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.
Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons
Poor communications deter theft;
good communications promote theft;
perfect communications stop theft.
—Van Braam
I
The moon spun. The woman watched. Twenty-one facets had been polished at the moon’s equator. Her function was to arm it. She was Mother Hitton, the weapons mistress of Old North Australia.
She was a ruddy-faced, cheerful blonde of indeterminate age. Her eyes were blue, her bosom heavy, her arms strong. She looked like a mother, but the only child she had ever had died many generations ago. Now she acted as mother to a planet, not to a person; the Norstrilians slept well because they knew she was watching. The weapons slept their long, sick sleep.
This night she glanced for the two-hundredth time at the warning bank. The bank was quiet. No danger lights shone. Yet she felt an enemy out somewhere in the universe—an enemy waiting to strike at her and her world, to snatch at the immeasurable wealth of the Norstrilians—and she snorted with impatience. Come along, little man, she thought. Come along, little man, and die. Don’t keep me waiting.
She smiled when she recognized the absurdity of her own thought.
She waited for him.
And he did not know it.
He, the robber, was relaxed enough. He was Benjacomin Bozart, and was highly trained in the arts of relaxation.
No one at Sunvale, here on Ttiollé, could suspect that he was a senior warden of the Guild of Thieves, reared under the light of the starry-violet star. No one could smell the odor of Viola Siderea upon him. “Viola Siderea,” the Lady Ru had said, “was once the most beautiful of worlds and it is now the most rotten. Its people were once models for mankind, and now they are thieves, liars, and killers. You can smell their souls in the open day.” The Lady Ru had died a long time ago. She was much respected, but she was wrong. The robber did not smell to others at all. He knew it. He was no more “wrong” than a shark approaching a school of cod. Life’s nature is to live, and he had been nurtured to live as he had to live—by seeking prey.
How else could he live? Viola Siderea had gone bankrupt a long time ago, when the photonic sails had disappeared from space and the planoforming ships began to whisper their way between the stars. His ancestors had been left to die on an off-trail planet. They refused to die. Their ecology shifted and they became predators upon man, adapted by time and genetics to their deadly tasks. And he, the robber, was champion of all his people—the best of their best.
He was Benjacomin Bozart.
He had sworn to rob Old North Australia or to die in the attempt, and he had no intention of dying.
The beach at Sunvale was warm and lovely. Ttiollé was a free and casual transit planet. His weapons were luck and himself: he planned to play both well.
The Norstrilians could kill.
So could he.
At this moment, in this place, he was a happy tourist at a lovely beach. Elsewhere, elsewhen, he could become a ferret among conies, a hawk among doves.
Benjacomin Bozart, thief and warden. He did not know that someone was waiting for him. Someone who did not know his name was prepared to waken death, just for him. He was still serene.
Mother Hitton was not serene. She sensed him dimly but could not yet spot him.
One of her weapons snored. She turned it over.
A thousand stars away, Benjacomin Bozart smiled as he walked toward the beach.
II
Benjacomin felt like a tourist. His tanned face was tranquil. His proud, hooded eyes were calm, His handsome mouth, even without its charming smile, kept a suggestion of pleasantness at its corners. He looked attractive without seeming odd in the least. He looked much younger than he actually was. He walked with springy, happy steps along the beach of Sunvale.
The waves rolled in, white-crested, like the breakers of Mother Earth. The Sunvale people were proud of the way their world resembled Manhome itself. Few of them had ever seen Manhome, but they had all heard a bit of history and most of them had a passing anxiety when they thought of the ancient government still wielding political power across the depth of space. They did not like the old Instrumentality of Earth, but they respected and feared it. The waves might remind them of the pretty side of Earth; they did not want to remember the not-so-pretty side.
This man was like the pretty side of old Earth. They could not sense the power within him. The Sunvale people smiled absently at him as he walked past them along the shoreline.
The atmosphere was quiet and everything around him serene. He turned his face to the sun. He closed his eyes. He let the warm sunlight beat through his eyelids, illuminating him with its comfort and its reassuring touch.
Benjacomin dreamed of the greatest theft that any man had ever planned. He dreamed of stealing a huge load of the wealth from the richest world that mankind had ever built. He thought of what would happen when he would finally bring riches back to the planet of Viola Siderea where he had been reared. Benjacomin turned his face away from the sun and languidly looked over the other people on the beach.
There were no Norstrilians in sight yet. They were easy enough to recognize. Big people with red complexions; superb athletes and yet, in their own way, innocent, young, and very tough. He had trained for this theft for two hundred years, his life prolonged for the purpose by the Guild of Thieves on Viola Siderea. He himself embodied the dreams of his own planet, a poor planet once a crossroads of commerce, now sunken to being a minor outpost for spoliation and pilferage.
He saw a Norstrilian woman come out from the hotel and go down to the beach. He waited, and he looked, and he dreamed. He had a question to ask and no adult Australian would answer it.
“Funny,” thought he, “that I call them ‘Australians’ even now. That’s the old, old Earth name for them—rich, brave, tough people. Fighting children standing on half the world…and now they are the tyrants of all mankind. They hold the wealth. They have the santaclara, and other people live or die depending upon the commerce they have with the Norstrilians. But I won’t. And my people won’t. We’re men who are wolves to man.”
