Norstrilia - Illustrated

by Cordwainer Smith

  “You have no chance at all without me. I’ll correct that. You have one chance in ten thousand of coming out alive.

  “With me, if you obey me through C’mell, your chances are very good indeed. More than one thousand to one in your favor. You will live—”

  “But my money!” Rod spieked wildly without knowing that he did it.

  “Your money is on Earth. It is Earth,” smiled the wise, powerful old official. “It is being taxed at enormous rates. This is your fate, young man. Remember it, and be ready to obey it. When I lift my hand, repeat after me. Do you understand?”

  Rod nodded. He was not afraid, exactly, but some unknown core within him had begun to radiate animal terror. He was not afraid of what might happen to himself; he was afraid of the strange, wild fierceness of it all. He had never known that man or boy could be so utterly alone.

  The loneliness of the open outback at home was physical. This loneliness had millions of people around him. He felt the past crowding up as though it were alive in its own right. The cat-girl beside him comforted him a little; he had met her through Doctor Vomact; to Vomact he had been sent by Redlady; and Redlady knew his own dear home. The linkage was there, though it was remote.

  In front of him there was no linkage at all.

  He stood, in his own mind, on a precipice of the present, staring down at the complex inexplicable immensity of Earth’s past. This was the place that all people were from. In those oceans they had crawled in the slime; from those salt, rich seas they had climbed to that land far below him; on that land they had changed from animals into men before they had seized the stars. This was home itself, the home of all men, and it could swallow him up.

  The word-thoughts came fast out of the Lord Jestocost’s mind, directly into his own. It was as though Jestocost had found some way around his impediment and had then disregarded it.

  “This is Old Earth itself, from which you were bred and to which all men return in their thoughts if not in their bodies. This is still the richest of the worlds, though its wealth is measured in treasures and memories, not in stroon.

  “Many men have tried to rule this world. A very few have done it for a little while.”

  Unexpectedly, the Lord Jestocost lifted his right hand. Without knowing why he did it, Rod repeated the last sentence.

  “A very few men have governed the world for a little while.”

  “The Instrumentality has made that impossible.”

  The right hand was still in the commanding “up” position, so Rod repeated, “The Instrumentality has made that impossible.”

  “And now you, Rod McBan, of Old North Australia, are the first to own it.”

  The hand was still raised.

  “And now I, Rod McBan, of Old North Australia, am the first to own it.”

  The hand dropped, but the Lord spieked on.

  “Go forward, then, with death around you.

  “Go forward, then, to your heart’s desire.

  “Go forward, with the love you will win and lose.

  “Go forward, to the world, and to that other world under the world.

  “Go forward, to wild adventures and a safe return.

  “Be watchful of C’mell. She will be my eyes upon you, my arm around your shoulders, my authority upon your person; but go.

  “Go.” Up went the hand.

  “Go…” said Rod.

  The Lord vanished.

  C’mell plucked at his sleeve. “Your trip is over, my husband. Now we take Earth itself.”

  Softly and quickly they ran to the steps which went to unimaginable Earth below them.

  Rod McBan had come to the fulfilment of his chance and his inheritance.

  “The Boy Who Bought Old Earth” ends here. The Planet Buyer concludes with the following brief chapter:

  EPILOGUE AND CODA

  How Rod McBan CLI took his chance and enjoyed his inheritance is, of course, implicit in all that he had done and had been done to him up to his meeting with the Lord Jestocost. The details of how it all worked out are doubtless fascinating (and will doubtless be told later), but the reason for this chronicle ends now that the players have made the moves that will determine the outcome.

  One piece remains to be removed from the board first, though.

  This is followed by a section “Old North Australia, Adm. Offices of the Commonwealth” like that in the chapter “Discourses and Recourses” (page 125). This is then followed by this section:

  The Prediction Machine at the Abba-dingo

  Jestocost was the only Lord of the Instrumentality who had bothered to put through a direct line to the prediction machine at the Abba-dingo, halfway up the immense column which supported Earthport. Most of the time the machine did not work at all; much of the rest was unintelligible, but Jestocost liked trying it anyhow.

