Norstrilia - Illustrated Read online

  Only then did Rod see that the second “beak” was no beak at all, but a javelin, its point biting cleanly and tightly right through the bird’s skull into its brain.

  No wonder the bird had dropped dead quickly!

  As Rod looked around to see who his rescuer might be, the ground rose up and struck him.

  He had fallen.

  The loss of blood was faster than he had allowed for.

  He looked around, almost like a child in his bewilderment and dizziness.

  There was a shimmer of turquoise and the girl Lavinia was standing over him. She had a medical pack open and was spraying his wounds with cryptoderm—the living bandage which was so expensive that only on Norstrilia, the exporter of stroon, could it be carried around in emergency cans.

  “Keep quiet,” she said with her voice, “keep quiet. Rod. We’ve got to stop the blood first of all. Lands of mercy, but you’re a crashing mess!”

  “Who…?” said Rod weakly.

  “The Hon. Sec.,” said she immediately.

  “You know?” he asked, amazed that she should understand everything so very quickly indeed.

  “Don’t talk, and I’ll tell you.” She had taken her field knife and was cutting the sticky shirt off him, so that she could tilt the bottle and spray right into the wound. “I just suspected you were in trouble, when Bill rode by the house and said something crazy, that you had bought half the galaxy by gambling all night with a crazy machine which paid off. I did not know where you were, but I thought that you might be in that old temple of yours that the rest of them can’t see. I didn’t know what kind of danger to look for, so I brought this.” She slapped her hip. Rod’s eyes widened. She had stolen her father’s one-kiloton grenade, which was to be removed from its rack only in the event of an offworld attack. She answered his question before he asked her. “It’s all right. I made a dummy to take its place before I touched it. Then, as I took it out, the Defense monitor came on and I just explained that I had hit it with my new broom, which was longer than usual. Do you think I would let Old Hot and Simple kill you, Rod, without a fight from me? I’m your cousin, your kith and kin. As a matter of fact, I’m number twelve after you when it comes to inheriting Doom and all the wonderful things there are on this station.”

  Rod said, “Give me water.” He suspected she was chattering to keep his attention off what she was doing to his shoulder and arm. The arm glowed once when she sprayed the cryptoderm on it; then it settled down to mere aching. The shoulder had exploded from time to time as she probed it. She had thrust a diagnostic needle into it and was reading the tiny bright picture on the end of the needle. He knew it had both analgesics and antiseptics as well as an ultraminiaturized X-ray, but he did not think that anyone would be willing to use it unaided in the field.

  She answered this question too before he asked it. She was a very perceptive girl.

  “We don’t know what the Onseck is going to do next. He may have corrupted people as well as animals. I don’t dare call for help, not until you have your friends around you. Certainly not, if you have bought half the worlds.”

  Rod dragged out the words. He seemed short of breath. “How did you know it was him?”

  “I saw his face—I hiered it when I looked in the bird’s own brain. I could see Houghton Syme, talking to the bird in some kind of an odd way, and I could see your dead body through the bird’s eyes, and I could feel a big wave of love and approval, happiness and reward, going through the bird when the job was to have been finished. I think that man is evil, evil!”

  “You know him, yourself?”

  “What girl around here doesn’t? He’s a nasty man. He had a boyhood that was all rotten from the time that he realized he was a short-lifer. He has never gotten over it. Some people are sorry for him and don’t mind his getting the job of Hon. Sec. If I’d my way, I’d have sent him to the Giggle Room long ago!”

  Lavinia’s face was set in prudish hate, an expression so unlike herself, who usually was bright and gay, that Rod wondered what deep bitterness might have been stirred within her.

  “Why do you hate him?”

  “For what he did.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He looked at me,” she said. “He looked at me in a way that no girl can like. And then he crawled all over my mind, trying to show me all the silly, dirty, useless things he wanted to do.”

  “But he didn’t do anything—?” said Rod.

