“Yes,” said Rod, reaching for a carafe of water and helping himself to another drink, “but it’s a long way from the philosophy of the universe down to my money. We have plenty of barmy swarmy talk in Old North Australia, but I never heard of anybody asking for another citizen’s money, right off the bat.”
The eyes of the E’telekeli glowed like cold fire but Rod knew that this was no hypnosis, no trick being played upon himself. It was the sheer force of the personality burning outward from the bird-man.
“Listen carefully, Mister McBan. We are the creatures of Man. You are gods to us. You have made us into people who talk, who worry, who think, who love, who die. Most of our races were the friends of Man before we became underpeople. Like C’mell. How many cats have served and loved Man, and for how long? How many cattle have worked for men, been eaten by men, been milked by men across the ages, and have still followed where men went, even to the stars? And dogs. I do not have to tell you about the love of dogs for men. We call ourselves the Holy Insurgency because we are rebels. We are a government. We are a power almost as big as the Instrumentality. Why do you think Teadrinker did not catch you when you arrived?”
“Who is Teadrinker?”
“An official who wanted to kidnap you. He failed because his underman reported to me, because my son E’ikasus, who joined you in Norstrilia, suggested the remedies to the Doctor Vomact who is on Mars. We love you, Rod, not because you are a rich Norstrilian, but because it is our faith to love the Mankind which created us.”
“This is a long slow wicket for my money,” said Rod. “Come to the point, sir.”
The E’telekeli smiled with sweetness and sadness. Rod immediately knew that it was his own denseness which made the bird-man sad and patient. For the very first time he began to accept the feeling that this person might actually be the superior of any human being he had ever met.
“I’m sorry,” said Rod. “I haven’t had a minute to enjoy my money since I got it. People have been telling me that everybody is after it. I’m beginning to think that I shall do nothing but run the rest of my life …”
The E’telekeli smiled happily, the way a teacher smiles when a student has suddenly turned in a spectacular performance. “Correct. You have learned a lot from the Catmaster, and from your own self. I am offering you something more—the chance to do enormous good. Have you ever heard of Foundations?”
Rod frowned. “The bottoms of buildings?”
“No. Institutions. From the very ancient past.”
Rod shook his head. He hadn’t.
“If a gift was big enough, it endured and kept on giving, until the culture in which it was set had fallen. If you took most of your money and gave it to some good, wise men, it could be spent over and over again to improve the race of Man. We need that. Better men will give us better lives. Do you think that we don’t know how pilots and pinlighters have sometimes died, saving their cats in space?”
“Or how people kill underpeople without a thought?” countered Rod. “Or humiliate them without noticing that they do it? It seems to me that you must have some self-interest, sir.”
“I do. Some. But not as much as you think. Men are evil when they are frightened or bored. They are good when they are happy and busy. I want you to give your money to provide games, sports, competitions, shows, music, and a chance for honest hatred.”
“Hatred?” said Rod. “I was beginning to think that I had found a Believer bird … somebody who mouthed old magic.”
“We’re not ending time,” said the great man-bird. “We are just altering the material conditions of Man’s situation for the present historical period. We want to steer mankind away from tragedy and self-defeat. Though the cliffs crumble, we want Man to remain. Do you know Swinburne?”
“Where is it?” said Rod.
“It’s not a place. It’s a poet, before the age of space. He wrote this. Listen.
Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble,
Till the terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink,
Till the strength of the waves of the high tides crumble
The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink,
Here now in his triumph where all things falter,
Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,
As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,
Death lies dead.
Do you agree with that?”
“It sounds nice, but I don’t understand it,” said Rod. “Please sir, I’m tireder than I thought. And I have only this one day with C’mell. Can I finish the business with you and have a little time with her?”
The great underman lifted his arms. His wings spread like a canopy over Rod.
“So be it!” he said, and the words rang out like a great song.
Rod could see the lips of the underpeople chorusing, but he did not notice the sound.
“I offer you a tangible bargain. Tell me if you find I read your mind correctly.”
Rod nodded, somewhat in awe.
“You want your money, but you don’t want it. You will keep five hundred thousand credits, FOE money, which will leave you the richest man in Old North Australia for the rest of a very long life. The rest you will give to a foundation which will teach men to hate easily and lightly, as in a game, not sickly and wearily, as in habit. The trustees will be Lords of the Instrumentality whom I know, such as Jestocost, Crudelta, the Lady Johanna Gnade.”
“And what do I get?”
“Your heart’s desire.” The beautiful wise pale face stared down at Rod like a father seeking to fathom the puzzlement of his own child. Rod was a little afraid of the face, but he confided in it, too.
“I want too much. I can’t have it all.”
“I’ll tell you what you want.
“You want to be home right now, and all the trouble done with. I can set you down at the Station of Doom in a single long jump. Look at the floor—I have your books and your postage stamp which you left in Amaral’s room. They go too.”
“But I want to see Earth!”
“Come back, when you are older and wiser. Some day. See what your money has done.”
