“What does she do?” asked Elaine.
“She has her pride,” said Mabel, her grotesque red face now jolly and eager, her slack mouth spraying spittle as she spoke.
“But doesn’t she do anything?” said Elaine.
Charley-is-my-darling intervened. “Nobody has to do anything here, Lady Elaine—”
“It’s illegal to call me ‘Lady,’” said Elaine.
“I’m sorry, human being Elaine. Nobody has to do anything at all here. The whole bunch of us are completely illegal. This corridor is a thought-shelter, so that no thoughts can escape or enter it. Wait a bit! Watch the ceiling…Now!”
A red glow moved across the ceiling and was gone.
“The ceiling glows,” said Charley-is-my-darling, “whenever anything thinks against it. The whole tunnel registers ‘sewage tank: organic waste’ to the outside, so that dim perceptions of life which may escape here are not considered too unaccountable. People built it for their own use, a million years ago.”
“They weren’t here on Fomalhaut III a million years ago,” snapped Elaine. Why, she wondered, did she snap at him? He wasn’t a person, just a talking animal who had missed being dropped down the nearest incinerator.
“I’m sorry, Elaine,” said Charley-is-my-darling. “I should have said, a long time ago. We underpeople don’t get much chance to study real history. But we use this corridor. Somebody with a morbid sense of humor named this place Clown Town. We live along for ten or twenty or a hundred years, and then people or robots find us and kill us all. That’s why Mabel was upset. She thought you were death for this time. But you’re not. You’re Elaine. That’s wonderful, wonderful.” His sly, too-clever face beamed with transparent sincerity. It must have been quite a shock to him to be honest.
“You were going to tell me what the undergirl is for,” said Elaine.
“That’s Crawlie,” said he. “She doesn’t do anything. None of us really have to. We’re all doomed anyhow. She’s a little more honest than the rest of us. She has her pride. She scorns the rest of us. She puts us in our place. She makes everybody feel inferior. We think she is a valuable member of the group. We all have our pride, which is hopeless anyway, but Crawlie has her pride all by herself, without doing anything whatever about it. She sort of reminds us. If we leave her alone, she leaves us alone.”
Elaine thought, You’re funny things, so much like people, but so inexpert about it, as though you all had to “die” before you really learned what it is to be alive. Aloud, she could only say. “I never met anybody like that.”
Crawlie must have sensed that they were talking about her, because she looked at Elaine with a short quick stare of blazing hatred. Crawlie’s pretty face locked itself into a glare of concentrated hostility and scorn; then her eyes wandered and Elaine felt that she, Elaine, no longer existed in the thing’s mind, except as a rebuke which had been administered and forgotten. She had never seen privacy as impenetrable as Crawlie’s. And yet the being, whatever she might have been made from, was very lovely in human terms.
A fierce old hag, covered with mouse-gray fur, rushed up to Elaine. The mouse-woman was the Baby-baby who had been sent on the errand. She held a ceramic cup in a pair of long tongs. Water was in it.
Elaine took the cup.
Sixty to seventy underpeople, including the little girl in the blue dress whom she had seen outside, watched her as she sipped. The water was good. She drank it all. There was a universal exhalation, as though everyone in the corridor had waited for this moment. Elaine started to put the cup down but the old mouse-woman was too quick for her. She took the cup from Elaine, stopping her in mid-gesture and using the tongs, so that the cup would not be contaminated by the touch of an underperson.
“That’s right, Baby-baby,” said Charley-is-my-darling, “we can talk. It is our custom not to talk with a newcomer until we have offered our hospitality. Let me be frank. We may have to kill you, if this whole business turns out to be a mistake, but let me assure you that if I do kill you, I will do it nicely and without the least bit of malice. Right?”
Elaine did not know what was so right about it, and said so. She visualized her head being twisted off. Apart from the pain and the degradation, it seemed so terribly messy—to terminate life in a sewer with things which did not even have a right to exist.
He gave her no chance to argue, but just went on explaining, “Suppose things turn out just right. Suppose that you are the Esther-Elaine-or-Eleanor that we have all been waiting for—the person who will do something to D’joan and bring us all help and deliverance—give us life, in short, real life—then what do we do?”