  “Yes, he did,” she snapped. “Not with his hands. I could have reported him. I would have. It’s what he did with his mind, the things he spieked to me.”

  “You can report those too,” said Rod, very tired of talking but nevertheless mysteriously elated to discover that he was not the only enemy which the Onseck had made.

  “Not what he did, I couldn’t,” said Lavinia, her face set in anger but dissolving into grief. Grief was tenderer, softer, but deeper and more real than anger. For the first time Rod sensed a feeling of concern about Lavinia. What might be wrong with her?

  She looked past him and spoke to the open fields and the big dead bird. “Houghton Syme was the worst man I’ve ever known. I hope he dies. He never got over that rotten boyhood of his. The old sick boy is the enemy of the man. We’ll never know what he might have been. And if you hadn’t been so wrapped up in your own troubles, Mister Rod to the hundred and fifty-first, you’d have remembered who I am.”

  “Who are you?” said Rod, naturally.

  “I’m the Father’s Daughter.”

  “So what?” said Rod. “All girls are.”

  “Then you never have found out about me. I’m the Father’s Daughter from ‘The Father’s Daughter’s Song.’”

  “Never heard it.”

  She looked at him and her eyes were close to tears. “Listen, then, and I’ll sing it to you now. And it’s true, true, true.

  You do not know what the world is like,

  And I hope that you never will.

  My heart was once much full of hope,

  But now it is very still.

  My wife went mad.

  She was my love and wore my ring

  When both of us were young.

  She bore my babes, but then, but then…

  And now there isn’t anything.

  My wife went mad.

  Now she lives in another place,

  Half sick, half well, and never young.

  I am her dread, who was her love.

  Each of us has another face.

  My wife went mad.

  You do not know what the world is like.

  War is never the worst of it.

  The stars within your eyes can drop.

  The lightning in your brain can strike.

  My wife went mad.

  And I see you have heard it, too,” she sighed. “Just as my father wrote it. About my mother. My own mother.”

  “Oh, Lavinia,” said Rod, “I’m sorry. I never thought it was you. And you my own cousin only three or four times removed. But Lavinia, there’s something wrong. How can your mother be mad if she was looking fine at my house last week?”

  “She was never mad,” said Lavinia. “My father was. He made up that cruel song about my mother so that the neighbors complained. He had his choice of the Giggle Room to die in, or the sick place, to be immortal and insane. He’s there now. And the Onseck, the Onseck threatened to bring him back to our own neighborhood if I didn’t do what he asked. Do you think I could forgive that? Ever? After people have sung that hateful song at me ever since I was a baby? Do you wonder that I know it myself?”

  Rod nodded.

  Lavinia’s troubles impressed him, but he had troubles of his own.

  The sun was never hot on Norstrilia, but he suddenly felt thirsty and hot. He wanted to sleep but he wondered about the dangers which surrounded him.

  She knelt beside him.

  “Close your eyes a bit. Rod. I will spiek very quietly and maybe nobody will notice it except your station hands. Bill and H
opper. When they come we’ll hide out for the day and tonight we can go back to your computer and hide. I’ll tell them to bring food.”

  She hesitated. “And, Rod?”

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Forgive me.”

  “For what?”

  “For my troubles,” she said contritely.

  “Now you have more troubles. Me,” he said. “Let’s not blame ourselves, but for sheep’s sake, girl, let me sleep.”

  He drifted off to sleep as she sat beside him, whistling a loud clear tune with long long notes which never added up. He knew some people, usually women, did that when they tried to concentrate on their telepathic spieking.

  Once he glanced up at her before he finally slept. He noticed that her eyes were a deep, strange blue. Like the mad wild faraway skies of Old Earth itself.

  He slept, and in his sleep he knew that he was being carried.

  The hands which carried him felt friendly, though, and he curled himself back into deep, deeper dreamless sleep.

  FOE Money, SAD Money

  When Rod finally awakened, it was to feel his shoulder tightly bound and his arm throbbing. He had fought waking up because the pain had increased as his mind moved toward consciousness, but the pain and the murmur of voices caused him to come all the way to the hard bright surface of consciousness.

