Norstrilia

THE QUARREL AT THE DINNER TABLE

At the end of the meal he waited for Doris to say grace to the Queen. She did but under her thick eyebrows her eyes expressed something other than thanks.

“You’re going out,” she said right after the prayer. It was an accusation, not a question.

The two hired men looked at him with quiet doubt. A week ago he had been a boy. Now he was the same person, but legally a man.

The workwoman Eleanor looked at him too. She smiled very unobtrusively to herself. She was on his side whenever any other person came into the picture; when they were alone, she nagged him as much as she dared. She had known his parents before they went offworld for a long-overdue honeymoon and were chewed into molecules by a battle between raiders and police. That gave her a proprietary feeling about him.

He tried to spiek to Doris with his mind, just to see if it would work.

It didn’t. The two men bounded from their seats and ran for the yard, Eleanor sat in her chair holding tight to the table but saying nothing, and aunt Doris screeched so loud that he could not make out the words.

He knew she meant “Stop it!”, so he did, and looked at her friendlily.

That started a fight.

Quarrels were common in Norstrilian life, because the Fathers had taught that they were therapeutic. Children could quarrel until adults told them to stop, freemen could quarrel as long as misters were not involved, misters could quarrel as long as an owner was not present, and owners could quarrel if, at the very end, they were willing to fight it out. No one could quarrel in the presence of an offworlder, nor during an alert, nor with a member of the defense or police on active duty.

Rod McBan was a mister and owner, but he was under trusteeship; he was a man, but he had not been given clear papers; he was a handicapped person.

The rules got all mixed up.

When Hopper came back to the table he muttered, “Do that again, laddie, and I’ll clout you one that you won’t forget!” Considering how rarely he used his voice, it was a beautiful man’s voice, resonant, baritone, full-bodied, hearty and sincere in the way the individual words came out.

Bill didn’t say a word, but from the contortions of his face Rod gathered that he was spieking to the others at a great rate and working off his grievance that way.

“If you’re spieking about me, Bill,” said Rod with a touch of arrogance which he did not really feel, “you’ll do me the pleasure of using words or you’ll get off my land!”

When Bill spoke, his voice was as rusty as an old machine. “I’ll have you know, you clutty little pommy, that I have more money in my name on Sidney ’Change than you and your whole glubby land are worth. Don’t you tell me twice to get off the land, you silly half of a mister, or I will get. So shut up!”

Rod felt his stomach knot with anger.

His anger became fiercer when he felt Eleanor’s restraining hand on his arm. He didn’t want another person, not one more damned useless normal person, tell him what to do about spieking and hiering. Aunt Doris’ face was still hidden in her apron; she had escaped, as she always did, into weeping.

Just as he was about to speak again, perhaps to lose Bill from the farm forever, his mind lifted in the mysterious way that it did sometimes; he could hier for miles. The people around him did not notice the difference. He saw the proud rage of Bill, with his money in the Sidney Exchange, bigger than many station owners had, waiting his time to buy back on the land which his father had left; he saw the honest annoyance of Hopper and was a little abashed to see that Hopper was watching him proudly and with amused affection; in Eleanor he saw nothing but wordless worry, a fear that she might lose him as she had lost so many homes for hnnnhnnnhnnn dzzmmmmm, a queer meaningless reference which had a shape in her mind but took no form in his; and in Aunt Doris he caught her inner voice calling, “Rod, Rod, Rod, come back! This may be your boy and I’m a McBan to the death, but I’ll never know what to do with a cripple like him.”

Bill was still waiting for him to answer when another thought came into his mind,

“You fool — go to your computer!”

“Who said that?” he thought, not trying to spiek again, but just thinking it with his mind.

“Your computer,” said the faraway thinkvoice.

“You can’t spieck,” said Rod, “you’re a pure machine with not an animal brain in you.”

“When you call me, Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan to the hundred and fifty first, I can speak across space itself. I’m cued to you and you shouted just now with your spiekmind. I can feel you hiering me.”

“But—” said Rod in words.

“Take it easy, lad,” said Bill, right in the room with him. “Take it easy. I didn’t mean it.”

“You’re having one of your spells,” said Aunt Doris, emerging rednosed from behind her apron.

Rod stood up.

Said he to all of them, “I’m sorry. I’m going out for a bit. Out into the night.”

“You’re going to that bloody computer,” said Bill.

“Don’t go, Mister McBan,” said Hopper, “don’t let us anger you into going. It’s bad enough being around that computer in daylight, but at night it must be horrible.”

“How would you know?” retorted Rod, “You’ve never been there at night. And I have. Lots of times…”

“There are dead people in it,” said Hopper. “It’s an old war computer. Your family should never have bought it in the first place. It doesn’t belong on a farm. A thing like that should be hung out of space and orbited.”

“All right, Eleanor,” said Rod, “you tell me what to do. Everybody else has,” he added with the last bit of his remaining anger, as his hiering closed down and he saw the usual opaque faces around him.

“It’s no use, Rod. Go along to your computer. You’ve got a strange life and you’re the one that will live it, Mister McBan, and not these other people around here.”

Her words made sense.

He stood up. “I’m sorry,” said he, again, in lieu of goodbye.

He stood in the doorway, hesitant. He would have liked to say goodbye in a better way, but he did not know how to express it. Anyhow, he couldn’t spiek, not so they could hier it with their minds; speaking with a voice was so crude, so flat for the fine little things that needed expression in life.

They looked at him, and he at them.

“Ngahh!” said he, in a raw cry of self-derision and fond disgust.

Their expression showed that they had gotten his meaning, though the word carried nothing with it. Bill nodded, Hopper looked friendly and a little worried, Aunt Doris stopped snivelling and began to stretch out one hand, only to stop it in midgesture, and Eleanor sat immobile at the table, upset by wordless troubles of her own.

He turned.

The cube of lamplight, the cabin room, was behind him; ahead the darkness of all Norstrilian nights, except for the weird rare times that they were cut up by traceries of lightness. He started off for a house which only a few but he could see, and which none but he could enter. It was a forgotten, invisible temple; it housed the MacArthur family computer, to which the older McBan computer was linked; and it was called the Palace of the Governor of Night.