Norstrilia - Illustrated Read online

  Wordlessly Rod got him the ale, and poured it for him with a pleasant nod.

  Beasley, uninclined to do any more talking, sipped at the ale. Perhaps, thought Rod, he is hiering around carefully to see if there have been any human minds nearby which might have picked up the telepathic leakage from the conversation.

  As Beasley handed back the mug and started to leave with a wordless neighborly nod, Rod could not restrain himself from asking one last question, which he spoke in a hissed whisper. Beasley had gotten his mind so far off the subject of sound talk that he merely stared at Rod. Perhaps, Rod thought, he is asking me to spiek plainly because he has forgotten that I cannot spiek at all. That was the case, because Beasley croaked in a very hoarse voice,

  “What is it, lad? Don’t make me talk much. My voice is scratching me and my honor is sore within me.”

  “What should I do, sir? What should I do?”

  “Mister and Owner McBan, that’s your problem. I’m not you. I wouldn’t know.”

  “But what would you do, sir? Suppose you were me.”

  Beasley’s blue eyes looked over at Pillow Hill for a moment, abstractedly. “Get offplanet. Get off. Go away. For a hundred years or so. Then that man—him—he’ll be dead in due time and you can come back, fresh as a new-blossomed twinkle.”

  “But how, sir? How can I do it?”

  Beasley patted him on his shoulder, gave him a broad wordless smile, put his foot in his stirrup, sprang into his saddle, and looked down at Rod.

  “I wouldn’t know, neighbor. But good luck to you, just the same. I’ve done more than I should. Goodbye.”

  He slapped his horse gently with his open hand and trotted out of the yard. At the edge of the yard the horse changed to a canter.

  Rod stood in his own doorway, utterly alone.

  THE OLD BROKEN TREASURES IN THE GAP

  After Beasley left, Rod loped miserably around his farm. He missed his grandfather, who had been living during his first three childhoods, but who had died while Rod was going through a fourth, simulated infancy in an attempt to cure his telepathic handicap. He even missed his Aunt Margot, who had voluntarily gone into Withdrawal at the age of nine hundred and two. There were plenty of cousins and kinsmen from whom he could ask advice; there were the two hands on the farm; there was even the chance that he could go see Mother Hitton herself, because she had once been married to one of his great11-uncles. But this time he did not want companionship. There was nothing he could do with people. The Onseck was people too; imagine Old Hot and Simple becoming a power in the land. Rod knew that this was his own fight.

  His own.

  What had ever been his own before?

  Not even his life. He could remember bits about the different boyhoods he had. He even had vague uncomfortable glimpses of seasons of pain—the times they had sent him back to babyhood while leaving him large. That hadn’t been his choice. The old man had ordered it or the Vice-Chairman had approved it or Aunt Margot had begged for it. Nobody had asked him much, except to say, “You will agree…”

  He had agreed.

  He had been good—so good that he hated them all at times and wondered if they knew he hated them. The hate never lasted, because the real people involved were too well-meaning, too kind, too ambitious for his own sake. He had to love them back.

  Trying to think these things over, he loped around his estate on foot.

  The big sheep lay on their platforms, forever sick, forever gigantic. Perhaps some of them remembered when they had been lambs, free to run through the sparse grass, free to push their heads through the pliofilm covers of the canals and to help themselves to water when they wanted to drink. Now they weighed hundreds of tons and were fed by feeding machines, watched by guard machines, checked by automatic doctors. They were fed and watered a little through the mouth only because pastoral experience showed that they stayed fatter and lived longer if a semblance of normality was left to them.

  His Aunt Doris, who kept house for him, was still away.

  His workwoman Eleanor, whom he paid an annual sum larger than many planets paid for their entire armed forces, had delayed her time at market.

  The two sheephands, Bill and Hopper, were still out.

  And he did not want to talk to them, anyhow.

