Norstrilia

by Cordwainer Smith

  “The Vice-Chairman will be here today.”

  (“The Vice-Chairman” was the head of the government; there had been no Chairman of the Temporary Commonwealth Government for some thousands of years. Norstrilians did not like posh and they thought that Vice-Chairman was high enough for any one man to go. Besides, it kept the offworlders guessing.)

  Rod was not impressed. He had seen the man. It was in one of his rare moments of broad hiering, and he found that the mind of the Vice-Chairman was full of numbers and horses, the results of every horse race for three hundred and twenty years, and the projection forward of six probable horse races in the next two years.

  “Yes, auntie,” he said.

  “Don’t bray all the time today. You don’t have to use your voice for little things like saying yes. Just nod your head. It will make a much better impression.”

  He started to answer, but gulped and nodded instead.

  She sank the comb into his thick yellow hair.

  Another one of the women, almost a girl, brought up a small table and a basin. He could tell from her expression that she was spieking to him, but this was one of the times in which he could not hier at all.

  The aunt gave his hair a particularly fierce tug just as the girl took his hand. He did not know what she meant to do. He yanked his hand back.

  The basin fell off the small table. Only then did he realize that it was merely soapy water for a manicure.

  “I am sorry,” he said; even to him, his voice sounded like a bray. For a moment he felt the fierce rush of humiliation and self-hate.

  They should kill me, he thought … By the time the sun goes down I’ll be in the Giggle Room, laughing and laughing before the medicine makes my brains boil away.

  He had reproached himself.

  The two women had said nothing. The aunt had walked away to get some shampoo, and the girl was returning with a pitcher, to refill the basin.

  He looked directly into her eyes, and she into his.

  “I want you,” she said, very clearly, very quietly, and with a smile which seemed inexplicable to him.

  “What for?” said he, equally quietly.

  “Just you,” she said. “I want you for myself. You’re going to live.”

  “You’re Lavinia, my cousin,” said he, as though discovering it for the first time.

  “Sh-h-h,” said the girl. “She’s coming back.”

  When the girl had settled down to getting his fingernails really clean, and the aunt had rubbed something like sheep-dip into his hair, Rod began to feel happy. His mood changed from the indifference which he had been pretending to himself. It became a real indifference to his fate, an easy acceptance of the grey sky above him, the dull rolling earth below. He had a fear—a little tiny fear, so small that it might have seemed to be a midget pet in a miniature cage—running around the inside of his thinking. It was not the fear that he would die: somehow he suddenly accepted his chances and remembered how many other people had had to take the same play with fortune. This little fear was something else, the dread that he might not behave himself properly if they did tell him to die.

  But then, he thought, I don’t have to worry. Negative is never a word—just a hypodermic, so that the first bad news the victim has is his own excited, happy laugh.

  With this funny peace of mind, his hiering suddenly lifted.

  He could not see the Garden of Death, but he could look into the minds tending it; it was a huge van hidden just beyond the next roll of hills, where they used to keep Old Billy, the eighteen-hundred-ton sheep. He could hear the clatter of voices in the little town eighteen kilometers away. And he could look right into Lavinia’s mind.

  It was a picture of himself. But what a picture! So grown, so handsome, so brave looking. He had schooled himself not to move when he could hier, so that other people would not realize that his rare telepathic gift had come back to him.

  Auntie was spieking to Lavinia without noisy words. “We’ll see this pretty boy in his coffin tonight.”

  Lavinia thought right back, without apology. “No, we won’t.”

  Rod sat impassive in his chair. The two women, their faces grave and silent, went on spieking the argument at each other with their minds.

  “How would you know—you’re not very old?” spieked auntie.

  “He has the oldest station in all of Old North Australia. He has one of the very oldest names. He is—” and even in spieking her thoughts cluttered up, like a stammer—“he is a very nice boy and he’s going to be a wonderful man.”

