When the People Fell

by Cordwainer Smith

  The mitres moved gently and the members of the panel rose.

  "You, my Lord Crudelta, will sleep till the trial is finished."

  A robot stroked him and he fell asleep.

  "Next witness," said the Lord Starmount, "in five minutes."

  XI

  Vomact tried to keep Rambo from being heard as a witness. He argued fiercely with the Lord Starmount in the intermission. "You Lords have shot up my hospital, abducted two of my patients, and now you are going to torment both Rambo and Elizabeth. Can't you leave them alone? Rambo is in no condition to give coherent answers and Elizabeth may be damaged if she sees him suffer."

  The Lord Starmount said to him, "You have your rules, Doctor, and we have ours. This trial is being recorded, inch by inch and moment by moment. Nothing is going to be done to Rambo unless we find that he has planet-killing powers. If that is true, of course, we will ask you to take him back to the hospital and to put him to death very pleasantly. But I don't think it will happen. We want his story so that we can judge my colleague Crudelta. Do you think that the Instrumentality would survive if it did not have fierce internal discipline?"

  Vomact nodded sadly; he went back to Grosbeck and Timofeyev, murmuring sadly to them, "Rambo's in for it. There's nothing we could do."

  The panel reassembled. They put on their judicial mitres. The lights of the room darkened and the weird blue light of justice was turned on.

  The robot orderly helped Rambo to the witness chair.

  "You are obliged," said Starmount, "to speak quickly and clearly to this court."

  "You're not Elizabeth," said Rambo.

  "I am the Lord Starmount," said the investigating Lord, quickly deciding to dispense with the formalities. "Do you know me?"

  "No," said Rambo.

  "Do you know where you are?"

  "Earth," said Rambo.

  "Do you wish to lie or to tell the truth?"

  "A lie," said Rambo, "is the only truth which men can share with each other, so I will tell you lies, the way we always do."

  "Can you report your trip?"

  "No."

  "Why not, citizen Rambo?"

  "Words won't describe it."

  "Do you remember your trip?"

  "Do you remember your pulse of two minutes ago?" countered Rambo.

  "I am not playing with you," said Starmount. "We think you have been in space-three and we want you to testify about the Lord Crudelta."

  "Oh!" said Rambo. "I don't like him. I never did like him."

  "Will you nevertheless try to tell us what happened also to you?"

  "Should I, Elizabeth?" asked Rambo of the girl, who sat in the audience.

  She did not stammer. "Yes," she said, in a clear voice which rang through the big room. "Tell them, so that we can find our lives again."

  "I will tell you," said Rambo.

  "When did you last see the Lord Crudelta?"

  "When I was stripped and fitted to the rocket, four jumps out beyond Outpost Baiter Gator. He was on the ground. He waved good-bye to me."

  "And then what happened?"

  "The rocket rose. It felt very strange, like no craft I had ever been in before. I weighed many, many gravities."

  "And then?"

  "The engines went on. I was thrown out of space itself."

  "What did it seem like?"

  "Behind me I left the working ships, the cloth and the food which goes through space. I went down rivers which did not exist. I felt people around me though I could not see them, red people shooting arrows at live bodies."

  "Where were you?" asked a panel member.

  "In the wintertime where there is no summer. In an emptiness like a child's mind. In peninsulas which had torn loose from the land. And I was the ship."

  "You were what?" asked the same panel member.

  "The rocket nose. The cone. The boat. I was drunk. It was drunk. I was the drunkboat myself," said Rambo.

  "And where did you go?" resumed Starmount.

  "Where crazy lanterns stared with idiot eyes. Where the waves washed back and forth with the dead of all the ages. Where the stars became a pool and I swam in it. Where blue turns to liquor, stronger than alcohol, wilder than music, fermented with the red red reds of love. I saw all the things that men have ever thought they saw, but it was me who really saw them. I've heard phosphorescence singing and tides that seemed like crazy cattle clawing their way out of the ocean, their hooves beating the reefs. You will not believe me, but I found Floridas wilder than this, where the flowers had human skins and eyes like big cats."

