To be me, is it right, is it good?
To go on, when the others have stood—
To the gate, through the door, past the wall,
Between this and the nothing-at-all.
It is cold, it is me, in the out.
I am true, I am me, in the lone.
Such silence leaves room for no doubt.
It is brightness unbroken by tone.
To be me, it is strange, it is true.
Shall I lie? To be them, to have peace?
Will I know, can I tell, when I’m through?
Do I stop when my troubles must cease?
If the wall isn’t glass, isn’t there,
If it’s real but compounded of air,
Am I lost if I go where I go
Where I’m me? I am yes. Am I no?
To be me, is it right, is it so?
Can I count on my brain, on my eye?
Will I be you or be her by and bye?
Are they true, all these things that I know?
You are mad, in the wall. On the out,
I’m alone and as sane as the grave.
Do I fail, do I lose what I save?
Am I me, if I echo your shout?
I have gone to a season of time…
Out of thought, out of life, out of rhyme.
If I come to be you, do I lose
The chance to be me if I choose?
Rod/Eleanor had moments of desperation, and sometimes wondered if the Earth authorities or the Instrumentality would take him/her away for reconditioning.
The warning today was formal, fierce, serene in its implacable self-assurance.
Against his/her better judgment, Roderick Henry McBan poured out a stiff drink and waited for the inevitable.
Destiny came as three men, all of them strangers, but one wearing the uniform of an Old North Australia consul. When they got close, she recognized the consul as Lord William Not-from-here, with whose daughter Ruth he/she had disported on these very sands many years before.
The greetings were wearisomely long, but Rod/Eleanor had learned, both on Old North Australia and here on Manhome Earth, never to discount ceremony as the salvager of difficult or painful occasions. It was the Lord William Not-from-here who spoke.
“Hear now, Lord Roderick Eleanor, the message of a plenum of the Instrumentality, lawfully and formally assembled, to wit—
“That you, the Lord Roderick Eleanor, be known to be and be indeed a Chief of the Instrumentality until the day of your death—
“That you have earned this status by survival capacity, and that the strange and difficult lives which you have already led with no thought of suicide have earned you a place in our terrible and dutiful ranks—
“That in being and becoming the Lord Roderick Eleanor, you shall be man or woman, young or old, as the Instrumentality may order—
“That you take power to serve, that you serve to take power, that you come with us, that you look not backward, that you remember to forget, that you forget old remembering, that within the Instrumentality you are not a person but a part of a person—
“That you be made welcome to the oldest servant of mankind, the Instrumentality itself.”
Roderick/Eleanor had not a word to say.
Newly appointed Lords of the Instrumentality rarely had anything to say. It was the custom of the Instrumentality to take new appointees by surprise, after minute examination of their records for intelligence, will, vitality, and again, vitality.
The Lord William was smiling as he held out his hand and speaking in offworldly honest Norstrilian talk:
“Welcome, cousin from the grey rich clouds. Not many of our people have ever been chosen. Let me welcome you.”
Roderick/Eleanor took his hand. There was still nothing to say.
The Palace of the Governor of Night, Twenty Years After Rod’s Return
“I turned off the human voice hours ago, Lavinia. Turned it off. We always get a sharper reading with the numbers. It doesn’t have a clue on our boys. I’ve been across this console a hundred times. Come along, old girl. It’s no use predicting the future. The future is already here. Our boys will be out of the van, one way or the other, by the time we walk over the hill and down to them.” He spoke with his voice, as a little sign of tenderness between them.
Lavinia asked nervously, “Shouldn’t we take an ornithopter and fly?”
“No, girl,” said Rod tenderly. “What would our neighbors and kinsmen think if they saw the parents flying in like wild offworlders or a pair of crimson pommies who can’t keep a steady head when there’s a bit of blow-up? After all, our big girl Casheba made it two years ago, and her eyes weren’t so good.”
“She’s a howler, that one,” said Lavinia warmly. “She could fight off a space pirate even better than you could before you could spiek.”
They walked slowly up the hill.
When they crossed the top of the hill, they got the ominous melody coming right at them.
Out in the Garden of Death, our young
Have tasted the valiant taste of fear.
With muscular arm and reckless tongue,
They have won, and lost, and escaped us here.
In one form or another, all Old North Australians knew that tune. It was what the old people hummed when the young ones had to go into the vans to be selected out for survival or non-survival.
They saw the judges come out of the van. The Hon. Sec. Houghton Syme was there, his face bland and his cares erased by the special dreamlives which Rod’s medicine had brought from the secret underground of Earth. The Lord Redlady was there. And Doctor Wentworth.
Lavinia started to run downhill toward the people, but Rod grabbed her arm and said with rough affection,
“Steady on, old girl. McBans never run—from nothing, and to nothing!”
She gulped but she joined pace with him.
People began looking up at them as they approached.
Nothing was to be told from the expressions.
It was the Lord Redlady, unconventional to the end, who broke the sign to them.
He held up one finger.
Only one.