  “Mark my thought,” spieked the auntie again, “I’m telling you that we’ll see him in his coffin tonight and that by midnight he’ll be on his coffin-ride to the Long Way Out.”

  Lavinia jumped to her feet. She almost knocked over the basin of water a second time. She moved her throat and mouth to speak words but she just croaked,

  “Sorry, Rod. Sorry.”

  Rod McBan, his face guarded, gave a pleasant, stupid little nod, as though he had no idea of what they had been spieking to each other.

  She turned and ran, shout-spieking the loud thought at auntie, “Get somebody else to do his hands. You’re heartless, hopeless. Get somebody else to do your corpse washing for you. Not me. Not me.”

  “What’s the matter with her?” said Rod to the auntie, just as though he did not know.

  “She’s just difficult, that’s all. Just difficult. Nerves, I suppose,” she added in her croaking spoken words. She could not talk very well, since all her family and friends could spiek and hier with privacy and grace. “We were spieking with each other about what you would be doing tomorrow.”

  “Where’s a priest, auntie?” said Rod.

  “A what?”

  “A priest, like the old poem has, in the rough rough days before our people found this planet and got our sheep settled down. Everybody knows it.

  Here is the place where the priest went mad.

  Over there my mother burned.

  I cannot show you the house we had.

  We lost that slope when the mountain turned.

  There’s more to it, but that’s the part I remember. Isn’t a priest a specialist in how to die? Do we have any around here?”

  He watched her mind as she lied to him. As he had spoken, he had a perfectly clear picture of one of their more distant neighbors, a man named Tolliver, who had a very gentle manner; but her words were not about Tolliver at all.

  “Some things are men’s business,” she said, cawing her words. “Anyhow, that song isn’t about Norstrilia at all. It’s about Paradise VII and why we left it. I didn’t know you knew it.”

  In her mind he read, “That boy knows too much.”

  “Thanks, auntie,” said he meekly.

  “Come along for the rinse,” said she. “We’re using an awful lot of real water on you today.”

  He followed her and he felt more kindly toward her when he saw her think, Lavinia had the right feelings but she drew the wrong conclusion. He’s going to be dead tonight.

  That was too much.

  Rod hesitated for a moment, tempering the chords of his oddly attuned mind. Then he let out a tremendous howl of telepathic joy, just to bother the lot of them. It did. They all stopped still. Then they stared at him.

  In words the auntie said, “What was that?”

  “What?” said he, innocently.

  “That noise you spieked. It wasn’t meaning.”

  “Just sort of a sneeze, I suppose. I didn’t know I did it.” Deep down inside himself he chuckled. He might be on his way to the Hoohoo House, but he would fritter their friskies for them while he went.

  It was a dashed silly way to die, he thought all to himself.

  And then a strange, crazy, happy idea came to him:

  Perhaps they can’t kill me. Perhaps I have powers. Powers of my own. Well, we’ll soon enough find out.

  THE TRIAL

  ROD walked across the dusty lot, took three steps up the folding staircase which
had been let down from the side of the big trailer van, knocked on the door once as he had been instructed to do, had a green light flash in his face, opened the door, and entered.

  It was a garden.

  The moist, sweet, scent-laden air was like a narcotic. There were bright green plants in profusion. The lights were clear but not bright; their ceiling gave the effect of a penetrating blue, blue sky. He looked around. It was a copy of Old Old Earth. The growths on the green plants were roses; he remembered pictures which his computer had showed him. The pictures had not gotten across the idea that they smelled nice at the same time that they looked nice. He wondered if they did that all the time, and then remembered the wet air: wet air always holds smells better than dry air does. At last, almost shyly, he looked up at the three judges.

  With real startlement, he saw that one of them was not a Norstrilian at all, but the local Commissioner of the Instrumentality, the Lord Redlady—a thin man with a sharp, inquiring face. The other two were Old Taggart and John Beasley. He knew them, but not well.

  “Welcome,” said the Lord Redlady, speaking in the funny singsong of a man from Manhome.