  He wished that he could see the Lord Redlady, that strange offworld man whom he had met in the Garden of Death. The Lord Redlady just looked as though he knew more things than Norstrilians did, as though he came from sharper, crueler, wiser societies than most people in Old North Australia had ever seen.

  But you can’t ask for a Lord. Particularly not when you have met him only in a secret hearing.

  Rod had gotten to the final limits of his own land.

  Humphrey’s Lawsuit lay beyond—a broad strip of poor land, completely untended, the building-high ribs of long-dead sheep skeletons making weird shadows as the sun began to set. The Humphrey family had been lawing over that land for hundreds of years. Meanwhile it lay waste except for the few authorized public animals which the Commonwealth was allowed to put on any land, public or private.

  Rod knew that freedom was only two steps away.

  All he had to do was to step over the line and shout with his mind for people. He could do that even though he could not really spiek. A telepathic garble of alarm would bring the orbiting guards down to him in seven or eight minutes. Then he would need only to say,

  “I swear off title. I give up Mistership and Ownership. I demand my living from the Commonwealth. Watch me, people, while I repeat.”

  Three repetitions of this would make him an Official Pauper, with not a care left—no meetings, no land to tend, no accounting to do, nothing but to wander around Old North Australia picking up any job he wanted and quitting it whenever he wanted. It was a good life, a free life, the best the Commonwealth could offer to Squatters and Owners who otherwise lived long centuries of care, responsibility, and honor. It was a fine life—

  But no McBan had ever taken it, not even a cousin.

  Nor could he.

  He went back to the house, miserable. He listened to Eleanor talking with Bill and Hopper while dinner was served—a huge plate of boiled mutton, potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, station-brewed beer out of the keg. (There were planets, he knew, where people never tasted such food from birth to death. There they lived on impregnated pasteboard which was salvaged from the latrines, reimpregnated with nutrients and vitamins, deodorized and sterilized, and issued again the next day.) He knew it was a fine dinner, but he did not care.

  How could he talk about the Onseck to these people? Their faces still glowed with pleasure at his having come out the right side of the Garden of Death. They thought he was lucky to be alive, even more lucky to be the most honored heir on the whole planet. Doom was a good place, even if it wasn’t the biggest.

  Right in the middle of dinner he remembered the gift the snake-soldier had given him. He had put it on the top shelf of his bedroom wall, and with the party and Beasley’s visit, he had never opened it.

  He bolted down his food and muttered, “I’ll be back.”

  The wallet was there, in his bedroom. The case was beautiful. He took it, opened it.

  Inside there was a flat metal disk.

  A ticket?

  Where to?

  He turned it this way and that. It had been telepathically engraved and was probably shouting its entire itinerary into his mind, but he could not hier it.

  He held it close to the oil lamp. Sometimes disks like this had old-writing on them, which at least showed the general limits. It would be a private ornithopter up to Menzies Lake at the best, or an airbus fare to New Melbourne and return. He caught the sheen of old-writing. One more tilt, angled to the light, and he had it. “Manhome and return.”

  Manhome!

  Lord have mercy, that was Old Earth itself!

  But then, thought Rod, I’d be running away from the Onseck, and I’d live the rest of my life with all my friends knowing I had r
un away from Old Hot and Simple. I can’t. Somehow I’ve got to beat Houghton Syme CXLIX. In his own way. And my own way.

  He went back to the table, dropped the rest of the dinner into his stomach as though it were sheep-food pellets, and went to his bedroom early.

  For the first time in his life, he slept badly.

  And out of the bad sleep, the answer came,

  “Ask Hamlet.”

  Hamlet was not even a man. He was just a talking picture in a cave, but he was wise, he was from Old Earth itself, and he had no friends to whom to give Rod’s secrets.

  With this idea, Rod turned on his sleeping shelf and went into a deep sleep.

  In the morning his Aunt Doris was still not back, so he told the workwoman Eleanor.

  “I’ll be gone all day. Don’t look for me or worry about me.”