“I don’t know where you get all these ideas about me. Why am I Esther-Elaine-or-Eleanor? What do I do to D’joan? Why me?”
Charley-is-my-darling stared at her as though he could not believe her question. Mabel frowned as though she could not think of the right words to put forth her opinions. Baby-baby, who had glided back to the group with swift mouselike suddenness, looked around as though she expected someone from the rear to speak. She was right. Crawlie turned her face toward Elaine and said, with infinite condescension:
“I did not know that real people were ill-informed or stupid. You seem to be both. We have all our information from the Lady Panc Ashash. Since she is dead, she has no prejudices against us underpeople. Since she has not had much of anything to do, she has run through billions and billions of probabilities for us. All of us know what most probabilities come to—sudden death by disease or gas, or maybe being hauled off to the slaughterhouses in big police ornithopters. But Lady Panc Ashash found that perhaps a person with a name like yours would come, a human being with an old name and not a number name, that that person would meet the Hunter, that she and the Hunter would teach the underchild D’joan a message, and that the message would change the worlds. We have kept one child after another named D’joan, waiting for a hundred years. Now you show up. Maybe you are the one. You don’t look very competent to me. What are you good for?”
“I’m a witch,” said Elaine.
Crawlie could not keep the surprise from showing in her face. “A witch? Really?”
“Yes.” said Elaine, rather humbly.
“I wouldn’t be one,” said Crawlie. “I have my pride.” She turned her face away and locked her features in their expression of perennial hurt and disdain.
Charley-is-my-darling whispered to the group nearby, not caring whether Elaine heard his words or not, “That’s wonderful, wonderful. She is a witch. A human witch. Perhaps the great day is here! Elaine,” said he humbly, “will you please look at us?”
Elaine looked. When she stopped to think about where she was, it was incredible that the empty old lower city of Kalma should be just outside, just beyond the wall, and the busy new city a mere thirty-five meters higher. This corridor was a world to itself. It felt like a world, with the ugly yellows and browns, the dim old lights, the stenches of man and animal mixed under intolerably bad ventilation. Baby-baby, Crawlie, Mabel, and Charley-is-my-darling were part of this world. They were real; but they were outside, outside, so far as Elaine herself was concerned.
“Let me go,” she said. “I’ll come back some day.”
Charley-is-my-darling, who was so plainly the leader, spoke as if in a trance: “You don’t understand, Elaine. The only ‘going’ you are going to go is death. There is no other direction. We can’t let the old you go out of this door, not when the Lady Panc Ashash has thrust you in to us. Either you go forward to your destiny, to our destiny too, either you do that, and all works out all right, so that you love us, and we love you,” he added dreamily, “or else I kill you with my own hands. Right here. Right now. I could give you another clean drink of water first. But that is all. There isn’t much choice for you, human being Elaine. What do you think would happen if you went outside?”
“Nothing, I hope,” said Elaine.
“Nothing!” snorted Mabel, her face regaining its original indignation. “Th
e police would come flapping by in their ornithopter—”
“And they’d pick your brains,” said Baby-baby.
“And they’d know about us,” said a tall pale man who had not spoken before.
“And we,” said Crawlie from her chair, “would all of us die within an hour or two at the longest. Would that matter to you, Ma’am and Elaine?”
“And,” added Charley-is-my-darling, “they would disconnect the Lady Panc Ashash, so that even the recording of that dear dead lady would be gone at last, and there would be no mercy at all left upon this world.”
“What is ‘mercy’?” asked Elaine.
“It’s obvious you never heard of it,” said Crawlie.
The old mouse-hag Baby-baby came close to Elaine. She looked up at her and whispered through yellow teeth, “Don’t let them frighten you, girl. Death doesn’t matter all that much, not even to you true humans with your four hundred years or to us animals with the slaughterhouse around the corner. Death is a when, not a what. It’s the same for all of us. Don’t be scared. Go straight ahead and you may find mercy and love. They’re much richer than death, if you can only find them. Once you do find them, death won’t be very important.”
