Norstrilia

BIRDS, FAR UNDERGROUND

Rod McBan was too weary to protest when the little white robots wrapped him in an enormous towel and led him into what looked like an operating room.

A large man, with a red-brown spade beard, very uncommon on Earth at this time, said,

“I am Doctor Vomact, the cousin of the other Doctor Vomact you met on Mars. I know that you are not a cat, Mister and Owner McBan, and it is only my business to check up on you. May I?”

“C’mell—” began Rod.

“She is perfectly all right. We have given her a sedative and for the time being she is being treated as though she were a human woman. Jestocost told me to suspend the rules in her case, and I did so, but I think we will both have trouble about the matter from some of our colleagues later on.”

“Trouble?” said Rod. “I’ll pay—”

“No, no, it’s not payment. It’s just the rule that damaged underpeople should be destroyed and not put in hospitals. Mind you, I treat them myself now and then, if I can do it on the sly. But now let’s have a look at you.”

“Why are we talking?” spieked Rod. “Didn’t you know that I can hier now?”

Instead of getting a physical examination, Rod had a wonderful visit with the doctor, in which they drank enormous glasses of a sweet Earth beverage called chai by the ancient Parosski ones. Rod realized that between Redlady, the other Doctor Vomact on Mars, and the Lord Jestocost on Earth, he had been watched and guarded all the way through. He found that this Doctor Vomact was a candidate for a Chiefship of the Instrumentality, and he learned something of the strange tests required for that office. He even found that the doctor knew more than he himself did about his own financial position, and that the actuarial balances of Earth were sagging with the weight of his wealth, since the increase in the price of stroon might lead to shorter lives. The doctor and he ended by discussing the underpeople; he found that the doctor had just as vivid an admiration for C’mell as he himself did. The evening ended when Rod said,

“I’m young, Doctor and Sir, and I sleep well, but I’m never going to sleep again if you don’t get that smell away from me, I can smell it inside my nose.”

The doctor became professional. He said,

“Open your mouth and breathe right into my facel”

Rod hesitated and then obeyed.

“Great crooked stars!” said the doctor. “I can smell it too. There’s a little bit in your upper respiratory system, perhaps a little even in your lungs. Do you need your sense of smell for the next few days?”

Rod said he did not.

“Fine,” said the doctor. “We can numb that section of the brain and do it very gently. There’ll be no residual damage. You won’t smell anything for eight to ten days, and by that time the smell of Amaral will be gone. Incidentally, you were charged with first-degree murder, tried, and acquitted. On the matter of Tostig Amaral.”

“How could I be?” said Rod. “I wasn’t even arrested.”

“The Instrumentality computered it They had the whole scene on tape, since Amaral’s room has been under steady surveillance since yesterday. When he warned you that whether cat or man, you were dying, he finished the case against himself. That was a death threat and your acquittal was for self-defense.”

Rod hesitated and then blurted out the truth, “And the men in the shaft?”

“The Lord Jestocost and Crudelta and I talked it over. We decided to let the matter drop. It keeps the police lively if they have a few unsolved crimes here and there. Now lie down, so I can kill off that smell.”

Rod lay down. The doctor put his head in a clamp and called in robot assistants. The smell-killing process knocked him out, and when he awakened, it was in a different building. He sat up in bed and saw the sea itself. C’mell was standing at the edge of the water. He sniffed. He smelled no salt, no wet, no water, no Amaral. It was worth the change.

C’mell came to him. “My dear, my very dear, my Sir and Master but my very dear! You chanced your life for me last night.”

“I’m a cat myself,” laughed Rod.

He leaped from the bed and ran out to the water margin. The immensity of blue water was incredible. The white waves were separate, definable miracles, each one of them. He had seen the enclosed lakes of Norstrilia, but none of them did things like this.

C’mell had the tact to stay silent till he had seen his fill.

Then she broke the news.

“You own Earth. You have work to do. Either you stay here and begin studying how to manage your property. Or you go somewhere else. Either way, something a little bit sad is going to happen. Today.”

He looked at her seriously, his pajamas flapping in the wet wind which he could no longer smell.

“I’m ready,” he said. “What is it?”

“You lose me.”

“Is that all?” he laughed.

C’mell looked very hurt. She stretched her fingers as though she were a nervous cat looking for something to claw.

“I thought—” said she, and stopped. She started again, “I thought—” She stopped again. She turned to look at him, staring fully, trustingly into his face. “You’re such a young man, but you can do anything. Even among men you are fierce and decided. Tell me, Sir and Master, what — what do you wish?”

