Norstrilia

by Cordwainer Smith

  Rod liked her, though he had been painfully shy with her at first. There was no side to her, no posh, no swank. Once she got down to business, her incredible body faded part way into the background, though with the sides of his eyes he could never quite forget it. It was her mind, her intelligence, her humor and good humor, which carried them across the hours and days they spent together. He found himself trying to impress her that he was a grown man, only to discover that in the spontaneous, sincere affections of her quick cat heart she did not care in the least what his status was. He was simply her partner and they had work to do together. It was his job to stay alive and it was her job to keep him alive.

  Doctor Vomact had told him not to speak to the other passengers, not to say anything to each other, and to call for silence if any of them spoke.

  There were ten other passengers who stared at one another in uncomfortable amazement.

  Ten in number, they were.

  All ten of them were Rod McBan.

  Ten identical Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBans to the one hundred and fifty-first, all exactly alike. Apart from C’mell herself and the little monkey-doctor, A’gentur, the only person on the ship who was not Rod McBan was Rod McBan himself. He had become the cat-man. The others seemed, each by himself, to be persuaded that he alone was Rod McBan and that the other nine were parodies. They watched each other with a mixture of gloom and suspicion mixed with amusement, just as the real Rod McBan would have done, had he been in their place.

  “One of them,” said Doctor Vomact in parting, “is your companion Eleanor from Norstrilia. The other nine are mouse-powered robots. They’re all copied from you. Good, eh?” He could not conceal his professional satisfaction.

  And now they were all about to see Earth together.

  C’mell took Rod to the edge of the little world and said gently, “I want to sing ‘The Tower Song’ to you, just before we shut down on the top of Earthport.” And in her wonderful voice she sang the strange little old song,

  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!

  Rod felt a little funny, standing there, looking at nothing, but he also felt pleasant with the girl’s head against his shoulder and his arm enfolding her. She seemed not only to need him, but to trust him very deeply. She did not feel adult—not self-important and full of unexplained business. She was merely a girl, and for the time his girl. It was pleasant and it gave him a strange foretaste of the future.

  The day might come when he would have a permanent girl of his own, facing not a day, but life, not a danger, but destiny. He hoped that he could be as relaxed and fond with that future girl as he was with C’mell.

  C’mell squeezed his hand, as though in warning.

  He turned to look at her, but she stared ahead and nodded with her chin.

  “Keep watching,” she said, “straight ahead. Earth.”

  He looked back at the blank artificial sky of the ship’s force-field. It was a monotonous but pleasant blue, conveying depths which were not really there.

  The change was so fast that he wondered whether he had really seen it.

  In one moment the clear flat blue.

  Then the false sky splashed apart as though it had literally been slashed into enormous ribbons, ribbons in their turn becoming blue spots and disappearing.

  Another blue sky was there—Earth’s.

  Manhome.

  Rod breathed deeply. It was hard to believe. The sky itself was not so different from the false sky which had surrounded the ship on its trip from Mars, but there was an aliveness and wetness to it, unlike any other sky he had ever heard about.

  It was not the sight of the Earth which surprised him—it was the smell. He suddenly realized that Old North Australia must smell dull, flat, dusty to Earthmen. This Earth air smelled alive. There were the odors of plants, of water, of things which he could not even guess. The air was coded with a million years of memory. In this air his people had swum to manhood, before they conquered the stars. The wetness was not the cherished damp of one of his covered canals. It was wild free moisture which came laden with the indications of things living, dying, sprawling, squirming, loving with an abundance which no Norstrilian could understand. No wonder the descriptions of Earth had always seemed fierce and exaggerated! What was stroon that men would pay water for it—water, the giver and carrier of life. This was his home, no matter how many generations his people had lived in the twisted hells of Paradise VII or the dry treasures of Old North Australia. He took a deep breath, feeling the plasma of Earth pour into him, the quick effluvium which had made man. He smelled Earth again—it would take a long lifetime, even with stroon, before a man could understand all these odors which came all the way up to the ship, which hovered, as planoforming ships usually did not, twenty-odd kilometers above the surface of the planet.

