Norstrilia

by Cordwainer Smith

  The Lord Crudelta did not respond with senile enthusiasm or childish laughter. He reverted, not to his childhood but to his maturity; with great dignity and force he said:

  “I approve. I understand. You have my proxy if you need it. Call that nurse to come and get me. I thought you were a clever fool, Jestocost. You sometimes are. This time you are showing that you have a heart as well as a head. One thing more. Bring that doctor Vomact back from Mars soon, and don’t torment Teadrinker too long, just for the sake of being clever. I might take it into my mind to torment you.”

  “And the ex-Lord Redlady?” asked Jestocost deferentially.

  “Him, nothing. Nothing. Let him live his life. The Old North Australians might as well cut their political teeth on him.”

  The bear-woman rustled back into the room. The Lord Crudelta waved his hand. Jestocost bowed almost to the floor, and the wheelchair, heavy as a tank, creaked its way across the doorsill.

  “That,” said Jestocost, “could have been trouble!” He wiped his brow.

  THE ROAD TO THE CATMASTER

  ROD, C’mell and A’gentur had had to hold the sides of the shaft several times as the traffic became heavy and large loads, going up or down, had to pass each other and them too. In one of these waits C’mell caught her breath and said something very swiftly to the little monkey. Rod, not heeding them, caught nothing but the sudden enthusiasm and happiness in her voice. The monkey’s murmured answer made her plaintive and she insisted,

  “But, Yeekasoose, you must! Rod’s whole life could depend on it. Not just saving his life now, but having a better life for hundreds and hundreds of years.”

  The monkey was cross: “Don’t ask me to think when I am hungry. This fast metabolism and small body just isn’t enough to support real thinking.”

  “If it’s food you want, have some raisins.” She took a square of compressed seedless raisins out of one of her matching bags.

  A’gentur ate them greedily but gloomily.

  Rod’s attention drifted away from them as he saw magnificent golden furniture, elaborately carved and inlaid with a pearlescent material, being piloted up the shaft by a whole troop of talkative dog-men. He asked them where the furniture was going. When they did not answer him, he repeated his question in a more peremptory tone of voice, as befitted the richest Old North Australian in the universe. The tone of demand brought answers, but they were not the ones he was expecting. “Meow,” said one dog-man. “Shut up, cat, or I’ll chase you up a tree.” “Not to your house, buster. Exactly what do you think you are—people?” “Cats are always nosy. Look at that one.” The dog-foreman rose into sight; with dignity and kindness he said to Rod, “Cat-fellow, if you feel like talking, you may get marked surplus. Better keep quiet in the public dropshaft!” Rod realized that to these beings he was one of them, a cat made into a man, and that the underpeople workmen who served Old Earth had been trained not to chatter while working on the business of Man.

  He caught the tail of C’mell’s urgent whisper to A’gentur: “… and don’t ask him. Tell Him. We’ll risk the people zone for a visit to the Catmaster! Tell Him.”

  A’gentur was panting with a rapid, shallow breath. His eyes seemed to protrude from their sockets and yet he was looking at nothing. He groaned as though with some inward effort. At last he lost his grip on the wall and would have floated slowly downward if C’mell had not caught him and cuddled him like a baby. C’mell whispered, eagerly,

  “You reached Him?”

  “Him,” gasped the little monkey.

  “Who?” asked Rod.

  “Aitch Eye,” said C’mell. “I’ll tell you later.” Of A’gentur she asked, “If you got Him, what did He say?”

  “He said, ‘E’ikasus, I do not say no. You are my son. Take the risk if you think it wise.’ And don’t ask me now, C’mell. Let me think a little. I have been all the way to Norstrilia and back. I’m still cramped in this little body. Do we have to do it now? Right now? Why can’t we go to Him”—and A’gentur nodded toward the depths below—“and find out what we want Rod for, anyhow? Rod is a means, not an end. Who really knows what to do with him?”

  “What are you talking about?” said Rod.

  Simultaneously C’mell snapped, “I know what we are going to do with him.”