“Nothing much,” he smiled at her, “except that I am buying you and taking you home. We can’t go to Norstrilia unless the law changes, but we can go to New Mars. They don’t have any rules there, none which a few tons of stroon won’t get changed. C’mell, I’ll stay cat. Will you marry me?”

She started laughing but the laughter turned into weeping. She hugged him and buried her face against his chest. At last she wiped her tears off on her arm and looked up at him:

“Poor silly me! Poor silly you! Don’t you see it, Mister, I am a cat. If I had children, they would be cat-kittens, every one of them, unless I went every single week to get the genetic code recycled so that they would turn out underpeople. Don’t you know that you and I can never marry — not with any real hope? Besides, Rod, there is the other rule. You and I cannot even see each other again from this sunset onward. How do you think the Lord Jestocost saved my life yesterday? How did he get me into a hospital to be flushed out of all those Amaral poisons? How did he break almost all the rules of the book?”

The brightness had gone out of Rod’s day. “I don’t know,” he said dully.

“By promising them I would die promptly and obediently if there were any more irregularities. By saying I was a nice animal. A biddable one. My death is hostage for what you and I must do. It’s not a law. It’s something worse than a law — it’s an agreement between the Lords of the Instrumentality.”

“I see,” said he, understanding the logic of it, but hating the cruel Earth customs which put C’mell and himself together, only to tear them apart.

“Let’s walk down the beach, Rod,” she said. “Unless you want your breakfast first of all…”

“Oh, no,” he said. “Breakfast! A flutty crupp for all the breakfasts on Earth!”

She walked as though she had not a care in the world, but there was an undertone of meaning to her walk which warned Rod that she was up to something.

It happened.

First, she kissed him, with a kiss he remembered the rest of his life.

Then, before he could say a word, she spieked. But her spieking was not words or ideas at all. It was singing of a high wild kind. It was the music which went along with her very own poem, which she had sung to him atop Earthport:

But it was not those words, not those ideas, even though they seemed subtly different this time. She was doing something which the best telepaths of Old North Australia had tried in vain for thousands of years to accomplish — she was transmitting the mathematical and proportional essence of music right of her mind, and she was doing it with a clarity and force which would have been worthy of a great orchestra. The “high wind driving” fugue kept recurring.

He turned his eyes away from her to see the astonishing thing which was happening all around them. The air, the ground, the sea were all becoming thick with life. Fish flashed out of blue waves. Birds circled by the multitude around them. The beach was thick with little running birds. Dogs and running animals which he had never seen before stood restlessly around C’mell — hectares of them. Abruptly she stopped her song. With very high volume and clarity, she spat commands in all directions:

“Think of people.”

“Think of this cat and me running away somewhere.”

“Think of ships.”

“Look for strangers.”

“Think of things in the sky.”

Rod was glad he did not have his broad-band hiering come on, as it sometimes had done at home. He was sure he would have gone dizzy with the pictures and the contradictions of it all.

She had grabbed his shoulders and was whispering fiercely into his ear:

“Rod, they’ll cover us. Please make a trip with me, Rod. One last dangerous trip. Not for you. Not for me. Not even for mankind. For life, Rod. The Aitch Eye wants to see you.”

“Who’s the Aitch Eye?”

“He’ll tell you the secret if you see him,” she hissed. “Do it for me, then, if you don’t trust my ideas.”

He smiled. “For you, C’mell, yes.”

“Don’t even think, then, till you get there. Don’t even ask questions. Just come along. Millions of lives depend on you, Rod.”

She stood up and sang again, but the new song had no grief in it, no anguish, no weird keening from species to species. It was as cool and pretty as a music box, as simple as an assured and happy goodbye.

The animals vanished so rapidly that it was hard to believe that legions of them had so recently been there.

“That,” said C’mell, “should rattle the telepathic monitors for a while. They are not very imaginative anyhow, and when they get something like this they write up reports about it. Then they can’t understand their reports and sooner or later one of them asks me what I did. I tell them the truth. It’s simple.”

“What are you going to tell them this time?” he asked, as they walked back to the house.

“That I had something which I did not want them to hear.”

“They won’t take that.”

“Of course not, but they will suspect me of trying to beg stroon for you to give to the underpeople.”

“Do you want some, C’mell?”

“Of course not! It’s illegal and it would just make me live longer than my natural life. The Catmaster is the only underperson who gets stroon, and he gets it by a special vote of the Lords.”

