Norstrilia

NIGHT, AND THE SKY UNFAMILIAR

There was a slight sound.

Rod turned around to face the Catmaster.

The old man was unchanged. He still wore the lunatic robes of grandeur, but his dignity survived even this outré effect.

“You like my poems? You like my things? I like them myself. Many men come in here to take things from me, but they find that title is vested in the Lord Jestocost, and they must do strange things to obtain my trifles.”

“Are all these things genuine?” asked Rod, thinking that even Old North Australia could not buy out this shop if they were.

“Certainly not,” said the old man. “Most of them are forgeries — wonderful forgeries. The Instrumentality lets me go to the robot-pits where insane or worn-out robots are destroyed. I can have my pick of them if they are not dangerous. I put them to work making copies of anything which I find in the museums.”

“Those Cape triangles?” said Rod. “Are they real?”

“Cape triangles? You mean the letter stickers. They are genuine, all right, but they are not mine. Those are on loan from the Earth Museum until I can get them copied.”

“I will buy them,” said Rod.

“You will not,” said the Catmaster. “They are not for sale.”

“Then I will buy Earth and you and them too,” said Rod.

“Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan to the one hundred and fifty-first, you willnot.”

“Who are you to tell me?”

“I have looked at one person and I have talked to two others.”

“All right,” said Rod. “Who?”

“I looked at the other Rod McBan, your workwoman Eleanor. She is a little mixed up about having” a young man’s body, because she is very drunk in the home of the Lord William Not-from-here and a beautiful young woman named Ruth Not-from-here is trying to make Eleanor marry her. She has no idea that she is dealing with another woman, and Eleanor, in her copy of your proper body, is finding the experience exciting but terribly confusing. No harm will come of it, and your Eleanor is perfectly safe. Half the rascals of Earth have converged on the Lord William’s house, but he has a whole battalion from the Defense Fleet on loan around the place, so nothing is going to happen, except that Eleanor will have a headache and Ruth will have a disappointment.”

Rod smiled, “You couldn’t have told me anything better. Who else did you talk to?”

“The Lord Jestocost and John Fisher to the hundredth.”

“Mister and Owner Fisher? He’s here.”

“He’s at his home. Station of the Good Fresh Joey. I asked him if you could have your heart’s desire. After a little while, he and somebody named Doctor Wentworth said that the Commonwealth of Old North Australia would approve it.” .

“How did you ever pay for such a call?” cried Rod. “Those things are frightfully expensive.”

“I didn’t pay for it, Mister and Owner. You did. I charged it to your account, by the authority of your trustee, the Lord Jestocost. He and his forefathers have been my patrons for four hundred and twenty-six years.”

“You’ve got your nerve!” said Rod. “Spending my money when I was right here and not even asking me!”

“You are an adult for some purposes and a minor for other purposes. I am offering you the skills which keep me alive. Do you think any ordinary cat-man would be allowed to live as long as this?”

“No,” said Rod. “Give me those stamps and let me go.”

The Catmaster looked at him levelly. Once again there was the personal look on his face, which in Norstrilia would have been taken as an unpardonable affront; but along with the nosiness, there was an air of confidence and kindness which put Rod a little in awe of the man, underperson though he was. “Do you think that you could love these stamps when you get back home? Could they talk to you? Could they make you like yourself? Those pieces of paper are not your heart’s desire. Something else is.”

“What?” said Rod truculently.

“In a bit, I’ll explain. First, you cannot kill me. Second, you cannot hurt me. Third, if I kill you, it will be all for your own good. Fourth, if you get out of here, you will be a very happy man.”

“Are you barmy, Mister?” cried Rod. “I can knock you flat and walk out that door. I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“Try it,” said the Catmaster levelly.

Rod looked at the tall withered old man with the bright eyes. He looked at the door, a mere seven or eight meters away. He did not want to try it.

“All right,” he conceded, “play your pitch.”

“I am a clinical psychologist. The only one on Earth and probably the only one on any planet. I got my knowledge from some ancient books when I was a kitten, being changed into a young man. I change people just a little, little bit. You know that the Instrumentality has surgeons and brains experts and all sorts of doctors. They can do almost anything with personality — anything but the light stuff… That, I do.”