  “What?” said the little monkey, very tired again.

  “We’re going to let this boy go free, and let him find happiness, and if he wants to give us his help, we will take it and be grateful. But we are not going to rob him. Not going to hurt him. That would be a mean, dirty way to start being better creatures than we are. If he knows who he is before he meets Him, they can make sense.” She turned to Rod and said with mysterious urgency,

  “Don’t you want to know who you are?”

  “I’m Rod McBan to the hundred and fifty-first,” said he promptly.

  “Sh-h-h,” said she, “no names here. I’m not talking about names. I’m talking about the deep insides of you. Life itself, as it flows through you. Do you have any idea who you are?”

  “You’re playing games,” he said. “I know perfectly well who I am, and where I live, and what I have. I even know that right now I am supposed to be a cat-man named C’roderick. What else is there to know?”

  “You men!” she sobbed at him. “You men! Even when you’re people, you’re so dense that you can’t understand a simple question. I’m not asking you your name or your address or your label or your greatgrandfather’s property. I’m asking about you, Rod, the only one that will ever live, no matter how many numbers your grandsons may put after their names. You’re not in the world just to own a piece of property or to handle a surname with a number after it. You’re you. There’s never been another you. There will never be another one, after you. What does this ‘you’ want?”

  Rod glanced down at the walls of the tunnel, which seemed to turn—oh, so far below—very gently to the north. He looked up at the little rhomboids of light cast on the tunnel walls by the landing doors into the various levels of Earthport. He felt his own weight tugging gently at his hand as he held to the rough surface of the vertical shaft, supported by his belt. The belt itself felt uncomfortable about his middle; after all, it was supporting most of his weight, and it squeezed him. What do I want? thought he. Who am I that I should have a right to want anything? I am Rod McBan CLI, the Mister and Owner of the Station of Doom. But I’m also a poor freak with bad telepathy who can’t even spiek or hier rightly.

  C’mell was watching him as clinically as a surgeon, but he could tell from her expression that she was not trying to peep his mind.

  He found himself speaking almost as wearily as had A’gentur, who was also called something like “Yeekasoose,” and who had strange powers for a little monkey:

  “I don’t suppose I want anything much, C’mell, except that I should like to spiek and hier correctly, like other people on my native world.”

  She looked at him, her expression showing intense sympathy and the effort to make a decision.

  A’gentur interrupted with his high clear monkey voice, “Say that to me, Sir and Master.”

  Rod repeated: “I don’t really want anything. I would like to spiek and hier because other people are fussing at me about it. And I would like to get a Cape of Good Hope twopenny triangular blue stamp while I am still on Earth. But that’s about all. I guess there’s nothing I really want.”

  The monkey closed his eyes and seemed to fall asleep again; Rod suspected it was some kind of telepathic trance.

  C’mell hooked A’gentur on an old rod which protruded from the surface of the shaft. Since he weighed only a few grams, there was no noticeable pull on the belt. She seized Rod’s shoulder and pulled him over to her.

  “Rod, listen! Do you want to know who you are?”

  “I don’t know,” said he. “I might be miserable.”

  “Not if you know who you are!” she insisted.

  “I might not like me,” said Rod. “Other people don’t an
d my parents died together when their ship went milky out in space. I’m not normal.”

  “For God’s sake, Rod!” she cried.

  “Who?” said he.

  “Forgive me, father,” said she, speaking to no one in sight.

  “I’ve heard that name, before, somewhere,” said Rod. “But let’s get going. I want to get to this mysterious place you are taking me and then I want to find out about Eleanor.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “My servant. She’s disguised as me, taking risks for me, along with eight robots. It’s up to me to do what I can for her. Always.”

  “But she’s your servant,” said C’mell. “She serves you. Almost like being an underperson, like me.”

  “She’s a person,” said Rod, stubbornly. “We have no underpeople in Norstrilia, except for a few in government jobs. But she’s my friend.”

  “Do you want to marry her?”

