When the People Fell

by Cordwainer Smith

  "I stun," she said, and her voice came at him from all directions. It echoed from the ceiling, came from all five walls of the old odd room, from the open windows, from both the doors. He felt as though he were being lifted into space and turned slowly in a condition of weightlessness. He tried to retain self-control, to listen for the one true sound among the many false sounds, to trap the girl by some outside chance.

  "I make you remember," said her multiple echoing voice.

  For an instant he did not see how this could be a weapon, even if the turtle-girl had learned all the ugly tricks of the Hechizera of Gonfalon.

  But then he knew.

  He saw his uncle, Kuraf, again. He saw his old apartments vividly around himself. Kuraf was there. The old man was pitiable, hateful, drunk, horrible; the girl on Kuraf's lap laughed at him, Casher O'Neill, and she laughed at Kuraf, too. Casher had once had a teenager's passionate concern with sex and at the same time had had a teenager's dreadful fear of all the unstated, invisible implications of what the man-woman relationship, gone sour, gone wrong, gone bad, might be. The present-moment Casher remembered the long-ago Casher and as he spun in the web of T'ruth's hypnotic powers he found himself back with the ugliest memory he had.

  The killings in the palace at Mizzer.

  The colonels had taken Kaheer itself, and they ultimately let Kuraf run away to the pleasure planet of Ttiollé.

  But Kuraf's companions, who had debauched the old republic of the Twelve Niles, those people! They did not go. The soldiers, stung to fury, had cut them down with knives. Casher thought of the blood, blood sticky on the floors, blood gushing purple into the carpets, blood bright red and leaping like a fountain when a white throat ended its last gurgle, blood turning brown where handprints, themselves bloody, had left it on marble tables. The warm palace, long ago, had gotten the sweet sick stench of blood all the way through it. The young Casher had never known that people had so much blood inside them, or that so much could pour out on the perfumed sheets, the tables still set with food and drink, or that blood could creep across the floor in growing pools as the bodies of the dead yielded up their last few nasty sounds and their terminal muscular spasms.

  Before that day of butchery had ended, one thousand, three hundred and eleven human bodies, ranging in age from two months to eighty-nine years, had been carried out of the palaces once occupied by Kuraf. Kuraf, under sedation, was waiting for a starship to take him to perpetual exile and Casher—Casher himself O'Neill!—was shaking the hand of Colonel Wedder, whose orders had caused all the blood. The hand was washed and the nails pared and cleaned, but the cuff of the sleeve was still rimmed with the dry blood of some other human being. Colonel Wedder either did not notice his own cuff, or he did not care.

  "Touch and yield!" said the girl-voice out of nowhere.

  Casher found himself on all fours in the room, his sight suddenly back again, the room unchanged, and T'ruth smiling.

  "I fought you," she said.

  He nodded. He did not trust himself to speak.

  He reached for his water-glass, looking at it closely to see if there were any blood on it.

  Of course not. Not here. Not this time, not this place.

  He pulled himself to his feet.

  The girl had sense enough not to help him.

  She stood there in her thin modest shift, looking very much like a wise female child, while he stood up and drank thirstily. He refilled the glass and drank again.

  Then, only then, did he turn to her and speak:

  "Do you do all that?"

  She nodded.

  "Alone? Without drugs or machinery?"

  She nodded again.

  "Child," he cried out, "you're not a person! You're a whole weapons system all by yourself. What are you, really? Who are you?"

  "I am the turtle-child T'ruth," she said, "and I am the loyal property and loving servant of my good master, the Mister and Owner Murray Madigan."

  "Madam," said Casher, "you are almost a thousand years old. I am at your service. I do hope you will let me go free later on. And especially, that you will take that religious picture out of my mind."

  As Casher spoke, she picked a locket from the table. He had not noticed it. It was an ancient watch or a little round box, swinging on a thin gold chain.

  "Watch this," said the child, "if you trust me, and repeat what I then say."

  (Nothing at all happened: nothing—anywhere.)

