Norstrilia - Illustrated Page 17

  “You stand right where you are till I come back!”

  They stood, saying nothing.

  C’mell and A’gentur took the place for granted.

  Rod stared as though he would drink up the world with his eyes. In this one enormous room, there was more antiquity and wealth than all Old North Australia possessed. Curtains of an incredibly rich material shimmered down from the thirty-meter ceiling; some of them seemed to be dirty and in bad repair, but any one of them, after paying the twenty million percent import duty, would cost more than any Old North Australian could afford to pay. There were chairs and tables here and there, some of them good enough to deserve a place in the Museum of Man on New Mars. Here they were merely used. The people did not seem any the happier for having all this wealth around them. For the first time, Rod got a glimpse of what the spartan self-imposed poverty had done to make life worthwhile at home. His people did not have much, when they could have chartered endless argosies of treasure, inbound from all worlds to their own planet, in exchange for the life-prolonging stroon. But if they had been heaped with treasure they would have appreciated nothing and would have ended up possessing nothing. He thought of his own little collection of hidden antiquities. Here on Earth it would not have filled a dustbin, but in the Station of Doom it would afford him connoisseurship as long as he lived.

  The thought of his home made him wonder what Old Hot and Simple, the Hon. Sec., might be doing with his adversary on Earth. “It’s a long, long way to reach here!” he thought to himself.

  C’mell drew his attention by plucking at his arm.

  “Hold me,” commanded she, “because I am afraid I might fall down and Yeekasoose is not strong enough to hold me.”

  Rod wondered who Yeekasoose might be, when only the little monkey A’gentur was with them; he also wondered why C’mell should need to be held. Norstrilian discipline had taught him not to question orders in an emergency. He held her.

  She suddenly slumped as though she had fainted or had gone to sleep. He held her with one arm and with his free hand he tipped her head against his shoulder so that she would look as though she were weary and affectionate, not unconscious. It was pleasant to hold her little female body, which felt fragile and delicate beyond belief. Her hair, disarrayed and windblown, still carried the smell of the salty sea air which had so surprised him an hour ago. She herself, he thought, was the greatest treasure of Earth which he had yet seen. But suppose he did have her? What could he do with her in Old North Australia? Underpeople were completely forbidden, except for military uses under the exclusive control of the Commonwealth government. He could not imagine C’mell directing a mowing machine as she walked across a giant sheep, shearing it. The idea of her sitting up all night with a lonely or frightened sheep-monster was itself ridiculous. She was a playgirl, an ornament in human form; for such as her, there was no place under the comfortable grey skies of home. Her beauty would fade in the dry air; her intricate mind would turn sour with the weary endlessness of a farm culture: property, responsibility, defense, self-reliance, sobriety. New Melbourne would look like a collection of rude shacks to her.

  He realized that his feet were getting cold. Up on the deck they had had sunlight to keep them warm, even though the chill salty wet air of Earth’s marvelous “seas” was blowing against them. Here, inside, it was merely high and cold, while still wet; he had never encountered wet cold before, and it was a strangely uncomfortable experience.

  C’mell came to and shook herself to wakefulness just as they saw the officer walking toward them from the other end of the immense room.

  Later, she told Rod what she had experienced when she lapsed into unconsciousness.

  First, she had had a call which she could not explain. This had made her warn Rod. “Yeekasoose” was, of course E’ikasus, the real name of the “monkey” which he called A’gentur.

  Then, as she felt herself swimming away into half-sleep with Rod’s strong arm around her, she had heard trumpets playing, just two or three of them, playing different parts to the same intricate, lovely piece of music, sometimes in solos, sometimes together. If a human or robot telepath had peeped her mind while she listened to the music, the impression would have been that of a perceptive c’girl who had linked herself with one of the many telepathic entertainment channels which filled the space of Earth itself.