  “Great sick sheep, girl! Are you barmy? No!”

  “Do you want to marry anybody?”

  “At sixteen?” he cried. “Anyhow, my family will arrange it.” The thought of plain honest devoted Lavinia crossed his mind, and he could not help comparing her to this wild voluptuous creature who floated beside him in the tunnel as the traffic passed them going up and down. With near weightlessness, C’mell’s hair floated like a magic flower around her head. She had been brushing it out of her eyes from time to time. He snorted, “Not Eleanor.”

  When he said this, another idea crossed the mind of the beautiful cat-girl.

  “You know what I am, Rod,” said she, very seriously.

  “A cat-girl from the planet Earth. You’re supposed to be my wife.”

  “That’s right,” she said, with an odd intonation in her voice. “Be it, then!”

  “What?” said Rod.

  “My husband,” she said, her voice catching slightly. “Be my husband, if it will help you to find you.”

  She stole a quick glance up and down the shaft. There was nobody near.

  “Look, Rod, look!” She spread the opening of her dress down and aside. Even with the poor light, to which his eyes had become accustomed, he could see the fine tracery of veins in her delicate chest and her young, pear-shaped breasts. The aureoles around the nipples were a clear, sweet, innocent pink; the nipples themselves were as pretty as two pieces of candy. For a moment there was pleasure and then a terrible embarrassment came over him. He turned his face away and felt horribly self-conscious. What she had done was interesting but it wasn’t nice.

  When he dared to glance at her, she was still studying his face.

  “I’m a girlygirl, Rod. This is my business. And you’re a cat, with all the rights of a tomcat. Nobody can tell the difference, here in this tunnel. Rod, do you want to do anything?”

  Rod gulped and said nothing.

  She swept her clothing back into place. The strange urgency left her voice. “I guess,” she said, “that that left me a little breathless. I find you pretty attractive, Rod. I find myself thinking, ‘What a pity he is not a cat.’ I’m over it now.”

  Rod said nothing.

  A bubble of laughter came into her voice, along with something mothering and tender, which tugged at his heartstrings. “Best of all, Rod, I didn’t mean it. Or maybe I did. I had to give you a chance before I felt that I really knew you. Rod, I’m one of the most beautiful girls on Old Earth itself. The Instrumentality uses me for that very reason. We’ve turned you into a cat and offered you me, and you won’t have me. Doesn’t that suggest that you don’t know who you are?”

  “Are you back on that?” said Rod. “I guess I just don’t understand girls.”

  “You’d better, before you’re through with Earth,” she said. “Your agents have bought a million of them for you, out of all that stroon money.”

  “People or underpeople?”

  “Both!”

  “Let them bug sheep!” he cried. “I had no part in ordering them. Come on, girl. This is no place for a boudoir conversation!”

  “Where on Earth did you learn that word?” she laughed.

  “I read books. Lots of books. I may look like a peasant to you Earth people, but I know a lot of things.”

  “Do you trust me, Rod?”

  He thought of her immodesty, which still left him a little breathless. The Old North Australian humor reasserted itself in him, as a cultural characteristic and not just as an individual one: “I’ve seen a lot of you, C’mell,” said he with a grin. “I suppose you don’t have many surprises left. All right, I trust you. Then what?”

  She studied him closely.

  “I’ll tell you what E’ikasus and I were discussing.”

  “Who?”

  “Him.” She nodded at the little monkey.

  “I thought his name was A’gentur.”

  “Like yours is C’rod!” she said.

  “He’s not a monkey?” asked Rod.

  She looked around and lowered her voice. “He’s a bird,” she said solemnly, “and he’s the second most important bird on Earth.”

  “So what?” said Rod.

  “He’s in charge of your destiny, Rod. Your life or your death. Right now.”

  “I thought,” he whispered back, “that that was up to the Lord Redlady and somebody named Jestocost on Earth.”

  “You’re dealing with other powers, Rod—powers which keep themselves secret. They want to be friends with you. And I think,” she added in a complete non sequitur, “that we’d better take the risk and go.”