  "What are you talking about?" asked the Lord Starmount.

  "What I found in space-three," snapped Artyr Rambo. "Believe it or not. This is what I now remember. Maybe it's a dream, but it's all I have. It was years and years and it was the blink of an eye. I dreamed green nights. I felt places where the whole horizon became one big waterfall. The boat that was me met children and I showed them El Dorado, where the gold men live. The people drowned in space washed gently past me. I was a boat where all the lost spaceships lay ruined and still. Seahorses which were not real ran beside me. The summer months came and hammered down the sun. I went past archipelagoes of stars, where the delirious skies opened up for wanderers. I cried for me. I wept for man. I wanted to be the drunkboat sinking. I sank. I fell. It seemed to me that the grass was a lake, where a sad child, on hands and knees, sailed a toy boat as fragile as a butterfly in spring. I can't forget the pride of unremembered flags, the arrogance of prisons which I suspected, the swimming of the businessmen! Then I was on the grass."

  "This may have scientific value," said the Lord Starmount, "but it is not of judicial importance. Do you have any comment on what you did during the battle in the hospital?"

  Rambo was quick and looked sane. "What I did, I did not do. What I did not do, I cannot tell. Let me go, because I am tired of you and space, big men and big things. Let me sleep and let me get well."

  Starmount lifted his hand for silence.

  The panel members stared at him.

  Only the few telepaths present knew that they had all said, "Aye. Let the man go. Let the girl go. Let the doctors go. But bring back the Lord Crudelta later on. He has many troubles ahead of him, and we wish to add to them."

  XII

  Between the Instrumentality, the Manhome Government, and the authorities at the Old Main Hospital, everyone wished to give Rambo and Elizabeth happiness.

  As Rambo got well, much of his Earth Four memory returned. The trip faded from his mind.

  When he came to know Elizabeth, he hated the girl.

  This was not his girl—his bold, saucy Elizabeth of the markets and the valleys, of the snowy hills and the long boat rides. This was somebody meek, sweet, sad, and hopelessly loving.

  Vomact cured that.

  He sent Rambo to the Pleasure City of the Hesperides, where bold and talkative women pursued him because he was rich and famous.

  In a few weeks—a very few indeed—he wanted his Elizabeth, this strange shy girl who had been cooked back from the dead while he rode space with his own fragile bones.

  "Tell the truth, darling." He spoke to her once gravely and seriously. "The Lord Crudelta did not arrange the accident which killed you?"

  "They say he wasn't there," said Elizabeth. "They say it was an actual accident. I don't know. I will never know."

  "It doesn't matter now," said Rambo. "Crudelta's off among the stars, looking for trouble and finding it. We have our bungalow, and our waterfall and each other."

  "Yes, my darling," she said, "each other. And no fantastic Floridas for us."

  He blinked at this reference to the past, but he said nothing. A man who has been through Space3 needs very little in life, outside of not going back to Space3. Sometimes he dreamed he was the rocket again, the old rocket taking off on an impossible trip. Let other men follow! he thought. Let other men go! I have Elizabeth and I am here.

  A Planet Named Shayol

  I
<
br />   There was a tremendous difference between the liner and the ferry in Mercer's treatment. On the liner, the attendants made gibes when they brought him his food.

  "Scream good and loud," said one rat-faced steward, "and then we'll know it's you when they broadcast the sounds of punishment on the Emperor's birthday."

  The other, fat steward ran the tip of his wet, red tongue over his thick, purple-red lips one time and said, "Stands to reason, man. If you hurt all the time, the whole lot of you would die. Something pretty good must happen, along with the—whatchamacallit. Maybe you turn into a woman. Maybe you turn into two people. Listen, cousin, if it's real crazy fun, let me know . . ." Mercer said nothing. Mercer had enough troubles of his own not to wonder about the daydreams of nasty men.

