Norstrilia

HOSPITALITY AND ENTRAPMENT

People waited, here and there. If there had been worldwide news coverage, the population would have converged on Earthport with curiosity, passion, or greed. But news had been forbidden long before; people could know only the things which concerned them personally; the centers of Earth remained undisturbed. Here and there, as Rod made his trip from Mars to Earth, there were anticipations of the event. Overall, the world of Old Old Earth remained quiet, except for the perennial bubble of its inward problems.

“They shut me out of the meeting this morning, when I’m in charge of visitors. That means that something is in the air,” said Commissioner Teadrinker to his underman, B’dank.

B’dank, expecting a dull day, had been chewing his cud while sitting on his stool in the corner. He knew far more about the case than did his master, and he had learned his additional information from the secret sources of the underpeople, but he was resolved to betray nothing, to express nothing. Hastily he swallowed his cud and said, in his reassuring, calm bull voice:

“There might be some other reason, Sir and Master. If they were considering a promotion for you, they would leave you out of the meeting. You certainly deserve a promotion, Sir and Master.”

“Are the spiders ready?” asked Teadrinker crossly.

“Who can tell the mind of a giant spider?” said B’dank calmly. “I talked to the foreman-spider for three hours yesterday with sign language. He wants twelve cases of beer. I told him I would give him more — he could have ten. The poor devil can’t count, though he thinks he can, so he was pleased at having outbargained me. They will take the person you designate to the steeple of Earthport and they will hide that person so that the human being cannot be found for many hours. When I appear with the cases of beer, they will give me the person. I will then jump out of a window, holding the person in my arms. There are so few people who go down the outside of Earthport that they may not notice me at all. I will take the person to the ruined palace directly under Alpha Ralpha Boulevard, the one which you showed me, Sir and Master, and there I will keep the person in good order until you come and do the things which you have to do.”

Teadrinker looked across the room. The big, florid, handsome face was so exasperatingly calm that it annoyed. Teadrinker had heard that bull-men, because of their cattle origin, were sometimes subject to fits of uncontrollable frantic rage, but he had never seen the least sign of any such phenomenon in B’dank. He snapped,

“Aren’t you worried?”

“Why should I worry, Sir and Master? You are doing the worrying for both of us.”

“Go fry yourself!”

“That is not an operational instruction,” said B’dank. “I suggest that the master eat something. That will calm his nerves. Nothing at all will happen today, and it is very hard for true men to wait for nothing at all. I have seen many of them get upset.”

Teadrinker gritted his teeth at this extreme reasonableness. Nevertheless, he took a dehydrated banana out of his desk drawer and began chewing on it.

He looked sharply across at B’dank. “Do you want one of these things?”

B’dank slid off his chair with surprisingly smooth agility; he was at the desk, his enormous ham-sized hand held out, before he said,

“Yes, indeed, sir. I love bananas.”

Teadrinker gave him one and then said, fretfully,

“Are you sure of the fact you never met the Lord Redlady?”

“Sure as any underman can be,” said B’dank, munching the banana. “We never really know what has been put into our original conditioning, or who put it there. We’re inferior and we’re not supposed to know. It is forbidden even to inquire.”

“So you admit that you might be a spy or agent of the Lord Redlady?”

“I might be, sir, but I do not feel like it.”

“Do you know who Redlady is?”

“You have told me, sir, that he is the most dangerous human being in the whole galaxy.”

“That’s right,” said Teadrinker, “and if I am running into something which the Lord Redlady has set up, I might as well cut up my throat before I start.”

“It would be simpler, sir,” said B’dank, “not to kidnap this Rod McBan at all. That is the only element of danger. If you did nothing, things would go on as they always have gone on quietly, calmly.”

“That’s the horror and anxiety of it! They do always go on. Don’t you think I want to get out of here, to taste power and freedom again?”

“You say so, sir,” said B’dank, hoping that Teadrinker would offer him one more of those delicious dried bananas.

Teadrinker, distracted, did not.

