She knew this.
In the middle of the room there was a tuner. The tuner was a direct, empathic relay, capable of picking up the simpler range of telepathic communications. Into this tuner went the concentrated emotions of Mother Hitton’s littul kittons.
The rage, the hate, the hunger, the sex were all carried far beyond the limits of the tolerable, and then all were thereupon amplified. And then the waveband on which this telepathic control went out was amplified, right there beyond the studio, on the high towers that swept the mountain ridge, up and beyond the valley in which the laboratory lay. And Mother Hitton’s moon, spinning geometrically, bounced the relay into a hollow englobement.
From the faceted moon, it went to the satellites—sixteen of them, apparently part of the weather control system. These blanketed not only space, but nearby subspace. The Norstrilians had thought of everything.
The short shocks of an alert came from Mother Hitton’s transmitter bank.
A call came. Her thumb went numb.
The noise shrieked.
The mink awakened.
Immediately, the room was full of chattering, scraping, hissing, growling, and howling.
Under the sound of the animal voices, there was the other sound: a scratchy, snapping sound like hail falling on a frozen lake. It was the individual claws of hundreds of mink trying to tear their way through metal panels.
Mother Hitton heard a gurgle. One of the minks had succeeded in tearing its paw loose and had obviously started to work on its own throat. She recognized the tearing fur, the ripping of veins.
She listened for the cessation of that individual voice, but she couldn’t be sure. The others were making too much noise. One mink less.
Where she sat, she was partly shielded from the telepathic relay, but not altogether. She herself, old as she was, felt queer wild dreams go through her. She thrilled with hate as she thought of beings suffering out beyond her—suffering terribly, since they were not masked by the built-in defenses of the Norstrilian communications system.
She felt the wild throb of long-forgotten lust.
She hungered for things she had not known she remembered. She went through the spasms of fear that the hundreds of animals expressed.
Underneath this, her sane mind kept asking. “How much longer can I take it? How much longer must I take it? Lord God, be good to your people here on this world! Be good to poor old me.”
The green light went on.
She pressed a button on the other side of her chair. The gas hissed in. As she passed into unconsciousness, she knew that her kittons passed into instant unconsciousness too.
She would waken before they did and then her duties would begin: checking the living ones, taking out the one that had clawed out its own throat, taking out those who had died of heart attacks, re-arranging them, dressing their wounds, treating them alive and asleep—asleep and happy—breeding, living in their sleep—until the next call should come to waken them for the defense of the treasures which blessed and cursed her native world.
VI
Everything had gone exactly right. Lavender had found an illegal planoform ship. This was no inconsequential accomplishment, since planoform ships were very strictly licensed and obtaining an illegal one was a chore on which a planet full of crooks could easily have worked a lifetime.
Lavender had been lavished with money—Benjacomin’s money.
The honest wealth of the thieves’ planet had gone in and had paid the falsifications and great debts, imaginary transactions that were fed to the computers for ships and cargoes and passengers that would be almost untraceably commingled in the commerce of ten thousand worlds.
“Let him pay for it,” said Lavender, to one of his confederates, an apparent criminal who was also a Norstrilian agent. “This is paying good money for bad. You better spend a lot of it.”
Just before Benjacomin took off Lavender sent on an additional message.
He sent it directly through the Go-Captain, who usually did not carry messages. The Go-Captain was a relay commander of the Norstrilian fleet, but he had been carefully ordered not to look like it.
The message concerned the planoform license—another twenty-odd tablets of stroon which could mortgage Viola Siderea for hundreds upon hundreds of years. The captain said: “I don’t have to send that through. The answer is yes.”
Benjacomin came into the control room. This was contrary to regulations, but he had hired the ship to violate regulations.
The Captain looked at him sharply. “You’re a passenger. Get out.”
Benjacomin said: “You have my little yacht on board. I am the only man here outside of your people.”
“Get out. There’s a fine if you’re caught here.”
“It does not matter,” Benjacomin said. “I’ll pay it.”
“You will, will you?” said the Captain. “You would not be paying twenty tablets of stroon. That’s ridiculous. Nobody could get that much stroon.”
Benjacomin laughed, thinking of the thousands of tablets he would soon have. All he had to do was to leave the planoform ship behind, strike once, go past the kittons and come back.
His power and his wealth came from the fact that he knew he could now reach it. The mortgage of twenty tablets of stroon against this planet was a low price to pay if it would pay off at thousands to one. The Captain replied: “It’s not worth it, it just is not worth risking twenty tablets for your being here. But I can tell you how to get inside the Norstrilian communications net if that is worth twenty-seven tablets.”
Benjacomin went tense.
For a moment he thought he might die. All this work, all this training—the dead boy on the beach, the gamble with the credit, and now this unsuspected antagonist!
He decided to face it out. “What do you know?” said Benjacomin.
“Nothing,” said the Captain.
“You said ‘Norstrilia.’”
“That I did,” said the Captain.
“If you said Norstrilia, you must have guessed it. Who told you?”
“Where else would a man go if you look for infinite riches? If you get away with it. Twenty tablets is nothing to a man like you.”
“It’s two hundred years’ worth of work from three hundred thousand people,” said Benjacomin grimly.
“When you get away with it, you will have more than twenty tablets, and so will your people.”
And Benjacomin thought of the thousands and thousands of tablets. “Yes, that I know.”