  “What about your lunch, Mister and Owner? You can’t run around the station with no tucker.”

  “Wrap some up, then.”

  “Where’re you going, Mister and Owner, sir, if you can tell me?” There was an unpleasant searching edge in her voice, as though—being the only adult woman present—she had to check on him as though he were still a child. He didn’t like it, but he replied with a frank enough air,

  “I’m not leaving the station. Just rambling around. I need to think.”

  More kindly she said, “You think, then, Rod. Just go right ahead and think. If you ask me, you ought to go live with a family—”

  “I know what you’ve said,” he interrupted her. “I’m not making any big decisions today, Eleanor. Just rambling and thinking.”

  “All right then, Mister and Owner. Ramble around and worry about the ground you’re walking on. It’s you that get the worries for it. I’m glad my daddy took the official pauper words. We used to be rich.” Unexpectedly, she brightened and laughed at herself. “Now that, you’ve heard that too. Rod. Here’s your food. Do you have water?”

  “I’ll steal from the sheep,” he said irreverently. She knew he was joking and she waved him a friendly goodbye.

  The old, old gap was to the rear of the house, so he left by the front. He wanted to go the long wrong way around, so that neither human eyes nor human minds would stumble on the secret he had found fifty-six years before, the first time he was eight years old. Through all the pain and the troubles he had remembered this one vivid bright secret—the deep cave full of ruined and prohibited treasures. To these he must go.

  The sun was high in the sky, spreading its patch of brighter grey above the grey clouds, when he slid into what looked like a dry irrigation ditch.

  He walked a few steps along the ditch. Then he stopped and listened carefully, very carefully.

  There was no sound except for the snoring of a young hundred-ton ram a mile or so way.

  Rod then stared around.

  In the far distance, a police ornithopter soared as lazy as a sated hawk.

  Rod tried desperately to hier.

  He hiered nothing with his mind, but with his ears he heard the slow heavy pulsing of his own blood pounding through his head.

  He took a chance.

  The trapdoor was there, just inside the edge of the culvert.

  He lifted it and, leaving it open, dove in confidently as a swimmer knifing his way into a familiar pool.

  He knew his way.

  His clothes ripped a little but the weight of his body dragged him past the narrowness of the doorframe.

  His hands reached out and like the hands of an acrobat they caught the inner bar. The door behind snapped shut. How frightening this had been when he was little and tried the trip for the first time! He had let himself down with a rope and a torch, never realizing the importance of the trap door at the edge of the culvert!

  Now it was easy.

  With a thud, he landed on his feet. The bright old illegal lights went on. The dehumidifier began to purr, lest the wetness of his breath spoil the treasures in the room.

  There were drama-cubes by the score, with two different sizes of projectors. There were heaps of clothing, for both men and women, left over from forgotten ages. In a chest, in the corner, there was even a small machine from before the Age of Space, a crude but beautiful mechanical chronograph, completely without resonance compensation, and the ancient name “Jaeger Le Coultre” written across its face. It still kept Earth time after fifteen thousand years.

  Rod sat down in an utterly impermissible chair—one which seemed to be a complex of pillows built on an interlocking frame. The touch enough was a medicine for his worries. One chair leg was broken, but that was the way his grandfather-to-the-nineteenth had violated the Clean Sweep.

  The Clean Sweep had been Old North Australia’s last political crisis, many centuries before, when the last underpeople were hunted down and driven off the planet and when all damaging luxuries had to be turned in to the Commonwealth authorities, to be repurchased by their owners only at a revaluation two hundred thousand times higher than their assessed worth. It was the final effort to keep Norstrilians simple, healthy and well. Every citizen had to swear that he had turned in every single item, and the oath had been taken with thousands of telepaths watching. It was a testimony to the high mental power and adept deceitfulness of grandfather-to-the-nineteenth that Rod McBan CXXX had inflicted only symbolic breakage on his favorite treasures, some of which were not even in the categories allowed for repurchase, like offworld drama-cubes, and had been able to hide his things in an unimportant corner of his fields—hide them so well that neither robbers nor police had thought of them for the hundreds of years that followed.