  There was something strange in this air, something sweet-clear to the nostrils, refreshing to the spirit. One great beautiful odor overrode all the others. What could it be? He sniffed and then said, very clearly, to himself,

  “Salt!”

  C’mell reminded him that he was beside her.

  “Do you like it, C’rod?”

  “Yes, yes, it’s better than—” Words failed him. He looked at her. Her eager, pretty, comradely smile made him feel that she was sharing every milligram of his delight. “But why,” he asked, “do you waste salt on the air? What good does it do?”

  “Salt?”

  “Yes—in the air. So rich, so wet, so salty. Is it to clean the ship some way that I do not understand?”

  “Ship? We’re not on the ship, C’rod. This is the landing roof of Earthport.”

  He gasped.

  No ship? There was not a mountain on Old North Australia more than six kilometers above MGL—mean ground level—and those mountains were all smooth, worn, old, folded by immense eons of wind into a gentle blanketing that covered his whole home world.

  He looked around.

  The platform was about two hundred meters long by one hundred wide.

  The ten “Rod McBans” were talking to some men in uniform. Far at the other side a steeple rose into eye-catching height—perhaps a whole half-kilometer. He looked down.

  There it was—Old Old Earth.

  The treasure of water reached before his very eyes—water by the millions of tons, enough to feed a galaxy of sheep, to wash an infinity of men. The water was broken by a few islands on the far horizon to the right.

  “Hesperides,” said C’mell, following the direction of his gaze. “They came up from the sea when the Daimoni built this for us. For people, I mean. I shouldn’t say ‘us.’”

  He did not notice the correction. He stared at the sea. Little specks were moving in it, very slowly. He pointed at one of them with his finger and asked C’mell,

  “Are those wethouses?”

  “What did you call them?”

  “Houses which are wet. Houses which sit on water. Are those some of them?”

  “Ships,” she said, not spoiling his fun with a direct contradiction. “Yes, those are ships.”

  “Ships?” he cried. “You’d never get one of those into space. Why call them ships then?”

  Very gently C’mell explained, “People had ships for water before they had ships for space. I think the Old Common Tongue takes the word for space vessel from the things you are looking at.”

  “I want to see a city,” said Rod. “Show me a city.”

  “It won’t look like much from here. We’re too high up. Nothing looks like much from the top of Earthport. But I can show you, anyhow. Come over here, dear.”

  When they walked away from the edge, Rod realized that the little monkey was still with them. “What are you doing here with us?” asked Rod, not unkindly.

  The monkey’s preposte
rous little face wrinkled into a knowing smile. The face was the same as it had been before, but the expression was different—more assured, more clear, more purposive than ever before. There was even humor and cordiality in the monkey’s voice.

  “We animals are waiting for the people to finish their entrance.”

  We animals? thought Rod. He remembered his furry head, his pointed ears, his cat-whiskers. No wonder he felt at ease with this girl and she with him.

  The ten Rod McBans were walking down a ramp, so that the floor seemed to be swallowing them slowly from the feet up. They were walking in single file, so that the head of the leading one seemed to sit bodiless on the floor, while the last one in line had lost nothing more than his feet. It was odd indeed.

  Rod looked at C’mell and A’gentur and asked them frankly, “When people have such a wide, wet, beautiful world, all full of life, why should they kill me?”

  A’gentur shook his monkey head sadly, as though he knew full well, but found the telling of it inexpressibly wearisome and sad.

  C’mell answered, “You are who you are. You hold immense power. Do you know that this tower is yours?”

  “Mine!” he cried.

  “You’ve bought it, or somebody bought it for you. Most of that water is yours, too. When you have things that big, people ask you for things. Or they take them from you. Earth is a beautiful place but I think it is a dangerous place, too, for offworlders like you who are used to just one way of life. You have not caused all the crime and meanness in the world, but it’s been sleeping and now wakes up for you.”

  “Why for me?”

  “Because,” said A’gentur, “you’re the richest person who has ever touched this planet. You own most of it already. Millions of human lives depend on your thoughts and your decisions.”

  They had reached the opposite side of the top platforms. Here, on the land side, the rivers were all leaking badly. Most of the land was covered with steamclouds, such as they saw on Norstrilia when a covered canal burst out of its covering. These clouds represented incalculable treasures of rain. He saw that they parted at the foot of the tower.