  At the ferry it was different. The biopharmaceutical staff was deft, impersonal, quick in removing his shackles. They took off all his prison clothes and left them on the liner. When he boarded the ferry, naked, they looked him over as if he were a rare plant or a body on the operating table. They were almost kind in the clinical deftness of their touch. They did not treat him as a criminal, but as a specimen.

  Men and women, clad in their medical smocks, they looked at him as though he were already dead.

  He tried to speak. A man, older and more authoritative than the others, said firmly and clearly, "Do not worry about talking. I will talk to you myself in a very little time. What we are having now are the preliminaries, to determine your physical condition. Turn around, please."

  Mercer turned around. An orderly rubbed his back with a very strong antiseptic.

  "This is going to sting," said one of the technicians, "but it is nothing serious or painful. We are determining the toughness of the different layers of your skin."

  Mercer, annoyed by this impersonal approach, spoke up just as a sharp little sting burned him above the sixth lumbar vertebra. "Don't you know who I am?"

  "Of course we know who you are," said a woman's voice. "We have it all in a file in the corner. The chief doctor will talk about your crime later, if you want to talk about it. Keep quiet now. We are making a skin test, and you will feel much better if you do not make us prolong it."

  Honesty forced her to add another sentence: "And we will get better results as well."

  They had lost no time at all in getting to work.

  He peered at them sidewise to look at them. There was nothing about them to indicate that they were human devils in the antechambers of hell itself. Nothing was there to indicate that this was the satellite of Shayol, the final and uttermost place of chastisement and shame. They looked like medical people from his life before he committed the crime without a name.

  They changed from one routine to another. A woman, wearing a surgical mask, waved her hand at a white table.

  "Climb up on that, please."

  No one had said "please" to Mercer since the guards had seized him at the edge of the palace. He started to obey her and then he saw that there were padded handcuffs at the head of the table. He stopped.

  "Get along, please," she demanded. Two or three of the others turned around to look at both of them.

  The second "please" shook him. He had to speak. These were people, and he was a person again. He felt his voice rising, almost cracking into shrillness as he asked her, "Please, Ma'am, is the punishment going to begin?"

  "There's no punishment here," said the woman. "This is the satellite. Get on the table. We're going to give you your first skin-toughening before you talk to the head doctor. Then you can tell him all about your crime—"

  "You know my crime?" he said, greeting it almost like a neighbor.

  "Of course not," said she, "but all the people who come through here are believed to have committed crimes. Somebody thinks so or they wouldn't be here. Most of them want to talk about their personal crimes. But don't slow me down. I'm a skin technician, and down on the surface of Shayol you're going to need the very best work that any of us can do for you. Now get on that table. And when you are ready to talk to the chief you'll have something to talk about besides your crime."

  He complied.

  Another masked person, probably a girl, took his hands in cool, gentle fingers and fitted them to the padded cuffs in a way he had never sensed before. By now he thought he knew every interrogation machine in the whole empire, but this was nothing like any of them.

  The orderly stepped back. "All clear, Sir and Doctor."

  "Which do you prefer?" said the skin technician. "A great deal of pain or a couple of hours' unconsciousness?"

  "Why should I want pain?" said Mercer.

  "Some specimens do," said the technician, "by the time they arrive here. I suppose it depends on what people have done to them before they got here. I take it you did not get any of the dream-punishments."

  "No," said Mercer. "I missed those." He thought to himself, I didn't know that I missed anything at all.

  He remembered his last trial, himself wired and plugged in to the witness stand. The room had been high and dark. Bright blue light shone on the panel of judges, their judicial caps a fantastic parody of the episcopal mitres of long, long ago. The judges were talking, but he could not hear them. Momentarily the insulation slipped and he heard one of them say, "Look at that white, devilish face. A man like that is guilty of everything. I vote for Pain Terminal." "Not Planet Shayol?" said a second voice. "The dromozoa place," said a third voice. "That should suit him," said the first voice. One of the judicial engineers must then have noticed that the prisoner was listening illegally. He was cut off. Mercer then thought that he had gone through everything which the cruelty and intelligence of mankind could devise.