Immediately thereafter Rod and Lavinia saw their twins. Ted, the fairer one, sat on a chair while Old Bill tried to give him a drink. Ted wouldn’t take it. He looked across the land as though he could not believe what he saw. Rich, the darker twin, stood all alone.
All alone, and laughing.
Laughing.
Rod McBan and his missus walked across the land of Doom to be civil to their neighbors. This was indeed what inexorable custom commanded. She squeezed his hand a little tighter; he held her arm a little more firmly.
After a long time they had done their formal courtesies. Rod pulled Ted to his feet, “Hullo, boy. You made it. You know what you are?”
Mechanically the boy recited, “Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan to the hundred-and-fifty-second, Sir and Father!”
Then the boy broke, for just a moment. He pointed at Rich, who was still laughing, off by himself, and then plunged for his father’s hug:
“Oh, dad! Why me? Why me?”
APPENDIX:
Variant Texts
The material of Norstrilia has been published in several different forms: the original magazine editions (“The Boy Who Bought Old Earth” and “The Store of Heart’s Desire”), the Pyramid editions (The Planet Buyer and The Underpeople) and the Ballantine/Del Rey edition (Norstrilia). There are several significant differences between the texts. While the text of this edition is based on the Del Rey edition, significant portions of other versions seem worthy of preservation. This appendix is not a complete variorum edition. We have made no attempt to note every difference between editions. Rather, we have included some of the larger blocks of text that were not included in Norstrilia itself, with notes explaining how the pieces were fitted together in the various editions. The notes are keyed to the appropriate pages in the main text.
Pa
ge 1, “Theme and Prologue.” In “The Boy Who Bought Old Earth,” this chapter is preceded by the following prelude:
Later, much later, people forgot how Rod McBan had bought the whole Planet Earth without even knowing that he had done it. They remembered the extraneous things, like the Council of Thieves chartering whole fleets to intercept Rod on his way between Old North Australia and Earth. They remembered the little ballad which had been made up for the Chief of Thieves at about that time;
Arson for the arsenal,
Money in the money-bags,
Parson in the parsonage,
And the girl for me!
(They even explained that a parsonage was a vital statistics computer and the parson was its input screen.)
The real drama remained untold.
What had driven a rich, mysterious boy to gamble everything—perhaps even his life—from the richest planet in the galaxy in order to buy Earth? What could he have possibly done with Earth if he did get it?
You have to understand something of Old North Australia (familiarly called “Norstrilia”) to see how he did it.
You have to understand why a lot of the young died young.
Then you get the pitch of it and you have the real story, the inside story, the original history—not just a cartoon of a handsome yellow-haired boy standing with his arms full of megacredit papers.
He never held them, anyhow. He couldn’t have held them. There were too many. This boy had bought Earth, Manhome itself, the Earthport tower, the oceans, everything. You couldn’t get the paper titles of all that stuff into one person’s room, much less into his arms.
So let’s go back to the beginnings, and start with Old North Australia.
Page 3. In both “The Boy Who Bought Old Earth” and The Planet Buyer, in Section 5, after the first 4 paragraphs (after the sentence that reads “We know the poor kid was born to troubles.”), the remainder of the section is replaced by the following:
He was born to inherit the Station of Doom.
He almost failed the Garden of Death.
The Onseck was after him.
His father had died out in the dirty part of space, where people never find nice clean deaths.
When he got in trouble, he trusted his computer.
The computer gambled, and it won Earth.
He went to Earth.
That was history itself—that and C’mell beside him.
At long, long last he got his rights and he came home.
That’s the story. Except for the details.
They follow.
Page 24, “The soldier held out his hand.” The four paragraphs beginning here are omitted in “The Boy Who Bought Old Earth.” Similarly, on page 35, the magazine version omits the text from “Their faces still glowed with pleasure…” through “He went back to the table,” thus deleting all mention of the wallet and its ticket to Earth.
Page 47. “Soon he would see it.” In “The Boy Who Bought Old Earth,” the text from here through “His own computer.” on page 52 is replaced by the following summary:
Soon he would see it—the Palace of the Governor of Night, forever luminescent in the ultraviolet band. It was a Daimoni-built palace once, long, long ago. It had been built for the Governor of Night on Khufu II, where they used to raise the Furry Mountain Fur. But the Fur was gone and the Khufuans starved, and the palace had gone up for sale when there was no more a Governor of Night.
William MacArthur—“Wild William,” they called him—had bought it for a prodigious price and shipped it to his farm.
It was a replica of the Temple of Diana at Ephesus, way back on Manhome Earth itself. Normal people could not see it, since it was visible only in the ultraviolet band. Sometimes, with a real mean dust storm, the dust outlined it and the palace then showed up in ghostly form…mysterious, sacred, useless, but very beautiful—to ordinary people.
For Rod it was the front gate to his old family computer, just as the secret passage in the gap was the back gate.
Only relatives of the McBans, with eyesight which ran into the ultraviolet, could see the building at normal times.
And now it belonged to Rod McBan, and housed his computer. His own computer.
