Norstrilia - Illustrated Read online

  “There’s the door, boy. Go. You’re a citizen. Free.”

  Rod started to thank him but the old man held up his right hand:

  “Don’t thank me. Duty. But remember—not one word, ever. Not one word, ever, about this hearing. Go along.”

  Rod plunged for the door, lurched through, and was in his own yard. Free.

  For a moment he stood in the yard, stunned.

  The dear grey sky of Old North Australia rolled low overhead; this was no longer the eerie light of Old Earth, where the heavens were supposed to shine perpetually blue. He sneezed as the dry air caught the tissue of his nostrils. He felt his clothing chill as the moisture evaporated out of it; he did not think whether it was the wetness of the trailer van or his own sweat which had made his shirt so wet. There were a lot of people there, and a lot of light. And the smell of roses was as far away as another life might be.

  Lavinia stood near him, weeping.

  He started to turn to her, when a collective gasp from the crowd caused him to turn around.

  The snake-man had come out of the van. (It was just an old theater van, he realized at last, the kind which he himself had entered a hundred times.) His Earth uniform looked like the acme of wealth and decadence among the dusty coveralls of the men and the poplin dresses of the women. His green complexion looked bright among the tanned faces of the Norstrilians. He saluted Rod.

  Rod did not return the salute. He just stared.

  Perhaps they had changed their minds and had sent the giggle of death after him.

  The soldier held out his hand. There was a wallet of what seemed to be leather, finely chased, of offworld manufacture.

  Rod stammered, “It’s not mine.”

  “It—is—not—yours,” said the snake-man, “but—it—is—the—things—gift—which—the—people—promised—you—inside.—Take—it—because—I—am—too—dry—out—here.”

  Rod took it and stuffed it in his pocket. What did a present matter when they had given him life, eyes, daylight, the wind itself?

  The snake-soldier watched with flickering eyes. He made no comment, but he saluted and went stiffly back to the van. At the door he turned and looked over the crowd as though he were appraising the easiest way to kill them all. He said nothing, threatened nothing. He opened the door and put himself into the van. There was no sign of who the human inhabitants of the van might be. There must be, thought Rod, some way of getting them in and out of the Garden of Death very secretly and very quietly, because he had lived around the neighborhood a long time and had never had the faintest idea that his own neighbors might sit on a board.

  The people were funny. They stood quietly in the yard, waiting for him to make the first move.

  He turned stiffly and looked around more deliberately.

  Why, it was his neighbors and kinfolk, all of them—McBans, MacArthurs, Passarellis, Schmidts, even the Sanders!

  He lifted his hand in greeting to all of them.

  Pandemonium broke loose.

  They rushed toward him. The women kissed him, the men patted him on the back and shook his hand, the little children began a piping little song about the Station of Doom. He had become the center of a mob which led him to his own kitchen.

  Many of the people had begun to cry.

  He wondered why. Almost immediately, he understood—

  They liked him.

  For unfathomable people reasons, mixed-up, non-logical human reasons they had wished him well. Even the auntie who had predicted a coffin for him was sniveling without shame, using a corner of her apron to wipe her eyes and nose.

  He had gotten tired of people, being a freak himself, but in this moment of trial their goodness, though capricious, flowed over him like a great wave. He let them sit him down in his own kitchen. Among the babble, the weeps, the laughter, the hearty and falsely cheerful relief, he heard a single fugue being repeated again and again: they liked him. He had come back from death: he was their Rod McBan.

  Without liquor, it made him drunk. “I can’t stand it,” he shouted. “I like you all so dashed bloomed crutting much that I could beat the sentimental brains out of the whole crook lot of you…”

  “Isn’t that a sweet speech?” murmured an old farm wife nearby.

  A policeman, in full uniform, agreed.

  The party had started. It lasted three full days, and when it was over there was not a dry eye or a full bottle on the whole Station of Doom.

  From time to time he cleared up enough to enjoy his miraculous gift of hiering. He looked through all their minds while they chatted and sang and drank and ate and were as happy as Larry; there was not one of them who had come along vainly. They were truly rejoicing. They loved him. They wished him well. He had his doubts about how long that kind of love would last, but he enjoyed it while it lasted.