  The murmur of voices?

  There was no place on all Old North Australia where voices murmured. People sat around and spieked to each other and hiered the answers without the clatter of vocal cords. Telepathy made for brilliant and quick conversation, the participants darting their thoughts this way and that, soaring with their shields so as to produce the effect of a confidential whisper.

  But here there were voices. Voices. Many voices. Not possible.

  And the smell was wrong. The air was wet—luxuriously, extravagantly wet, like a miser trying to catch a rainstorm in his cabin!

  It was almost like the van of the Garden of Death.

  Just as he woke, he recognized Lavinia singing an odd little song. It was one which Rod knew, because it had a sharp catchy, poignant little melody to it which sounded like nothing on this world. She was singing, and it sounded like one of the weird sadnesses which his people had brought from their horrible group experience on the abandoned planet of Paradise VII:

  Is there anybody here or is everybody dead

  at the grey green blue black lake?

  The sky was blue and now it is red

  over old tall green brown trees.

  The house was big but now it looks small

  at the grey green blue black lake.

  And the girl that I knew isn’t there any more

  at the old flat dark torn place.

  His eyes opened and it was indeed Lavinia whom he saw at the edge of vision. This was no house. It was a box, a hospital, a prison, a ship, a cave or a fort. The furnishings were machined and luxurious. The light was artificial and almost the color of peaches. A strange hum in the background sounded like alien engines dispensing power for purposes which Norstrilian law never permitted to private persons. The Lord Redlady leaned over Rod; the fantastic man broke into song himself, chanting—

  Light a lantern—

  Light a lantern—

  Light a lantern,

  Here we come!

  When he saw the obvious signs of Rod’s perplexity he burst into a laugh,

  “That’s the oldest song you ever heard, my boy. It’s pre-Space and it used to be called ‘general quarters’ when ships like big iron houses floated on the waters of Earth and fought each other. We’ve been waiting for you to wake up.”

  “Water,” said Rod. “Please give me water. Why are you talking?”

  “Water!” cried the Lord Redlady to someone behind him. His sharp thin face was alight with excitement as he turned back to Rod. “And we’re talking because I have my buzzer on. If people want to talk to each other, they jolly well better use their voices in this ship.”

  “Ship?” said Rod, reaching for the mug of cold, cold water which a hand had reached out to him.

  “This is my ship, Mister and Owner Rod McBan to the hundred and fifty-first! An Earth ship. I pulled it out of orbit and grounded it with the permission of the Commonwealth. They don’t know you’re on it yet. They can’t find out right now because my Humanoid-Robot Brainwave Dephasing Device is on. Nobody can think in or out through that, and anybody who tries telepathy on this boat is going to get himself a headache here.”

  “Why you?” said Rod. “What for?”

  “In due time,” said the Lord Redlady. “Let me introduce you first. You know these people.” He waved at a group.

  Lavinia sat with his hands, Bill and Hopper, with his workwoman Eleanor, with his Aunt Doris. They looked odd, sitting on the low, soft, luxurious Earth furniture. They were all sipping some Earth drink of a color which Rod had never seen before. Their expressions were diverse: Bill looked truculent, Hopper looked greedy, Aunt Doris looked utterly embarrassed, and Lavinia looked as though she were enjoying herself.

  “And then here…” said the Lord Redlady.

  The man he pointed to might not have been a man. He was the Norstrilian type all right, but he was a giant, of the kind which were always killed in the Garden of Death.

  “At your service,” said the giant, who was almost three meters tall and who had to watch his head, lest it hit the ceiling, “I am Donald Dumfrie Hordern Anthony Garwood Gaines Wentworth to the fourteenth generation, Mister and Owner McBan. A military surgeon, at your service, sir!”

  “But this is private. Surgeons aren’t allowed to work for anybody but government.”

  “I am on loan to the Earth government,” said Wentworth the giant, his face in a broad grin.