“I still don’t know mercy.” said Elaine, “but I thought I knew what love was, and I don’t expect to find my lover in a dirty old corridor full of underpeople.”
“I don’t mean that kind of love,” laughed Baby-baby, brushing aside Mabel’s attempted interruption with a wave of her hand-paw. The old mouse face was on fire with sheer expressiveness. Elaine could suddenly imagine what Baby-baby had looked like to a mouse-underman when she was young and sleek and gray. Enthusiasm flushed the old features with youth as Baby-baby went on, “I don’t mean love for a lover, girl. I mean love for yourself. Love for life. Love for all things living. Love even for me. Your love for me. Can you imagine that?”
Elaine swam through fatigue but she tried to answer the question. She looked in the dim light at the wrinkled old mouse-hag with her filthy clothes and her little red eyes. The fleeting image of the beautiful young mouse-woman had faded away; there was only this cheap, useless old thing, with her inhuman demands and her senseless pleading. People never loved underpeople. They used them, like chairs or doorhandles. Since when did a doorhandle demand the Charter of Ancient Rights?
“No,” said Elaine calmly and evenly, “I can’t imagine ever loving you.”
“I knew it,” said Crawlie from her chair. There was triumph in the voice.
Charley-is-my-darling shook his head as if to clear his sight. “Don’t you even know who controls Fomalhaut III?”
“The Instrumentality,” said Elaine. “But do we have to go on talking? Let me go or kill me or something. This doesn’t make sense. I was tired when I got here, and I’m a million years tireder now.”
Mabel said, “Take her along.”
“All right,” said Charley-is-my-darling. “Is the Hunter there?”
The child D’joan spoke. She had stood at the back of the group. “He came in the other way when she came in the front.”
Elaine said to Charley-is-my-darling, “You lied to me. You said there was only one way.”
“I did not lie,” said he. “There is only one way for you or me or for the friends of the Lady Panc Ashash. The way you came. The other way is death.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” he said, “that it leads straight into the slaughterhouses of the men you do not know. The Lords of the Instrumentality who are here on Fomalhaut III. There is the Lord Femtiosex, who is just and without pity. There is the Lord Limaono, who thinks that underpeople are a potential danger and should not have been started in the first place. There is the Lady Goroke, who does not know how to pray, but who tries to ponder the mystery of life and who has shown kindnesses to underpeople, as long as the kindnesses were lawful ones. And there is the Lady Arabella Underwood, whose justice no man can understand. Nor underpeople either,” he added with a chuckle.
“Who is she? I mean, where did she get the funny name? It doesn’t have a number in it. It’s as bad as your names. Or my own,” said Elaine.
“She’s from Old North Australia, the stroon world, on loan to the Instrumentality, and she follows the laws she was born to. The Hunter can go through the rooms and the slaughterhouses of the Instrumentality, but could you? Could I?”
“No,” said Elaine.
“Then forward,” said Charley-is-my-darling, “to your death or to great wonders. May I lead the way, Elaine?”
Elaine nodded wordlessly.
The mouse-hag Baby-baby patted Elaine’s sleeve, her eyes alive with strange hope. As Elaine passed Crawlie’s chair, the proud, beautiful girl looked straight at her, expressionless, deadly, and severe. The dog-girl D’joan followed the little procession as if she had been invited.
They walked down and down and down. Actually, it could not have been a full half-kilometer. But with the endless browns and yellows, the strange shapes of the lawless and untended underpeople, the stenches and the thick heavy air, Elaine felt as if she were leaving all known worlds behind.
In fact, she was doing precisely that, but it did not occur to her that her own suspicion might be true.
V
At the end of the corridor there was a round gate with a door of gold or brass.
Charley-is-my-darling stopped.
“I can’t go further,” he said. “You and D’joan will have to go on. This is the forgotten antechamber between the tunnel and the upper palace. The Hunter is there. Go on. You’re a person. It is safe. Underpeople usually die in there. Go on.” He nudged her elbow and pulled the sliding door apart.
