reassembling you, it’s come in handy. We just let down the portal of memory and identity today, but I’ve talked to you for hundreds of hours already.”

Rod tried to speak.

He could not utter a word. His throat was dry and he was afraid that he might throw up his food — if he had eaten any.

The doctor put a friendly hand on his arm. “Easy, Mister and Owner McBan, easy now. We all do that when we come out.”

Rod croaked, “I’ve been dead? Dead? Me?”

“Not exactly dead,” said the doctor, “but close to it.”

“The box — that little box!” cried Rod.

“What little box?”

“Please, doctor — the one I came in?”

“That box wasn’t so little,” said Doctor Vomact. He squared his hands in the air and made a shape about the size of the little ladies’ bonnet-box which Rod had seen in the Lord Redlady’s private operating room. “It was this big. Your head was full natural size. That’s why it’s been so easy and so successful to bring you back to normality in such a hurry.”

“And Eleanor?”

“Your companion? She made it, too. Nobody intercepted the ship.”

“You mean the rest is true, too. I’m still the richest man in the universe? And I’m gone, gone from home?” Rod would have liked to beat the bedspread, but did not.

“I am glad,” said Doctor Vomact, “to see you express so much feeling about your situation. You showed a great deal when you were under the sedatives and hypnotics, but I was beginning to wonder how we could help you realize your true position when you came back, as you have, to normal life. Forgive me for talking this way. I sound like a medical journal. It’s hard to be friends with a patient, even when one really likes him…”

Vomact was a small man, a full head shorter than Rod himself, but so gracefully proportioned that he did not look stunted or little. His face was thin, with a mop of ungovernable black hair which fell in all directions. Among Norstrilians, this fashion would have been deemed eccentric; to judge by the fact that other Earthmen let their hair grow wild and long, it must have been an Earth fashion. Rod found it foolish but not repulsive.

It was not Vomact’s appearance which caused the impression. It was the personality which tingled out of every pore. Vomact could become calm when he knew, from his medical wisdom, that kindness and tranquility were in order, but these qualities were not usual to him. He was vivacious, moody, lively, talkative to an extreme, but he was sensitive enough to the person to whom he was talking: he never became a bore. Even among Norstrilian women, Rod bad never seen a person who expressed so much, so fluently. When Vomact talked, his hands were in constant motion — outlining, describing, clarifying the points which he described. When he talked he smiled, scowled, raised his eyebrows in questioning, stared with amazement, looked aside in wonder. Rod was used to the sight of two Norstrilians having a long telepathic conversation, spieking and hiering one another as their bodies reposed, comfortable and immobile, while their minds worked directly on one another. To do all this with the speaking voice — that, to a Norstrilian, was a marvel to hear and behold. There was something graceful and pleasant about the animation of this Earth doctor which stood in complete contrast to the quick dangerous decisiveness of the Lord Redlady. Rod began to think that if Earth were full of people, all of them like Vomact, it must be a delightful but confusing place. Vomact once hinted that his family was unusual, so that even in the long weary years of perfection, when everyone else had numbers, they kept their family name secret but remembered.

One afternoon Vomact suggested that they walk across the Martian plain a few kilometers to the ruins of the first human settlement on Mars. “We have to talk,” said he, “but it is easy enough to talk through these soft helmets. The exercise will do you good. You’re young and you will take a lot of conditioning.”

Rod agreed.

Friends they became in the ensuing days.

Rod found that the doctor was by no means as young as he looked, just ten years or so older than himself. The doctor was a hundred and ten years old, and had gone through his first rejuvenation just ten years before. He had two more and then death, at the age of four hundred, if the present schedule were kept for Mars.

“You may think, Mister McBan, that you are an upset, wild type yourself. I can promise you, young bucko, that Old Earth is such a happy mess these days that they will never notice you. Haven’t you heard about the Rediscovery of Man?”

