Norstrilia Read online

  “I must ask you to pull your clothing together a little,” said Jestocost in a clinical turn of voice. “I am a man, even if I am an official, and this interview is more important to you and to me than any distraction would be.”

  She was a little frightened by his tone. She had meant no challenge. With the funeral that day, she meant nothing at all; these clothes were the only kind she had.

  He read all this in her face.

  Relentlessly, he pursued the subject.

  “Young lady, I asked about your leader. You name your boss and you name your father. I want your leader.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said, on the edge of a sob, “I don’t understand.”

  Then, he thought to himself, I’ve got to take a gamble. He thrust the mental dagger home, almost drove his words like steel straight into her face. “Who …” he said slowly and icily, “is … Ee … telly … kelly?”

  The girl’s face had been cream-colored, pale with sorrow. Now she went white. She twisted away from him. Her eyes glowed like twin fires.

  Her eyes … like twin fires.

  (No undergirl, thought Jestocost as he reeled, could hypnotize me.)

  Her eyes … were like cold fires.

  The room faded around him. The girl disappeared. Her eyes became a single white, cold fire.

  Within this fire stood the figure of a man. His arms were wings, but he had human hands growing at the elbows of his wings. His face was clear, white, cold as the marble of an ancient statue; his eyes were opaque white. “I am the E’telekeli. You will believe in me. You may speak to my daughter C’mell.”

  The image faded.

  Jestocost saw the girl staring as she sat awkwardly on the chair, looking blindly through him. He was on the edge of making a joke about her hypnotic capacity when he saw that she was still deeply hypnotized even after he had been released. She had stiffened and again her clothing had fallen into its planned disarray. The effect was not stimulating; it was pathetic beyond words, as though an accident had happened to a pretty child. He spoke to her.

  He spoke to her, not really expecting an answer.

  “Who are you?” he said to her, testing her hypnosis.

  “I am he whose name is never said aloud,” said the girl in a sharp whisper, “I am he whose secret you have penetrated. I have printed my image and my name in your mind.”

  Jestocost did not quarrel with ghosts like this. He snapped out a decision. “If I open my mind, will you search it while I watch you? Are you good enough to do that?”

  “I am very good,” hissed the voice in the girl’s mouth.

  C’mell arose and put her two hands on his shoulders. She looked into his eyes. He looked back. A strong telepath himself, Jestocost was not prepared for the enormous thought-voltage which poured out of her.

  Look in my mind, he commanded, for the subject of underpeople only.

  I see it, thought the mind behind C’mell.

  Do you see what I mean to do for the underpeople?

  Jestocost heard the girl breathing hard as her mind served as a relay to his. He tried to remain calm so that he could see which part of his mind was being searched. Very good so far, he thought to himself. An intelligence like that on Earth itself, he thought—and we of the lords not knowing it!

  The girl hacked out a dry little laugh.

  Jestocost thought at the mind, Sorry. Go ahead.

  This plan of yours—thought the strange mind—may I see more of it?

  That’s all there is.

  Oh, said the strange mind, you want me to think for you. Can you give me the keys in the Bell and Bank which pertain to destroying underpeople?

  You can have the information keys if I can ever get them, thought Jestocost, but not the control keys and not the master switch of the Bell.

  Fair enough, thought the other mind, and what do I pay for them?

  You support me in my policies before the Instrumentality. You keep the underpeople reasonable, if you can, when the time comes to negotiate. You maintain honor and good faith in all subsequent agreements. But how can I get the keys? It would take me a year to figure them out myself.

  Let the girl look once, thought the strange mind, and I will be behind her. Fair?

  Fair, thought Jestocost.

  Break? thought the mind.

  How do we reconnect? thought Jestocost back.

  As before. Through the girl. Never say my name. Don’t think it if you can help it. Break?

  Break! thought Jestocost.

  The girl, who had been holding his shoulders, drew his face down and kissed him firmly and warmly. He had never touched an underperson before, and it never had occurred to him that he might kiss one. It was pleasant, but he took her arms away from his neck, half-turned her around, and let her lean against him.

  “Daddy!” she sighed happily.

  Suddenly she stiffened, looked at his face, and sprang for the door. “Jestocost!” she cried. “Lord Jestocost! What am I doing here?”

  “Your duty is done, my girl. You may go.”

  She staggered back into the room. “I’m going to be sick,” she said. She vomited on his floor.

  He pushed a button for a cleaning robot and slapped his desk-top for coffee.

  She relaxed and talked about his hopes for the underpeople. She stayed an hour. By the time she left they had a plan. Neither of them had mentioned E’telekeli, neither had put purposes in the open. If the monitors had been listening, they would have found no single sentence or paragraph which was suspicious.

  When she had gone, Jestocost looked out of his window. He saw the clouds far below and he knew the world below him was in twilight. He had planned to help the underpeople, and he had met powers of which organized mankind had no conception or perception. He was righter than he had thought. He had to go on through.