“But the little girl,” said Elaine.
“She’s not a girl,” said Charley-is-my-darling. “She’s just a dog—as I’m not a man, just a goat brightened and cut and trimmed to look like a man. If you come back, Elaine, I will love you like God or I will kill you. It depends.”
“Depends on what?” asked Elaine. “And what is ‘God?’”
Charley-is-my-darling smiled the quick tricky smile which was wholly insincere and completely friendly, both at the same time. It was probably the trademark of his personality in ordinary times. “You’ll find out about God somewhere else, if you do. Not from us. And the depending is something you’ll know for yourself. You won’t have to wait for me to tell you. Go along now. The whole thing will be over in the next few minutes.”
“But D’joan?” persisted Elaine.
“If it doesn’t work,” said Charley-is-my-darling, “we can always raise another D’joan and wait for another you. The Lady Panc Ashash had promised us that. Go on in!”
He pushed her roughly, so that she stumbled through. Bright light dazzled her and the clean air tasted as good as fresh water on her first day out of the space-ship pod.
The little dog-girl had trotted in beside her.
The door, gold or brass, clanged to behind them.
Elaine and D’joan stood still, side by side, looking forward and upward.
There are many famous paintings of that scene. Most of the paintings show Elaine in rags with the distorted, suffering face of a witch. This is strictly unhistorical. She was wearing her everyday culottes, blouse, and twin over-the-shoulder purses when she went in the other end of Clown Town. This was the usual dress on Fomalhaut III at that time. She had done nothing at all to spoil her clothes, so she must have looked the same when she came out. And D’joan—well, everyone knows what D’joan looked like.
The Hunter met them.
The Hunter met them, and new worlds began.
He was a shortish man, with black curly hair, black eyes that danced with laughter, broad shoulders, and long legs. He walked with a quick sure step. He kept his hands quiet at his side, but the hands did not look tough and calloused, as though they had been terminating lives, even the lives of animals.
“Come up and sit down,” he greeted them. “I’ve been waiting for you both.”
/> Elaine stumbled upward and forward. “Waiting?” she gasped.
“Nothing mysterious,” he said. “I had the viewscreen on. The one into the tunnel. Its connections are shielded, so the police could not have peeped it.”
Elaine stopped dead still. The little dog-girl, one step behind her, stopped too. She tried to draw herself up to her full height. She was about the same tallness that he was. It was difficult, since he stood four or five steps above them. She managed to keep her voice even when she said:
“You know, then?”
“What?”
“All those things they said.”
“Sure I know them,” he smiled. “Why not?”
“But,” stammered Elaine, “about you and me being lovers? That too?”
“That too.” He smiled again. “I’ve been hearing it half my life. Come on up, sit down, and have something to eat. We have a lot of things to do tonight, if history is to be fulfilled through us. What do you eat, little girl?” said he kindly to D’joan. “Raw meat or people food?”
“I’m a finished girl,” said D’joan, “so I prefer chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream.”
“That you shall have,” said the Hunter. “Come, both of you, and sit down.”
They had topped the steps. A luxurious table, already set, was waiting for them. There were three couches around it. Elaine looked for the third person who would join them. Only as she sat down did she realize that he meant to invite the dog-child.
He saw her surprise, but did not comment on it directly.
Instead, he spoke to D’joan.
“You know me, girl, don’t you?”
The child smiled and relaxed for the first time since Elaine had seen her. The dog-girl was really strikingly beautiful when the tension went out of her. The wariness, the quietness, the potential disquiet—these were dog qualities. Now the child seemed wholly human and mature far beyond her years. Her white face had dark, dark brown eyes.
“I’ve seen you lots of times, Hunter. And you’ve told me what would happen if I turned out to be the D’joan. How I would spread the word and meet great trials. How I might die and might not, but people and underpeople would remember my name for thousands of years. You’ve told me almost everything I know—except the things that I can’t talk to you about. You know them too, but you won’t talk, will you?” said the little girl imploringly.
The Rediscovery of Man - The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith - Illustrated Page 33