Rod hesitated. He had paid no attention to the news himself, but he did not want to discredit his home planet by making it seem more ignorant than it really was. “Something about language, wasn’t it? And length of life, too? I never paid much attention to off-planet news, unless it was technical inventions or big battles. I think some people in Old North Australia have a keen interest in Old Earth itself. What was it, anyhow?”

“The Instrumentality finally took on a big plan. Earth had no dangers, no hopes, no rewards, no future except endlessness. Everybody stood a thousand-to-one chance of living the four hundred years which was allotted for persons who earned the full period by keeping busy—”

“Why didn’t everybody do it?” interrupted Rod.

“The Instrumentality took care of the shorties in a very fair way. If offered them wonderfully delicious and exciting vices when they got to be about seventy. Things that combined electronics, drugs and sex in the subjective mind. Anybody who didn’t have a lot of work to do ended up getting ‘the blissfuls’ and eventually died of sheer fun. Who wants to take time for mere hundred-years renewals when they can have five or six thousand years of orgies and adventures every single night?”

“Sounds horrible to me,” said Rod. “We have our Giggle Rooms, but people die in them right away. They don’t mess around, dying among their neighbors. Think of the awful interaction you must get with the normals.”

Doctor Vomact’s face clouded over with anger and grief. He turned away and looked over the endless Martian plains. Dear blue Earth hung friendlily in the sky. He looked up at the star of Earth as though he hated it and he said to Rod, his face still turned away,

“You may have a point there, Mister McBan. My mother was a shortie and after she gave up, my father went too. And I’m a normal. I don’t suppose I’ll get over what it did to me. They weren’t my real parents, of course — there was nothing that dirty in my family — but they were my final adopters. I’ve always thought that you Old North Australians were crazy, rich barbarians for killing off your teen-agers if they didn’t jump enough or something crude like that, but I’ll admit that you’re clean barbarians. You don’t make yourselves live with the sweet sick stink of death inside your own apartments…”

“What’s an apartment?”

“What we live in.”

“You mean a house,” said Rod.

“No, an apartment is part of a house. Two hundred thousand of them sometimes make up one big house.”

“You mean,” said Rod, “there are two hundred thousand families all in one enormous living room? The room must be kilometers long.”

“No, no, no!” said the doctor, laughing a little. “Each apartment has a separate living room with sleep sections that come out of the walls, an eating section, a washroom for yourself and your visitors that might come to have a bath with you, a garden room, a study room, and a personality room.”

“What’s a personality room?”

“That,” said the doctor, “is a little room where we do things that we don’t want our own families to watch.”

“We call that a bathroom,” said Rod.

The doctor stopped in their walk. “That’s what makes it so hard to explain to you what Earth is doing. You’re fossils, that’s what you are. You’ve had the old language of Inglish, you keep your family system and your names, you’ve had unlimited life—”

“Not unlimited,” said Rod, “just long. We have to work for it and pay for it with tests.”

The doctor looked sorry. “I didn’t mean to criticize you. You’re different. Very different from what Earth has been. You would have found Earth inhuman. Those apartments we were talking about, for example. Two-thirds of them empty. Underpeople moving into the basements. Records lost; jobs forgotten. If we didn’t make such good robots, everything would have fallen to pieces at the same time.” He looked at Rod’s face. “I can see you don’t understand me. Let’s take a practical case. Can you imagine killing me?”

“No,” said Rod, “I like you.”

“I don’t mean that. Not the real us. Suppose you didn’t know who I was and you found me intruding on your sheep or stealing your stroon.”

“You couldn’t steal my stroon. My government processes it for me and you couldn’t get near it.”

“All right, all right, not stroon. Just suppose I came from off your planet without a permit. How would you kill me?”

“I wouldn’t kill you. I’d report it to the police.”

“Suppose I drew a weapon on you?”

“Then,” said Rod, “you’d get your neck broken. Or a knife in your heart. Or a minibomb somewhere near you.”

“There!” said the doctor, with a broad grin.

“There what?” said Rod.

