Norstrilia

by Cordwainer Smith

  “You mean, they don’t want to do anything?”

  “Not exactly,” said C’mell, “but they find that we are better than they are at almost anything. Real work, that is, not statesmanship like running the Instrumentality and the Earth Government. Here and there a real human being gets to work, and there are always offworlders like you to stimulate them and challenge them with new problems. But they used to have secure lives of four hundred years, a common language, and a standard conditioning. They were dying off, just by being too perfect. One way to get better would have been to kill off us underpeople, but they couldn’t do that all the way. There was too much messy work to be done that you couldn’t count on robots for. Even the best robot, if he’s a computer linked to the mind of a mouse, will do fine routine, but unless he has a very complete human education, he’s going to make some wild judgments which won’t suit what people want. So they need underpeople. I’m still a cat underneath it all, but even the cats which are unchanged are pretty close relatives of human beings. They make the same basic choices between power and beauty, between survival and self-sacrifice, between common sense and high courage. So the Lady Alice More worked out this plan for the Rediscovery of Man. Set up the Ancient Nations, give everybody an extra culture besides the old one based on the Old Common Tongue, let them get mad at each other, restore some disease, some danger, some accidents, but average it out so that nothing is really changed.”

  They had come to a storeroom, the sheer size of which made Rod blink. The great reception hall at the top of Earthport had astounded him; this room was twice the size. The room was filled with extremely ancient cargoes which had not even been unpacked from their containers. Rod could see that some were marked outbound for worlds which no longer existed, or which had changed their names; others were inbound, but no one had unpacked them for five thousand years and more.

  “What’s all this stuff?”

  “Shipping. Technological change. Somebody wrote it all off the computers, so they didn’t have to think of it any more. This is the thing which underpeople and robots are searching, to supply the ancient artifacts for the Rediscovery of Man. One of our boys—rat stock, with a human I.Q. of 300—found something marked Musée National. It was the whole National Museum of the Republic of Mali, which had been put inside a mountain when the ancient wars became severe. Mali apparently was not a very important ‘nation,’ as they called those groupings, but it had the same language as France, and we were able to supply real material, almost everything that was needed to restore some kind of a French civilization. China has been hard. The Chinesians survived longer than any other nation, and they did their own grave robbing, so that we have found it impossible to reconstruct China before the age of space. We can’t modify people into being Ancient Chinese.”

  Rod stopped, thunderstruck. “Can I talk to you here?”

  C’mell listened with a faraway look on her face. “Not here. I feel the very weak sweep of a monitor across my mind now and then. In a couple of minutes you can. Let’s hurry along.”

  “I just thought,” cried Rod, “of the most important question in all the worlds!”

  “Stop thinking it, then,” said C’mell, “until we come to a safe place.”

  Instead of going straight on through the big aisle between the forgotten crates and packages, she squeezed between two crates and made her way to the edge of the big underground storeroom.

  “That package,” she said, “is stroon. They lost it. We could help ourselves to it if we wanted to, but we’re afraid of it.”

  Rod looked at the names on the package. It had been shipped by Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan XXVI to Adaminaby Port and reconsigned to Earthport. “That’s one hundred and twenty-five generations ago, shipped from the Station of Doom. My farm. I think it turns poison if you leave it for more than two hundred years. Our own military people have some horrible uses for it, when invaders show up, but ordinary Norstrilians, when they find old stroon, always turn it in to the Commonwealth. We’re afraid of it. Not that we often lose it. It’s too valuable and we’re too greedy, with a twenty million percent import duty on everything …”

  C’mell led on. They unexpectedly passed a tiny robot, a lamp fixed to his head, who was seated between two enormous piles of books. He was apparently reading them one by one, because he had beside him a pile of notes larger in bulk than he was. He did not look up, nor did they interrupt him.

  At the wall, C’mell said, “Now do exactly what you’re told. See the dust along the base of this crate?”

  “I see it,” said Rod.

