Norstrilia - Illustrated Read online

  She couldn’t help it.

  TRAPS, FORTUNES AND WATCHERS

  We all know that no communications systems are leakproof. Even inside the far-reaching communications patterns of the Instrumentality, there were soft spots, rotten points, garrulous men. The MacArthur-McBan computer, sheltered in the Palace of the Governor of Night, had had time to work out abstract economics and weather patterns, but the computer had not tasted human love or human wickedness. All the messages concerning Rod’s speculation in the forward santaclara crop and stroon export had been sent in the clear. It was no wonder that on many worlds, people saw Rod as a chance, an opportunity, a victim, a benefactor, or an enemy.

  For we all know the old poem:

  Luck is hot and people funny.

  Everybody’s fond of money.

  Lose a chance and sell your mother.

  Win the pot and buy another.

  Other people fall and crash:

  You may get the ton of cash!

  It applied in this case too. People ran hot and cold with the news.

  On Earth, Same Day, within Earthport Itself

  Commissioner Teadrinker tapped his teeth with a pencil.

  Four megacredits FOE money already and more, much more to come.

  Teadrinker lived in a fever of perpetual humiliation. He had chosen it. It was called “the honorable disgrace” and it applied to ex-Lords of the Instrumentality who chose long life instead of service and honor. He was a thousandmorer, meaning that he had traded his career, his reputation, and his authority for a long life of one thousand or more years. (The Instrumentality had learned, long ago, that the best way to protect its members from temptation was to tempt them itself. By offering “honorable disgrace” and low, secure jobs within the Instrumentality to those Lords who might be tempted to trade long life for their secrets, it kept its own potential defectors. Teadrinker was one of these.)

  He saw the news and he was a skilled wise man. He could not do anything to the Instrumentality with money, but money worked wonders on Earth. He could buy a modicum of honor. Perhaps he could even have the records falsified and get married again. He flushed slightly, even after hundreds of years, when he remembered his first wife blazing at him when she saw his petition for long life and honorable disgrace: “Go ahead and live, you fool. Live and watch me die without you, inside the decent four hundred years which everybody else has if they work for it and want it. Watch your children die, watch your friends die, watch all your hobbies and ideas get out of date. Go along, you horrible little man, and let me die like a human being!”

  A few megacredits could help that.

  Teadrinker was in charge of incoming visitors. His underman, the cattle-derived B’dank, was custodian of the scavenger spiders—half-tame one-ton insects which stood by for emergency work if the services of the tower failed. He wouldn’t need to have this Norstrilian merchant very long. Just long enough for a recorded order and a short murder.

  Perhaps not. If the Instrumentality caught him, it would be dream-punishments, things worse than Shayol itself.

  Perhaps yes. If he succeeded, he would escape a near immortality of boredom and could have a few decades of juicy fun instead.

  He tapped his teeth again.

  “Do nothing, Teadrinker,” he said to himself, “but think, think, think. Those spiders look as though they might have possibilities.”

  On Viola Siderea, at the Council of the Guild of Thieves

  “Put two converted police cruisers in orbit around the Sun. Mark them for charter or sale, so that we won’t run into the police.

  “Put an agent into every liner which is Earthbound within the time stated.

  “Remember, we don’t want the man. Just his luggage. He’s sure to be carrying a half-ton or so of stroon. With that kind of fortune, we could pay off all the debts we gathered with that Bozart business. Funny we never heard from Bozart. Nothing.

  “Put three senior thieves in Earthport itself. Make sure that they have fake stroon, diluted down to about one-thousandth, so that they can work the luggage switch if they have the chance.

  “I know all this costs money, but you have to spend money to get it. Agreed, gentlemen of the larcenical arts?”

  There was a chorus of agreement around the table, except for one old, wise thief who said,

  “You know my views.”

  “Yes,” said the chairman, with toneless polite hatred, “we know your views. Rob corpses. Clean out wrecks. Become human hyenas instead of human wolves.”