  But as partner—C’mell herself!

  Was there ever an odder diplomat in the history of worlds?

  -3-

  In less than a week they had decided what to do. It was the Council of the lords of the Instrumentality at which they would work—the brain center itself. The risk was high, but the entire job could be done in a few minutes if it were done at the Bell itself.

  This is the sort of thing which interested Jestocost.

  He did not know that C’mell watched him with two different facets of her mind. One side of her was alertly and wholeheartedly his fellow-conspirator, utterly in sympathy with the revolutionary aims to which they were both committed. The other side of her—was feminine.

  She had a womanliness which was truer than that of any hominid woman. She knew the value of her trained smile, her splendidly kept red hair with its unimaginably soft texture, her lithe young figure with firm breasts and persuasive hips. She knew down to the last millimeter the effect which her legs had on hominid men. True humans kept few secrets from her. The men betrayed themselves by their unfulfillable desires, the women by their irrepressible jealousies. But she knew people best of all by not being one herself. She had to learn by imitation, and imitation is conscious. A thousand little things which ordinary women took for granted, or thought about just once in a whole lifetime, were subjects of acute and intelligent study to her. She was a girl by profession; she was a human by assimilation: she was an inquisitive cat in her genetic nature. Now she was falling in love with Jestocost, and she knew it.

  Even she did not realize that the romance would sometime leak out into rumor, be magnified into legend, distilled into romance. She had no idea of the ballad about herself that would open with the lines which became famous much later:

  She got the which of the what-she-did,

  Hid the bell with a blot, she did,

  But she fell in love with a hominid.

  Where is the which of the what-she-did?

  All this lay in the future, and she did not know it.

  She knew her own past.

  She remembered the off-Earth prince who had rested his head in her lap and had s
aid, sipping his glass of mott by way of farewell:

  “Funny, C’mell, you’re not even a person and you’re the most intelligent human being I’ve met in this place. Do you know it made my planet poor to send me here? And what did I get out of them? Nothing, nothing, and a thousand times nothing. But you, now. If you’d been running the government of Earth, I’d have gotten what my people need, and this world would be richer too. Manhome, they call it. Manhome, my eye! The only smart person on it is a female cat.”

  He ran his fingers around her ankle. She did not stir. That was part of hospitality, and she had her own ways of making sure that hospitality did not go too far. Earth police were watching her; to them, she was a convenience maintained for outworld people, something like a soft chair in the Earthport lobbies or a drinking fountain with acid-tasting water for strangers who could not tolerate the insipid water of Earth. She was not expected to have feelings or to get involved. If she had ever caused an incident, they would have punished her fiercely, as they often punished animals or underpeople, or else (after a short formal hearing with no appeal) they would have destroyed her, as the law allowed and custom encouraged.

  She had kissed a thousand men, maybe fifteen hundred. She had made them feel welcome and she had gotten their complaints or their secrets out of them as they left. It was a living, emotionally tiring but intellectually very stimulating. Sometimes it made her laugh to look at human women with their pointed-up noses and their proud airs, and to realize that she knew more about the men who belonged to the human women than the human women themselves ever did.

  Once a policewoman had had to read over the record of two pioneers from New Mars. C’mell had been given the job of keeping in very close touch with them. When the policewoman got through reading the report she looked at C’mell and her face was distorted with jealousy and prudish rage.

  “Cat, you call yourself. Cat! You’re a pig, you’re a dog, you’re an animal. You may be working for Earth but don’t ever get the idea that you’re as good as a person. I think it’s a crime that the Instrumentality lets monsters like you greet real human beings from outside! I can’t stop it. But may the Bell help you, girl, if you ever touch a real Earth man! If you ever get near one! If you ever try tricks here! Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” C’mell had said. To herself she thought, “That poor thing doesn’t know how to select her own clothes or how to do her own hair. No wonder she resents somebody who manages to be pretty.”

  Perhaps the policewoman thought that raw hatred would be shocking to C’mell. It wasn’t. Underpeople were used to hatred, and it was not any worse raw than it was when cooked with politeness and served like poison. They had to live with it.

  But now, it was all changed.

  She had fallen in love with Jestocost.

  Did he love her?

  Impossible. No, not impossible. Unlawful, unlikely, indecent—yes, all these, but not impossible. Surely he felt something of her love.

  If he did, he gave no sign of it.

  People and underpeople had fallen in love many times before. The underpeople were always destroyed and the real people brainwashed. There were laws against that kind of thing. The scientists among people had created the underpeople, had given them capacities which real people did not have (the fifty-meter jump, the telepath two miles underground, the turtle-man waiting a thousand years next to an emergency door, the cow-man guarding a gate without reward), and the scientists had also given many of the underpeople the human shape. It was handier that way. The human eye, the five-fingered hand, the human size—these were convenient for engineering reasons. By making underpeople the same size and shape as people, more or less, the scientists eliminated the need for two or three or a dozen different sets of furniture. The human form was good enough for all of them.