“You know how to kill people, should the need arise.”

“All citizens know how,” said Rod, “but that doesn’t mean they do it. We’re not bushwhacking each other all the time, the way I heard some Earth people thought we did.”

“Precisely,” said Vomact. “And that’s what the Instrumentality is trying to do for all mankind today. To make life dangerous enough and interesting enough to be real again. We have diseases, dangers, fights, chances. It’s been wonderful.”

Rod looked back at the group of sheds they had left. “I don’t see any signs of it here on Mars.”

“This is a military establishment. It’s been left out of the Rediscovery of Man until the effects have been studied better. We’re still living perfect lives of four hundred years here on Mars. No danger, no change, no risk.”

“How do you have a name, then?”

“My father gave it to me. He was an official Hero of the Frontier Worlds who came home and died a shortie. The Instrumentality let people like that have names before they gave the privilege to everybody.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Working.” The doctor started to resume their walk. Rod did not feel much awe of him. He was such a shamelessly talkative person, the way most Earth men seemed to be, that it was hard not to be at ease with him.

Rod took Vomact’s arm, gently. “There’s more to it—”

“You know it,” said Vomact. “You have good perceptions. Should I tell you?’

“Why not?” said Rod.

“You’re my patient. It might not be fair to you.”

“Go ahead,” said Rod, “you ought to know I’m tough.”

“I’m a criminal,” said the doctor.

“But you’re alive,” said Rod. “In my world we kill criminals or we send them off planet.”

“I’m off planet,” said Vomact. “This isn’t my world. For most of us here on Mars, this is a prison, not a home.”

“What did you do?”

“It’s too awful…” said the doctor. “I’m ashamed of it myself. They have sentenced me to conditional conditional.”

Rod looked at him quickly. Momentarily he wondered whether he might be the victim of some outrageous bewilderment and grief.

“I revolted,” said the doctor, “without knowing it. People can say anything they want on Earth, and they can print up to twenty copies of anything they need to print, but beyond that it’s mass communications. Against the law. When the Rediscovery of Man came, they gave me the Spanish language to work on. I used a lot of research to get out La Prensa. Jokes, dialogues, imaginary advertisements, reports of what had happened in the ancient world. But then I got a bright idea. I went down to Earthport and got the news from incoming ships. What was happening here. What was happening there. You have no idea, Rod, how interesting mankind is! And the things we do… so strange, so comical, so pitiable. The news even comes in on machines, all marked ‘official use only.’ I disregarded that and I printed up one issue with nothing but truth in it — a real issue, all facts.”

“I printed real news.”

“Rod, the roof fell in. All persons who had been reconditioned for Spanish were given stability tests. I was asked, did I know the law? Certainly, said I, I knew the law. No mass communications except within government. News is the mother of opinion, opinion the cause of mass delusion, delusion the source of war. The law was plain and I thought it did not matter. I thought it was just an old law.

“I was wrong, Rod, wrong. They did not charge me with violating the news laws. They charged me with revolt — against the Instrumentality. They sentenced me to death, immediately. Then they made it conditional, conditional on my going off planet and behaving well. When I got here, they made it double conditional. If my act has no bad results. But I can’t find out. I can go back to Earth any time. That part is no trouble. If they think my misdeed still has effect, they will give me the dream punishments or send me off to that awful planet somewhere. If they think it doesn’t matter, they will restore my citizenship with a laugh. But they don’t know the worst of it. My underman learned Spanish and the underpeople are keeping the newspaper going very secretly. I can’t even imagine what they will do to me if they ever find out what has gone wrong and know that it was me who started it all. Do you think I’m wrong, Rod?”

Rod stared at him. He was not used to judging adults, particularly not at their own request. In Old North Australia, people kept their distance. There were fitting ways for doing everything, and one of the most fitting things was to deal only with people of your own age group.

He tried to be fair, to think in an adult way, and he said, “Of course I think you’re wrong, Mister and Doctor Vomact. But you’re not very wrong. None of us should trifle with war.”