  With unexpected humor the old man said, “Crudely put. But correct. And safer.”

  “Do we need to vote?” said the chairman, looking around the table.

  There was a chorus of nos.

  “Carried, then,” said the presiding chief. “Hit hard, and hit for the small target, not the big one.”

  Ten Kilometers Below the Surface of the Earth

  “He is coming, father! He is coming.”

  “Who is coming?” said the voice, like a great drum resounding.

  E’lamelanie said it as though it were a prayer: “The blessed one, the appointed one, the guarantor of our people, the new messenger on whom the robot, rat and Copt agreed. With money he is coming, to help us, to save us, to open to us the light of day and the vaults of heaven.”

  “You are blasphemous,” said the E’telekeli.

  The girl fell into a hush. She not only respected her father. She worshipped him as her personal religious leader. His great eyes blazed as though they could see through thousands of meters of dirt and rock and still see beyond into the deep of space. Perhaps he could see that far…Even his own people were never sure of the limits of his power. His white face and white feathers gave his penetrating eyes a miraculously piercing capacity.

  Calmly, rather kindly, he added, “My darling, you are wrong. We simply do not know who this man McBan really is.”

  “Couldn’t it be written?” she pleaded. “Couldn’t it be promised? That’s the direction of space from which the robot, the rat and the Copt sent back our very special message, ‘From the uttermost deeps one shall come, bringing uncountable treasure and a sure delivery.’ So it might be now! Mightn’t it?”

  “My dear,” he responded, “you still have a crude idea of real treasure if you think it is measured in megacredits. Go read The Scrap of the Book, then think, and then tell me what you have thought. But meanwhile—no more chatter. We must not excite our poor oppressed people.”

  Ruth, on the Beach Near Meeya Meefla

  On this day Ruth thought nothing at all of Norstrilia or treasures. She was trying to do watercolors of the breakers and they came out very badly indeed. The real ones kept on being too beautiful and the water colors looked like watercolors.

  The Temporary Council of the Commonwealth of Old North Australia

  “All the riffraff of all the worlds. They’re all going to make a run for that silly boy of ours.”

  “Right.”

  “If he stays here, they’ll come here.”

  “Right.”

  “Let’s let him go to Earth. I have a feeling that little rascal Redlady will smuggle him out tonight and save us the trouble.”

  “Right.”

  “After a while it will be all right for him to come back. He won’t spoil our hereditary defense of looking stupid. I’m afraid he’s bright but by Earth standards he’s just a yokel.”

  “Right.”

  “Should we send along twenty or thirty more Rod McBans and get the attackers really loused up?”

  “No.”

  “Why not, Sir and Owner?”

  “Because it would look clever. We rely on never looking clever. I have the next best answer.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Suggest to all the really rum worlds we know that a good impersonator could put his hands on the McBan money. Make the suggestion so that they would not know that we had originated it. The starlanes will be full of Rod McBans, complete with phony Norstrilian accents,
for the next couple of hundred years. And no one will suspect that we set them up to it. Stupid’s the word, mate, stupid. If they ever think we’re clever, we’re for it!” The speaker sighed: “How do the bloody fools suppose our forefathers got off Paradise VII if they weren’t clever? How can they think we’d hold this sharp little monopoly for thousands of years? They’re stupid not to think about it, but let’s not make them think. Right?”

  “Right.”

  THE NEARBY EXILE

  Rod woke with a strange feeling of well-being. In a corner of his mind there were memories of pandemonium—knives, blood, medicine, a monkey working as surgeon. Rum dreams! He glanced around and immediately tried to jump out of bed.

  The whole world was on fire!

  Bright blazing intolerable fire, like a blowtorch.

  But the bed held him. He realized that a loose comfortable jacket ended in tapes and that the tapes were anchored in some way to the bed.

  “Eleanor!” he shouted. “Come here.”