  “And I,” said the Lord Redlady, “am both the Instrumentality and the Earth Government for diplomatic purposes. I borrowed him. He’s under Earth rules. You will be well in two or three hours.”

  The doctor, Wentworth, looked at his hand as though he saw a chronograph there:

  “Two hours and seventeen minutes more.”

  “Let it be,” said the Lord Redlady. “Here’s our last guest.”

  A short, angry man stood up and came over. He glared out at Rod and held forth an angry hand.

  “John Fisher to the hundredth. You know me.”

  “Do I?” said Rod, not impolitely. He was just dazed.

  “Station of the Good Fresh Joey,” said Fisher.

  “I haven’t been there,” said Rod, “but I’ve heard of it.”

  “You needn’t have,” snapped the angry Fisher. “I met you at your grandfather’s.”

  “Oh, yes, Mister and Owner Fisher,” said Rod, not really remembering anything at all, but wondering why the short, red-faced man was so angry with him.

  “You don’t know who I am?” said Fisher.

  “Silly games!” thought Rod. He said nothing but smiled dimly. Hunger began to stir inside him.

  “Commonwealth Financial Secretary, that’s me,” said Fisher. “I handle the books and the credits for the government.”

  “Wonderful work,” said Rod. “I’m sure it’s complicated. Could I have something to eat?”

  The Lord Redlady interrupted: “Would you like French pheasant with Chinesian sauce steeped in the thieves’ wine from Viola Siderea? It would only cost you six thousand tons of refined gold, orbited near Earth, if I ordered it sent to you by special courier.”

  For some inexplicable reason the entire room howled with laughter. The men put their glasses down so as not to spill them. Hopper seized the opportunity to refill his own glass. Aunt Doris looked hilarious and secretly proud, as though she herself had laid a diamond egg or done some equal marvel. Only Lavinia, though laughing, managed to look sympathetically at Rod to make sure that he did not feel mocked. The Lord Redlady laughed as loudly as the rest, and even the short, angry John Fisher allowed himself a wan smile, while holding out his hand for a refill on his drink. An animal, a little
one which looked very much like an extremely small person, lifted up the bottle and filled his glass for him; Rod suspected that it was a “monkey” from Old Old Earth, from the stories he had heard.

  Rod didn’t even say, “What’s the joke?” though he realized plainly that he was himself in the middle of it. He just smiled weakly back at them, feeling the hunger grow within him.

  “My robot is cooking you an Earth dish. French toast with maple syrup. You could live ten thousand years on this planet and never get it. Rod, don’t you know why we’re laughing? Don’t you know what you’ve done?”

  “The Onseck tried to kill me, I think,” said Rod.

  Lavinia clapped her hand to her mouth, but it was too late.

  “So that’s who it was,” said the doctor, Wentworth, with a voice as gigantic as himself.

  “But you wouldn’t laugh at me for that—” Rod started to say. Then he stopped himself.

  An awful thought had come to him.

  “You mean, it really worked? That stuff with my family’s old computer?”

  The laughter broke out again. It was kind laughter, but it was always the laughter of a peasant people, driven by boredom, who greet the unfamiliar with attack or with laughter.

  “You did it,” said Hopper. “You’ve bought a billion worlds.”

  John Fisher snapped at him, “Let’s not exaggerate. He’s gotten about one point six stroon years. You couldn’t buy any billion worlds for that. In the first place, there aren’t a billion settled worlds, not even a million. In the second place, there aren’t many worlds for sale. I doubt that he could buy thirty or forty.”

  The little animal, prompted by some imperceptible sign from the Lord Redlady, went out of the room and returned with a tray. The odor from the tray made all the people in the room sniff appreciatively. The food was unfamiliar, but it combined pungency and sweetness. The monkey fitted the tray into an artfully concealed slot at the head of Rod’s couch, took off an imaginary monkey cap, saluted, and went back to his own basket behind the Lord Redlady’s chair.