Vomact seized Rod’s arm. The gesture was hysterical, almost ugly. “Rod,” he whispered, very urgently, “you’re rich. You come from an important family. Could you get me into Old North Australia?”

“Why not?” said Rod. “I can pay for all the visitors I want.”

“No, Rod, I don’t mean that. As an immigrant.”

It was Rod’s turn to become tense. “Immigrant?” he said. “The penalty for immigration is death. We’re killing our own people right now, just to keep the population down. How do you think we could let outsiders settle with us? And the stroon. What about that?”

“Never mind, Rod,” said Vomact. “I won’t bother you again. I won’t mention it again. It’s a weary thing, to live many years with death ready to open the next door, ring the next bell, be on the next page of the message file. I haven’t married. How could I?” With a whimsical turn of his vivacious mind and face, he was off on a cheerful track. “I have a medicine, Rod, a medicine for doctors, even for rebels. Do you know what it is?”

“A tranquilizer?” Rod was still shocked at the indecency of anyone mentioning immigration to a Norstrilian. He could not think straight.

“Work,” said the little doctor, “that’s my medicine.”

“Work is always good,” said Rod, feeling pompous at the generalization. The magic had gone out of the afternoon.

The doctor felt it too. He sighed. “I’ll show you the old sheds which men from Earth first built. And then I’ll go to work. Do you know what my main work is?”

“No,” said Rod, politely.

“You,” said Doctor Vomact, with one of his sad gay mischievous smiles. “You’re well but I’ve got to make you more than well. I’ve got to make you kill-proof.”

They had reached the sheds.

The ruins might be old but they were not very impressive. They looked something like the homes on the more modest stations back on Norstrilia.

On their way back Rod said, very casually,

“What are you going to do to me, Sir and Doctor?”

“Anything you want,” said Vomact lightly.

“Really, now. What?”

“Well,” said Vomact, “the Lord Redlady sent along a whole cube of suggestions. Keep your personality. Keep your retinal and brain images. Change your appearance. Change your workwoman into a young man who looks just like your description.”

“You can’t do that to Eleanor. She’s a citizen.”

“Not here, not on Mars, she isn’t. She’s your baggage.”

“But her legal rights!”

“This is Mars, Rod, but it’s Earth territory. Under Earth law. Under the direct control of the Instrumentality. We can do these things all right. The hard thing is this. Would you consent to passing for a underman?”

“I never saw one. How would I know?” said Rod.

“Could you stand the shame of it?”

Rod laughed, by way of an answer.

Vomact sighed. “You’re funny people, you Norstrilians. I’d rather die than be mistaken for an underman. The disgrace of it, the contempt! But the Lord Redlady said that you could walk into Earth as free as a breeze if we made you pass for a cat-man. I might as well tell you, Rod. Your wife is already here.”

Rod stopped walking. “My wife? I have no wife.”

“Your cat-wife,” said the doctor. “Of course it isn’t real marriage. Underpeople aren’t allowed to have it. But they have a companionship which looks something like marriage and we sometimes slip and call them husband and wife. The Instrumentality has already sent a cat-girl out to be your ‘wife.’ She’ll travel back to Earth with you from Mars. You’ll just be a pair of lucky cats who’s been doing dances and acrobatics for the bored station personnel here.”

“And Eleanor?”

“I suppose somebody will kill her, thinking it’s you. That’s what you brought her for, isn’t it? Aren’t you rich enough?”

“No, no, no” said Rod, “nobody is that rich. We have to think of something else.”

They spent the entire walk making new plans which would protect Eleanor and Rod both.

As they entered the shedport and took off their helmets, Rod said,

“This wife of mine, when can I see her?”

“You won’t overlook her,” said Vomact. “She’s as wild as fire and twice as beautiful.”

“Does she have a name?”

“Of course she does,” said the doctor. “They all do.”

“What is it, then?”

“C’mell.”