  He remembered the mad bird attacking him, Lavinia transporting him to the cabin of the sharp Earthman, Lord Redlady. He remembered medicines and fuss. But this—what was this?

  When the door opened, more of the intolerable light poured in. It was as though every cloud had been stripped from the sky of Old North Australia, leaving only the blazing heavens and the fiery sun. There were people who had seen that happen, when the weather machines occasionally broke down and let a hurricane cut a hole in the clouds, but it had certainly not happened in his time, or in his grandfather’s time.

  The man who entered was pleasant, but he was no Norstrilian. His shoulders were slight, he did not look as though he could lift a cow, and his face had been washed so long and so steadily that it looked like a baby’s face. He had an odd medical-looking suit on, all white, and his face combined the smile and the ready professional sympathy of a good physician.

  “We’re feeling better, I see,” said he.

  “Where on Earth am I?” asked Rod. “In a satellite? It feels odd.”

  “You’re not on Earth, man.”

  “I know I’m not. I’ve never been there. Where’s this place?”

  “Mars. The Old Star Station. I’m Jeanjacques Vomact.” Rod mumbled the name so badly the other man had to spell it out for him. When that was straightened out, Rod came back to the subject.

  “Where’s Mars? Can you untie me? When’s that light going to go off?”

  “I’ll untie you right now,” said Doctor Vomact, “but stay in bed and take it easy until we’ve given you some food and taken some tests. The light—that’s sunshine. I’d say it’s about seven hours, local time, before it goes off. This is late morning. Don’t you know what Mars is? It’s a planet.”

  “New Mars, you mean,” said Rod proudly, “the one with the enormous shops and the zoological gardens.”

  “The only shops we have here are the cafeteria and the PX. New Mars? I’ve heard of that place somewhere. It does have big shops and some kind of an animal show. Elephants you can hold in your hand. They’ve got those too. This isn’t that place at all. Wait a sec, I’ll roll your bed to the window.”

  Rod looked eagerly out of the window. It was frightening. A naked, dark sky did not have a cloud in sight. A few holes showed in it here and there. They almost looked like the “stars” which people saw when they were in spaceship transit from one cloudy planet to another. Dominating everything was a single explosive horrible light, which hung high and steady in the sky without ever going off. He found himself cringing for the explosion, but he could tell, from the posture of the doctor next to him, that the doctor was not in the least afraid of that chronic hydrogen bomb, whatever it might turn out to be. Keeping his voice level and trying not to sound like a boy, he said,

  “What’s that?”

  “The Sun.”

  “Don’t cook my book, mate. Give me the straight truth. Everybody calls his star a sun. What’s this one?”

  “The Sun. The original Sun. The Sun of Old Earth itself. Just as this is plain Mars. Not even Old Mars. Certainly not New Mars. This is Earth’s neighbor.”

  “That thing never goes off, goes up—boom!—or goes down?”

  “The Sun, you mean?” said Doctor Vomact. “No, I should think not. I suppose it looked that way to your ancestors and mine half a million years ago, when we were all running around naked on Earth.” The doctor busied himself as he talked. He chopped the air with a strange-looking little key, and the tapes fell loose. The mittens dropped off Rod’s hands. Rod looked at his own hands in the intense light and saw that they seemed strange. They looked smooth and naked and clean, like the doctor’s own hands. Weird memories began to come back to him, but his handicap about spieking and hiering telepathically had made him cautious and sensitive, so he did not give himself away.

  “If this is old, old Mars, what are you doing, talking the Old North Australian language to me? I thought my people were the only ones in the universe who still spoke Ancient Inglish.” He shifted proudly but clumsily over to the Old Common Tongue: “You see, the Appointed Ones of my family taught me this language as well. I’ve never been offworld before.”

  “I speak your language,” said the doctor, “because I learned it. I learned it because you paid me, very generously, to learn it. In the months that we have been reassembling you, it’s come in handy. We just let down the portal of memory and identity today, but I’ve talked to you for hundreds of hours already.”