He just walked up and down his room, desperate with the torment of hope, danger, and delay.

The Lady Johanna Gnade was there first. She was clean, well dressed, alert. The Lord Jestocost, who followed her in, wondered if she had any personal life at all. It was bad manners, among the Chiefs of the Instrumentality, to inquire into another Chief’s personal affairs, even though the complete personal histories of each of them, kept up to the day and minute, was recorded in the computer cabinet in the corner. Jestocost knew, because he had peeped his own record, using another Chiefs name, just so that he could see whether several minor illegalities of his had been recorded; they had been, all except for the biggest one — his deal with the cat girl C’mell — which he had successfully kept off the recording screens. (The record simply showed him having a nap at the time.) If the Lady Johanna had any secrets, she kept them well.

“My sir and colleague,” said she, “I suspect you of sheer inquisitiveness — a vice most commonly attributed to women.”

“When we get as old as this, my lady, the differences in character between men and women become imperceptible. If, indeed, they ever existed in the first place. You and I are bright people and we each have a good nose for danger or disturbance. Isn’t it likely we would both look up somebody with the impossible name of Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan to the hundred-and-fifty-first generation? See — I memorized all of it! Don’t you think that was rather clever of me?”

“Rather,” said she, in a tone which implied she didn’t.

“I’m expecting him this morning.”

“You are?” she asked, on a rising note which implied that there was something improper about his knowledge. “There’s nothing about it in the messages.”

“That’s it,” said the Lord Jestocost, smiling, “I arranged for Mars solar radiation to be carried two extra decimals until he left. This morning it’s back down to three decimals. That means he’s coming. Clever of me, wasn’t it?”

“Too clever,” she said. “Why ask me? I never thought you valued my opinion. Anyhow, why are you taking all these pains with the case? Why don’t you just ship him out so far that it would take him a long lifetime, even with stroon, to get back here again?”

He looked at her evenly until she flushed. He said nothing.

“My — my comment was improper, I suppose.” She stammered. “You and your sense of justice. You’re always putting the rest of us in the wrong.”

“I didn’t mean to,” he said mildly, “because I am just thinking of Earth. Did you know he owns this tower?”

“Earthport?” she cried. “Impossible.”

“Not at all,” said Jestocost. “I myself sold it to his agent ten days ago. For forty megacredits FOE money. That’s more than we happen to have on Earth right now. When he deposited it, we began paying him three percent a year interest. And that wasn’t all he bought from me. I sold him that ocean too, right there, the one the ancients called Atlantic. And I sold him three hundred thousand attractive underwomen trained in various tasks, together with the dower rights of seven hundred human women of appropriate ages.”

“You mean you did all this to save the Earth treasury three megacredits a year?”

“Wouldn’t you? Remember this is FOE money.”

She pursed her lips. Then she burst into a smile. “I never saw anyone else like you, my Lord Jestocost. You’re the fairest man I ever knew and yet you never forget a little bit more in the way of earnings!”

“That’s not the end of it,” said he with a very crafty, pleased smile. “Did you read Amended (Reversionary) Schedule 711-19-13P which you yourself voted for eleven days ago?”

“I looked at it,” she said defensively. “We all did. It was something to do with Earth funds and Instrumentality funds. The Earth representative didn’t complain. We all passed it because we trusted you.”

“Do you know what it means?”

“Frankly, not at all. Does it have anything to do with this rich old man, McBan?”

“Don’t be sure,” said the Lord Jestocost, “that he’s old. He might be young. Anyhow, the tax schedule raises taxes on kilocredits very slightly. Megacredit taxes are divided evenly between Earth and the Instrumentality, provided that the owner is not personally operating the property. It comes to one per cent a month. That’s the very small type in the footnote at the bottom of the seventh page of rates.”

“You — you mean—” she gasped with laughter, “that by selling the poor man the Earth you are not only cutting him out of three percent interest a year, but you’re charging him twelve percent taxes. Blessed rockets, man, you’re weird. I love you. You’re the cleverest, most ridiculous person we ever had as a Chief of the Instrumentality!” From the Lady Johanna Gnade, this was lurid language indeed. Jestocost did not know whether to be offended or pleased.