  “Weather machines,” said C’mell. “The cities are all covered with weather machines. Don’t you have weather machines in Old North Australia?”

  “Of course we do,” said Rod, “but we don’t waste water by letting it float around in the open air like that. It’s pretty, though. I guess the extravagance of it makes me feel critical. Don’t you Earth people have anything better to do with your water than to leave it lying on the ground or having it float over open land?”

  “We’re not Earth people,” said C’mell. “We’re underpeople. I’m a cat-person and he’s made from apes. Don’t call us people. It’s not decent.”

  “Fudge!” said Rod. “I was just asking a question about Earth, not pestering your feelings when—”

  He stopped short.

  They all three spun around.

  Out of the ramp there came something like a mowing machine. A human voice, a man’s voice, screamed from within it, expressing rage and fear.

  Rod started to move forward.

  C’mell held his arm, dragging back with all her weight.

  “No! Rod, no! No!”

  A’gentur slowed him down better by jumping into his face, so that Rod suddenly saw nothing but a universe of brown belly-fur and felt tiny hands gripping his hair and pulling it. He stopped and reached for the monkey. A’gentur anticipated him and dropped to the ground before Rod could hit him.

  The machine was racing up the outside of the steeple and almost disappearing into the sky above. The voice had become thin.

  Rod looked at C’mell. “All right. What was it? What’s happening?”

  “That’s a spider, a giant spider. It’s kidnapping or killing Rod McBan.”

  “Me?” keened Rod. “It’d better not touch me. I’ll tear it apart.”

  “Sh-h-h!” said C’mell.

  “Quiet!” said the monkey.

  “Don’t ‘sh-h-h’ me and don’t ‘quiet’ me,” said Rod. “I’m not going to let that poor blighter suffer on my account. Tell that thing to come down. What is it, anyhow, this spider? A robot?”

  “No,” said C’mell, “an insect.”

  Rod was narrowing his eyes, watching the mowing machine which hung on the outside of the tower. He could barely see the man within its grip. When C’mell said “insect,” it triggered something in his mind. Hate. Revulsion. Resistance to dirt. Insects on Old North Australia were small, serially numbered and licensed. Even at that, he felt them to be his hereditary enemies. (Somebody had told him that Earth insects had done terrible things to the Norstrilians when they lived on Paradise VII.) Rod yelled at the spider, making his voice as loud as possible,

  “You—come—down!”

  The filthy thing on the tower quivered with sheer smugness and seemed to bring its machine-like legs closer together, settling down to be comfortable.

  Rod forgot he was supposed to be a cat.

  He gasped for air. Earth air was wet but thin. He closed his eyes for a moment or two. He thought hate, hate, hate for the insect. Then he shrieked telepathically, louder than he had ever shrieked at home:

  hate-spit-spit-vomit!

  dirt, dirt, dirt,

  explode!

  crush:

  ruin:

  stink, collapse, putrefy, disappear!

  hate-hate-hate!

  The fierce red roar of his inarticulate spieking hurt even him. He saw the little monkey fall to the ground in a dead faint. C’mell was pale and looked as though she might throw up her food.

  He looked away from them and up at the “spider.” Had he reached it?

  He had.

  Slowly, slowly, the long legs moved out in spasm, releasing the man, whose body flashed downward. Rod’s eyes followed the movement of “Rod McBan” and he cringed when a wet crunch let him know that the duplicate of his own body had been splashed all over the hard deck of the tower, a hundred meters away. He glanced back up at the “spider.” It scrabbled for purchase on the tower and then cartwheeled downward. It too hit the deck hard and lay there dying, its legs twitching as its personality slipped into its private, everlasting night.

  Rod gasped. “Eleanor. Oh, maybe that’s Eleanor!” His voice wailed. He started to run to the facsimile of his human body, forgetting that he was a cat-man.

  C’mell’s voice was as sharp as a howl, though low in tone. “Shut up! Shut up! Stand still! Close your mind! Shut up! We’re dead if you don’t shut up!”

