Norstrilia - Illustrated Read online

  “What makes you think you can do it?”

  “I am a pure computer, obsolete model. All the others have animal brains built into them, to allow for error. I do not. Furthermore, your great12-grandfather hooked me into the defense net.”

  “Didn’t the Commonwealth cut you out?”

  “I am the only computer which was built to tell lies, except to the families of MacArthur and McBan. I lied to the Commonwealth when they checked on what I was getting. I am obliged to tell the truth only to you and to your designated descendants.”

  “I know that, but what does it have to do with it?”

  “I predict my own space weather, ahead of the Commonwealth.” The accent was not in the pleasant, even-toned voice; Rod himself supplied it.

  “You’ve tried this out?”

  “I have war-gamed it more than a hundred million times. I had nothing else to do while I waited for you.”

  “You never failed?”

  “I failed most of the time, when I first began. But I have not failed a war game from real data for the last thousand years.”

  “What would happen if you failed now?”

  “You would be disgraced and bankrupt. I would be sold and disassembled.”

  “Is that all?” said Rod cheerfully.

  “Yes,” said the computer.

  “I could stop Old Hot and Simple if I owned Old Earth itself. Let’s go.”

  “I do not go anywhere,” said the computer.

  “I mean, let’s start.”

  “You mean, to buy Earth, as we discussed?”

  “What else?” yelled Rod. “What else have we been talking about?”

  “You must have some soup, hot soup and a tranquilizer first. I cannot work at optimum if I have a human being who gets excited.”

  “All right,” said Rod.

  “You must authorize me to buy them.”

  “I authorize you.”

  “That will be three credits.”

  “In the name of the seven healthy sheep, what does it matter? How much will Earth cost?”

  “Seven thousand million million megacredits.”

  “Deduct three for the soup and the pill then,” shouted Rod, “if it won’t spoil your calculations.”

  “Deducted,” said the computer. The tray with the soup appeared, a white pill beside it.

  “Now let’s buy Earth,” said Rod.

  “Drink your soup and take your pill first,” said the computer.

  Rod gulped down his soup, washing the pill down with it.

  “Now, let’s go, cobber.”

  “Repeat after me,” said the computer, “I herewith mortgage the whole body of the said sheep Sweet William for the sum of five hundred thousand credits to the New Melbourne Exchange on the open board…”

  Rod repeated it.

  And repeated it.

  The hours became a nightmare of repetition.

  The computer lowered its voice to a low murmur, almost a whisper. When Rod stumbled in the messages, the computer prompted him and corrected him.

  Forward purchase…sell short…option to buy…preemptive margin…offer to sell…offer temporarily reserved…first collateral…second collateral…deposit to drawing account…convert to FOE credits…hold in SAD credits…twelve thousand tons of stroon…mortgage forward…promise to buy…promise to sell…hold…margin…collateral guaranteed by previous deposit…promise to pay against the pledged land…guarantor…McBan land…MacArthur land…this computer itself…conditional legality…buy…sell…guarantee…pledge…withhold…offer confirmed…offer cancelled…four thousand million megacredits…rate accepted…rate refused…forward purchase…deposit against interest…collateral previously pledged…conditional appreciation…guarantee…accept title…refuse delivery…solar weather…buy…sell…pledge…withdraw from market…withdraw from sale…not available…no collections now…dependent on radiation…corner market…buy…buy…buy…buy…buy…confirm title…reconfirm title…transactions completed…reopen…register…reregister…confirm at Earth central…message fees…fifteen thousand megacredits…

  Rod’s voice became a whisper, but the computer was sure, the computer was untiring, the computer answered all questions from the outside.

  Many times Rod and the computer both had to listen to telepathic warnings built into the markets communications net. The computer was cut out and Rod could not hier them. The warnings went unheard.

  …buy…sell…hold…confirm…deposit…convert…guarantee…arbitrage…message…Commonwealth tax…commission…buy…sell…buy…buy…buy…buy…deposit title! deposit title! deposit title!

  The process of buying Earth had begun.

