Norstrilia

by Cordwainer Smith

  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 each 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

  Of protest out of the mad profound

  Trap of the godmachine!

  “Godmachine,” thought Rod, “now that’s a clue. I’ve got the only all-mechanical computer on this planet. I’ll play it on the stroon crop, win all or lose all.”

  The boy stood up in the forbidden room.

  “Fight it is,” he said to the cubes on the floor, “and a good thanks to you, grandfather-to-the-nineteenth. You met the law and did not lose. And now it is my turn to be Rod McBan.”

  He turned and shouted to himself,

  “To Earth!”

  The call embarrassed him. He felt unseen eyes staring at him. He almost blushed and would have hated himself if he had.

  He stood on the top of a treasure-chest turned on its side. Two more gold coins, worthless as money but priceless as curios, fell noiselessly on the thick old rugs. He thought a goodbye again to his secret room and he jumped upward for the bar. He caught it, chinned himself, raised himself higher, swung a leg on it but not over it, got his other foot on the bar, and then, very carefully but with the power of all his muscles, pushed himself into the black opening above. The lights suddenly went off, the dehumidifier hummed louder, and the daylight dazzled him as the trap door, touched, flung itself open.

  He thrust his head into the culvert. The daylight seemed deep grey after the brilliance of the treasure room.

  All silent. All clear. He rolled into the ditch.

  The door, with silence and power, closed itself behind him. He was never to know it, but it had been cued to the genetic code of the descendants of Rod McBan. Had any other person touched it, it would have withstood them for a long time. Almost forever.

  You see, it was not really his door. He was its boy.

  “This land has made me,” said Rod aloud, as he clambered out of the ditch and looked around. The young ram had apparently wakened; his snoring had stopped and over the quiet hill there came the sound of his panting. Thirsty again! The Station of Doom was not so rich that it could afford unlimited water to its giant sheep. They lived all right. But he would have asked the trustees to sell even the sheep for water, if a real drought set in. But never the land.

  Never the land.

  No land for sale.

  It didn’t even really belong to him: he belonged to it—the rolling dry fields, the covered rivers and canals, the sky catchments which caught every drop which might otherwise have gone to his neighbors. That was the pastoral business—its product immortality and its price water. The Commonwealth could have flooded the planet and could have created small oceans, with the financial resources it had at command, but the planet and the people were regarded as one ecological entity. Old Australia—that fabulous continent of Old Earth now covered by the rains of the abandoned Chinesian cityworld of Aojou Nanbien—had in its prime been broad, dry, open, beautiful; the planet of Old North Australia, by the dead weight of its own tradition, had to remain the same.

  Imagine trees. Imagine leaves—vegetation dropping uneaten to the ground. Imagine water pouring by the thousands of tons, no one greeting it with tears of relief or happy laughter! Imagine Earth. Old Earth. Manhome itself. Rod had tried to think of a whole planet inhabited by Hamlets, drenched with music and poetry, knee-deep in blood and drama. It was unimaginable, really, though he had tried to think it through.

  Like a chill, a drill, a thrill cutting into his very nerves he thought:

  Imagine Earth women!

  What terrifying beautiful t
hings they must be. Dedicated to ancient and corruptive arts, surrounded by the objects which Norstrilia had forbidden long ago, stimulated by experiences which the very law of his own world had expunged from the books! He would meet them; he couldn’t help it; what, what would he do when he met a genuine Earth woman?

  He would have to ask his computer, even though the neighbors laughed at him for having the only pure computer left on the planet.

  They didn’t know what grandfather-to-the-nineteenth had done. He had taught the computer to lie. It stored all the forbidden things which the Law of the Clean Sweep had brushed out of Norstrilian experience. It could lie like a trooper. Rod wondered whether a “trooper” might be some archaic Earth official who did nothing but tell the untruth, day in and day out, for his living. But the computer usually did not lie to him.

  If grandfather19 had behaved as saucily and unconventionally with the computer as he had with everything else, that particular computer would know all about women. Even things which they did not themselves know. Or wish to know.

  Good computer! thought Rod as he trotted around the long, long fields to his house. Eleanor would have the tucker on. Doris might be back. Bill and Hopper would be angry if they had to wait for the Mister before they ate. To speed up his trip, he headed straight for the little cliff behind the house, hoping no one would see him jump down it. He was much stronger than most of the men he knew, but he was anxious, for some private inexpressible reason, for them not to know it.

  The route was clear.

  He found the cliff.

  No observers.

  He dropped over it, feet first, his heels kicking up the scree as he tobogganed through loose rock to the foot of the slope.

  And Aunt Doris was there.

  “Where have you been?” said she.

  “Walking, mum,” said he.

  She gave him a quizzical look but knew better than to ask more. Talking always fussed her, anyhow. She hated the sound of her own voice, which she considered much too high. The matter passed.

  Inside the house, they ate. Beyond the door and the oil lamp, a grey world became moonless, starless, black. This was night, his own night.

  THE QUARREL AT THE DINNER TABLE

  AT the end of the meal he waited for Doris to say grace to the Queen. She did but under her thick eyebrows her eyes expressed something other than thanks.

  “You’re going out,” she said right after the prayer. It was an accusation, not a question.

  The two hired men looked at him with quiet doubt. A week ago he had been a boy. Now he was the same person, but legally a man.

  The workwoman Eleanor looked at him too. She smiled very unobtrusively to herself. She was on his side whenever any other person came into the picture; when they were alone, she nagged him as much as she dared. She had known his parents before they went offworld for a long-overdue honeymoon and were chewed into molecules by a battle between raiders and police. That gave her a proprietary feeling about him.