  Casher said to her, "You're making me dizzy, swinging that ornament. Put it back on. Isn't that the one you were wearing?"

  "No, Casher, it isn't."

  "What were we talking about?" demanded Casher.

  "Something," said she. "Don't you remember?"

  "No," said Casher brusquely. "Sorry, but I'm hungry again." He wolfed down a sweet roll encrusted with sugar and decorated with fruits. His mouth full, he washed the food down with water. At last he spoke to her. "Now what?"

  She had watched with timeless grace.

  "There's no hurry, Casher. Minutes or hours, they don't matter."

  "Didn't you want me to fight somebody after Gosigo left me here?"

  "That's right," she said, with terrible quiet.

  "I seem to have had a fight right here in this room." He stared around stupidly.

  She looked around the room, very cool. "It doesn't look as though anybody's been fighting here, does it?"

  "There's no blood here, no blood at all. Everything is clean," said he.

  "Pretty much so."

  "Then why," said Casher, "should I think I had a fight?"

  "This wild weather on Henriada sometimes upsets off-worlders until they get used to it," said T'ruth mildly.

  "If I didn't have a fight in the past, am I going to get into one in the future?"

  The old room with the golden-oak furniture swam around him. The world outside was strange with the sunlit marshes and wide bayous trailing off to the forever-thundering storm, just over the horizon, which lay beyond the weather machines. Casher shrugged and shivered. He looked straight at the girl. She stood erect and looked at him with the even regard of a reigning empress. Her young budding breasts barely showed through the thinness of her shift; she wore golden flat-heeled shoes. Around her neck there was a thin gold chain, but the object on the chain hung down inside her dress. It excited him a little to think of her flat chest barely budding into womanhood. He had never been a man who had an improper taste for children, but there was something about this person which was not childlike at all.

  "You are a girl and not a girl. . . ." he said in bewilderment.

  She nodded gravely.

  "You are that woman in the story, the Hechizera of Gonfalon. You are reborn."

  She shook her head, equally seriously. "No, I am not reborn. I am a turtle-child, an underperson with a very long life, and I have been imprinted with the personality of the Citizen Agatha. This is all."

  "You stun," he said, "but I do not know how you do it."

  "I stun," she said flatly and around the edge of his mind there flickered up hot little torments of memory.

  "Now I remember," he cried. "You have me here to kill somebody. You are sending me into a fight."

  "You are going to a fight, Casher. I wish I could send somebody else, not you, but you are the only person here strong enough to do the job."

  Impulsively he took her hand. The moment he touched her, she ceased to be a child or an underperson. She felt tender and exciting, like the most desirable and important person he had ever known. His sister? But he had no sister. He felt that he was himself terribly, unendurably important to her. He did not want to let her hand go, but she withdrew from his touch with an authority which no decent man could resist.

  "You must fight to the death, now, Casher," she said, looking at him as evenly as might a troop commander examining a special soldier selected for a risky mission.

  He nodded. He was tired of having his mind confused. He knew something had happened to him after the forgetty
, Gosigo, had left him at the front door, but he was not at all sure of what it was. They seemed to have had a sort of meal together in this room. He felt himself in love with the child. He knew that she was not even a human being. He remembered something about her living ninety thousand years and he remembered something else about her having gotten the name and the skills of the greatest battle hypnotist of all history, the Hechizera of Gonfalon. There was something strange, something frightening about that chain around her neck: there were things he hoped he would never have to know.

  He strained at the thought and it broke like a bubble.

  "I'm a fighter," he said. "Give me my fight and let me know."

  "He can kill you. I hope not. You must not kill him. He is immortal and insane. But in the law of Old North Australia, from which my master, the Mister and Owner Murray Madigan, is an exile, we must not hurt a house guest, nor may we turn him away in a time of great need."

  "What do I do?" snapped Casher impatiently.

  "You fight him. You frighten him. You make his poor crazy mind fearful that he will meet you again."

  "I'm supposed to do this."