  By the time that the first pretty parts of silver-grey dawn had begun, it was done. Rod was dizzy with fatigue and confusion.

  “Go home and sleep,” said the computer. “When people find out what you have done with me, many of them will probably be excited and will wish to talk to you at great length. I suggest you say nothing.”

  THE EYE UPON THE SPARROW

  Drunk with fatigue, Rod stumbled across his own land back to his cabin.

  He could not believe that anything had happened.

  If the Palace of the Governor of Night—

  If the computer spoke the truth, he was already the wealthiest human being who had ever lived. He had gambled and won, not a few tons of stroon or a planet or two, but credits enough to shake the Commonwealth to its foundation. He owned the Earth, on the system that any overdeposit could be called due at a certain very high margin. He owned planets, countries, mines, palaces, prisons, police systems, fleets, border guards, restaurants, pharmaceuticals, textiles, night clubs, treasures, royalties, licenses, sheep, land, stroon, more sheep, more land, more stroon. He had won.

  Only in Old North Australia could a man have done this without being besieged by soldiers, reporters, guards, police, investigators, tax collectors, fortune seekers, doctors, publicity hounds, the sick, the inquisitive, the compassionate, the angry, and the affronted.

  Old North Australia kept calm.

  Privacy, simplicity, frugality—these virtues had carried them through the hell-world of Paradise VII, where the mountains ate people, the volcanoes poisoned sheep, the delirious oxygen made men rave with bliss as they pranced into their own deaths. The Norstrilians had survived many things, including sickness and deformity. If Rod McBan had caused a financial crisis, there were no newspapers to print it, no viewboxes to report it, nothing to excite the people. The Commonwealth authorities would pick the crisis out of their “in” baskets sometime after tucker and tea the next morning, and by afternoon he, his crisis, and the computer would be in the “out” baskets. If the deal had worked, the whole thing would be paid off honestly and literally. If the deal had not worked out the way that the computer had said, his lands would be up for auction and he himself would be led gently away.

  But that’s what the Onseck gas going to do to him anyway—Old Hot and Simple, a tiring dwarf-lifed man, driven by the boyhood hatred of many long years ago!

  Rod stopped for a minute. Around him stretched the rolling plains of his own land. Far ahead, to his left, there gleamed the glassy worm of a river-cover, the humped long, barrel-like line which kept the precious water from evaporating—that too was his.

  Maybe. After the night now passed.

  He thought of flinging himself to the ground and sleeping right there. He had done it before.

  But not this morning.

  Not when he might be the person he might be—the man who made the worlds reel with his wealth.

  The computer had started easy. He could not take control of his property except for an emergency. The computer had made him create the emergency by selling his next three years’ production of santaclara at the market price. That was a serious enough emergency for any pastoralist to be in deep sure trouble.

  From that the rest had followed.

  Rod sat down.

  He was not trying to remembe
r. The remembering was crowding into his mind. He wanted just to get his breath, to get on home, to sleep.

  A tree was near him, with a thermostatically controlled cover which domed it in whenever the winds were too strong or too dry, and an underground sprinkler which kept it alive when surface moisture was not sufficient. It was one of the old MacArthur extravagances which his McBan ancestor had inherited and had added to the Station of Doom. It was a modified Earth oak, very big, a full thirteen meters high. Rod was proud of it although he did not like it much, but he had relatives who were obsessed by it and would make a three-hour ride just to sit in the shade—dim and diffuse as it was—of a genuine tree from Earth.

  When he looked at the tree, a violent noise assailed him.

  Mad frantic laughter.

  Laughter beyond all jokes.

  Laughter, sick, wild, drunk, dizzy.

  He started to be angry and was then puzzled. Who could be laughing at him already? As a matter of nearer fact, who could be trespassing on his land? Anyhow, what was there to laugh about?