They had reached the house. C’mell paused:

“Remember, we are the servants of the Lady Frances Oh. She promised Jestocost that she would order us to do anything that I asked her to. So she’s going to order us to have a good, hearty breakfast. Then she is going to order us to look for something far under the surface of Earthport.”

“She is? But why—”

“No questions, Rod.” The smile she gave him would have melted a monument. He felt well. He was amused and pleased by the physical delight of hiering and spieking with the occasional true people who passed by. (Some underpeople could hier and spiek but they tried to conceal it, for fear that they would be resented.) He felt strong. Losing C’mell was a sad thing to do, but it was a whole day off; he began dreaming of things that he could do for her when they parted. Buying her the services of thousands of people for the rest of her life? Giving her jewelry which would be the envy of Earth mankind? Leasing her a private planoform yacht? He suspected these might not be legal, but they were pleasant to think about.

Three hours later, he had no time for pleasant thoughts. He was bone-weary again. They had flown into Earthport city “on the orders” of their hostess, the Lady Oh, and they had started going down. Forty-five minutes of dropping had made his stomach very queasy. He felt the air go warm and stale and he wished desperately that he had not given up his sense of smell.

Where the dropshafts ended, the tunnels and the elevators began.

Down they went, where incredibly old machinery spun slowly in a spray of oil, performing tasks which only the wildest mind could guess at.

In one room, C’mell had stopped and had shouted at him over the noise of engines:

“That’s a pump.”

It did not look obvious. Huge turbines moved wearily. They seemed to be hooked up to an enormous steam engine powered by nuclear fuel. Five or six brightly polished robots eyed them suspiciously as they walked around the machine, which was at least eighty meters long by forty-five high.

“And come here…” shouted C’mell.

They went into another room, empty and clean and quiet except for a rigid column of moving water which shot from floor to ceiling with no evidence of machinery at all. An underman, sloppily formed from a rat body, got up from his rocking chair when they entered. He bowed to C’mell as though she were a great lady but she waved him back to his chair.

She took Rod near the column of water and pointed to a shiny ring on the floor.

“That’s the other pump. They do the same amount of work.”

“What is it?” he shouted.

“Force-field, I guess. I’m not an engineer.” They went on.

In a quieter corridor she explained that the pumps were both of them for the service of weather control. The old one had been running six or seven thousand years, and showed very little wear. When people had needed a supplementary one, they had simply printed it on plastic, set it in the floor, and turned it on with a few amps. The underman was there just to make sure that nothing broke down or went critical.

“Can’t real people design things any more?” asked Rod.

“Only if they want to. Making them want to do things is the hard part now.”

“You mean, they don’t want to do anything?”

“Not exactly,” said C’mell, “but they find that we are better than they are at almost anything. Real work, that is, not statesmanship like running the Instrumentality and the Earth government. Here and there a real human being gets to work, and there are always offworlders like you to stimulate them and challenge them with new problems. But they used to have secure lives of four hundred years, a common language, and a standard conditioning. They were dying off, just by being too perfect. One way to get better would have been to kill off us underpeople, but they couldn’t do that all the way. There was too much messy work to be done that you couldn’t count on robots for. Even the best robot, if he’s a computer linked to the mind of a mouse, will do fine routine, but unless he has a very complete human education, he’s going to make some wild judgments which won’t suit what people want. So they need underpeople. I’m still cat underneath it all, but even the cats which are unchanged are pretty close relatives of human beings. They make the same basic choices between power and beauty, between survival and self-sacrifice, between common sense and high courage. So the Lady Alice More worked out this plan for the Rediscovery of Man. Set up Ancient Nations, give everybody an extra culture besides the old one based on the Old Common Tongue, let them get mad at each other, restore some disease, some danger, some accidents, but average it out so that nothing is really changed.”

They had come to a storeroom, the sheer size of which made Rod blink. The great reception hall at the top of Earthport had astounded him; this room was twice the size. The room was filled with extremely ancient cargoes which had not even been unpacked from their containers. Rod could see that some were marked outbound for worlds which no longer existed, or which had changed their names; others were inbound, but no one had unpacked them for five thousand years and more.

“What’s all this stuff?”

