Norstrilia

DISCOURSES AND RECOURSES

Rod McBan, disguised as a cat, floated down the dropshaft to the strangest encounter which could have befallen any man of his epoch. C’mell floated down beside him. She clenched her skirt between her knees, so that it would not commit immodesties. A’gentur, his monkey hand lightly on C’mell’s shoulder, loved her soft red hair as it stood and moved with the up-draft which they themselves created; he looked forward to becoming E’ikasus again and he admired C’mell deeply, but love between the different strains of underpeople was necessarily platonic. Physiologically they could not breed outside their own stock and emotionally they found it hard to mesh deeply with the empathic needs of another form of life, however related it might be. E’ikasus therefore very truly and deeply wanted C’mell for his friend, and nothing more.

While they moved downward in relative peace, other people were concerned about them on various worlds.

“You, former Hon. Sec. of this government, are charged with going outside the limits of your onseckish duties and of attempting to commit mayhem or murder upon the person of one of Her Absent Majesty’s subjects, the said subject being Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan to the one-hundred-and-fifty-first generation; and you are further charged with the abuse of an official instrument of this Commonwealth government in designing and encompassing the said unlawful purpose, to wit, one mutated sparrow, serial number 0919487, specialty number 2328525, weighing forty-one kilograms and having a monetary value of 685 minicredits. What say you?”

Houghton Syme CXLIX buried his face in his hands and sobbed.

“Aunt Doris, he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead. I feel it.”

“Nonsense, Lavinia. He may be in trouble and we might not know. But with all that money, the government or the Instrumentality would use the Big Blink to send word of the change in status of this property. I don’t mean to sound cold-hearted, girl, but when there is this much property at stake, people act rapidly.”

“He is so dead.”

Doris was not one to discount the telepathic arts. She remembered how the Australians had gotten off the incarnate fury of Paradise VII. She went over to the cupboard and took from it a strangely tinted jar. “Do you know what this is?” said she to Lavinia.

The girl forced a smile past her desperate inward feelings. “Yes,” she said. “Ever since I was no bigger than a mini-elephant, people have told me that jar was ‘do not touch’.”

“Good girl, then, if you haven’t touched it!” said Aunt Doris dryly. “It’s a mixture of stroon and Paradise VII honey.”

“Honey,” cried Lavinia. “I thought no one ever went back to that horrible place.”

“Some do,” said Lavinia. “It seems that some Earth forms have taken over and are still living there. Including bees. The honey has powers on the human mind. It is a strong hypnotic. We mix it with stroon to make sure it is safe.”

Aunt Doris put a small spoon into the jar, lifted, spun the spoon to pick up the threads of heavy honey, and handed the spoon to Lavinia. “Here,” said she, “take this and lick it off. Swallow it all down.”

Lavinia hesitated and then obeyed. When the spoon was clean she licked her lips and handed the clean spoon back to Aunt Doris, who put it aside for washing up.

Aunt Doris ceremoniously put the jar back on the high shelf of the cupboard, locked the cupboard, and put the key in the pocket of her apron.

“Let’s sit outside,” said she to Lavinia.

“When’s it going to happen? The trance — the visions — whatever this stuff brings on?”

Doris laughed her weary rational laugh. “Oh, that! Sometimes nothing at all happens. In any event, it won’t hurt you, girl. Let’s sit on the bench. I’ll tell you if you start looking strange to me.”

They sat on the bench, doing nothing. Two police ornithopters, flying just under the forever grey clouds, quietly watched the station of Doom. They had been doing this ever since Rod’s computer showed him how to win all that money: the fortune was still piling up, almost faster than it could be computed. The bird-engines were lazy and beautiful as they flew. The operators had synchronized the flapping of the two sets of wings, so that they looked like rukhs doing a ballet. The effect caught the eyes of both Lavinia and Aunt Doris.

Lavinia suddenly spoke in a clear, sharp, demanding voice, quite unlike her usual tone: “It’s all mine, isn’t it?”

Doris breathed softly, “What, my dear?”

“The Station of Doom. I’m one of the heiresses, anyhow, aren’t I?” Lavinia pursed her lips in a proud prim smug smile which would have humiliated her if she had been in her right mind.

Aunt Doris said nothing. She nodded silently.

“If I marry Rod I’ll be Missus and Owner McBan, the richest woman who ever lived. But if I do marry him, he’ll hate me, because he’ll think it’s for his money and his power. But I’ve loved Rod, loved him specially because he couldn’t hier or spiek. I’ve always known that he would need me someday, not like my Daddy, singing his crazy sad proud songs forever and ever! But how can I marry him now… ?”

Whispered Doris, very gently, very insinuatingly: “Look for Rod, my dear. Look for Rod in that part of your mind which thought he was dead. Look for Rod, Lavinia, look for Rod.”