  But this woman said he had missed the dream-punishments. Could there be people in the universe even worse off than himself? There must be a lot of people down on Shayol. They never came back.

  He was going to be one of them; would they boast to him of what they had done, before they were made to come to this place?

  "You asked for it," said the woman technician. "It is just an ordinary anesthetic. Don't panic when you awaken. Your skin is going to be thickened and strengthened chemically and biologically."

  "Does it hurt?"

  "Of course," said she. "But get this out of your head. We're not punishing you. The pain here is just ordinary medical pain. Anybody might get it if they needed a lot of surgery. The punishment, if that's what you want to call it, is down on Shayol. Our only job is to make sure that you are fit to survive after you are landed. In a way, we are saving your life ahead of time. You can be grateful for that if you want to be. Meanwhile, you will save yourself a lot of trouble if you realize that your nerve endings will respond to the change in the skin. You had better expect to be very uncomfortable when you recover. But then, we can help that, too." She brought down an enormous lever and Mercer blacked out.

  When he came to, he was in an ordinary hospital room, but he did not notice it. He seemed bedded in fire. He lifted his hand to see if there were flames on it. It looked the way it always had, except that it was a little red and a little swollen. He tried to turn in the bed. The fire became a scorching blast which stopped him in mid-turn. Uncontrollably, he moaned.

  A voice spoke, "You are ready for some pain-killer."

  It was a girl nurse. "Hold your head still," she said, "and I will give you half an amp of pleasure. Your skin won't bother you then."

  She slipped a soft cap on his head. It looked like metal but it felt like silk.

  He had to dig his fingernails into his palms to keep from threshing about on the bed.

  "Scream if you want to," she said. "A lot of them do. It will just be a minute or two before the cap finds the right lobe in your brain."

  She stepped to the corner and did something which he could not see.

  There was the flick of a switch.

  The fire did not vanish from his skin. He still felt it; but suddenly it did not matter. His mind was full of delicious pleasure which throbbed outward fr
om his head and seemed to pulse down through his nerves. He had visited the pleasure palaces, but he had never felt anything like this before.

  He wanted to thank the girl, and he twisted around in the bed to see her. He could feel his whole body flash with pain as he did so, but the pain was far away. And the pulsating pleasure which coursed out of his head, down his spinal cord, and into his nerves was so intense that the pain got through only as a remote, unimportant signal.

  She was standing very still in the corner.

  "Thank you, nurse," said he.

  She said nothing.

  He looked more closely, though it was hard to look while enormous pleasure pulsed through his body like a symphony written in nerve-messages. He focused his eyes on her and saw that she too wore a soft metallic cap.

  He pointed at it.

  She blushed all the way down to her throat.

  She spoke dreamily, "You looked like a nice man to me. I didn't think you'd tell on me . . ."

  He gave her what he thought was a friendly smile, but with the pain in his skin and the pleasure bursting out of his head, he really had no idea of what his actual expression might be. "It's against the law," he said. "It's terribly against the law. But it is nice."

  "How do you think we stand it here?" said the nurse. "You specimens come in here talking like ordinary people and then you go down to Shayol. Terrible things happen to you on Shayol. Then the surface station sends up parts of you, over and over again. I may see your head ten times, quick-frozen and ready for cutting up, before my two years are up. You prisoners ought to know how we suffer," she crooned, the pleasure-charge still keeping her relaxed and happy. "You ought to die as soon as you get down there and not pester us with your torments. We can hear you screaming, you know. You keep on sounding like people even after Shayol begins to work on you. Why do you do it, Mr. Specimen?" She giggled sillily. "You hurt our feelings so. No wonder a girl like me has to have a little jolt now and then. It's real, real dreamy and I don't mind getting you ready to go down on Shayol." She staggered over to his bed. "Pull this cap off me, will you? I haven't got enough will power left to raise my hands."