  He stopped, stared at her stupidly. Then he saw she was in mortal earnest. He complied. He stopped moving. He did not try to talk. He capped his mind, closed himself against telepathy until his brainbox began to ache. The little monkey, A’gentur, was crawling up off the floor, looking shaken and sick. C’mell was still pale.

  Men came running up the ramp, saw them, and headed toward them.

  There was the beat of wings in the air.

  An enormous bird—no, it was an ornithopter—landed with its claws scratching the deck. A uniformed man jumped out and cried,

  “Where is he?”

  “He jumped over!” C’mell shouted.

  The man started to follow the direction of her gesture and then cut sharply back to her.

  “Fool!” he said. “People can’t jump off here. The barrier would hold ships in place. What did you see?”

  C’mell was a good actress. She pretended to be getting over shock and gasping for words. The uniformed man looked at her haughtily.

  “Cats,” he said, “and a monkey. What are you doing here? Who are you?”

  “Name C’mell, profession, girlygirl, Earthport staff, commanded by Commissioner Teadrinker. This—boyfriend, no status, name C’roderick, cashier in night bank down below. Him?” She nodded at A’gentur. “I don’t know much about him.”

  “Name A’gentur. Profession, supplementary surgeon. Status, animal. I’m not an underperson. Just an animal. I ca
me in on the ship from Mars with the dead man there and some other true men who looked like him, and they went down first—”

  “Shut up,” said the uniformed man. He turned to the approaching men and said, “Honored Subchief, Sergeant 387 reporting. The user of the telepathic weapon has disappeared. The only things here are these two cat-people, not very bright, and a small monkey. They can talk. The girl says she saw somebody get off the tower.”

  The subchief was a tall redhead with a uniform even handsomer than the sergeant’s. He snapped at C’mell, “How did he do it?”

  Rod knew C’mell well enough by now to recognize the artfulness of her becoming confused, feminine and incoherent—in appearance. Actually, she was in full control of the situation. Said she, babbling:

  “He jumped, I think. I don’t know how.”

  “That’s impossible,” said the subchief. “Did you see where he went?” he barked at Rod McBan.

  Rod gasped at the suddenness of the question: besides, C’mell had told him to keep quiet. Between these two peremptories, he said, “Er—ah—oh—you see—”

  The little monkey-surgeon interrupted drily, “Sir and Master Subchief, that cat-man is not very bright. I do not think you will get much out of him. Handsome but stupid. Strictly breeding stock—”

  Rod gagged and turned a little red at these remarks, but he could tell from the hooded quick glare which C’mell shot him that she wanted him to go on being quiet.

  She cut in. “I did notice one thing, Master. It might matter.”

  “By the Bell and Bank, animal! Tell me!” cried the subchief. “Stop deciding what I ought to know!”

  “The strange man’s skin was lightly tinged with blue.”

  The subchief took a step back. His soldiers and the sergeant stared at him. In a serious, direct way he said to C’mell, “Are you sure?”

  “No, my Master. I just thought so.”

  “You saw just one?” barked the subchief.

  Rod, overacting the stupidity, held up four fingers.

  “That idiot,” cried the subchief, “thinks he saw four of them. Can he count?” he asked C’mell.

  C’mell looked at Rod as though he were a handsome beast with not a brain in his head. Rod looked back at her, deliberately letting himself feel stupid. This was something which he did very well, since by neither hiering nor spieking at home, he had had to sit through interminable hours of other people’s conversation when he was little, never getting the faintest idea of what it was all about. He had discovered very early that if he sat still and looked stupid, people did not bother him by trying to bring him into the conversation, turning their voices on and braying at him as though he were deaf. He tried to simulate the familiar old posture and was rather pleased that he could make such a good showing with C’mell watching him. Even when she was seriously fighting for their freedom and playing girl all at once, her corona of blazing hair made her shine forth like the sun of Earth itself; among all these people on the platform, her beauty and her intelligence made her stand out, cat though she was. Rod was not at all surprised that he was overlooked, with such a vivid personality next to him; he just wished that he could be overlooked a little more, so that he could wander over idly and see whether the body was Eleanor’s or one of the robot’s. If Eleanor had already died for him, in her first few minutes of the big treat of seeing Earth, he felt that he would never forgive himself as long as he lived.