“I don’t get it,” said Rod.

“Would you go to a brain surgeon to get a haircut? Would you need a dermatologist to give you a bath? Of course not. I don’t do heavy work. I just change people a little bit It makes them happy. If I can’t do anything with them, I give them souvenirs from this junkpile out here. The real work is in there. That’s where you’re going, pretty soon.” He nodded his head at the door marked HATE HALL.

Rod cried out, “I’ve been taking orders from one stranger after another, all these long weeks since my computers and I made that money! Can’t I ever do anything myself?”

The Catmaster looked at him with sympathy. “None of us can. We may think that we are free. Our lives are made for us by the people we happen to know, the places we happen to be, the jobs or hobbies which we happen to run across. Will I be dead a year from now? I don’t know. Will you be back in Old North Australia a year from now, still only seventeen, but rich and wise and on your way to happiness? I don’t know. You’ve had a run of good luck. Look at it that way. It’s luck. And I’m part of the luck. If you get killed here, it will not be my doing but just the over-strain of your body against the devices which the Lady Goroke approved a long time ago — devices which the Lord Jestocost reports to the Instrumentality. He keeps them legal that way. I’m the only underman in the universe who is entitled to process real people in any way whatever without having direct human supervision. All I do is to develop people, like an Ancient Man developing a photograph from a piece of paper exposed to different grades of light. I’m not a hidden jungle, like your men in the Garden of Death. It’s going to be you against you, with me just helping, and when you come out you’re going to be a different you — the same you, but a little better there, a little more flexible here. As a matter of fact, that cat-type body you’re wearing is going to make your contest with yourself a little harder for me to manage. We’ll do it, Rod. Are you ready?”

“Ready for what?”

“For the tests and changes there.” The Catmaster nodded at the door marked HATE HALL.

“I suppose so,” said Rod. “I don’t have much choice.”

“No,” said the Catmaster, sympathetically and almost sadly, “not at this point, you don’t. If you walk out that door, youre an illegal cat-man, in immediate danger of being buzzed down by the robot police.”

“Please,” said Rod, “win or fail, can I have one of these Cape triangles?”

The Catmaster smiled. “I promise you — if you want one, you shall have it.” He waved at the door: “Go on in.”

Rod was not a coward, but it was with feet and legs of lead that he walked to the door. It opened by itself. He walked in, steady but afraid.

The room was dark with a darkness deeper than mere black. It was the dark of blindness, the expanse of cheek where no eye has ever been.

The door closed behind him and he swam in the dark, so tangible had the darkness become.

He felt blind. He felt as if he had never seen.

But he could hear.

He heard his own blood pulsing through his head.

He could smell — indeed, he was good at smelling. And this air — this air — this air smelled of the open night on the dry plains of Old North Australia.

The smell made him feel little and afraid. It reminded him of his repeated childhoods, of the artificial drownings in the laboratories where he had gone to be reborn from one childhood to another.

He reached out his hands.

Nothing.

He jumped gently. No ceiling.

Using a fieldsman’s trick familiar from times of dust-storms, he dropped lightly to his hands and feet. He scuttled crabwise on two feet and one hand, using the other hand as a shield to protect his face. In a very few meters he found the wall. He followed the wall around.

Circular.

This was the door.

Follow again.

With more confidence, he moved fast. Around, around, around. He could not tell whether the floor was asphalt or some kind of rough worn tile.

Door again.

A voice spieked to him.

Spieked! And he heard it.

He looked upward into the nothing which was bleaker than blindness, almost expecting to see the words in letters of fire, so clear had they been.

The voice was Norstrilian and it said,

Rod McBan is a man, man, man.

But what is man?

(Immediate percussion of crazy, sad laughter.)

Rod never noticed that he reverted to the habits of babyhood. He sat flat on his rump, legs spread out in front of him at a ninety-degree angle. He put his hands a little behind him and leaned back, letting the weight of his body push his shoulders a little bit upward. He knew the ideas that would follow the words, but he never knew why he so readily expected them.

Light formed in the room, as he had been sure it would.

The images were little, but they looked real.