  (All Norstrilians knew that humor was “pleasurable corrigible malfunction.” It was in the Book of Rhetoric which their Appointed Relatives had to get them through if they were even to qualify for the tests of the Garden of Death. There were no schools, no classes, no teachers, no libraries except for private ones. There were just the seven liberal arts, the six practical sciences, and the five collections of police and defense studies. Specialists were trained offworld, but they were trained only from among the survivors of the Garden, and nobody could get as far as the Garden unless the sponsors, who staked their lives along with that of the student—so far as the question of aptness was concerned—guaranteed that the entrant knew the eighteen kinds of Norstrilian knowledge. The Book of Rhetoric came second, right after the Book of Sheep and Numbers, so that all Norstrilians knew why they laughed and what there was to laugh about.)

  But this laughter!

  Aagh, who could it be?

  A sick man? Impossible. Hostile hallucinations brought on by the Hon. Sec. in his own onseckish way with unusual telepathic powers? Scarcely.

  Rod began to laugh himself as he realized what the sound must be.

  It was something rare and beautiful, a kookaburra bird, the same kind of bird which had laughed in Original Australia on Old Old Earth. A very few had reached this new planet and they had not multiplied well, even though the Norstrilians respected them and loved them and wished them well.

  Good luck came with their wild birdish laughter. A man could feel he had a fine day ahead. Lucky in love, thumb in an enemy’s eye, new ale in the fridge, or a ruddy good chance on the market.

  Laugh, bird, laugh! thought Rod.

  Perhaps the bird understood him. The laughter increased and reached manic, hilarious proportions. The bird sounded as though it were watching the most comical bird-comedy which any bird-audience had ever been invited to, as though the bird-jokes were sidesplitting, convulsive, gut-popping, unbelievable, racy, daring, and overwhelming. The bird-laughter became hysterical and a note of fear, of warning crept in.

  Rod stepped toward the tree.

  In all this time he had not seen the kookaburra.

  He squinted into the tree, peering against the brighter side of the sky which showed that morning had arrived well.

  To him, the tree was blindingly green, since it kept most of its Earth color, not turning beige or grey as the Earth grasses had done when they had been adapted and planted in Norstrilian soil.

  To be sure, the bird was there, a tiny slender laughing impudent shape.

  Suddenly the bird cawed: this was no laugh.

  Startled, Rod stepped back and started to look around for danger.

  The step saved his life.

  The sky whistled at him, the wind hit him, a dark shape shot past him with the speed of a projectile and was gone. As it leveled out just above the ground, Rod saw what it was.

  A mad sparrow.

  Sparrows had reached twenty kilos’ weight, with straight swordlike beaks almost a meter in length. Most of the time the Commonwealth left them alone, because they preyed on the giant lice, the size of footballs, which had grown with the sick sheep. Now and then one went mad and attacked people.

  Rod turned, watching the sparrow as it walked around, about a hundred meters away.

  Some mad sparrows, it was rumored, were not mad at all, but were tame sparrows sent on evil missions of revenge or death by Norstrilian men whose minds had been twisted into crime. This was rare, this was crime, but this was possible.

  Could the Onseck already be attacking?

  Rod slapped his belt for weapons as the sparrow took to the air again, flapping upward with the pretense of innocence. He had nothing except his belt light and a canister. This would not hold out long unless somebody came along. What could a tired man do, using bare hands, against a sword which burst through the air with a monomaniac birdbrain behind it?

  Rod braced himself for the bird’s next power dive, holding the canister like a shield.

  The canister was not much of a shield.

  Down came the bird, preceded by the whistle of air against its head and beak. Rod watched for the eyes and when he saw them, he jumped.

  The dust roared up as the giant sparrow twisted its spearlike beak out of the line of the ground, opening its wings, beat the air against gravity, caught itself centimeters from the surface, and flapped away with powerful strokes; Rod stood and watched quietly, glad that he had escaped.

  His left arm was wet.

  Rain was so rare in the Norstrilian plains that he did not see how he could have gotten wet. He glanced down idly.

  Blood it was, and his own.

  The kill-bird had missed him with its beak but had touched him with the razorlike wing feathers, which had mutated into weapons; both the rachis and the vane in the large feathers were tremendously reinforced, with the development of a bitterly sharp hyporhachis in the case of the wingtips. The bird had cut him so fast he had not felt it or noticed it.