  “That must be left undisturbed. Now watch. I’m going to jump from the top of this crate to the top of that one, without disturbing the dust. Then I want you to jump the same way and go exactly where I point, without even thinking about it, if you can manage. I’ll follow. Don’t try to be polite or chivalrous, or you’ll mess up the whole arrangement.”

  Rod nodded.

  She jumped to a case against the wall. Her red hair did not fly behind her, because she had tied it up in a turban before they started out, when she had obtained coveralls for each of them from the robot-servants of the Lady Frances Oh. They had looked like an ordinary couple of working c’people.

  Either she was very strong or the case was very light. Standing on the case, she tipped it very delicately, so that the pattern of dust around its base would be unchanged, save for microscopic examination. A blue glow came from beyond the case. With an odd, practiced turn of the wrist she indicated that Rod should jump from his case to the tipped one, and from there into the area—whatever it might be—beyond the case. It seemed easy for him, but he wondered if she could support both his weight and hers on the case. He remembered her order not to talk or think. He tried to think of the salmon steak he had eaten the day before. That should certainly be a good cat-thought, if a monitor should catch his mind at that moment! He jumped, teetered on the slanting top of the second packing case, and scrambled into a tiny doorway just big enough for him to crawl through. It was apparently designed for cables, pipes and maintenance, not for habitual human use: it was too low to stand in. He scrambled forward.

  There was a slam.

  C’mell had jumped in after him, letting the case fall back into its old and apparently undisturbed position.

  She crawled up to him. “Keep going,” she said.

  “Can we talk here?”

  “Of course! Do you want to? It’s not a very sociable place.”

  “That question, that big question,” said Rod. “I’ve got to ask you. You underpeople are taking charge of people. If you’re fixing up their new cultures for them, you’re getting to be the masters of men!”

  “Yes,” said C’mell, and let the explosive affirmative hang in the air between them.

  He couldn’t think of anything to say; it was his big bright idea for the day, and the fact that she already knew underpeople were becoming secret masters—that was too much!

  She looked at his friendly face and said, more gently, “We underpeople have seen it coming for a long time. Some of the human people do, too. Especially the Lord Jestocost. He’s no fool. And, Rod, you fit in.”

  “I?”

  “Not as a person. As an economic change. As a source of unallocated power.”

  “You mean, C’mell, you’re after me, too? I can’t believe it. I can recognize a pest or a nuisance or a robber. You don’t seem like any of these. You’re good, all the way through.” His voice faltered. “I meant it this morning, C’mell, when I asked you to marry me.”

  The delicacy of cat and the tenderness of woman combined in her voice as she answered, “I know you meant it.” She stroked a lock of hair away from his forehead, in a caress as restrained as any touch could be. “But it’s not for us. And I’m not using you myself, Rod. I want nothing for myself, but I want a good world for underpeople. And for people too. For people too. We cats have loved you people long before we had brains. We’ve been your c
ats longer than anyone can remember. Do you think our loyalty to the human race would stop just because you changed our shapes and added a lot of thinking power? I love you, Rod, but I love people too. That’s why I’m taking you to the Aitch Eye!”

  “Can you tell me what that is—now?”

  She laughed. “This place is safe. It’s the Holy Insurgency. The secret government of the underpeople. This is a silly place to talk about it, Rod. You’re going to meet the head of it, right now.”

  “All of them?” Rod was thinking of the Chiefs of the Instrumentality.

  “It’s not a them, it’s a him. The E’telekeli. The bird beneath the ground. E’ikasus is one of His sons.”

  “If there’s only one, how did you choose him? Is he like the British Queen, whom we lost so long ago?”

  C’mell laughed. “We did not choose Him. He grew and now He leads us. You people took an eagle’s egg and tried to make it into a Daimoni man. When the experiment failed, you threw the fetus out. It lived. It’s He. It’ll be the strongest mind you’ve ever met. Come on. This is no place to talk, and we’re still talking.”

  She started crawling down the horizontal shaft, waving at Rod to follow her.

  He followed.

  As they crawled, he called to her,

  “C’mell, stop a minute.”