Lavinia laughed happily, and it was the laugh of a small child.

She stared at her feet, at the sky, at Doris — looking right through her.

Her eyes seemed to clear. When she spoke, it was in her normal adult voice:

“I see Rod, someone has changed him into a cat man, just like the pictures we’ve seen of underpeople. And there’s a girl with him — a girl, Doris — and I can’t be jealous of him being with her. She is the most beautiful thing that ever lived on any world. You ought to see her hair, Doris. You ought to see her hair. It is like a bushel of beautiful fire. Is that Rod? I don’t know. I can’t tell. I can’t see.” She sat on the bench, looking straight at Doris and seeing nothing, but weeping copiously.

Aunt Doris started to get up; it was about time for the poor thing to be led to her bed, so that she could sleep off the hypnotic of Paradise VII.

But Lavinia spoke again, “I see them too.”

“Who?” said Aunt Doris, not much interested, now that they had found their information about Rod. Doris never mentioned the matter to any masculine person, but she was a deeply superstitious person who found great satisfaction in tampering with the preternatural, but even in these ventures she kept the turn of mind, essentially practical, which had characterized her whole life. Thus, when Lavinia stumbled on the greatest secret of the contemporary universe, she made no note of it. She told no one about it, then or later.

Lavinia insisted, “I see the proud pale people with strong hands and white eyes. The ones who built the palace of the Governor of Night.”

“That’s nice,” said Aunt Doris, “but it is time for your nap…”

“Goodbye, dear people…” said Lavinia, a little drunkenly.

She had glimpsed the Daimoni in her home world.

Aunt Doris, unheeding, stood up and took Lavinia’s arm, leading her away to rest. Nothing remained of the Daimoni, except for a little song which Lavinia found herself making up a few weeks later, not knowing whether she had dreamed some such thing or had read it in a book:

Thus came news of Rod, unreported, unrepeated; thus passed the glimpse of the Daimoni in their star-hidden home.

“Father, you can’t be here. You never come here!”

“But I have,” said Lord William Not-from-here. “And it’s important.” .

“Important?” laughed Ruth. “Then it’s not me. I’m not important. Your work up there is.” She looked toward the rim of the Earthport, which floated, distinct and circular, beyond the crests of some faraway clouds.

The overdressed lord squatted incongruously on the sand.

“Listen, girl,” said he slowly and emphatically, “I’ve never asked much of you but I am asking now.”

“Yes, father,” she said, a little frightened by this totally unaccustomed air: her father was usually playfully casual with her, and equally forgot her ten seconds after he got through talking to her.

“Ruth, you know we are Old North Australians?”

“We’re rich, if that’s what you mean. Not that it matters, the way things go.”

“I’m not talking about riches now, I’m talking about home, and I mean it!”

“Home? We never had a home, father.”

“Norstrilia!” he snarled at her.

“I never saw it, father. Nor did you. Nor your father. Nor great-grandpa. What are you talking about?’

“We can go home again!”

“Father, what’s happened? Have you lost your mind? You’ve always told me that our family bought out and could never go back. What’s happened now? Have they changed the rules? I’m not even sure I want to go there, anyhow. No water, no beaches, no cities. Just a dry dull planet with sick sheep and a lot of immortal farmers who go around armed to the teeth!”

“Ruth, you can take us back!”

She jumped to her feet and slapped the sand off her bottom. She was a little taller than her father; though he was an extremely handsome, aristocratic-looking man, she was an even more distinctive person. It would be obvious to anyone that she would never lack for suitors or pursuers.

“All right, father. You always have schemes. Usually it’s antique money. This time I’m mixed up with it somehow, or you wouldn’t be here. Father, just what do you want me to do?”

“To marry. To marry the richest man who has ever been known in the universe.”

“Is that all?” she laughed. “Of course I’ll marry him. I’ve never married an offworlder before. Have you made a date with him?”

“You don’t understand, Ruth. This isn’t Earth marriage. In Norstrilian law and custom you marry only one man, you marry only once, and you stay married to him for as long as you live.”

A cloud passed over the sun. The beach became cooler. She looked at her father with a funny mixture of sympathy, contempt, and curiosity.

“That,” she said, “is a cat of another breed. I’ll have to see him first…”

“Don’t tell me there’s nothing. Or make up stories about blue men. You go back to that top deck and take it apart, molecule by molecule, until you find out where that brainbomb went off!”

“But, sir—”

“Don’t but me! I’ve been in battle and you haven’t. I know a bomb when I feel one. The blasted thing still gives me a headache. Now you take your men back up to that top deck and find out where that bomb went off.”

“Yes, sir,” said the young subchief gloomily, never thinking for a moment that he would have the least success in his mission. He saluted dispiritedly.