Page 89, “Traps, Fortunes and Watchers.” In “The Boy Who Bought Old Earth,” this entire chapter is replaced by the text that follows. (The Planet Buyer contains the whole chapter except for the section “Ruth, on the Beach…” on page 91.)
That very night it happened.
They scunned him; they reduced him; they froze him; they dehydrated him.
The Lord Redlady arranged a relay with the special courier ship which would run him to Earth itself.
These things were supposed to be secret, but they could not be kept completely secret. We all know that no communications systems are wholly leak-proof. Even inside the vast networks of the Instrumentality, shielded, coded and protected though they were, there were soft electronic spots, weak administrative points, or garrulous men here and there. The old computer had not allowed for ordinary human wickedness. It understood the human rules, but not the temptations to break the rules. All the messages concerning Rod’s vast speculations had been sent in the clear. It was no wonder that on many worlds, people saw Rod as a chance, an opportunity, a victim, a benefactor, or an enemy.
We all know the old rhyme:
Luck is hot and people funny.
Everybody’s fond of money.
Lose a chance and sell your mother.
Win the pot and buy another.
Other people fall and crash:
You could win the pot of cash!
It applied in this case, too. People ran hot and cold with the news.
On Earth, Commissioner Teadrinker wondered if he dared kidnap this rich man who was coming and hold him to ransom. It was illegal, but Teadrinker was so old that he had outlived mere legality.
At Viola Siderea, the Council of Thieves sent the Chief of Thieves in pursuit, spending hard-stolen money on honest lease of patrol ships, so great was their urgency.
At the heart of the underpeople world, an unknown magister invoked the seven logoi and the three Nameless Ones, hoping that the stranger might bring great tidings.
The Commonwealth Council of Old North Australia sat on the matter and decided to send along a full dozen McBan impersonations, just to throw robbers and interceptors off the track. They did not do this because they loved Rod, or because they had special regard for him as an individual citizen, but because it was against their principles to let any Old North Australian be robbed with impunity.
And Rod—
Rod woke on Mars, already reconstituted.
Page 95. “Vomact was a small man…” In “The Boy Who Bought Old Earth,” the text from here to “On their way back Rod said, very casually…” on page 101 is replaced by the single paragraph that follows. (The first two paragraphs of the Norstrilia text appear in “The Store of Heart’s Desire” at the equivalent of page 185, but as the description of the second Doctor Vomact.)
Friends they became in the ensuing days. After several weeks, Vomact came to the plans he had—when Rod was well enough—for the disguise for a trip to Earth.
Page 103. “Hospitality and Entrapment.” None of this chapter appears in “The Boy Who Bought Old Earth.”
Page 114. “They all three spun around.” The text from here to the end of “The Boy Who Bought Old Earth” is quite different, completely omitting the giant-spider incident and going directly to the interview with Lord Jestocost that also appears in The Planet Buyer (see below).
Page 122. “They walked toward a dropshaft.” In The Planet Buyer, the remainder of this chapter is replaced by an encounter with Lord Jestocost that appears nowhere in Norstrilia; essentially the same text appears in “The Boy Who Bought Old Earth.” The text from The Planet Buyer follows:
They walked only a few steps, then stopped short.
They all three spun around.
A man faced them—a tall man, clad in fo
rmal garments, his face gleaming with intelligence, courage, wisdom and a very special kind of elegance.
“I am projecting,” said he.
“You know me,” he said to C’mell.
“My Lord Jestocost!”
“You will sleep,” he commanded A’gentur, and the little monkey crumpled into a heap of fur on the deck of the tower.
“I am the Lord Jestocost, one of the Instrumentality,” said the strange man, “and I am going to speak to you at very high speed. It will seem like many minutes, but it will only take seconds. It is necessary for you to know your fate.”
“You mean my future?” said Rod McBan. “I thought that you, or somebody else, had it all arranged.”
“We can dispose, but we cannot arrange. I have talked to the Lord Redlady. I have plans for you. Perhaps they will work out.”
A slight frowning smile crossed the face of the distinguished man. With his left hand he warned C’mell to do nothing. The beautiful cat-girl started to step forward and then obeyed the imperious gesture, stopped, and merely watched.
The Lord Jestocost dropped to one knee. He bowed proudly and freely, with his head held high and his face tilted upward while he stared directly at Rod McBan.
Still kneeling, he said ceremoniously, “Some day, young man, you will understand what you are now seeing. The Lord Jestocost, which is myself, has bowed to no man or woman since the day of his initiation. That was more time ago than I like to remember. But I bow freely to the man who has bought Earth. I offer you my friendship and my help. I offer both of these without mental reservation. Now I stand up and I greet you as my younger comrade.”
He stood erect and reached for Rod’s hand. Rod shook hands with him, still bewildered.
“You have seen the work of some of the people who want you dead. I have had a hand in getting you through that (and I might tell you that the man who sent the spider will regret very deeply and very long that he did it). Other people will try to hunt you down for what you have done or for what you are. I am willing for you to save some of your property and all of your life. You will have experiences which you will treasure—if you live through them.
Norstrilia - Illustrated Page 29