  He looked blank and she added,

  “To the Catmaster.”

  “They’ll do something to me there.”

  “Yes,” she said. Her face was calm, friendly, and even. “You will die, maybe—but not much chance. Or you might go mad—there’s always the possibility. Or you will find all the things you want—that’s the likeliest of all. I have been there, Rod. I myself have been there. Don’t you think that I look like a happy, busy girl, when you consider that I’m really just an animal with a rather low-down job?”

  Rod studied her. “How old are you?”

  “Thirty next year,” she said, inflexibly.

  “For the first time?”

  “For us animal-people there is no second time, Rod. I thought you knew that.”

  He returned her gaze. “If you can take it,” said he, “I can too. Let’s go.”

  She lifted A’gentur or E’ikasus, depending on which he really was, off the wall, where he had been sleeping like a marionette between plays. He opened his exhausted little eyes and blinked at her.

  “You have given us our orders,” said C’mell. “We are going to the Department Store.”

  “I have,” he said, crossly, coming much more awake. “I don’t remember it!”

  She laughed, “Just through me, E’ikasus!”

  “That name!” he hissed. “Don’t get foolhardy. Not in a public shaft.”

  “All right, A’gentur,” she responded, “but do you approve?”

  “Of the decision?”

  She nodded.

  The little monkey looked at both of them. He spoke to Rod, “If she gambles her life and yours, not to mention mine—if she takes chances to make you much, much happier, are you willing to come along?”

  Rod nodded in silent agreement.

  “Let’s go, then,” said the monkey-surgeon.

  “Where are we going?” asked Rod.

  “Down into Earthport City. Among all the people. Swarms and swarms of them,” said C’mell, “and you will get to see the everyday life of Earth, just the way that you asked at the top of the tower, an hour ago.”

  “A year ago, you mean,” said Rod. “So much has happened!” He thought of her young naked breasts and the impulse which had made her show them to him, but the thought did not make him excited or guilty; he felt friendly, because he sensed in their whole relationship a friendliness much more fervent than sex itself.

  “We are going to a store,” said the sleepy monkey.
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  “A commissary. For things? What for?”

  “It has a nice name,” said C’mell, “and it is run by a wonderful person. The Catmaster himself. Five hundred some years old, and still allowed to live by virtue of the legacy of the Lady Goroke.”

  “Never heard of her,” said Rod. “What’s the name?”

  “The Department Store of Hearts’ Desires,” said C’mell and E’ikasus simultaneously.

  * * *

  The trip was a vivid, quick dream. They had only a few hundred meters to fall before they reached ground level.

  They came out on the people-street. A robot-policeman watched them from a corner.

  Human beings in the costumes of a hundred historical periods were walking around in the warm, wet air of Earth. Rod could not smell as much salt in the air as he had smelled at the top of the tower, but down here in the city it smelled of more people than he had ever even imagined in one place. Thousands of individuals, hundreds and thousands of different kinds of foods, the odors of robots, of underpeople and of other things which seemed to be unmodified animals.

  “This is the most interesting-smelling place I have ever been,” said he to C’mell.

  She glanced at him idly. “That’s nice. You can smell like a dog-man. Most of the real people I have known couldn’t smell their own feet. Come on though, C’roderick—remember who you are! If we’re not tagged and licensed for the surface, we’ll get stopped by that policeman in one minute or less.”

  She carried E’ikasus and steered Rod with a pressure on his elbow. They came to a ramp which led to an underground passage, well illuminated. Machines, robots and underpeople were hurrying back and forth along it, busy with the commerce of Earth.

  Rod would have been completely lost if he had been without C’mell. Though his miraculous broad-band hiering, which had so often surprised him at home, had not returned during his few hours on Old Earth, his other senses gave him a suffocating awareness of the huge number of people around him and above him. (He never realized that there were times, long gone, when the cities of Earth had populations which reached the tens of millions; to him, several hundred thousand people, and a comparable number of underpeople, was a crowd almost beyond all measure.)