  Last, there came the messages. They were not encoded in the music in any way whatever. The music caused the images to form in her mind because she was C’mell, herself, unique, individual. Particular fugues or even individual notes reached into her memory and emotions, causing her mind to bring up old, half-forgotten associations. First she thought of “High birds flying…” as in the song which she had sung to Rod. Then she saw eyes, piercing eyes which blazed with knowledge while they stayed moist with humility. Then she smelled the strange odors of Downdeep-downdeep, the work-city where the underpeople maintained the civilization on the surface and where some illegal underpeople lurked, overlooked by the authority of Man. Finally she saw Rod himself, striding off the deck with his loping Norstrilian walk. It added up simply. She was to bring Rod to the forgotten, forlorn, forbidden chambers of the Nameless One, and to do so promptly. The music in her head stopped, and she woke up.

  The officer arrived.

  He looked at them inquisitively and angrily. “This whole business is funny. The Acting Commissioner does not believe that there are any blue men. We’ve all heard of them. And yet we know somebody set off a telepathic emotion-bomb. That rage! Half the people in this room fell down when it went off. Those weapons are completely prohibited for use inside the Earth’s atmosphere.”

  He cocked his head at them.

  C’mell remained prudently silent, Rod practiced looking thoroughly stupid, and A’gentur looked like a bright, helpless little monkey.

  “Funnier still,” said the officer, “the Acting Commissioner got orders to let you go. He got them while he was chewing me out. How does anybody know that you underpeople are here? Who are you, anyhow?”

  He looked at them with curiosity for a minute, but then the curiosity faded with the pressure of his lifelong habits.

  He snapped, “Who cares? Get along. Get out. You’re underpeople and you’re not allowed to stand in this room, anyhow.”

  He turned his back on them and walked away.

  “Where are we going?” whispered Rod, hoping C’mell would say that he could go down to the surface and see Old Earth itself.

  “Down to the bottom of the world, and then—” she bit her lip “…and then, much further down. I have instructions.”

  “Can’t I take an hour and look at Earth?” asked Rod. “You stay with me, of course.”

  “When death is jumping around us like wild sparks? Of course not. Come along, Rod. You’ll get your freedom some time soon, if somebody doesn’t kill you first. Yeekasoose, you lead the way!”

  They walked toward a dropshaft.

  When Rod looked down it, the sight made him dizzy. Only the sight of people floating up and down in it made him realize that this was some Earth device which his people did not have in Old North Australia.

  “Take a belt,” said C’mell quietly. “Do it as though you were used to it.”

  He looked around. Only after she had taken a canvas belt, about fifteen centimeters wide, and was cinching it to her waist, did he see what she meant. He took one too and put it on. They waited while A’gentur ran up and down the racks of belts, looking for one small enough to fit him. C’mell finally helped him by taking one of normal size and looping it around his waist twice before she hooked it.

  “Magnetic,” she murmured. “For the dropshafts.”

  They did not take the main dropshaft.

  “That’s for people only,” said C’mell.

  The underpeople dropshaft was the same, except that it did not have the bright lights, the pumping of fresh air, the labeling of the levels, and the entertaining pictures to divert the passengers as they went
up and down. This dropshaft, moreover, seemed to have more cargo than people in it. Huge boxes, bales, bits of machines, furniture and inexplicable bundles, each tied with magnetic belts and each guided by an underperson, floated up and down in the mysterious ever busy traffic of Old Earth.

  DISCOURSES AND RECOURSES

  Rod McBan, disguised as a cat, floated down the dropshaft to the strangest encounter which could have befallen any man of his epoch. C’mell floated down beside him. She clenched her skirt between her knees, so that it would not commit immodesties. A’gentur, his monkey hand lightly on C’mell’s shoulder, loved her soft red hair as it stood and moved with the updraft which they themselves created; he looked forward to becoming E’ikasus again and he admired C’mell deeply, but love between the different strains of underpeople was necessarily platonic. Physiologically they could not breed outside their own stock, and emotionally they found it hard to mesh deeply with the empathic needs of another form of life, however related it might be. E’ikasus therefore very truly and deeply wanted C’mell for his friend, and nothing more.

  While they moved downward in relative peace, other people were concerned about them on various worlds.