  “Thank you,” said Rod.

  “You are Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan the one hundred and fifty-first?” said Taggart, knowing perfectly well that Rod was that person.

  Lord love a duck and lucky me! thought Rod, I’ve got my hiering, even in this place!

  “Yes,” said the Lord Redlady.

  There was silence.

  The other two judges looked at the Manhome man; the stranger looked at Rod; Rod stared, and then began to feel sick at the bottom of his stomach.

  For the first time in his life, he had met somebody who could penetrate his peculiar perceptual abilities.

  At last he thought, “I understand.”

  The Lord Redlady looked sharply and impatiently at him, as though waiting for a response to that single word “yes.”

  Rod had already answered—telepathically.

  At last Old Taggart broke the silence.

  “Aren’t you going to talk? I asked you your name.”

  The Lord Redlady held up his hand in a gesture for patience; it was not a gesture which Rod had ever seen before, but he understood it immediately.

  He thought telepathically at Rod, “You are watching my thoughts.”

  “Indeed I am,” thought Rod, back at him.

  The Lord Redlady clapped a hand to his forehead. “You are hurting me. Did you think you said something?”

  With his voice Rod said, “I told you that I was reading your mind.”

  The Lord Redlady turned to the other two men and spieked to them: “Did either of you hier what he tried to spiek?”

  “No.” “No.” They both thought back at him. “Just noise, loud noise.”

  “He is a broadbander like myself. And I have been disgraced for it. You know that I am the only Lord of the Instrumentality who has been degraded from the status of Lord to that of Commissioner—”

  “Yes,” they spieked.

  “You know that they could not cure me of shouting and suggested I die?”

  “No,” they answered.

  “You know that the Instrumentality thought I could not bother you here and sent me to your planet on this miserable job, just to get me out of the way?”

  “Yes,” they answered.

  “Then, what do you want to do about him? Don’t try to fool him. He knows all about this place already.” The Lord Redlady glanced quickly, sympathetically up at Rod, giving him a little phantom smile of encouragement. “Do you want to kill him? To exile him? To turn him loose?”

  The other two men fussed around in their minds. Rod could see that they were troubled at the idea he could watch them thinking, when they had thought him a telepathic deaf-mute; they also resisted the Lord Redlady’s unmannerly precipitation of the decision. Rod almost felt that he was swimming in the thick wet air, with the smell of roses cloying his nostrils so much that he would never smell anything but roses again, when he became aware of a massive consciousness very near him—a fifth person in the room, whom he had not noticed at all before.

  It was an Earth soldier, complete with uniform. The soldier was handsome, erect, tall, formal with a rigid military decorum. He was, furthermore, not human and he had a strange weapon in his left hand.

  “What is that?” spieked Rod to the Earthman. The man saw his face, not the thought.

  “An underman. A snake-man. The only one on this planet. He will carry you out of here if the decision goes against you.”

  Beasley cut in, almost angrily. “Here, cut it out. This is a hearing, not a blossoming tea party. Don’t clutter all that futt into the air. Keep it formal.”

  “You want a formal hearing?” said the Lord Redlady. “A formal hearing for a man who knows everything that all of us are thinking? It’s foolish.”

  “In Old North Australia, we always have formal hearings,” said old Taggart. With an acuteness of insight born of his own personal danger, Rod saw Taggart all over again for the first time—a careworn poor old man, who had worked a poor farm hard for a thousand years; a farmer, like his ancestors before him; a man rich only in the millions of megacredits which he would never take time to spend; a man of the soil, honorable, careful, formal, righteous, and very just. Such men did not yield to innovation, ever. They fought change.

  “Have the hearing then,” said the Lord Redlady, “have the hearing if it is your custom, my Mister and Owner Taggart, my Mister and Owner Beasley.”

  The Norstrilians, appeased, bowed their heads briefly.