  She stopped until he caught up with her. She thought he might ask for a kiss, so worried and lonely did he look. She was ready to be kissed. He surprised her by saying, instead,

  “I can’t smell, C’mell. Please, I’m so used to smelling that I miss it. What does this place smell like?”

  Her eyes widened and then she laughed: “It smells like underground. Electricity burning the air. Animals somewhere far away, a lot of different smells of them. The old, old smell of man, almost gone. Engine oil and bad exhaust. It smells like a headache. It smells like silence, like things untouched. There, is that it?”

  He nodded and they went on.

  At the end of the horizontal C’mell turned and said:

  “All men die here. Come on!”

  Rod started to follow and then stopped. “C’mell, are you discoordinated? Why should I die? There’s no reason to.”

  Her laughter was pure happiness. “Silly C’rod! You are a cat, cat enough to come where no man has passed for centuries. Come on. Watch out for those skeletons. There’re a lot of them around here. We hate to kill real people, but there are some that we can’t warn off in time.”

  They emerged on a balcony, overlooking an even more enormous storeroom than the one before. This had thousands more boxes in it. C’mell paid no attention to it. She went to the end of the balcony and raced down a slender steel ladder.

  “More junk from the past!” she said, anticipating Rod’s comment. “People have forgotten it up above; we mess around in it.”

  Though he could not smell the air, at this depth it felt thick, heavy, immobile.

  C’mell did not slow down. She threaded her way through the junk and treasures on the floor as though she were an acrobat. On the far side of the old room she stopped. “Take one of these,” she commanded.

  They looked like enormous umbrellas. He had seen umbrellas in the pictures which his computer had showed him. These seemed oddly large, compared to the ones in the pictures. He looked around for rain. After his memories of Tostig Amaral, he wanted no more indoor rain. C’mell did not understand his suspicions.

  “The shaft,” she said, “has no magnetic controls, no updraft of air. It’s just a shaft twelve meters in diameter. These are parachutes. We jump into the shaft with them and then we float down. Straight down. Four kilometers. It’s close to the Moho.”

  Since he did not pick up one of the big umbrellas, she handed him one. It was surprisingly light.

  He blinked at her. “How will we ever get out?”

  “One of the bird-men will fly us up the shaft. It’s hard work but they can do it. Be sure to hook that thing to your belt. It’s a long slow time falling, and we won’t be able to talk. And it’s terribly dark, too.”

  He complied.

  She opened a big door, beyond which there was the feel of nothing. She gave him a wave, partially opened her “umbrella,” stepped over the edge of the door and vanished. He looked over the edge himself. There was nothing to be seen. Nothing of C’mell, no sound except for the slippage of air and an occasional mechanical whisper of metal against metal. He supposed that must be the rib-tips of the umbrella touching the edge of the shaft as she fell.

  He sighed. Norstrilia was safe and quiet compared to this.

  He opened his umbrella too.

  Acting on an odd premonition, he took his little hiering-spieking shell out of his ear and put it carefully in his coverall pocket. That act saved his life.

  HIS OWN STRANGE ALTAR

  ROD McBan remembered falling and falling. He shouted into the wet adhesive darkness, but there was no reply. He thought of cutting himself loose from his big umbrella and letting himself drop to the death below him, but then he thought of C’mell and he knew that his body would drop upon her like a bomb. He wondered about his desperation, but could not understand it. (Only later did he find out that he was passing telepathic suicide screens which the underpeople had set up, screens fitted to the human mind, designed to dredge filth and despair from the paleocortex, the smell-bite-mate sequence of the nose-guided animals who first walked Earth; but Rod was cat enough, just barely cat enough, and he was also telepathically subnormal, so that the screens did not do to him what they would have done to any normal man of Earth—delivered a twisted dead body at the bottom. No man had ever gotten that far, but the underpeople resolved that none ever should.) Rod twisted in his harness and at last he fainted.

  * * *

  He awakened in a relatively small room, enormous by Earth standards but still much smaller than the storerooms which he had passed through on the way down.