  Old North Australia, Administrative Offices of the Commonwealth, The Same Day

  “You, former Hon. Sec. of this government, are charged with going outside the limits of your onseckish duties and of attempting to commit mayhem or murder upon the person of one of Her Absent Majesty’s subjects, the said subject being Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan to the one-hundred-and-fifty-first generation; and you are further charged with the abuse of an official instrument of this Commonwealth government in designing and encompassing the said unlawful purpose, to wit, one mutated sparrow, serial number 0919487, specialty number 2328525, weighing forty-one kilograms, and having a monetary value of 685 minicredits. What say you?”

  Houghton Syme CXLIX buried his face in his hands and sobbed.

  The Cabin of the Station of Doom, At the Same Time

  “Aunt Doris, he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead. I feel it.”

  “Nonsense, Lavinia. He may be in trouble and we might not know. But with all that money, the government or the Instrumentality would use the Big Blink to send word of the change in status of this property. I don’t mean to sound cold-hearted, girl, but when there is this much property at stake, people act rapidly.”

  “He is so dead.”

  Doris was not one to discount the telepathic arts. She remembered how the Australians had gotten off the incarnate fury of Paradise VII. She went over to the cupboard and took from it a strangely tinted jar. “Do you know what this is?” said she to Lavinia.

  The girl forced a smile past her desperate inward feelings. “Yes,” she said. “Ever since I was no bigger than a mini-elephant, people have told me that jar was ‘do not touch.’”

  “Good girl, then, if you haven’t touched it!” said Aunt Doris drily. “It’s a mixture of stroon and Paradise VII honey.”

  “Honey?” cried Lavinia. “I thought no one ever went back to that horrible place.”

  “Some do,” said Aunt Doris. “It seems that some Earth forms have taken over and are still living there. Including bees. The honey has powers on the human mind. It is a strong hypnotic. We mix it with stroon to make sure it is safe.”

  Aunt Doris put a small spoon into the jar, lifted, spun the spoon to pick up the threads of heavy honey, and handed the spoon to Lavinia. “Here,” said she, “take this and lick it off. Swallow it all down.”

  Lavinia hesitated and then obeyed. When the spoon was clean she licked her lips and handed the clean spoon back to Aunt Doris, who put it aside for washing up.

  Aunt Doris ceremoniously put the jar back on the high shelf of the cupboard, locked the cupboard, and put the key in the pocket of her apron.

  “Let’s sit outside,” said she to Lavinia.

  “When’s it going to happen?”

  “When’s what going to happen?”

  “The trance—the visions—whatever this stuff brings on?”

  Doris laughed her weary rational laugh. “Oh, that! Sometimes nothing at all happens. In any event, it won’t hurt you, girl. Let’s sit on the bench. I’ll tell you if you start looking strange to me.”

  They sat on the bench, doing nothing. Two police ornithopters, flying just under the forever grey clouds, quietly watched the Station of Doom. They had been doing this ever since Rod’s computer showed him how to win all that money: the fortune was still piling up, almost faster than it could be computed. The bird-engines were lazy and beautiful as they flew. The operators had synchronized the flapping of the two sets of wings, so that they looked like rukhs doing a ballet. The effect caught the eyes of both Lavinia and Aunt Doris.

  Lavinia suddenly spoke in a clear, sharp, demanding voice, quite unlike her usual tone: “It’s all mine, isn’t it?”

  Doris breathed softly, “What, my dear?”

  “The Station of Doom. I’m one of the heiresses, anyhow, aren’t I?” Lavinia pursed her lips in a proud prim smug smile which would have humiliated her if she had been in her right mind.

  Aunt Doris said nothing. She nodded silently.

  “If I marry Rod I’ll be Missus and Owner McBan, the richest woman who ever lived. But if I do marry him, he’ll hate me, because he’ll think it’s for his money and his power. But I’ve loved Rod, loved him specially because he couldn’t hier or spiek. I’ve always known that he would need me someday, not like my Daddy, singing his crazy sad proud songs forever and ever! But how can I marry him now…?”