Since she was in a rare good humor, he dared to mention his half-secret project to her.

“Do you think, my lady, that if we have all this unexpected credit, we could waste a little of our stroon imports?”

Her laugh stopped. “On what?” she said sharply.

“On the underpeople. For the best of them.”

“Oh, no. Oh, no! Not for the animals, while there are still people who suffer. You’re mad to think of it, my Lord.”

“I’m mad,” he said. “I’m mad all right. Mad — for justice. And this strikes me as simple justice. I’m not asking for equal rights. Merely for a little more justice for them.”

“They’re underpeople,” she said blankly. “They’re animals.” As though this comment settled the matter altogether.

“You never heard, did you, my lady, of the dog named Joan?” His question held a wealth of allusion.

She saw no depth in it, said flatly, “No,” and went back to studying the agency for the day.

The old engines turned like tides. The smell of hot oil was on them. Down here there were no luxuries. Life and flesh were cheaper than transistors; besides, they had much less radiation to be detected. In the groaning depths, the hidden and forgotten under-people lived. They thought their chief, the E’telekeli, to be magical. Sometimes he thought so himself.

His white handsome face staring like a marble bust of immortality, his crumpled wings hugged closely to him in fatigue, he called to his first-egg child, the girl E’lamelanie,

“He comes, my darling.”

“That one, father? The promised one.”

“The rich one.”

Her eyes widened. She was his daughter but she did not always understand his powers. “How do you know, father?”

“If I tell you the truth, will you agree to let me erase it from your mind right away, so there will be no danger of betrayal?”

“Of course, father.”

“No,” said the marble-faced bird-man, “you must say the right words—”

“I promise, father, that if you fill my heart with the truth, and if my joy at the truth is full, that I will yield to you my mind, my whole mind without fear, hope, or reservation, and that I will ask you to take from my mind whatever truth or parts of the truth might hurt our kind of people, in the name of the First Forgotten One, in the Name of the Second Forgotten One, in the Name of the Third Forgotten One, and for the sake of D’joan whom we all love and remember!”

He stood. He was a tall man, His legs ended in the enormous feet of a bird, with white talons shimmering like mother of pearl. His humanoid hands stood forth from the joint of his wings; with them he extended the prehistoric gesture of blessing over her head, while he chanted the truth in a ringing hypnotic voice,

“Let the truth be yours, my daughter, that you may be whole and happy with the truth. Knowing the truth, my daughter, know freedom and the right to forget!

“The child, my child, who was your brother, the little boy you loved…”

“Yeekasoose!” she said, her voice trance-like and childish.

“E’ikasus, whom you remember, was changed by me, his father, into the form of a small ape-man, so that the true people mistook him for an animal, not an underperson. They trained him as a surgeon and sent him to the Lord Redlady. He came with this young man McBan to Mars, where he met C’mell, whom I recommended to the Lord Jestocost for confidential errands. They are coming back with this man today. He has already bought the Earth, or most of it. Perhaps he will do us good. Do you know what you should know, my daughter?”

“Tell me, father, tell me. How do you know?”

“Remember the truth, girl, and then lose it! The messages come from Mars. We cannot touch the Big Blink or the message-coding machines, but each recorder has his own style. By a shift in the pace of his work, a friend can relay moods, emotions, ideas, and sometimes names. They have sent me words like ‘riches, monkey, small, cat, girl, everything, good’ by the pitch and speed of their recording. The human messages carry ours and no cryptographer in the world can find them.

“Now you know, and you will now now now now forget!”

He raised his hands again.

E’lamelanie looked at him normally with a happy smile, “It’s so sweet and funny, daddy, but I know I’ve just forgotten something good and wonderful!” Ceremonially he added, “Do not forget Joan.” Formally she responded, “I shall never forget Joan.”