When he met his men at the door, he gave them an almost imperceptible shake of his head. In consequence, he and his men were the sorriest collection of slouching scarecrows ever seen at Earthport as they trudged their weary way up the ramp to the top deck of Earthport.

“We got the bull-man, B’dank, but somehow he escaped. Probably he is down in the sewers, hiding out. I haven’t got the heart to send the police after him. He won’t last long, down there. And it would make a fuss if I pardoned him. You might agree with me, but the rest of the Council wouldn’t.”

“And Commissioner Teadrinker, my lord? What are you going to do about him? That’s sticky wicket, my lord. He’s a former Lord of the Instrumentality. We can’t have people like that committing crimes.” The Lady Johanna Gnade was emphatic.

“I have the punishment for him,” said Jestocost, with a bland smile.

“Oblivion and reconditioning?” said the Lady Johanna. “He’s basically talented material.”

“Nothing that simple.”

“What, my lord?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean, ‘nothing,’ Jestocost? It does not make sense.” The Lady Johanna let a rare note of petulance come into her voice.

“I meant what I said, my lady. Nothing. He knows that I know something. The spider is dead. The robot is demolished. Nine other Rod McBans are causing a bit of chaos in the lower city. But Teadrinker doesn’t know that I know everything. I have my own sources.”

“We know you pride yourself on that,” said the Lady Johanna, with a charming wry smile. “We also know that you like to keep individual secrets from the rest of us. We put up with it, my lord, because we love you and trust you, but it could be a very dangerous practice if it were carried out by other persons, less judicious than you, or less skilful. And it could even be dangerous if—” she hesitated, looked at him appraisingly, and then went on, “—if, my lord, you lost your shrewdness, or died suddenly.”

“I haven’t,” said he crisply, dismissing the subject,

“You haven’t told me what you are going to do with Teadrinker.”

“Nothing, I said,” said Jestocost a little crossly. “I’m going to do nothing at all and let him wait for me to bring destruction down on him. If he begins to think that I have forgotten, I will find some little way of reminding him that somebody or something is on his trail. Teadrinker is going to be a very unhappy man before I get through with him.”

“That sounds inhumane, my lord. He might appeal.”

“And be tried for murder?”

She gave up. “Your ways are new, my lord. You have seen your way into the Rediscovery of Man. Letting people suffer. Letting things go wrong. I was brought up on the old philosophy — if you see wrong, right it.”

“And I saw,” said Jestocost, “that we were dying of perfection.”

“I suppose you’re right,” said she wearily. “You have this rich man covered, I suppose?”

“As well as I can manage,” said Jestocost.

“That’s perfect, then,” said she with an air of finality. “I just hope you haven’t gotten him mixed up with that queer hobby of yours.”

“Queer hobby?” said Jestocost in a courtly fashion, with a lift of his eyebrows.

“Underpeople,” she said with a tone of disgust. “Underpeople. I like you, Jestocost, but your fussing about those animals sometimes makes me sick.”

He did not argue. He stood very still and looked at her. She knew he was avoiding a provocation. He was her senior, so she offered him a very slight curtsey and left the room.

A bear-woman, complete with starched cap and nurse’s uniform, pushed the wheelchair of the Lord Crudelta into the room. Jestocost looked up from the situation shows which he had been watching. When he saw who it was, he offered Crudelta a deep bow indeed. The bear-woman, flustered by this famous place and all the great dignitaries whom she was meeting, spoke up in a singularly high voice,

“My lord and master Crudelta, may I leave you here?”

“Yes. Go. I will call for you later. Go to the bathroom on your way out. It’s on the right.”

“My lord — !” she gasped with embarrassment.

“You wouldnt have dared if I hadn’t told you. I’ve been watching your mind for the last half-hour. Now go along.”

The bear-woman fled with a rustle of her starched skirts.

When Crudelta looked directly at him, Jestocost gave him a very deep bow. In lifting his eyes he looked directly into the face of the old, old man and said, with something near pride in his voice,

“Still up to your old tricks, my lord and colleague Crudelta!”

“And you to yours, Jestocost. How are you going to get that boy out of the sewers?”

“What boy? What sewers?”

“Our sewers. The boy you sold this tower to.”

For once, Jestocost was flabbergasted. His jaw dropped. Then he collected himself and said, “You’re a knowledgeable man, my lord Crudelta.”

“That I am,” said Crudelta, “and a thousand years older than you, to boot. That was my reward for coming back from the Nothing-at-all.”