  "You can," she said very seriously. "I've already tested you. That's where you have the little spot of amnesia about this room."

  "But why? Why bother? Why not get some of your human servants and have them tie him up or put him in a padded room?"

  "They can't deal with him. He is too strong, too big, too clever, even though insane. Besides, they don't dare follow him."

  "Where does he go?" said Casher sharply.

  "Into the control room," replied T'ruth, as if it were the saddest phrase ever uttered.

  "What's wrong with that? Even a place as fine as Beauregard can't have too much of a control room. Put locks on the control."

  "It's not that kind of a control room."

  Almost angry, he shouted, "What is it, then?"

  "The control room," she answered, "is for a planoform ship. This house. These counties, all the way to Mottile on the one side and to Ambiloxi on the other. The sea itself, way out into the Gulf of Esperanza. All this is one ship."

  Casher's professional interest took over. "If it's turned off, he can't do any harm."

  "It's not turned off," she said. "My master leaves it on a very little bit. That way, he can keep the weather machines going and make this edge of Henriada a very pleasant place."

  "You mean," said Casher, "that you'd risk letting a lunatic fly all these estates off into space."

  "He doesn't even fly," said T'ruth gloomily.

  "What does he do, then?" yelled Casher.

  "When he gets at the controls, he just hovers."

  "He hovers? By the Bell, girl, don't try to fool me. If you hover a place as big as this, you could wipe out the whole planet any moment. There have been only two or three pilots in the history of space who would be able to hover a machine like this one."

  "He can, though," insisted the little girl.

  "Who is he, anyhow?"

  "I thought you knew. Or had heard somewhere about it. His name is John Joy Tree."

  "Tree the Go-Captain?" Casher shivered in the warm room. "He died a long time ago after he made that record flight."

  "He did not die. He bought immortality and went mad. He came here and he lives under my master's protection."

  "Oh," said Casher. There was nothing else he could say. John Joy Tree, the great Norstrilian who took the first of the Long Plunges outside the galaxy: he was like Magno Taliano of ages ago, who could fly space on his living brain alone.

  But fight him? How could anybody fight him?

  Pilots are for piloting; killers are for killing; women are for loving or forgetting. When you mix up the purposes, everything goes wrong.

  Casher sat down abruptly. "Do you have any more of that coffee?"

  "You don't need coffee," she said.

  He looked up, inquiringly.

  "You're a fighter. You need a war. That's it," she said, pointing with her girlish hand to a small doorway which looked like the entrance to a closet. "Just go in there. He's in there now. Tinkering with the machines again. Making me wait for my master to get blown to bits at any minute! And I've put up with it for over a hundred years."

  "Go yourself," he said.

  "You've been in a ship's control room," she declared.

  "Yes," he nodded.

  "You know how people go all naked and frightened inside. You know how much training it takes to make a Go-Captain. What do you think happens to me?" At last, long last, her voice was shrill, angry, excited, childish.

  "What happens?" said Casher dully, not caring very much; he felt weary in every bone. Useless battles, murder he had to try, dead people arguing after their ballads had already grown out of fashion. Why didn't the Hechizera of Gonfalon do her own work?

  Catching his thought, she screeched at him, "Because I can't!"

  "All right," said Casher. "Why not?"

  "Because I turn into me."

  "You what?" said Casher, a little startled.

  "I'm a turtle-child. My shape is human. My brain is big. But I'm a turtle. No matter how much my master needs me, I'm just a turtle."

  "What's that got to do with it?"

  "What do turtles do when they're faced with danger? Not underpeople-turtles, but real turtles, little animals. You must have heard of them somewhere."

  "I've even seen them," said Casher, "on some world or other. They pull into their shells."

  "That's what I do"—she wept—"when I should be defending my master. I can meet most things. I am not a coward. But in that control room, I forget, forget, forget!"

  "Send a robot, then!"

  She almost screamed at him. "A robot against John Joy Tree? Are you mad, too?"