  Lavinia stayed out of his way the first day; on the second and third days she was gone. They gave him real Norstrilian beer to drink, which they had brought up to one-hundred-and-eight proof by the simple addition of raw spirits. With this, he forgot the Garden of Death, the sweet wet smells, the precise off world voice of the Lord Redlady, the pretentious blue sky in the ceiling.

  He looked in their minds and over and over again he saw the same thing,

  “You’re our boy. You made it. You’re alive. Good luck, Rod, good luck to you, fellow. We didn’t have to see you stagger off, giggling and happy, to the house that you would die in.”

  Had he made it, thought Rod, or was it chance which had done it for him?

  ANGER OF THE ONSECK

  By the end of the week, the celebration was over. The assorted aunts and cousins had gone back to their farms. The Station of Doom was quiet, and Rod spent the morning making sure that the fieldhands had not neglected the sheep too much during the prolonged party. He found that Daisy, a young three-hundred-ton sheep, had not been turned for two days and had to be relanolized on her ground side before earth canker set in; then he discovered that the nutrient tubes for Tanner, his thousand-ton ram, had become jammed and that the poor sheep was getting a bad case of edema in his gigantic legs. Otherwise things were quiet. Even when he saw Beasley’s red pony tethered in his own yard, he had no premonition of trouble.

  He went cheerfully into the house, greeting Beasley with an irreverent, “Have a drink on me, Mister and Owner Beasley! Oh, you have one already! Have the next one then, sir!”

  “Thanks for the drink, lad, but I came to see you. On business.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Rod. “You’re one of my trustees, aren’t you?”

  “That I am,” said Beasley, “but you’re in trouble, lad. Real trouble.”

  Rod smiled at him evenly and calmly. He knew that the older man had to make a big effort to talk with his voice instead of just spieking with his mind; he appreciated the fact that Beasley had come to him personally, instead of talking to the other trustees about him. It was a sign that he, Rod, had passed his ordeal. With genuine composure, Rod declared:

  “I’ve been thinking, sir, this week, that I’d gotten out of trouble.”

  “What do you mean, Owner McBan?”

  “You remember…” Rod did not dare mention the Garden of Death, nor his memory that Beasley had been one of the secret board who had passed him as being fit to live.

  Beasley took the cue. “Some things we don’t mention, lad, and I see that you have been well taught.”

  He stopped there and stared at Rod with the expression of a man looking at an unfamiliar corpse before turning it over to identify it. Rod became uneasy with the stare.

  “Sit, lad, sit down,” said Beasley, commanding Rod in his own house.

  Rod sat down on the bench, since Beasley occupied the only chair—Rod’s grandfather’s huge carved offworld throne. He sat. He did not like being ordered about, but he was sure that Beasley meant him well and was probably strained by the unfamiliar effort of talking with his throat and mouth.

  Beasley looked at him again with that peculiar ex
pression, a mixture of sympathy and distaste.

  “Get up again, lad, and look round your house to see if there’s anybody about.”

  “There isn’t,” said Rod. “My Aunt Doris left after I was cleared, the workwoman Eleanor borrowed a cart and went off to the market, and I have only two station hands. They’re both out reinfecting Baby. She ran low on her santaclara count.”

  Normally, the wealth-producing sicknesses of their gigantic half-paralyzed sheep would have engrossed the full attention of any two Norstrilian farmers, without respect to differences in age and grade.

  This time, no.

  Beasley had something serious and unpleasant on his mind. He looked so pruney and unquiet that Rod felt a real sympathy for the man.

  Beasley repeated, “Go have a look, anyhow.”