  The night of Rod’s arrival he asked, “What is happening in the world?”

  Said the machine, “What? What? Be clear.”

  “Has anything started happening in the world today?” shouted Jestocost.

  There was a long delay. Jestocost thought of disconnecting, but finally the machine spoke, in the accents of ages past, “This-machine is cold, cold. This-machine is old, old. It is hard to tell. It is hard to know. But something has begun to happen. Something strange, like the first few drops of an immense rainstorm, like the tiny glow of an approaching comet. Change is coming to this world. It is not change which weapons can stop. This change whispers in like a forgotten dream. Maybe it will be good. Change, change…at the center of it all, there is a boy. One boy. This-machine cannot see him…”

  There was a long silence. Jestocost finally knew that the machine had nothing more to say. He cut the connection. And then, very deeply, he sighed.

  Page 125. “Discourses and Recourses.” At the beginning of The Underpeople, this is preceded by the following chapter, which does not appear in Norstrilia:

  LOST MUSIC IN AN OLD WORLD

  You may have seen the musical play which was written about the confrontation of Rod McBan, the boy who had bought Earth, and the Lady Johanna Gnade, proudest and most self-willed of the Lords of the Instrumentality. It was not a very long play. Indeed, among the many plays and ballads that were composed about Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan the hundred and fifty-first, this short drama was characterized by economy of form, understatement of the dramatic elements, and the generous use of music. People remembered the music even when they forgot which play it came from. (Then the Instrumentality stepped in and ordered that the play be withdrawn, gradually and imperceptibly, on the ground that the music was licentious. Unfortunately, it was. Old music from the First Space Age has a real tendency to corrupt people of our own time. You can’t pick something out of a half-mythical place like ancient “New York” and turn it loose without people getting very queer ideas indeed.)

  This is the way it happened.

  Hansgeorg Wagner was one of the first musicians to be imprinted with the Doych language, sometimes called German or Teut, when the Rediscovery of Man began bringing the pre-Ruin cultures back into the world.

  Hansgeorg Wagner had a neat eye for the dramatic. When the story of Rod McBan began to leak out, soon after McBan went back to his home planet of Old North Australia, Wagner refused to consider the obvious scenes: the boy gambling for Earth on his dry, faraway planet, and winning most of the available money in the universe; the boy walking on Mars; the boy meeting his “wife,” C’mell, most beautiful of the cat-women who served as the girlygirl hostesses for Earth; the boy fighting Amaral for the life of one of them; the mystery of the Department Store of Hearts’ Desires and what befell Rod there; or even the terrifying terminal scene with the E’telekeli. Wagner did not even want the dramatic scene in which Rod’s companion, his workwoman Eleanor, parted from him on Earthport tower soon after C’mell had sung her own famous little tower song to Rod:

  And oh! my love, for you.

  High birds crying, and a

>   High sky flying, and a

  High wind driving, and a

  High heart striving, and a

  High brave place for you!

  In the Music Room: A Meeting with the Past

  The passenger dropshaft from Earthport was like an ancient elevator shaft, except for the fact that if an actual ancient had seen it, he would have been surprised. It was ten miles deep, or more (it’s hard to figure out exactly what miles were, but they were much longer than kilometers), and it had no elevators. The shaft was ornamentally illuminated. There were signs for information, frequent stops for refreshment, and curious sights to be seen. This was for people only. People put on magnetic belts, stepped into the shaft, and were carried up or down at the rate of about twenty meters a minute, depending on which shaft they had gotten into; shafts always came in pairs, an up shaft and a down shaft.