Men and women and children, children and women and men marched into his vision and out again.

They were not freaks; they were not beasts; they were not alien monstrosities begotten in some outside universe; they were not robots; they were not underpeople; they were all hominids like himself, kinsmen in the Earthborn races of men.

First came people like Old North Australians and Earth people, very much alike, and both similar to the ancient types, except that Norstrilians were pale beneath their tanned skins, bigger, and more robust.

Then came Daimoni, white-eyed pale giants with a magical assurance, whose very babies walked as if they had already been given ballet lessons.

Then heavy men, fathers, mothers, infants swimming on the solid ground from which they would never arise.

Then rainmen from Amazonas Triste, their skins hanging in enormous folds around them, so that they looked like bundles of wet rags wrapped around monkeys.

Blind men from Olympia, staring fiercely at the world through the radars mounted on their foreheads.

Bloated monster-men from abandoned planets — people as bad off as his own race had been after escaping from Paradise VII.

And still more races.

People he had never heard of.

Men with shells.

Men and women so thin that they looked like insects.

A race of smiling, foolish giants, lost in the irreparable hebephrenia of their world. (Rod had the feeling that they were shepherded by a race of devoted dogs, more intelligent than themselves, who cajoled them into breeding, begged them to eat, led them to sleep. He saw no dogs, only the smiling unfocused fools, but the feeling dog, good dog! was somehow very near.)

A funny little people who pranced with an indefinable deformity of gait.

Water-people, the clean water of some unidentified world pulsing through their gills.

And then—

More people, still, but hostile ones. Lipsticked hermaphrodites with enormous beards and fluting voices. Carcinomas which had taken over men. Giants rooted in the Earth. Human bodies crawling, and weeping as they crawled through wet grass, somehow contaminated themselves and looking for more people to infect.

Rod did not know it, but he growled.

He jumped into a squatting position and swept his hands across the rough floor, looking for a weapon.

These were not men — they were enemies!

Still they came. People who had lost eyes, or who had grown fire-resistant, the wrecks and residues of abandoned settlements and forgotten colonies. The waste and spoilage of the human race.

And then—

Him.

Himself.

The child Rod McBan.

And voices, Norstrilian voices calling: “He can’t hier. He can’t spiek. He’s a freak. He’s a freak. He can’t hier. He can’t spiek.”

And another voice: “His poor parents!”

The child Rod disappeared and there were his parents again. Twelve times smaller than life, so high that he had to peer up into the black absorptive ceiling to see the underside of their faces.

The mother wept.

The father sounded stern.

The father was saying, “It’s no use. Doris can watch him while we’re gone, but if he isn’t any better, we’ll turn him in.”

The calm, loving, horrible voice of the man, “Darling, spiek to him yourself. He’ll never hier. Can that be a Rod McBan?”

Then the woman’s voice, sweet-poisonous and worse than death, sobbing agreement with her man against her son.

“I don’t know, Rod. I don’t know. Just don’t tell me about it.”

He had hiered them, in one of his moments of wild penetrating hiering when everything telepathic came in with startling clarity. He had hiered them when he was a baby.

The real Rod in the dark room, let out a roar of fear, desolation, loneliness, rage, hate. This was the telepathic bomb with which he had so often startled or alarmed the neighbors, the mind-shock with which he had killed the giant spider in the tower of Earth-port far above him.

But this time, the room was closed.

His mind roared back at itself.

Rage, loudness, hate, raw noise poured into hin from the floor, the circular wall, the high ceiling.

He cringed beneath it and as he cringed, the sizes of the images changed. His parents sat in chairs, small chairs. They were little, little. He was an almighty baby, so enormous that he could scoop them up with his right hand.

He reached to crush the tiny loathsome parents who had said, “Let him die.”

To crush them, but they faded first.

Their faces turned frightened. They looked wildly around. Their chairs dissolved, the fabric falling to a floor which in turn looked tike storm-eroded cloth. They turned for a last kiss and had no lips. They reached to hug each other and their arms fell off. Their spaceship had gone milky in mid-trip, dissolving into traceless nothing. And he, he, he himself had seen it!

The rage was followed by tears, by a guilt too deep for regret, by a self-accusation so raw and wet that it lived like one more organ inside his living body.