  He tried to spiek to Doris with his mind, just to see if it would work.

  It didn’t. The two men bounded from their seats and ran for the yard, Eleanor sat in her chair holding tight to the table but saying nothing, and Aunt Doris screeched so loud that he could not make out the words.

  He knew she meant “Stop it!” so he did, and looked at her friendlily.

  That started a fight.

  Quarrels were common in Norstrilian life, because the Fathers had taught that they were therapeutic. Children could quarrel until adults told them to stop, freemen could quarrel as long as Misters were not involved, Misters could quarrel as long as an Owner was not present, and Owners could quarrel if, at the very end, they were willing to fight it out. No one could quarrel in the presence of an offworlder, nor during an alert, nor with a member of the defense or police on active duty.

  Rod McBan was a Mister and Owner, but he was under trusteeship; he was a man, but he had not been given clear papers; he was a handicapped person.

  The rules got all mixed up.

  When Hopper came back to the table he muttered, “Do that again, laddie, and I’ll clout you one that you won’t forget!” Considering how rarely he used his voice, it was a beautiful man’s voice, resonant, baritone, full-bodied, hearty and sincere in the way the individual words came out.

  Bill didn’t say a word, but from the contortions of his face Rod gathered that he was spieking to the others at a great rate and working off his grievance that way.

  “If you’re spieking about me, Bill,” said Rod with a touch of arrogance which he did not really feel, “you’ll do me the pleasure of using words or you’ll get off my land!”

  When Bill spoke, his voice was as rusty as an old machine. “I’ll have you know, you clutty little pommy, that I have more money in my name on Sidney ’Change than you and your whole glubby land are worth. Don’t you tell me twice to get off the land, you silly half of a Mister, or I will get. So shut up!”

  Rod felt his stomach knot with anger.

  His anger became fiercer when he felt Eleanor’s restraining hand on his arm. He didn’t want another person, not one more damned useless normal person, to tell him what to do about spieking and hiering. Aunt Doris’s face was still hidden in her apron; she had escaped, as she always did, into weeping.

  Just as he was about to speak again, perhaps to lose Bill from the farm forever, his mind lifted in the mysterious way that it did sometimes; he could hier for miles. The people around him did not notice the difference. He saw the proud rage of Bill, with his money in the Sidney Exchange, bigger than many station owners had, waiting his time to buy back on the land which his father had left; he saw the honest annoyance of Hopper and was a little abashed to see that Hopper was watching him proudly and with amused affection; in Eleanor he saw nothing but wordless worry, a fear that she might lose him as she had lost so many homes for hnnnhnnnhnnn dzzmmmmm, a queer meaningless reference which had a shape in her mind but took no form in his; and in Aunt Doris he caught her inner voice calling, “Rod, Rod, Rod, come back! This may be your boy and I’ m a McBan to the death, but I’ll never know what to do with a cripple like him.”

  Bill was still waiting for him to answer when another thought came into his mind,

  “You fool—go to your computer!”

  “Who said that?” he thought, not trying to spiek again, but just thinking it with his mind.

  “Your computer,” said the faraway thinkvoice.

  “You can’t spiek,” said Rod. “You’re a pure machine with not an animal brain in you.”

  “When you call me, Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan to the hundred and fifty-first, I can spiek across space itself. I’m cued to you and you shouted just now with your spiekmind. I can feel you hiering me.”

  “But—” said Rod in words.

  “Take it easy, lad,” said Bill, right in the room with him. “Take it easy. I didn’t mean it.”

  “You’re having one of your spells,” said Aunt Doris, emerging rednosed from behind her apron.

  Rod stood up.

  Said he to all of them, “I’m sorry. I’m going out for a bit. Out into the night.”

  “You’re going to that bloody computer,” said Bill.

  “Don’t go, Mister McBan,” said Hopper. “Don’t let us anger you into going. It’s bad enough being around that computer in daylight, but at night it must be horrible.”

  “How would you know?” retorted Rod. “You’ve never been there at night. And I have. Lots of times …”

  “There are dead people in it,” said Hopper. “It’s an old war computer. Your family should never have bought it in the first place. It doesn’t belong on a farm. A thing like that should be hung out in space and orbited.”

  “All right, Eleanor,” said Rod, “you tell me what to do. Everybody else has,” he added with the last bit of his remaining anger, as his hiering closed down and he saw the usual opaque faces around him.

  “It’s no use,
Rod. Go along to your computer. You’ve got a strange life and you’re the one that will live it, Mister McBan, and not these other people around here.”

  Her words made sense.

  He stood up. “I’m sorry,” said he, again, in lieu of goodbye.

  He stood in the doorway, hesitant. He would have liked to say goodbye in a better way, but he did not know how to express it. Anyhow, he couldn’t spiek, not so they could hier it with their minds; speaking with a voice was so crude, so flat for the fine little things that needed expression in life.

  They looked at him, and he at them.

  “Ngahh!” said he, in a raw cry of self-derision and fond disgust.

  Their expressions showed that they had gotten his meaning, though the word carried nothing with it. Bill nodded, Hopper looked friendly and a little worried, Aunt Doris stopped sniveling and began to stretch out one hand, only to stop it in midgesture, and Eleanor sat immobile at the table, upset by wordless troubles of her own.

  He turned.

  The cube of lamplight, the cabin room, was behind him; ahead the darkness of all Norstrilian nights, except for the weird rare times that they were cut up by traceries of lightness. He started off for a house which only a few but he could see, and which none but he could enter. It was a forgotten, invisible temple; it housed the MacArthur family computer, to which the older McBan computer was linked; and it was called the Palace of the Governor of Night.