  But they had forgotten the human heart.

  And now she, C’mell, had fallen in love with a man, a true man old enough to have been her own father’s grandfather.

  But she didn’t feel daughterly about him at all. She remembered that with her own father there was an easy comradeship, an innocent and forthcoming affection, which masked the fact that he was considerably more catlike than she was. Between them there was an aching void of forever-unspoken words—things that couldn’t quite be said by either of them, perhaps things that couldn’t be said at all. They were so close to each other that they could get no closer. This created enormous distance, which was heart-breaking but unutterable. Her father had died, and now this true man was here with all the kindness—

  “That’s it,” she whispered to herself, “with all the kindness that none of these passing men have ever really shown. With all the depth which my poor underpeople can never get. Not that it’s not in them. But they’re born like dirt, treated like dirt, put away like dirt when they die. How can any of my own men develop real kindness? There’s a special sort of majesty to kindness. It’s the best part there is to being people. And he has whole oceans of it in him. And it’s strange, strange, strange that he’s never given his real love to any human woman.”

  She stopped, cold.

  Then she consoled herself and whispered on, “Or if he did, it’s so long ago that it doesn’t matter now. He’s got me. Does he know it?”

  -4-

  The Lord Jestocost did know, and yet he didn’t. He was used to getting loyalty from people, because he offered loyalty and honor in his daily work. He was even familiar with loyalty becoming obsessive and seeking physical form, particularly from women, children, and underpeople. He had always coped with it before. He was gambling on the fact that C’mell was a wonderfully intelligent person, and that as a girlygirl, working on the hospitality staff of the Earthport police, she must have learned to control her personal feelings.

  “We’re born in the wrong age,” he thought, “when I meet the most intelligent and beautiful female I’ve ever met, and then have to put business first. But this stuff about people and underpeople is sticky. Sticky. We’ve got to keep personalities out of it.”

  So he thought. Perhaps he was right.

  If the nameless one, whom he did not dare to remember, commanded an attack on the Bell itself, that was worth their lives. Their emotions could not come into it. The Bell mattered; justice mattered; the perpetual return of mankind to progress mattered. He did not matter, because he had already done most of his work. C’mell did not matter, because their failure would leave her with mere underpeople forever. The Bell did count.

  The price of what he proposed to do was high, but the entire job could be done in a few minutes if it were done at the Bell itself.

  The Bell, of course, was not a Bell. It was a three-dimensional situation table, three times the height of a man. It was set one story below the meeting room, and shaped roughly like an ancient bell. The meeting table of the lords of the Instrumentality had a circle cut out of it, so that the lords could look down into the Bell at whatever situation one of them called up either manually or telepathically. The Bank below it, hidden by the floor, was the key memory-bank of the entire system. Duplicates existed at thirty-odd other places on Earth. Two duplicates lay hidden in interstellar space, one of them beside the ninety-million-mile gold-colored ship left over from the war against Raumsog and the other masked as an asteroid.

  Most of the lords were off-world on the business of the Instrumentality.

  Only three besides Jestocost were present—the Lady Johanna Gnade, the Lord Issan Olascoaga, and the Lord William Not-from-here. (The Not-from-heres were a great Norstrilian family which had migrated back to Earth many generations before.)

  The E’telekeli told Jestocost the rudiments of a plan.

  He was to bring C’mell into the chambers on a summons.

  The summons was to be serious.

  They should avoid her summary death by automatic justice, if the relays began to trip.

  C’mell would go into partial trance in the chamber.

  He was then to call the items i
n the Bell which E’telekeli wanted traced. A single call would be enough. E’telekeli would take the responsibility for tracing them. The other lords would be distracted by him, E’telekeli.

  It was simple in appearance.

  The complication came in action.

  The plan seemed flimsy, but there was nothing which Jestocost could do at this time. He began to curse himself for letting his passion for policy involve him in the intrigue. It was too late to back out with honor; besides, he had given his word; besides, he liked C’mell—as a being, not as a girlygirl—and he would hate to see her marked with disappointment for life. He knew how the underpeople cherished their identities and their status.

  With heavy heart but quick mind he went to the council chamber. A dog-girl, one of the routine messengers whom he had seen many months outside the door, gave him the minutes.

  He wondered how C’mell or E’telekeli would reach him, once he was inside the chamber with its tight net of telepathic intercepts.

  He sat wearily at the table—

  And almost jumped out of his chair.

  The conspirators had forged the minutes themselves and the top item was: “C’mell daughter to C’mackintosh, cat stock (pure), lot 1138, confession of. Subject: conspiracy to export homuncular material. Reference: planet De Prinsensmacht.”

  The Lady Johanna Gnade had already pushed the buttons for the planet concerned. The people there, Earth by origin, were enormously strong but they had gone to great pains to maintain the original Earth appearance. One of their first-men was at the moment on Earth. He bore the title of the Twilight Prince (Prins van de Schemering) and he was on a mixed diplomatic and trading mission.