  By contrast, the freight shaft had no signs, no refreshments, and no amenities. The down speed was considerably faster. Freight rose or fell, tied to magnetic belts; underpeople and robots wore the belts, unless they forgot them and swiftly became bloody pulp or mashed machinery far below. The freight shaft, like the passenger shaft, did have a warning in both the up and the down shaft, because if people got loose from their belts, they whistled downward to their deaths. Each set of shafts had interceptor nets, both for saving falling persons or objects, and to protect the other passengers below, but the nets did not work too well.

  Wagner’s drama has an initial scene showing Rod McBan and C’mell pausing at the top of the freight dropshaft. She is carrying the small monkey-surgeon A’gentur, who has gone to sleep, bone-weary after the trip. Rod McBan, standing a full head taller than most cat-men, is expostulating with gestures more coarse and more real than any c’man ever used. His big bush of yellow hair had been made cat-like before he landed on Earth, and the long sparse whiskers of this cat-moustache twitched oddly indeed as he explained his emphatic desires with forthright Old North Australian gestures.

  After a short development of the scene, Wagner has both of them singing the lyric refrain, “Earth is mine, but what good does it do me?” from Rod, and “Earth is yours, but be patient, my love” from C’mell. A touch of comedy is provided by C’mell’s trying to get a magnetic harness on Rod while he squirms. The scene ends with the two of them stepping over the edge of the dropshaft (which looks bottomless) on their long, long drop down to the surface of the Earth.

  We know that the two of them dropped easily. The only difficulty was caused by Rod’s tendency to talk too much when he, the richest man in the world, was supposed to be traveling in the disguise of a poor simple cat-man. Torn between irritation and love, C’mell switched between humoring him and shushing him.

  Crisis came (and Hansgeorg Wagner catches it in his play) when Rod heard the sound of unbelievable music.

  It was like no music that he had ever heard before.

  “What’s that?” he cried to C’mell.

  “Music,” she said, soothingly.

  He did not call her a fool, but he growled in annoyance and reached over to seize a rung of the endless emergency ladder which followed the dropshaft down. He climbed a dozen rungs upward and peered into a pitch-black lateral corridor which led, apparently, to nowhere but from which strange fierce beautiful music was certainly coming. He had climbed against the gentle throbbing pull of the magnetic belt and he breathed heavily with the double exertion. C’mell had dropped another ten meters before she saw what he was doing. Wearily, but with no word of complaint, she climbed up the ladder to him, carrying her own weight, that of the sleeping monkey-surgeon whom she had tossed over her shoulder, and the pull of her own belt as well. When her head reached the level of Rod’s feet, he stepped carefully off the ladder and took two very gingerly steps into the dark lateral corridor.

  The music was clear to both of them.

  Throbbing, beaten strings made the lovely sounds.

  She sensed his inquiry though she could not see his face in the dark.

  “That instrument—it’s a piano. They’ve started making them again.”

  Rod put his hand on her arm to quiet her. “Listen, I think he’s singing.”

  Full-bodied and full-noted the music of the piano and a man’s tenor voice came clearly and fully at them from the corridor, hidden by the darkness but not sounding too far away:

  Ignoraba yo.

  I didn’t use to know it.

  Ignoraba yo.

  I didn’t use to show it

  that I loved you, loved you so.

  I love you and I love you,

  Hoy y mañana.

  There’s nothing else in life for me.

  Hoy y mañana.

  You love me wild and use me up,

  Hoy y mañana.

  Was I happier or sadder when I didn’t even know you?

  Ignoraba yo.

  I couldn’t even show you.

  The voice trailed away. There were a few flourishes of beaten strings, as though the player were trying to get the arrangement just right.

  “Part of that is Ancient Inglish,” said Rod, “but I never heard the other language before. And I certainly never heard that kind of a melody, anywhere.”

  “I know most of the music which is played on Earth,” whispered C’mell, “and I never heard anything like that before. Come on, Rod. Let’s go on down the shaft. When we get to a safe place, I will send messengers back to find out what is going on in this part of Earthport tower.”

  “No,” said Rod, “I’m going in.”