  The lights were bright.

  He suspected that the room stank but he could not prove it with his smell gone.

  A man was speaking: “The Forbidden Word is never given unless the man who does not know it plainly asks for it.”

  There was a chorus of voices sighing, “We remember. We remember. We remember what we remember.”

  The speaker was almost a giant, thin and pale. His face was the face of a dead saint, pale, white as alabaster, with glowing eyes. His body was that of man and bird both, man from the hips up, except that human hands grew out of the elbows of enormous clean white wings. From the hips down his legs were bird-legs, ending in horny, almost translucent bird-feet which stood steadily on the ground.

  “I am sorry, Mister and Owner McBan, that you took that risk. I was misinformed. You are a good cat on the outside but still completely a human man on the inside. Our safety devices bruised your mind and they might have killed you.”

  Rod stared at the man as he stumbled to his feet. He saw that C’mell was one of the people helping him. When he was erect, someone handed him a beaker of very cold water. He drank it thirstily. It was hot down here—hot, stuffy, and with the feel of big engines nearby.

  “I,” said the great bird-man, “am the E’telekeli.” He pronounced it Ee-telly-kelly. “You are the first human being to see me in the flesh.”

  “Blessed, blessed, blessed, fourfold blessed is the name of our leader, our father, our brother, our son the E’telekeli!” chorused the underpeople.

  Rod looked around. There was every kind of underperson imaginable here, including several that he had never even thought of. One was a head on a shelf, with no apparent body. When he looked, somewhat shocked, directly at the head, its face smiled and one eye closed in a deliberate wink. The E’telekeli followed his glance. “Do not let us shock you. Some of us are normal, but many of us down here are the discards of men’s laboratories. You know my son.”

  A tall, very pale young man with no feathers stood up at this point. He was stark naked and completely unembarrassed. He held out a friendly hand
to Rod. Rod was sure he had never seen the young man before. The young man sensed Rod’s hesitation.

  “You knew me as A’gentur. I am the E’ikasus.”

  “Blessed, blessed, threefold blessed is the name of our leader-to-be, the Yeekasoose!” chanted the underpeople.

  Something about the scene caught Rod’s rough Norstrilian humor. He spoke to the great underman as he would have spoken to another Mister and Owner back home, friendlily but bluntly.

  “Glad you welcome me, Sir!”

  “Glad, glad, glad is the stranger from beyond the stars!” sang the chorus.

  “Can’t you make them shut up?” asked Rod.

  “‘Shut up, shut up, shut up,’ says the stranger from the stars!” chorused the group.

  The E’telekeli did not exactly laugh, but his smile was not pure benevolence.

  “We can disregard them and talk, or I can blank out your mind every time they repeat what we say. This is a sort of court ceremony.”

  Rod glanced around. “I’m in your power already,” said he, “so it won’t matter if you mess around a little with my mind. Blank them out.”

  The E’telekeli stirred the air in front of him as though he were writing a mathematical equation with his finger; Rod’s eyes followed the finger and he suddenly felt the room hush.

  “Come over here and sit down,” said the E’telekeli.

  Rod followed.

  “What do you want?” he asked as he followed.

  The E’telekeli did not even turn around to answer. He merely spoke while walking ahead.

  “Your money, Mister and Owner McBan. Almost all of your money.”

  Rod stopped walking. He heard himself laughing wildly. “Money? You? Here? What could you possibly do with it?”

  “That,” said the E’telekeli, “is why you should sit down.”

  “Do sit,” said C’mell, who had followed.

  Rod sat down.

  “We are afraid that Man himself will die and leave us alone in the universe. We need Man, and there is still an immensity of time before we all pour into a common destiny. People have always assumed that the end of things is around the corner, and we have the promise of the First Forbidden One that this will be soon. But it could be hundreds of thousands of years, maybe millions. People are scattered, Mister McBan, so that no weapon will ever kill them all on all planets, but no matter how scattered they are, they are still haunted by themselves. They reach a point of development and then they stop.”