Benjacomin waited gracefully. Tanned by the light of many suns, he looked forty though he was two hundred. He dressed casually, by the standards of a vacationer. He might have been an intercultural salesman, a senior gambler, an assistant starport manager. He might even have been a detective working along the commerce lanes. He wasn’t. He was a thief. And he was so good a thief that people turned to him and put their property in his hands because he was reassuring, calm, gray-eyed, blond-haired. Benjacomin waited. The woman glanced at him, a quick glance full of open suspicion.
What she saw must have calmed her. She went on past. She called back over the dune, “Come on, Johnny, we can swim out here.” A little boy, who looked eight or ten years old, came over the dune top, running toward his mother.
Benjacomin tensed like a cobra. His eyes became sharp, his eyelids narrowed.
This was the prey. Not too young, not too old. If the victim had been too young he wouldn’t know the answer; if the victim were too old it was no use taking him on. Norstrilians were famed in combat; adults were mentally and physically too strong to warrant attack.
Benjacomin knew that every thief who had approached the planet of the Norstrilians—who had tried to raid the dream world of Old North Australia—had gotten out of contact with his people and had died. There was no word of any of them.
And yet he knew that hundreds of thousands of Norstrilians must know the secret. They now and then made jokes about it. He had heard these jokes when he was a young man, and now he was more than an old man without onc
e coming near the answer. Life was expensive. He was well into his third lifetime and the lifetimes had been purchased honestly by his people. Good thieves all of them, paying out hard-stolen money to obtain the medicine to let their greatest thief remain living. Benjacomin didn’t like violence. But when violence prepared the way to the greatest theft of all time, he was willing to use it.
The woman looked at him again. The mask of evil which had flashed across his face faded into benignity; he calmed. She caught him in that moment of relaxation. She liked him.
She smiled and, with that awkward hesitation so characteristic of the Norstrilians, she said, “Could you mind my boy a bit while I go in the water? I think we’ve seen each other here at the hotel.”
“I don’t mind,” said he. “I’d be glad to. Come here, son.”
Johnny walked across the sunlit dunes to his own death. He came within reach of his mother’s enemy.
But the mother had already turned.
The trained hand of Benjacomin Bozart reached out. He seized the child by the shoulder. He turned the boy toward him, forcing him down. Before the child could cry out, Benjacomin had the needle into him with the truth drug.
All Johnny reacted to was pain, and then a hammer-blow inside his own skull as the powerful drug took force.
Benjacomin looked out over the water. The mother was swimming. She seemed to be looking back at them. She was obviously unworried. To her, the child seemed to be looking at something the stranger was showing him in a relaxed, easy way.
“Now, sonny,” said Benjacomin, “tell me, what’s the outside defense?”
The boy didn’t answer.
“What is the outer defense, sonny? What is the outer defense?” repeated Benjacomin. The boy still didn’t answer.
Something close to horror ran over the skin of Benjacomin Bozart as he realized that he had gambled his safety on this planet, gambled the plans themselves for a chance to break the secret of the Norstrilians.
He had been stopped by simple, easy devices. The child had already been conditioned against attack. Any attempt to force knowledge out of the child brought on a conditioned reflex of total muteness. The boy was literally unable to talk.
Sunlight gleaming on her wet hair, the mother turned around and called back, “Are you all right, Johnny?”
Benjacomin waved to her instead. “I’m showing him my pictures, ma’am. He likes ’em. Take your time.” The mother hesitated and then turned back to the water and swam slowly away.
Johnny, taken by the drug, sat lightly, like an invalid, on Benjacomin’s lap.
Benjacomin said, “Johnny, you’re going to die now and you will hurt terribly if you don’t tell me what I want to know.” The boy struggled weakly against his grasp. Benjacomin repeated, “I’m going to hurt you if you don’t tell me what I want to know. What are the outer defenses? What are the outer defenses?”
The child struggled and Benjacomin realized that the boy was putting up a fight to comply with the orders, not a fight to get away. He let the child slip through his hands and the boy put out a finger and began writing on the wet sand. The letters stood out.
A man’s shadow loomed behind them.
Benjacomin, alert, ready to spin, kill, or run, slipped to the ground beside the child and said, “That’s a jolly puzzle. That is a good one. Show me some more.” He smiled up at the passing adult. The man was a stranger. The stranger gave him a very curious glance which became casual when he saw the pleasant face of Benjacomin, so tenderly and so agreeably playing with the child.
The fingers were still making the letters in the sand.
There stood the riddle in letters: MOTHER HITTON’S LITTUL KITTONS.
The woman was coming back from the sea, the mother with questions. Benjacomin stroked the sleeve of his coat and brought out his second needle, a shallow poison which it would take days or weeks of laboratory work to detect. He thrust it directly into the boy’s brain, slipping the needle up behind the skin at the edge of the hairline. The hair shadowed the tiny prick. The incredibly hard needle slipped under the edge of the skull. The child was dead.