  Casher admitted, in a mumble, that on second thought it wouldn't do much good to send a robot against the greatest Go-Captain of them all. He concluded, lamely, "I'll go, if you want me to."

  "Go now," she shouted, "go right in!"

  She pulled at his arm, half-dragging and half-leading him to the little brightened door which looked so innocent.

  "But—" he said.

  "Keep going," she pleaded. "This is all we ask of you. Don't kill him, but frighten him, fight him, wound him if you must. You can do it. I can't." She sobbed as she tugged at him. "I'd just be me."

  Before he knew quite what had happened she had opened the door. The light beyond was clear and bright and tinged with blue, the way the skies of Manhome, Mother Earth, were shown in all the viewers.

  He let her push him in.

  He heard the door click behind him.

  Before he even took in the details of the room or noticed the man in the Go-Captain's chair, the flavor and meaning of the room struck him like a blow against his throat.

  This room, he thought, is hell.

  He wasn't even sure that he remembered where he had learned the word "hell." It denoted all good turned to evil, all hope to anxiety, all wishes to greed.

  Somehow, this room was it.

  And then. . . .

  X

  And then the chief occupant of hell turned and looked squarely at him.

  If this was John Joy Tree, he did not look insane.

  He was a handsome, chubby man with a red complexion, bright eyes, dancing-blue in color, and a mouth which was as mobile as the mouth of a temptress.

  "Good day," said John Joy Tree.

  "How do you do," said Casher inanely.

  "I do not know your name," said the ruddy brisk man, speaking in a tone of voice which was not the least bit insane.

  "I am Casher O'Neill, from the city of Kaheer on the planet Mizzer."

  "Mizzer?" John Joy Tree laughed. "I spent a night there, long, long ago. The entertainment was most unusual. But we have other things to talk about. You have come here to kill the undergirl T'ruth. You received your orders from the honorable Rankin Meiklejohn, may he soak in drink! The child has caught you and now she wants you to kill me, but she does
not dare utter those words."

  John Joy Tree, as he spoke, shifted the spaceship controls to standby, and got ready to get out of his captain's seat.

  Casher protested, "She said nothing about killing you. She said you might kill me."

  "I might, at that." The immortal pilot stood on the floor. He was a full head shorter than Casher but he was a strong and formidable man. The blue light of the room made him look clear, sharp, distinct.

  The whole flavor of the situation tickled the fear-nerves inside Casher's body. He suddenly felt that he wanted very much to go to a bathroom, but he felt—quite surely—that if he turned his back on this man, in this place, he would die like a felled ox in a stockyard. He had to face John Joy Tree.

  "Go ahead," said the pilot. "Fight me."

  "I didn't say that I would fight you," said Casher. "I am supposed to frighten you and I do not know how to do it."

  "This isn't getting us anywhere," said John Joy Tree. "Shall we go into the outer room and let poor little T'ruth give us a drink? You can just tell her that you failed."

  "I think," said Casher, "that I am more afraid of her than I am of you."

  John Joy Tree flung himself into a comfortable passenger's chair. "All right, then. Do something. Do you want to box? Gloves? Bare fists? Or would you like swords? Or wirepoints? There are some over there in the closet. Or we can each take a pilot ship and have a ship-duel out in space."

  "That wouldn't make much sense," said Casher, "me fighting a ship against the greatest Go-Captain of them all. . . ."

  John John Tree greeted this with an ugly underlaugh, a barely audible sound which made Casher feel that the whole situation was ridiculous.

  "But I do have one advantage," said Casher. "I know who you are and you do not know who I am."

  "How could I tell," said John Joy Tree, "when people keep on getting born all over the place?"

  He gave Casher a scornful, comfortable grin. There was charm in the man's poise. Keeping his eyes focused directly on Casher, he felt for a carafe and poured himself a drink.

  He gave Casher an ironic toast and Casher took it, standing frightened and alone. More alone than he had ever been before in his life.

  Suddenly John Joy Tree sprang lightly to his feet and stared with a complete change of expression past Casher. Casher did not dare look around. This was some old fight trick.