He wanted nothing.

No money, no stroon, no Station of Doom. He wanted no friends, no companionship, no welcome, no house, no food. He wanted no walks, no solitary discoveries in the field, no friendly sheep, no treasures in the gap, no computer, no day, no night, no life.

He wanted nothing, and he could not understand death.

The enormous room lost all light, all sound, and he did not notice it. His own naked life lay before him like a freshly dissected cadaver. It lay there and it made no sense. There had been many Rodrick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBans, one hundred and fifty of them in a row, but he — 151! 151! 151! was not one of them, not a giant who had wrestled treasure from the sick Earth and hidden sunshine of the Norstrilian plains. It wasn’t his telepathic deformity, his spieklessness, his brain deafness to hiering. It was himself, the “Me-subtile” inside him, which was wrong, all wrong. He was the baby worth killing, who had killed instead. He had hated mama and papa for their pride and their hate: when he hated them, they crumpled and died out in the mystery of space, so that they did not even leave bodies to bury.

Rod stood to his feet. His hands were wet. He touched his face and he realized that he had been weeping with his face cupped in his hands.

Wait.

There was something.

There was one thing he wanted. He wanted Houghton Syme not to hate him. Houghton Syme could hier and spiek, but he was a shortie, living with the sickness of death lying between himself and every girl, every friend, every job he had met. And he, Rod, had mocked that man, calling him Old Hot and Simple. Rod might be worthless but he was not as bad off as Houghton Syme, the Hon. Sec. Houghton Syme was at least trying to be a man, to live his miserable scrap of life, and all Rod had ever done was to flaunt his wealth and near-immortality before the poor cripple who had just one hundred and sixty years to live. Rod wanted only one thing — to get back to North Australia in time to help Houghton Syme, to let Houghton Syme know that the guilt was his, Rod’s, and not Syme’s. The Onseck had a bit of life and he deserved the best of it.

Rod stood there, expecting nothing.

He had forgiven his last enemy.

He had forgiven himself.

The door opened very matter-of-factly and there stood the Catmaster, a quiet wise smile upon his face.

“You can come out now, Mister and Owner McBan; and if there is anything in this outer room which you want, you may certainly have it.”

Rod walked out slowly. He had no idea how long he had been in HATE HALL.

When he emerged, the door closed behind him.

“No, thanks, cobber. It’s mighty friendly of you, but I don’t need anything much, and I’d better be getting back to my own planet”

“Nothing?” said the Catmaster, still smiling very attentively and very quietly.

“I’d like to hier and spiek, but it’s not very important.”

“This is for you,” said the Catmaster. “You put it in your ear and leave it there. If it itches or gets dirty, you take it out, wash it, and put it back in. It’s not a rare device, but apparently you don’t have them on your planet.” He held out an object no larger than the kernel of a groundnut.

Rod took it absently and was ready to put it into his pocket, not into his ear, when he saw that the smiling attentive face was watching, very gently but very alertly. He put the device into his ear. It felt a little cold.

“I will now,” said the Catmaster, “take you to C’mell, who will lead you to your friends in Downdeep-downdeep. You had better take this blue twopenny Cape of Good Hope postage stamp with you. I will report to Jestocost that it was lost while I attempted to copy it. That is slightly true, isn’t it?” Rod started to thank him absent-mindedly and then—

Then, with a thrill which sent gooseflesh all over his neck, back and arms, he realized that the Cat-master had not moved his lips in the slightest, had not pushed air through his throat, had not disturbed the air with the pressure or noise. The Catmaster had spieked to Rod, and Rod had hiered him.

Thinking very carefully and very clearly, but closing his lips and making no sound whatever, Rod thought,

“Worthy and gracious Catmaster, I thank you for the ancient treasure of the old Earth stamp. I thank you even more for the hiering-spieking device which I am now testing. Will you please extend your right hand to shake hands with me, if you can actually hier me now?” The Catmaster stepped forward and extended his hand. Man and underman, they faced each other with a kindness and gratitude which was so poignant as to be very close to grief.

Neither of them wept. Neither.

They shook hands without speaking or spieking.