“Well—” said Rod.
“You want C’mell.” The bland wise white face showed no embarrassment, no anger, no condescension. “You shall have her, in a linked dream, her mind to yours, for a happy subjective time of about a thousand years. You will live through all the happy things that you might have done together if you had stayed here and become a c’man. You will see your kitten-children flourish, grow old, and die. That will take about one half-hour.”
“It’s just a dreamy,” said Rod. “You want to take megacredits from me and give me a dreamy!”
“With two minds? Two living, accelerated minds, thinking into each other? Have you ever heard of that?”
“No,” said Rod.
“Do you trust me?” said the E’telekeli.
Rod stared at the man-bird inquisitively and a great weight fell from him. He did trust this creature more than he had ever trusted the father who did not want him, the mother who gave him up, the neighbors who looked at him and were kind. He sighed, “I trust you.”
“I also,” added the E’telekeli, “will take care of all the little incidentals through my own network and I will leave the memory of them in your mind. If you trust me that should be enough. You get home, safe. You are protected, off Norstrilia, into which I rarely reach, for as long as you live. You have a separate life right now with C’mell and you will remember most of it. In return, you go to the wall and transfer your fortune, minus one-half FOE megacredit, to the Foundation of Rod McBan.”
Rod did not see that the underpeople thronged around him like worshippers. He had to stop when a very pale, tall girl took his hand and held it to her cheek. “You may not be the Promised One, but you are a great and good man. We can take nothing from you. We can only ask. That is the teaching of Joan. And you have given.”
“Who are you?” said Rod
in a frightened voice, thinking that she might be some lost human girl whom the underpeople had abducted to the guts of the Earth.
“E’lamelanie, daughter of the E’telekeli.”
Rod stared at her and went to the wall. He pushed a routine sort of button. What a place to find it! “The Lord Jestocost,” he called. “McBan speaking. No, you fool, I own this system.”
A handsome, polished plumpish man appeared on the screen. “If I guess right,” said the strange man, “you are the first human being ever to get into the depths. Can I serve you, Mister and Owner McBan?”
“Take a note—” said the E’telekeli, out of sight of the machine, beside Rod.
Rod repeated it.
The Lord Jestocost called witnesses at his end.
It was a long dictation, but at last the conveyance was finished. Only at one point did Rod balk. When they tried to call it the McBan Foundation, he said, “Just call it the One Hundred and Fifty Fund.”
“One Hundred and Fifty?” asked Jestocost.
“For my father. It’s his number in our family. I’m to-the-hundred-and-fifty-first. He was before me. Don’t explain the number. Just use it.”
“All clear,” said Jestocost. “Now we have to get notaries and official witnesses to veridicate our imprints of your eyes, hands and brain. Ask the Person with you to give you a mask, so that the cat-man face will not upset the witnesses. Where is this machine you are using supposed to be located? I know perfectly well where I think it is.”
“At the foot of Alpha Ralpha Boulevard, in a forgotten market,” said the E’telekeli. “Your servicemen will find it there tomorrow when they come to check the authenticity of the machine.” He still stood out of line of sight of the machine, so that Jestocost could hear him but not see him.
“I know the voice,” said Jestocost. “It comes to me as in a great dream. But I shall not ask to see the face.”
“Your friend down here has gone where only underpeople go,” said the E’telekeli, “and we are disposing of his fate in more ways than one, my Lord, subject to your gracious approval.”
“My approval does not seem to have been needed much,” snorted Jestocost, with a little laugh.
“I would like to talk to you. Do you have any intelligent underperson near you?”
“I can call C’mell. She’s always somewhere around.”
“This time, my lord, you cannot. She’s here.”
“There, with you? I never knew she went there.” The amazement showed on the face of the Lord Jestocost.
“She is here, nevertheless. Do you have some other underperson?”
Rod felt like a dummy, standing in the visiphone while the two voices, unseen by one another, talked past him. But he felt, very truly, that they both wished him well. He was almost nervous in anticipation of the strange happiness which had been offered to him and C’mell, but he was a respectful enough young man to wait until the great ones got through their business.
“Wait a moment,” said Jestocost.
On the screen, in the depths, Rod could see the Lord of the Instrumentality work the controls of other, secondary screens. A moment later Jestocost answered:
“B’dank is here. He will enter the room in a few minutes.”
“Twenty minutes from now, my Sir and Lord, will you hold hands with your servant B’dank as you once did with C’mell? I have the problem of this young man and his return. There are things which you do not know, and I would rather not put them on the wires.”
Jestocost hesitated only for the slightest of moments. “Good, then,” he laughed. “I might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb.”
The E’telekeli stood aside. Someone handed Rod a mask which hid his cat-man features and still left his eyes and hands exposed. The brain print was gotten through the eyes.
The recordings were made.