Murder was accomplished. Benjacomin casually erased the secret from the sand. The woman came nearer. He called to her, his voice full of pleasant concern. “Ma’am, you’d better come here, I think your son has fainted from the heat.”
He gave the mother the body of her son. Her face changed to alarm. She looked frightened and alert. She didn’t know how to meet this.
For a dreadful moment she looked into his eyes.
Two hundred years of training took effect…She saw nothing. The murderer did not shine with murder. The hawk was hidden beneath the dove. The heart was masked by the trained face.
Benjacomin relaxed in professional assurance. He had been prepared to kill her too, although he was not sure that he could kill an adult, female Norstrilian. Very helpfully said he, “You stay here with him. I’ll run to the hotel and get help. I’ll hurry.”
He turned and ran. A beach attendant saw him and ran toward him. “The child’s sick,” he shouted. He came to the mother in time to see blunt, puzzled tragedy on her face and with it, something more than tragedy: doubt.
“He’s not sick,” said she. “He’s dead.”
“He can’t be.” Benjacomin looked attentive. He felt attentive. He forced the sympathy to pour out of his posture, out of all the little muscles of his face. “He can’t be. I was talking to him just a minute ago. We were doing little puzzles in the sand.”
The mother spoke with a hollow, broken voice that sounded as though it would never find the right chords for human speech again, but would go on forever with the ill-attuned flats of unexpected grief. “He’s dead,” she said. “You saw him die and I guess I saw him die, too. I can’t tell what’s happened. The child was full of santaclara. He had a thousand years to live but now he’s dead. What’s your name?”
Benjacomin said, “Eldon. Eldon the salesman, ma’am. I live here lots of times.”
III
“Mother Hitton’s littul kittons. Mother Hitton’s littul kittons.”
The silly phrase ran in his mind. Who was Mother Hitton? Who was she the mother of? What were kittons? Were they a misspelling for “kittens”? Little cats? Or were they something else?
Had he killed a fool to get a fool’s answer?
How many more days did he have to stay there with the doubtful, staggered woman? How many days did he have to watch and wait? He wanted to get back to Viola Siderea; to take the secret, bad as it was, for his people to study. Who was Mother Hitton?
He forced himself out of his room and went downstairs.
The pleasant monotony of a big hotel was such that the other guests looked interestedly at him. He was the man who had watched while the child died on the beach.
Some lobby-living scandalmongers that stayed there had made up fantastic stories that he had killed the child. Others attacked the stories, saying they knew perfectly well who Eldon was. He was Eldon the salesman. It was ridiculous.
People hadn’t changed much, even though the ships with the Go-Captains sitting at their hearts whispered between the stars, even though people shuffled between worlds—when they had the money to pay their passage back and forth—like leaves falling in soft, playful winds. Benjacomin faced a tragic dilemma. He knew very well that any attempt to decode the answer would run directly into the protective devices set up by the Norstrilians.
Old North Australia was immensely wealthy. It was known the length and breadth of all the stars that they had hired mercenaries, defensive spies, hidden agents, and alerting devices.
Even Manhome—Mother Earth herself, whom no money could buy—was bribed by the drug of life. An ounce of the santaclara drug, reduced, crystallized, and called “stroon,” could give forty to sixty years of life. Stroon entered the rest of the Earths by ounces and pounds, but it was refined back on North Australia by the ton. With treasure like this, the Norstrilians owned an unimaginable world whose resour
ces overreached all conceivable limits of money. They could buy anything. They could pay with other people’s lives.
For hundreds of years they had given secret funds to buying foreigners’ services to safeguard their own security.
Benjacomin stood there in the lobby: “Mother Hitton’s littul kittons.”
He had all the wisdom and wealth of a thousand worlds stuck in his mind but he didn’t dare ask anywhere as to what it meant.
Suddenly he brightened.
He looked like a man who had thought of a good game to play, a pleasant diversion to be welcomed, a companion to be remembered, a new food to be tasted. He had had a very happy thought.
There was one source that wouldn’t talk. The library. He could at least check the obvious, simple things, and find out what there was already in the realm of public knowledge concerning the secret he had taken from the dying boy.
His own safety had not been wasted, Johnny’s life had not been thrown away, if he could find any one of the four words as a key. Mother or Hitton or Littul, in its special meaning, or Kitton. He might yet break through to the loot of Norstrilia.
He swung jubilantly, turning on the ball of his right foot. He moved lightly and pleasantly toward the billiard room, beyond which lay the library. He went in.
This was a very expensive hotel and very old-fashioned. It even had books made out of paper, with genuine bindings. Benjacomin crossed the room. He saw that they had the Galactic Encyclopedia in two hundred volumes. He took down the volume headed “Hi-Hi.” He opened it from the rear, looking for the name “Hitton,” and there it was, “Hitton, Benjamin—pioneer of Old North Australia. Said to be originator of part of the defense system. Lived A.D. 10719-17213.” That was all. Benjacomin moved among the books. The word “kittons” in that peculiar spelling did not occur anywhere, neither in the encyclopedia nor in any other list maintained by the library. He walked out and upstairs, back to his room.
The Rediscovery of Man - The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith - Illustrated Page 48