  Whispered Doris, very gently, very insinuatingly: “Look for Rod, my dear. Look for Rod in that part of your mind which thought he was dead. Look for Rod, Lavinia, look for Rod.”

  Lavinia laughed happily, and it was the laugh of a small child.

  She stared at her feet, at the sky, at Doris—looking right through her.

  Her eyes seemed to clear. When she spoke, it was in her normal adult voice:

  “I see Rod. Someone has changed him into a cat-man, just like the pictures we’ve seen of underpeople. And there’s a girl with him—a girl, Doris—and I can’t be jealous of him being with her. She is the most beautiful thing that ever lived on any world. You ought to see her hair, Doris. You ought to see her hair. It is like a bushel of beautiful fire. Is that Rod? I don’t know. I can’t tell. I can’t see.” She sat on the bench, looking straight at Doris and seeing nothing, but weeping copiously.

  Aunt Doris started to get up; it was about time for the poor thing to be led to her bed, so that she could sleep off the hypnotic of Paradise VII.

  But Lavinia spoke again. “I see them too.”

  “Who?” said Aunt Doris, not much interested, now that they had found their information about Rod. Doris never mentioned the matter to any masculine person, but she was a deeply superstitious person who found great satisfaction in tampering with the preternatural, but even in these ventures she kept the turn of mind, essentially practical, which had characterized her whole life. Thus, when Lavinia stumbled on the greatest secret of the contemporary universe, she made no note of it. She told no one about it, then or later.

  Lavinia insisted, “I see the proud pale people with strong hands and white eyes. The ones who built the palace of the Governor of Night.”

  “That’s nice,” said Aunt Doris, “but it is time for your nap…”

  “Goodbye, dear people…” said Lavinia, a little drunkenly.

  She had glimpsed the Daimoni in their home world.

  Aunt Doris, unheeding, stood up and look Lavinia’s arm, leading her away to rest. Nothing remained of the Daimoni, except for a little song which Lavinia found herself making up a few weeks later, not knowing whether she had dreamed some such thing or had read it in a book:

  Oh, you will see, you will see

  Them striding fair, oh fair and free!

  Down garden paths of silver grass

  Past flowing rivers,

  Their
hair pushed back

  By fingers of the wind.

  And you will know them

  By their blank white faces,

  Expressionless, removed,

  All lines smoothed,

  As they stride on in the night

  Toward their unimaginable goals…

  Thus came news of Rod, unreported, unrepeated; thus passed the glimpse of the Daimoni in their star-hidden home.

  At the Beach of Meeya Meefla, The Same Day

  “Father, you can’t be here. You never come here!”

  “But I have,” said Lord William Not-from-here. “And it’s important.”

  “Important?” laughed Ruth. “Then it’s not me. I’m not important. Your work up there is.” She looked toward the rim of the Earthport, which floated, distinct and circular, beyond the crests of some faraway clouds.

  The overdressed lord squatted incongruously on the sand.

  “Listen, girl,” said he slowly and emphatically, “I’ve never asked much of you but I am asking now.”

  “Yes, father,” she said, a little frightened by this totally unaccustomed air: her father was usually playfully casual with her, and equally usually forgot her ten seconds after he got through talking to her.

  “Ruth, you know we are Old North Australians?”

  “We’re rich, if that’s what you mean. Not that it matters, the way things go.”

  “I’m not talking about riches now, I’m talking about home, and I mean it!”

  “Home? We never had a home, father.”

  “Norstrilia!” he snarled at her.

  “I never saw it, father. Nor did you. Nor your father. Nor great-grandpa. What are you talking about?”

  “We can go home again!”

  “Father, what’s happened? Have you lost your mind? You’ve always told me that our family bought out and could never go back. What’s happened now? Have they changed the rules? I’m not even sure I want to go there, anyhow. No water, no beaches, no cities. Just a dry dull planet with sick sheep and a lot of immortal farmers who go around armed to the teeth!”