  Like any good Norstrilian, he thought in terms of first aid.

  The flow of blood was not very rapid. Should he try to tie up his arm first or to hide from the next diving attack?

  The bird answered his question for him.

  The ominous whistle sounded again.

  Rod flung himself along the ground, trying to get to the base of the tree trunk, where the bird could not dive on him.

  The bird, making a serious mental mistake, thought it had disabled him. With a flutter of wings it landed calmly, stood on its feet, and cocked its head to look him over. When the bird moved its head, the sword-beak gleamed evilly in the weak sunshine.

  Rod reached the tree and started to lift himself up by seizing the trunk.

  Doing this, he almost lost his life.

  He had forgotten how fast the sparrows could run on the ground.

  In one second, the bird was standing, comical and evil, studying him with its sharp, bright eyes; the next second, the knife-beak was into him, just below the bony part of the shoulder.

  He felt the eerie wet pull of the beak being drawn out of his body, the ache in his surprised flesh which would precede the griping pain. He hit at the bird with his belt light. He missed.

  By now he was weakened from his two wounds. The arm was still dripping blood steadily and he felt his shirt get wet as blood poured out of his shoulder.

  The bird, backing off, was again studying him by cocking its head. Rod tried to guess his chances. One square blow from his hand, and the bird was dead. The bird had thought him disabled, but now he really was partially disabled.

  If his blow did not land, score one Mister for the bird, mark a credit for the Hon. Sec., give Old Hot and Simple the victory!

  By now Rod had not the least doubt that Houghton Syme was behind the attack.

  The bird rushed.

  Rod forgot to fight the way he had planned.

  He kicked instead and caught the bird right in
its heavy, coarse body.

  It felt like a very big football filled with sand.

  The kick hurt his foot but the bird was flung a good six or seven meters away. Rod rushed behind the tree and looked back at the bird.

  The blood was pulsing fast out of his shoulder at this point.

  The kill-bird had gotten to its feet and was walking firmly and securely around the tree. One of the wings trailed a little; the kick seemed to have hurt a wing but not the legs or that horribly strong neck.

  Once again the bird cocked its comical head. It was his own blood which dripped from the long beak, now red, which had gleamed silver grey at the beginning of the fight. Rod wished he had studied more about these birds. He had never been this close to a mutated sparrow before and he had no idea of how to fight one. All he had known was that they attacked people on very rare occasions and that sometimes the people died in the encounters.

  He tried to spiek, to let out a scream which would bring the neighborhood and the police flying and running toward him. He found he had no telepathy at all, not when he had to concentrate his whole mind and attention on the bird, knowing that its very next move could bring him irretrievable death. This was no temporary death with the rescue squads nearby. There was no one in the neighborhood, no one at all, except for the excited and sympathetic kookaburras haha-ing madly in the tree above.

  He shouted at the bird, hoping to frighten it.

  The kill-bird paid him no more attention than if it had been a deaf reptile.

  The foolish head tipped this way and that. The little bright eyes watched him. The red sword-beak, rapidly turning brown in the dry air, probed abstract dimensions for a way to his brain or heart. Rod even wondered how the bird solved its problems in solid geometry—the angle of approach, the line of thrust, the movement of the beak, the weight and direction of the fleeing object, himself.

  He jumped back a few centimeters, intending to look at the bird from the other side of the tree-trunk.

  There was a hiss in the air, like the helpless hiss of a gentle little snake.

  The bird, when he saw it, looked odd: suddenly it seemed to have two beaks.

  Rod marveled.

  He did not really understand what was happening until the bird leaned over suddenly, fell on its side, and lay—plainly dead—on the dry cool ground. The eyes were still open but they looked blank; the bird’s body twitched a little. The wings opened out in a dying spasm. One of the wings almost struck the trunk of the tree, but the tree-guarding device raised a plastic shaft to ward off the blow; a pity the device had not been designed as a people-guard as well.