  Rod tried to speak.

  He could not utter a word. His throat was dry and he was afraid that he might throw up his food—if he had eaten any.

  The doctor put a friendly hand on his arm. “Easy, Mister and Owner McBan, easy now. We all do that when we come out.”

  Rod croaked, “I’ve been dead? Dead? Me?”

  “Not exactly dead,” said the doctor, “but close to it.”

  “The box—that little box!” cried Rod.

  “What little box?”

  “Please, Doctor—the one I came in?”

  “That box wasn’t so little,” said Doctor Vomact. He squared his hands in the air and made a shape about the size of the little ladies’ bonnet-box which Rod had seen in the Lord Redlady’s private operating room. “It was this big. Your head was full natural size. That’s why it’s been so easy and so successful to bring you back to normality in such a hurry.”

  “And Eleanor?”

  “Your companion? She made it, too. Nobody intercepted the ship.”

  “You mean the rest is true, too? I’m still the richest man in the universe? And I’m gone, gone from home?” Rod would have liked to beat the bedspread, but did not.

  “I am glad,” said Doctor Vomact, “to see you express so much feeling about your situation. You showed a great deal when you were under the sedatives and hypnotics, but I was beginning to wonder how we could help you realize your true position when you came back, as you have, to normal life. Forgive me for talking this way. I sound like a medical journal. It’s hard to be friends with a patient, even when one really likes him…”

  Vomact was a small man, a full head shorter than Rod himself, but so gracefully proportioned that he did not look stunted or little. His face was thin, with a mop of ungovernable black hair which fell in all directions. Among Norstrilians, this fashion would have been deemed eccentric; to judge by the fact that other Earthmen let their hair grow wild and long, it must have been an Earth fashion. Rod found it foolish but not repulsive.

  It was not Vomact’s appearance which caused the impression. It was the personality which tingled out of every pore. Vomact could become calm when he knew, from his medical wisdom, that kindness and tranquility were in order, but these qualities were not usual to him. He was vivacious, moody, lively, talkative to an extreme, but he was sensitive enough to the person to whom he was talking: he never became a bore. Even among Norstrilian women, Rod had never seen a person who expressed so much, so fluently. When Vomact talked, his hands were in constant motio
n—outlining, describing, clarifying the points which he described. When he talked he smiled, scowled, raised his eyebrows in questioning, stared with amazement, looked aside in wonder. Rod was used to the sight of two Norstrilians having a long telepathic conversation, spieking and hiering one another as their bodies reposed, comfortable and immobile, while their minds worked directly on one another. To do all this with the speaking voice—that, to a Norstrilian, was a marvel to hear and behold. There was something graceful and pleasant about the animation of this Earth doctor which stood in complete contrast to the quick dangerous decisiveness of the Lord Redlady. Rod began to think that if Earth were full of people, all of them like Vomact, it must be a delightful but confusing place. Vomact once hinted that his family was unusual, so that even in the long weary years of perfection, when everyone else had numbers, they kept their family name secret but remembered.

  One afternoon Vomact suggested that they walk across the Martian plain a few kilometers to the ruins of the first human settlement on Mars. “We have to talk,” said he, “but it is easy enough to talk through these soft helmets. The exercise will do you good. You’re young and you will take a lot of conditioning.”

  Rod agreed.

  Friends they became in the ensuing days.

  Rod found that the doctor was by no means as young as he looked, just ten years or so older than himself. The doctor was a hundred and ten years old, and had gone through his first rejuvenation just ten years before. He had two more and then death, at the age of four hundred, if the present schedule were kept for Mars.

  “You may think, Mister McBan, that you are an upset, wild type yourself. I can promise you, young bucko, that Old Earth is such a happy mess these days that they will never notice you. Haven’t you heard about the Rediscovery of Man?”