  Rod did not argue. Dutifully he went out the back door, looked around the south side of the house, saw no one, walked around the house on the north side, saw no one there either, and reentered the house from the front door. Beasley had not stirred, except to pour a little more bitter ale from his bottle to his glass. Rod met his eyes. Without another word. Rod sat down. If the man was seriously concerned about him (which Rod thought he was), and if the man was reasonably intelligent (which Rod knew he was), the communication was worth waiting for and listening to. Rod was still sustained by the pleasant feeling that his neighbors liked him, a feeling which had come plainly to the surface of their honest Norstrilian faces when he walked back into his own back yard from the van of the Garden of Death.

  Beasley said, as though he were speaking of an unfamiliar food or a rare drink, “Boy, this talking has some advantages. If a man doesn’t put his ear into it, he can’t just pick it up with his mind, can he now?”

  Rod thought for a moment. Candidly he spoke, “I’m too young to know for sure, but I never heard of somebody picking up spoken words by hiering them with his mind. It seems to be one or the other. You never talk while you are spieking, do you?”

  Beasley nodded. “That’s it, then. I have something to tell you which I shouldn’t tell you, and yet I have got to tell you, so if I keep my voice blooming low, nobody else will pick it up, will they?”

  Rod nodded. “What is it, sir? Is there something wrong with the title to my property?”

  Beasley took a drink but kept staring at Rod over the top of the mug while he drank.

  “You’ve got trouble there too, lad, but even though it’s bad, it’s something I can talk over with you and with the other trustees. This is more personal, in a way. And worse.”

  “Please, sir! What is it?” cried Rod, almost exasperated by all this mystification.

  “The Onseck is after you.”

  “What’s an onseck?” said Rod. “I have never heard of it.”

  “It’s not an it,” said Beasley gloomily, “it’s a him. Onseck, you know, the chap in the Commonwealth government. The man who keeps the books for the Vice-Chairman. It was Hon. Sec., meaning Honorary Secretary or something else prehistoric, when we first came to this planet, but by now everybody just says Onseck and writes it just the way it sounds. He knows that he can’t reverse your hearing in the Garden of Death.”

  “Nobody could,” cried Rod. “It’s never been done; everybody knows that.”

  “They may know it, but there’s civil trial.”

  “How can they give me a civil trial when I haven’t had time to change? You yourself know—”

  “Never, laddie, never say what Beasley knows or doesn’t know. Just say what you think.” Even in private, between just the two of them, Beasley did not want to violate the fundamental secrecy of the hearing in the Garden of Death.

  “I’m just going to say, Mister and Owner Beasley,” said Rod very heatedly, “that a civil trial for general incompetence is something which is applied to an owner only after the neighbors have been complaining for a long time about him. They haven’t had the time or the right to complain about me, have they now?”

  Beasley kept his hand on the handle of his mug. The use of spoken words tired him. A crown of sweat began to show around the top of his forehead.

  “Suppose, lad,” said he very solemnly, “that I knew through proper channels something about how you were judged in that van—there! I’ve said it, me that shouldn’t have—and suppose that I knew the Onseck hated a foreign gentleman that might have been in a van like that—”

  “The Lord Redlady?” whispered Rod, shocked at last by the fact that Beasley forced himself to talk about the unmentionable.

  “Aye,” nodded Beasley, his honest face close to breaking into tears, “and suppose that I knew that the Onseck knew you and felt the rule was wrong, all wrong, that you were a freak who would hurt all Norstrilia, what would I do?”

  “I don’t know,” said Rod. “Tell me, perhaps?”

  “Never,” said Beasley. “I’m an honest man. Get me another drink.”

  Rod walked over to the cupboard, brought out another bottle of bitter ale, wondering where or when he might have known the Onseck. He had never had much of anything to do with government; his family—first his grandfather, while he lived, and then his aunts and cousins—had taken care of all the official papers and permits and things.

  Beasley drank deeply of the ale. “Good ale, this. Hard work, talking, even though it’s a fine way to keep a secret, if you’re pretty sure nobody can peep our minds.”

  “I don’t know him,” said Rod.

  “Who?” asked Beasley, momentarily off his trail of thought.

  “The Onseck. I don’t know any Onseck. I’ve never been to New Canberra. I’ve never seen an official, no, nor an offworlder neither, not until I met that foreign gentleman we were talking about. How can the Onseck know me if I don’t know him?”