  Almost shyly, Beasley looked over at the Lord Redlady. “Sir and Commissioner, will you say the words? The good old words. The ones that will help us to find our duty and to do it.”

  (Rod saw a quick flare of red anger go through the Lord Redlady’s mind as the Earth Commissioner thought fiercely to himself, “Why all this fuss about killing one poor boy? Let him go, you dull clutts, or kill him.” But the Earthman had not directed the thoughts outward and the two Norstrilians were unaware of his private view of them.)

  On the outside, the Lord Redlady remained calm. He used his voice, as Norstrilians did on occasion of great ceremony:

  “We are here to hear a man.”

  “We are here to hear him,” they responded.

  “We are not to judge or to kill, though this may follow,” said he.

  “Though this may follow,” they responded.

  “And where, on Old Old Earth, does man come from?”

  They knew the answer by rote and said it heavily together: “This is the way it was on Old Old Earth, and this is the way it shall be among the stars, no matter how far we men may wander:

  “The seed of wheat is planted in dark, moist earth; the seed of man in dark, moist flesh. The seed of wheat fights upward to air, sun and space; the stalk, leaves, blossom and grain flourish under the open glare of heaven. The seed of man grows in the salty private ocean of the womb, the sea-darkness remembered by the bodies of his race. The harvest of wheat is collected by the hands of men; the harvest of men is collected by the tenderness of eternity.”

  “And what does this mean?” chanted the Lord Redlady.

  “To look with mercy, to decide with mercy, to kill with mercy, but to make the harvest of man strong and true and good, the way that the harvest of wheat stood high and proud on Old Old Earth.”

  “And who is here?” he asked.

  They both recited Rod’s full name.

  When they had finished, the Lord Redlady turned to Rod and said, “I am about to utter the ceremonial words, but I promise you that you will not be surprised, no matter what happens. Take it easy, therefore. Easy, easy.” Rod was watching the Earthman’s mind and the minds of the two Norstrilians. He could see that Beasley and Taggart were befuddled with the ritual of the words, the wetness and scent of the air, and the false blue sky in the top of the van; they did not know what they were going to do. But Rod could also
see a sharp, keen triumphant thought forming in the bottom of the Lord Redlady’s mind, I’ll get this boy off! He almost smiled, despite the presence of the snake-man with the rigid smile and the immovable glaring eyes standing just three paces beside him and a little to his rear, so that Rod could only look at him through the corner of his eye.

  “Misters and Owners!” said the Lord Redlady.

  “Mister Chairman!” they answered.

  “Shall I inform the man who is being heard?”

  “Inform him!” they chanted.

  “Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan the one hundred and fifty-first!”

  “Yes, sir,” said Rod.

  “Heir-in-trust of the Station of Doom!”

  “That’s me,” said Rod.

  “Hear me!” said the Lord Redlady.

  “Hear him!” said the other two.

  “You have not come here, Child and Citizen Roderick, for us to judge you or to punish you. If these things are to be done, they must be done in another place or time, and they must be done by men other than ourselves. The only concern before this board is the following: should you or should you not be allowed to leave this room safe and free and well, taking into no account your innocence or guilt of matters which might be decided elsewhere, but having regard only for the survival and the safety and the welfare of this given planet? We are not punishing and we are not judging, but we are deciding, and what we are deciding is your life. Do you understand? Do you agree?”

  Rod nodded mutely, drinking in the wet, rose-scented air and stilling his sudden thirst with the dampness of the atmosphere. If things went wrong now, they did not have very far to go. Not far to go, not with the motionless snake-man standing just beyond his reach. He tried to look at the snake-brain but got nothing out of it except for an unexpected glitter of recognition and defiance.

  The Lord Redlady went on, Taggart and Beasley hanging on his words as though they had never heard them before.

  “Child and Citizen, you know the rules. We are not to find you wrong or right. No crime is judged here, no offense. Neither is innocence. We are only judging the single question, Should you live or should you not? Do you understand? Do you agree?”