“Shipping. Technological change. Somebody wrote it all off the computers, so they didn’t have to think of it any more. This is the thing which underpeople and robots are searching, to supply the ancient artifacts for the Rediscovery of Man. One of our boys-rat stock, with a human I.Q. of 300 — found something marked Muse National. It was the whole National Museum of the Republic of Mali, which had been put inside a mountain when the ancient wars became severe. Mali apparently was not a very important ‘nation,’ as they called those groupings, but it had the same language as France, and we were able to supply the real material with almost everything they needed to restore some kind of a French civilization. China has been hard. The Chinesians survived longer than any other nation, and they did their own grave robbing, so that we have found it impossible to reconstruct China before the age of space. We can’t modify people into being Ancient Chinese.”

Rod stopped, thunderstruck. “Can I talk to you here?”

C’mell listened with a faraway look on her face. “Not here. I feel the very weak sweep of a monitor across my mind now and then. In a couple of minutes you can. Let’s hurry along.”

“I just thought,” cried Rod, “of the most important question in all the worlds!”

“Stop thinking it, then,” said C’mell, “until we come to a safe place.”…

Instead of going straight on through the big aisle between the forgotten crates and packages, she squeezed between two crates and made her way to the edge of the big underground storeroom.

“That package,” she said, “is stroon. They lost it. We could help ourselves to it if we wanted to, but we’re afraid of it.”

Rod looked at the names on the package. It had been shipped by Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan XXVI to Adaminaby Port and reconsigned to Earthport. “That’s one hundred and twenty-five generations ago, shipped from the Station of Doom. My farm. I think it turns poison if you leave it for more than two hundred years. Our own military people have some horrible uses for it, when invaders show up, but ordinary Norstrilians, when they find old stroon, always turn it in to the Commonwealth. We’re afraid of it. Not that we often lose it. It’s too valuable and we’re too greedy, with a twenty million percent import duty on everything…”

C’mell led on. They unexpectedly passed a tiny robot, a lamp fixed to his head, who was seated between two enormous piles of books. He was apparently reading them one by one, because he had beside him a pile of notes larger in bulk than he was. He did not look up, nor did they interrupt him.

At the wall, C’mell said, “Now do exactly what you’re told. See the dust along the base of this crate?”

“I see it,” said Rod.

“That must be left undisturbed. Now watch. I’m going to jump from the top of this crate to the top of that one, without disturbing the dust. Then I want you to jump the same way and go exactly where I point, without even thinking about it, if you can manage. I’ll follow. Don’t try to be polite or chivalrous, or you’ll mess up the whole arrangement.”

Rod nodded.

She jumped to a case against the wall. Her red hair did not fly behind her, because she had tied it up in a turban before they started out, when she had obtained coveralls for each of them from the robot-servants of the Lady Frances Oh. They had looked like an ordinary couple of working c’people.

Either she was very strong or the case was very light. Standing on the case, she tipped it very delicately, so that the pattern of dust around its base would be unchanged, save for microscopic examination. A blue glow came from beyond the case. With an odd, practised turn of the wrist she indicated that Rod should jump from his case to the tipped one, and from there into the area — whatever it might be — beyond the case. It seemed easy for him, but he wondered if she could support both his weight and hers on the case. He remembered her order not to talk or think. He tried to think of the salmon steak he had eaten the day before. That should certainly be a good cat-thought, if a monitor should catch his mind at that moment! He jumped, teetered on the slanting top of the second packing case, and scrambled into a tiny doorway just big enough for him to crawl through. It was apparently designed for cables, pipes and maintenance, not for habitual human use: it was too low to stand it. He scrambled forward.

There was a slam.

C’mell had jumped in after him, letting the case fall back into its old and apparently undisturbed position.

She crawled up to him. “Keep going,” she said.

“Can we talk here?”

“Of course! Do you want to? It’s not a very sociable place.”

“That question, that big question,” said Rod. “I’ve got to ask you. You underpeople are taking charge of people, if you’re fixing up their new cultures for them, you’re getting to be the masters of men!”

“Yes,” said C’mell, and let the explosive affirmative hang in the air between them.

He couldn’t think of anything to say; it was his big bright idea for the day, and the fact that she already knew underpeople were becoming secret masters — that was too much!

She looked at his friendly face and said, more gently, “We underpeople have seen it coming for a long time. Some of the human people do, too. Especially the Lord Jestocost. He’s no fool. And, Rod, you fit in.”

“I?”

“Not as a person. As an economic change. As a source of unallocated power.”

“You mean, C’mell, you’re after me, too? I can’t believe it. I can recognize a pest or a nuisance or a robber. You don’t seem like any of these. You’re good, all the way through.” His voice faltered. “I meant it this morning, C’mell, when I asked you to marry me.”