  “But you did, laddie. He wasn’t Onseck then.”

  “For sheep’s sake, sir,” said Rod, “tell me who it is!”

  “Never use the Lord’s name unless you are talking to the Lord,” said Beasley glumly.

  “I’m sorry, sir. I apologize. Who was it?”

  “Houghton Syme to the hundred-and-forty-ninth,” said Beasley.

  “We have no neighbor of that name, sir.”

  “No, we don’t,” said Beasley hoarsely, as though he had come to the end of his road in imparting secrets.

  Rod stared at him, still puzzled.

  In the far, far distance, way beyond Pillow Hill, his giant sheep baa’d. That probably meant that Hopper was hoisting her into a new position on her platform, so that she could reach fresh grass.

  Beasley brought his face close to Rod’s. He whispered, and it was funny to see the hash a normal man made out of whispering when he hadn’t even talked with his voice for half a year.

  His words had a low, dirty tone to them, as though he were going to tell Rod an extremely filthy story or ask him some personal and most improper question.

  “Your life, laddie,” he gasped, “I know you’ve had a rum one. I hate to ask you, but I must. How much do you know of your own life?”

  “Oh, that,” said Rod easily. “That. I don’t mind being asked that, even if it is a little wrongo. I have had four childhoods, zero to sixteen each time. My family kept hoping that I would grow up to spiek and hier like everybody else, but I just stayed me. Of course, I wasn’t a real baby on the three times they started me over, just sort of an educated idiot the size of a boy sixteen.”

  “That’s it, lad. But can you remember them, those other lives?”

  “Bits and pieces, sir. Pieces and bits. It didn’t hold together—” He checked himself and gasped, “Houghton Syme! Houghton Syme! Old Hot and Simple. Of course I know him. The one-shot boy. I knew him in my first prepper, in my first childhood. We were pretty good friends, but we hated each other anyhow. I was a freak and he was too. I couldn’t spiek or hier, and he couldn’t take stroon. That meant that I would never get through the Garden of Death—just the Giggle Room and a fine owner’s coffin for me. And him—he was worse. He would just get an Ol
d Earth lifetime—a hundred and sixty years or so and then blotto. He must be an oldish man now. Poor chap! How did he get to be Onseck? What power does an Onseck have?”

  “Now you have it, laddie. He says he’s your friend and that he hates to do it, but he’s got to see to it that you are killed. For the good of Norstrilia. He says it’s his duty. He got to be Onseck because he was always jawing about his duty and people were a little sorry for him because he was going to die so soon, just one Old Earth lifetime with all the stroon in the universe produced around his feet and him unable to take it—”

  “They never cured him, then?”

  “Never,” said Beasley. “He’s an old man now, and bitter. And he’s sworn to see you die.”

  “Can he do it? Being Onseck, I mean.”

  “He might. He hates that foreign gentleman we were talking about because that offworlder told him he was a provincial fool. He hates you because you will live and he will not. What was it you called him in school?”

  “Old Hot and Simple. A boy’s joke on his name.”

  “He’s not hot and he’s not simple. He’s cold and complicated and cruel and unhappy. If we didn’t all of us think that he was going to die in a little while, ten or a hundred years or so, we might vote him into a Giggle Room ourselves. For misery and incompetence. But he is Onseck and he’s after you. I’ve said it now. I shouldn’t have. But when I saw that sly cold face talking about you and trying to declare your board incompetent right while you, laddie, were having an honest binge with your family and neighbors at having gotten through at last—when I saw that white sly face creeping around where you couldn’t even see him for a fair fight—then I said to myself, Rod McBan may not be a man officially, but the poor clodding crutt has paid the full price for being a man, so I’ve told you. I may have taken a chance, and I may have hurt my honor.” Beasley sighed. His honest red face was troubled indeed. “I may have hurt my honor, and that’s a sore thing here in Norstrilia where a man can live as long as he wants. But I’m glad I did. Besides, my throat is sore with all this talking. Get me another bottle of bitter ale, lad, before I go and get my horse.”