  Rod picked up his favorite: Hamlet, by William Shakespeare. Without a viewer, the cube was designed to act when touched by a true human being. The top of the cube became a little stage, the actors appeared as bright miniatures speaking Ancient Inglish, a language very close to Old North Australian, and the telepathic commentary, cued to the Old Common Tongue, rounded out the story. Since Rod was not dependably telepathic, he had learned a great deal of the Ancient Inglish by trying to understand the drama without commentary. He did not like what he first saw and he shook the cube until the play approached its end. At last he heard the dear high familiar voice speaking in Hamlet’s last scene:

  I am dead, Horatio. Wretched queen, adieu!

  You that look pale and tremble at this chance,

  That are but mutes or audience to this act,

  Had I but time—as this fell sergeant, death,

  Is strict in his arrest—O! I could tell you—

  But let it be, Horatio, I am dead.

  Rod shook the cube very gently and the scene sped down a few lines. Hamlet was still talking:

  …what a wounded name,

  Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me.

  If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,

  Absent thee from felicity a while,

  And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain

  To tell my story.

  Rod put down the cube very gently.

  The bright little figures disappeared.

  The room was silent.

  But he had the answer and it was wisdom. And wisdom, coeval with man, comes unannounced, unbidden, and unwelcome into every life. Rod found that he had discovered the answer to a basic problem.

  But not his own problem. The answer was Houghton Syme’s, Old Hot and Simple. It was the Hon. Sec. who was already dying of a wounded name. Hence the persecution. It was the Onseck who had the “fell sergeant, death” acting strictly in his arrest, even if the arrest were only a few decades off instead of a few minutes. He, Rod McBan, was to live; his old acquaintance was to die; and the dying—oh, the dying, always, always!—could not help resenting the survivors, even if they were loved ones, at least a little bit.

  Hence the Onseck.

  But what of himself?

  Rod brushed a pile of priceless, illegal manuscripts out of the way and picked up a small book marked, Reconstituted Late Inglish Language Verse. At e
ach page, as it was opened, a young man or woman seven centimeters high stood up brightly on the page and recited the text. Rod ruffled the pages of the old book so that the little figures appeared and trembled and fled like weak flames seen on a bright day. One caught his eye and he stopped the page at midpoem. The figure was saying:

  The challenge holds, I cannot now retract

  The boast I made to that relentless court,

  The hostile justice of my self-contempt.

  If now the ordeal is prepared, my act

  Must soon be shown. I pray that it is short,

  And never dream that I shall be exempt.

  He glanced at the foot of the page and saw the name, Casimir Colegrove. Of course, he had seen that name before. An old poet. A good one. But what did the words mean to him, Rod McBan, sitting in a hidden hole within the limits of his own land? He was a Mister and Owner, in all except final title, and he was running from an enemy he could not define.

  “The hostile justice of my self-contempt…”

  That was the key of it! He was not running from the Onseck. He was running from himself. He took justice itself as hostile because it corresponded with his sixty-odd years of boyhood, his endless disappointment, his compliance with things which would never, till all worlds burned, be complied with. How could he hier and spiek like other people if somewhere a dominant feature had turned recessive? Hadn’t real justice already vindicated him and cleared him?

  It was he himself who was cruel.

  Other people were kind. (Shrewdness made him add “sometimes.”)

  He had taken his own inner sense of trouble and had made it fit the outside world, like the morbid little poem he had read a long time ago. It was somewhere right in this room, and when he had first read it, he felt that the long-dead writer had put it down for himself alone. But it wasn’t really so. Other people had had their troubles too and the poem had expressed something older than Rod McBan. It went:

  The wheels of fate are spinning around.

  Between them the souls of men are ground

  Who strive for throats to make some sound