  “You can’t, Rod. You can’t. It might ruin everything. The disguise, Lord Jestocost’s plans, your safety.”

  “I bought this world,” said Rod, “and I’m a ruddy fool if I can’t even ask for a piece of music. I’m going in.”

  “Rod,” she cried.

  “Stop me,” he said, crudely, and walked boldly down the corridor into the dark, just as though there might be no trap doors or electric screens. C’mell followed him, carefully and reluctantly.

  The corridor blazed red with letters of warning:

  KEEP OUT!

  NO PEOPLE ALLOWED

  INSTRUMENTALITY WORK—SECRET

  A recorded voice shouted at them, “Go away! Go away! No robots. No underpeople. No real persons. Lords of the Instrumentality, get individual clearance before you enter here. Secret work. Go away! Go away! No robots. No underpeople,” and so on, in a sustained irritating shout.

  Rod ignored the voice even though C’mell was plucking at his sleeve.

  The red warning lights had revealed the outline of a door with a doorknob.

  He took the doorknob, twisted it. It was locked. The door itself did not seem to be of steel or Daimoni material. Perhaps it was even wood, which was much too precious on Old North Australia to be used for anything as cheap as a common door: the Norstrilians used plastics derived from sheep-bones.

  Rod shouted, “Open up, inside. Open up.”

  “Go away,” said a mild, pleasant voice from beyond the door, so near that it startled them.

  The voice was so near and the door so fragile that Rod was tempted.

  He stepped back until he was next to C’mell. He was sorry when he heard her sigh with relief—apparently at the thought that he had heeded the warning and was going to go back to the dropshaft.

  Instead, he used a fighting trick which he had learned at home. He jumped with the full force of his body at the door, striking the door just above the knob with both his feet and putting his hands below him so as to cushion the fall of his body against the floor.

  Results were startling:

  The door yielded so easily that Rod plunged on through into a bright sun-lit room, landed on a carpet and slid with the carpet until his feet, firmly but gently, were stopped by a large beautiful upright wooden box, elegantly polished, which seemed to have a rudimentary console. A middle-aged gentleman, showing great surprise, jumped out of his way. Blinking against the brightness of the light, C’mell and A’gentur fol
lowed Rod into the room.

  Their startled host spoke:

  “You’re underpeople! Do you want to die? Somebody will kill you for this. Not I, of course. What do you want here?”

  Rod brought himself to his feet with all the dignity which he could command.

  “My name is Rod McBan,” said he, “and I take full responsibility for what has happened. I am the new owner of this planet Earth, and I want to hear some more of that music you were making.”

  “Ignoraba yo. That Spanish bop? What business is it of yours, cat-man? That is secret work for the Instrumentality. And all you are going to do is to die when the robot police arrive.”

  C’mell spoke up. Her voice had a calm urgency to it, which could not be ignored by anyone. Said she, “You have a connection with the Central Computer?”

  “Of course,” said the man, “all protected offices do.”

  “You are not a person?”

  “Of course not, cat-woman. I am the dog-man D’igo and I am the musical historian assigned to work in this office.”

  “I am C’mell,” said she flatly.

  The dog-man was startled but when he spoke, his voice was very agreeable: “I know who you are. Anything here is at your service, C’mell.”

  “Your connection?” she demanded.

  He nodded his head at one side of the room. She saw the speaker in the wall. A’gentur sat sleepily on the floor, while Rod had produced one single clear note by pushing one of the keys of the beautiful big upright box.

  C’mell called, “Rod, come here.”

  “Right ho,” he said, coming over to the speaker.

  “Listen. Your life may be in danger, Rod. I’ll call Central Computer and I want you to assert your authority over this room and this work. Demand to hear the music that you want. Tell the Central Computer the truth. That may keep the robot police from coming in and killing you before they find that you are not really a cat-man.”

  “He isn’t a cat-man…” murmured D’igo in wonderment from the side.