“I know that, sir.” Jestocost’s full, pleasant face did not show worry, but he studied the old man across from him with extreme care. In his prime, the Lord Crudelta had been the greatest of the Lords of the Instrumentality, a telepath of whom the other lords were always a little afraid, because he picked minds so deftly and quickly that he was the best mental pickpocket who had ever lived. A strong conservative, he had never opposed a specific policy because it ran counter to his general appetites. He had, for example, carried the vote for the Rediscovery of Man by coming out of retirement and tongue-lashing the whole Council into a corner with his vehement support for reform. Jestocost had never liked him — who could like a rapier tongue, a mind of unfathomable brilliance, a cold old ego which neither offered nor asked companionship? Jestocost knew that if the old man had caught on to the Rod McBan adventure, he might be on the trail of Jestocost’s earlier deal with — no, no, no! don’t think it here, not with those eyes watching.

“I know about that, too,” said the old old man.

“What?”

“The secret you are trying most of all to hide.”

Jestocost stood submissive, waiting for the blow to fall.

The old man laughed. Most people would have expected a cackle from that handsome fresh young face with the withered spidery body. They would have been fooled. The laugh was full-bodied, genuine and warm.

“Redlady’s a fool,” said Crudelta.

“I think so too,” said Jestocost, “but what are your reasons, my lord and master?”

“Sending that young man off his own planet when he has so much wealth and so little experience.”

Jestocost nodded, not wanting to say anything until the old man had made his line of attack plain.

“I like your idea, however,” said the Lord Crudelta. “Sell him the Earth and then tax him for it. But what is your ultimate aim? Making him Emperor of the Planet Earth, in the old style? Murdering him? Driving him mad? Having the cat-girl of yours seduce him and then send him home a bankrupt? I admit I have thought of all these too, but I didn’t see how any of them would fit in with your passion for justice. But there’s one thing you can’t do, Jestocost. You can’t sell him the planet Earth and then have him stay here and manage it. He might want to use this tower for his residence. That would be too much. I am too old to move out. And he mustn’t roll up that ocean out there and take it home for a souvenir. You’ve all been very clever, my lord — clever enough to be fools. You have created an unnecessary crisis. What are you going to get out of it?”

Jestocost plunged. The old man must have picked his own mind. Nowhere else could he have put all the threads of the case together. Jestocost decided on the truth and the whole truth. He started with the day that the Big Blink rang in the enormous transactions in stroon futures, financial gambles which soon reached out of the commodity markets of Old North Australia and began to unbalance the economy of all the civilized worlds. He started to explain who Redlady was—

“Don’t tell me that,” cried the Lord Crudelta. “It was I who caught him, sentenced him to death, and then argued to have the sentence set aside. He’s not a bad man, but he’s a sly one, that he is. He’s smart enough to be an utter and complete fool when he gets wound up in his logical plots. I’ll wager you a minicredit to a credit that he has already murdered somebody by now. He always does. He has a taste for theatrical violence. But go back to your story. Tell me what you plan to do. If I like it, I will help you. If I don’t like it, I will have the whole story before a plenum of the council this very morning, and you know that they will tear your bright idea to shreds. They will probably seize the boy’s property, send him to a hospital, and have him come out speaking Basque as a flamenco player. You know as well as I do that the Instrumentality is very generous with other people’s property, but pretty ruthless when it comes to any threat directed against itself. After all, I was one of the men who wiped out Raumsog.”

Jestocost began to talk very quietly, very calmly. He spoke with the assurance of an accountant who, books in order, is explaining an intricate point to his manager. Old himself, he was a child compared to the antiquity and wisdom of the Lord Crudelta. He went into details, including the ultimate disposition of Rod McBan. He even shared with the Lord Crudelta his sympathies for the underpeople and his own very secret, very quiet struggle to improve their position. The only thing which he did not mention was the E’telekeli and the counter-brain which the underpeople had set up in Downdeep-downdeep. If the old man knew it, he knew it, and Jestocost couldn’t stop him, but if he did not know it, there was no point in telling him.

The Lord Crudelta did not respond with senile enthusiasm or childish laughter. He reverted, not to his childhood but to his maturity; with great dignity and force he said:

“I approve. I understand. You have my proxy if you need it. Call that nurse to come and get me. I thought you were a clever fool, Jestocost. You sometimes are. This time you are showing that you have a heart as well as a head. One thing more. Bring that doctor Vomact back from Mars soon, and don’t torment Teadrinker too long, just for the sake of being clever. I might take it into my mind to torment you.”

’’And the ex-Lord Redlady?” asked Jestocost deferentially.

“Him, nothing. Nothing. Let him live his life. The Old North Australians might as well cut their political teeth on him.”

The bear-woman rustled back into the room. The lord Crudelta waved his hand. Jestocost bowed almost to the floor, and the wheelchair, heavy as a tank, creaked its way across the doorsill.

“That,” said Jestocost, “could have been trouble!” He wiped his brow.