Rod went back to the bench and table. He helped himself to another drink of water from the carafe. Someone threw a wreath of fresh flowers around his shoulders. Fresh flowers! In such a place … He wondered. Three rather pretty undergirls, two of them of cat origin and one of them derived from dogs, were leading a freshly dressed C’mell toward him. She wore the simplest and most modest of all possible white dresses. Her waist was cinched by a broad golden belt. She laughed, stopped laughing, and then blushed as they led her to Rod.
Two seats were arranged on the bench. Cushions were disposed so that both of them would be comfortable. Silky metallic caps, like the pleasure caps used in surgeries, were fitted on their heads. Rod felt his sense of smell explode within his brain; it came alive richly and suddenly. He took C’mell by the hand and began walking through an immemorial Earth forest, with a temple older than time shining in the clear soft light cast by Earth’s old moon. He knew that he was already dreaming. C’mell caught his thought and said,
“Rod, my master and lover, this is a dream. But I am in it with you …”
Who can measure a thousand years of happy dreaming—the travels, the hunts, the picnics, the visits to forgotten and empty cities, the discovery of beautiful views and strange places? And the love, and the sharing, and the re-reflection of everything wonderful and strange by two separate, distinct and utterly harmonious personalities. C’mell the c’girl and C’roderick the c’man: they seemed happily doomed to be with one another. Who can live whole centuries of real bliss and then report it in minutes? Who can tell the full tale of such real lives—happiness, quarrels, reconciliations, problems, solutions and always sharing, happiness, and more sharing …?
When they awakened Rod very gently, they let C’mell sleep on. He looked down at himself and expected to find himself old. But he was a young man still, in the deep forgotten underground of the E’telekeli, and he could not even smell. He reached for the thousand wonderful years as he watched C’mell, young again, lying on the bench, but the dream-years had started fading even as he reached for them.
Rod stumbled on his feet. They led him to a chair. The E’telekeli sat in an adjacent chair, at the same table. He seemed weary.
“My Mister and Owner McBan, I monitored your dreamsharing, just to make sure it stayed in the right general direction. I hope you are satisfied.”
Rod nodded, very slowly, and reached for the carafe of water, which someone had refilled while he slept.
“While you slept, Mister McBan,” said the great E’man, “I had a telepathic conference with the Lord Jestocost, who has been your friend, even though you do not know him. You have heard of the new automatic planoform ships.”
“They are experimental,” said Rod.
“So they are,” said the E’telekeli, “but perfectly safe. And the best ‘automatic’ ones are not automatic at all. They have snake-men pilots. My pilots. They can outperform any pilots of the Instrumentality.”
“Of course,” said Rod, “because they are dead.”
“No more dead than I,” laughed the white calm bird of the underground. “I put them in cataleptic trances, with the help of my son the doctor E’ikasus, whom you first knew as the monkey-doctor A’gentur. On the ships they wake up. One of them can take you to Norstrilia in a single long fast jump. And my son can work on you right here. We have a good medical workshop in one of those rooms. After all, it was he who restored you under the supervision of Doctor Vomact on Mars. It will seem like a single night to you, though it will be several days in objective time. If you say goodbye to me now, and if you are ready to go, you will wake up in orbit just outside the Old North Australian subspace net. I have no wish for one of my underpeople to tear himself to pieces if he meets Mother Hitton’s dreadful little kittens, whatever they may be. Do you happen to know?”
“I don’t,” said Rod quickly, “and if I did, I couldn’t tell you. It’s the Queen’s secret.”
“The Queen?”
“The Absent Queen. We use it to mean the Commonwealth government. Anyhow, Mister Bird, I can’t go now. I’ve got to go back up to the surface of Earth. I want to say goodbye to the Catma
ster. And I’m not going to leave this planet and abandon Eleanor. And I want my stamp that the Catmaster gave me. And the books. And maybe I should report about the death of Tostig Amaral.”
“Do you trust me, Mister and Owner McBan?” The white giant rose to his feet; his eyes shone like fire.
The underpeople spontaneously chorused, “Put your trust in the joyful lawful, put your trust in the loyal-awful bright blank power of the under-bird!”
“I’ve trusted you with my life and my fortune, so far,” said Rod, a little sullenly, “but you’re not going to make me leave Eleanor. No matter how much I want to get home. And I have an old enemy at home that I want to help. Houghton Syme the Hon. Sec. There might be something on Old Earth which I could take back to him.”
“I think you can trust me a little further,” said the E’telekeli. “Would it solve the problem of the Hon. Sec. if you gave him a dreamshare with someone he loved, to make up for his having a short life?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“I can,” said the master of the underpeople, “have his prescription made up. It will have to be mixed with plasma from his blood before he takes it. It would be good for about three thousand years of subjective life. We have never let this out of our own undercity before, but you are the Friend of Earth, and you shall have it.”
Rod tried to stammer his thanks, but he mumbled something about Eleanor instead: he just couldn’t leave her.
The white giant took Rod by the arm and led him back to the visiphone, still oddly out of place in this forgotten room, so far underground.
“You know,” said the white giant, “that I will not trick you with false messages or anything like that?”
Norstrilia Page 28