The delicacy of cat and the tenderness of woman combined in her voice as she answered, “I know you meant it.” She stroked a lock of hair away from his forehead, in a caress as restrained as any touch could be. “But it’s not for us. And I’m not using you myself, Rod. I want nothing for myself, but I want a good world for underpeople. And for people too. For people too. We cats have loved you people long before we had brains. We’ve been your cats longer than anyone can remember. Do you think our loyalty to the human race would stop just because you changed our shapes and added a lot of thinking power? I love you, Rod, but I love people too. That’s why I’m taking you to the Aitch Eye!”

“Can you tell me what that is — now?”

She laughed. “This place is safe. It’s the Holy Insurgency. The secret government of the underpeople. This is a silly place to talk about it, Rod. You’re going beneath the ground. E’ikasus is one of His sons.”

“All of them?” Rod was thinking of the Chiefs of the Instrumentality.

“It’s not a them, it’s a him. The E’telekeli. The bird meet the head of it, right now.”

“If there’s only one, how did you choose him? Is he like the British Queen, whom we lost so long ago?”

C’mell laughed. “We did not choose Him. He grew and now He leads us. You people took an eagle’s egg and tried to make it into a Daimoni man. When the experiment failed, you threw the fetus out. It lived. It’s He. It’ll be the strongest mind you’ve ever met. Come on. This is no place to talk, and we’re still talking.”

She started crawling down the horizontal shaft, waving at Rod to follow her.

He followed.

As they crawled, he called to her, ”

“C’mell, stop a minute.”

She stopped until he caught up with her. She thought he might ask for a kiss, so worried and lonely did he look. She was ready to be kissed. He surprised her by saying, instead,

“I can’t smell, C’mell. Please, I’m so used to smelling that I miss it. What does this place smell like?”

Her eyes widened and then she laughed: “It smells like underground. Electricity burning the air. Animals somewhere far away, a lot of different smells of them. The old, old smell of man, almost gone. Engine oil and bad exhaust. It smells like a headache. It smells like silence, like things untouched. There, is that it?”

He nodded and they went on.

At the end of the horizontal shaft C’mell turned and said:

“All men die here. Come on!”

Rod started to follow and then stopped, “C’mell, are you discoordinated? Why should I die? There’s no reason to.”

Her laughter was pure happiness. “Silly C’rod! You are a cat, cat enough to come where no man has passed for centuries. Come on. Watch out for those skeletons. They’re a lot of them around here. We hate to kill real people, but there are some that we can’t warn off in time.”

They emerged on a balcony, overlooking an even more enormous storeroom than the one before. This had thousands more boxes in it. C’mell paid no attention to it. She went to the end of the balcony and raced down a slender steel ladder.

“More junk from the past!” she said, anticipating Rod’s comment. “People have forgotten it up above; we mess around in it.”

Though he could not smell the air, at this depth it felt thick, heavy, immobile.

C’mell did not slow down. She threaded her way through the junk arid treasures on the floor as though she were an acrobat. On the far side of the old room she stopped. “Take one of these,” she commanded.

They looked like enormous umbrellas. He had seen umbrellas in the pictures which his computer had showed him. These seemed oddly large, compared to the ones in the pictures. He looked around for rain. After his memories of Tostig Amaral, he wanted no more indoor rain. C’mell did not understand his suspicions.

“The shaft,” she said, “has no magnetic controls, no updraft of air. It’s just a shaft twelve meters in diameter. These are parachutes. We jump into the shaft with them and then we float down. Straight down. Four kilometers. It’s close to the Moho.”

Since he did not pick up one of the big umbrellas, she handed him one. It was surprisingly light.

He blinked at her. “How will we ever get out?”

“One of the bird-men will fly up the shaft. It’s hard work but they can do it. Be sure to hook that thing to your belt. It’s a long slow time falling, and we won’t be able to talk. And it’s terribly dark, too.”

He complied.

She opened a big door, beyond which there was the feel of nothing. She gave him a wave, partially opened her “umbrella,” stepped over the edge of the door and vanished. He looked over the edge himself. There was nothing to be seen. Nothing of C’mell, no sound except for the slippage of air and an occasional mechanical whisper of metal against metal. He supposed that must be the rib-tips of the umbrella touching the edge of the shaft as she fell.

He sighed. Norstrilia was safe and quiet compared to this.

He opened his umbrella too.

Acting on an odd premonition, he took his little hiering-spieking shell out of his ear and put it carefully in his coverall pocket.

That act saved his life.