“If you don’t get away with it, you’ve got the card.”
“That’s right. All right. Get me inside the net. I’ll pay the twenty-seven tablets.”
“Give me the card.”
Benjacomin refused. He was a trained thief, and he was alert to thievery. Then he thought again. This was the crisis of his life. He had to gamble a little on somebody.
He had to wager the card. “I’ll mark it and then I’ll give it back to you.” Such was his excitement that Benjacomin did not notice that the card went into a duplicator, that the transaction was recorded, that the message went back to Olympia Center, that the loss and the mortgage against the planet of Viola Siderea should be credited to certain commercial agencies in Earth for three hundred years to come.
Benjacomin got the card back. He felt like an honest thief.
If he did die, the card would be lost and his people would not have to pay. If he won, he could pay that little bit out of his own pocket.
Benjacomin sat down. The Go-captain signaled to his pinlighters. The ship lurched.
For half a subjective hour they moved, the Captain wearing a helmet of space upon his head, sensing and grasping and guessing his way, stepping stone to stepping stone, right back to his home. He had to fumble the passage, or else Benjacomin might guess that he was in the hands of double agents.
But the captain was well trained. Just as well trained as Benjacomin.
Agents and thieves, they rode together.
The
y planoformed inside the communications net. Benjacomin shook hands with them. “You are allowed to materialize as soon as I call.”
“Good luck, Sir,” said the Captain.
“Good luck to me,” said Benjacomin.
He climbed into his space yacht. For less than a second in real space, the gray expanse of Norstrilia loomed up. The ship which looked like a simple warehouse disappeared into planoform, and the yacht was on its own.
The yacht dropped.
As it dropped, Benjacomin had a hideous moment of confusion and terror.
He never knew the woman down below but she sensed him plainly as he received the wrath of the much-amplified kittons. His conscious mind quivered under the blow. With a prolongation of subjective experience which made one or two seconds seem like months of hurt drunken bewilderment, Benjacomin Bozart swept beneath the tide of his own personality. The moon relay threw minkish minds against him. The synapses of his brain re-formed to conjure up might-have-beens, terrible things that never happened to any man. Then his knowing mind whited out in an overload of stress.
His subcortical personality lived on a little longer.
His body fought for several minutes. Mad with lust and hunger, the body arched in the pilot’s seat, the mouth bit deep into his own arm. Driven by lust, the left hand tore at his face, ripping out his left eyeball. He screeched with animal lust as he tried to devour himself…not entirely without success.
The overwhelming telepathic message of Mother Hitton’s littul kittons ground into his brain.
The mutated minks were fully awake.
The relay satellites had poisoned all the space around him with the craziness to which the minks were bred.
Bozart’s body did not live long. After a few minutes, the arteries were open, the head slumped forward, and the yacht was dropping helplessly toward the warehouses which it had meant to raid. Norstrilian police picked it up.
The police themselves were ill. All of them were ill. All of them were white-faced. Some of them had vomited. They had gone through the edge of the mink defense. They had passed through the telepathic band at its thinnest and weakest point. This was enough to hurt them badly.
They did not want to know.
They wanted to forget.
One of the younger policemen looked at the body and said, “What on earth could do that to a man?”
“He picked the wrong job,” said the police captain.
The young policeman said: “What’s the wrong job?”
“The wrong job is trying to rob us, boy. We are defended, and we don’t want to know how.”
The young policeman, humiliated and on the verge of anger, looked almost as if he would defy his superior, while keeping his eyes away from the body of Benjacomin Bozart.
The older man said: “It’s all right. He did not take long to die and this is the man who killed the boy Johnny, not very long ago.”
“Oh, him? So soon?”
“We brought him.” The old police officer nodded. “We let him find his death. That’s how we live. Tough, isn’t it?”
The ventilators whispered softly, gently. The animals slept again. A jet of air poured down on Mother Hitton. The telepathic relay was still on. She could feel herself, the sheds, the faceted moon, the little satellites. Of the robber there was no sign.
She stumbled to her feet. Her raiment was moist with perspiration. She needed a shower and fresh clothes…
Back at Manhome, the Commercial Credit Circuit called shrilly for human attention. A junior subchief of the Instrumentality walked over to the machine and held out his hand.
The machine dropped a card neatly into his fingers.
He looked at the card.
“Debit Viola Siderea—credit Earth Contingency—subcredit Norstrilian account—four hundred million man megayears.”
Though all alone, he whistled to himself in the empty room. “We’ll all be dead, stroon or no stroon, before they finish paying that!” He went off to tell his friends the odd news.
The machine, not getting its card back, made another one.
Alpha Ralpha Boulevard
We were drunk with happiness in those early years. Everybody was, especially the young people. These were the first years of the Rediscovery of Man, when the Instrumentality dug deep in the treasury, reconstructing the old cultures, the old languages, and even the old troubles. The nightmare of perfection had taken our forefathers to the edge of suicide. Now under the leadership of the Lord Jestocost and the Lady Alice More, the ancient civilizations were rising like great land masses out of the sea of the past.
I myself was the first man to put a postage stamp on a letter, after fourteen thousand years. I took Virginia to hear the first piano recital. We watched at the eye-machine when cholera was released in Tasmania, and we saw the Tasmanians dancing in the streets, now that they did not have to be protected any more. Everywhere, things became exciting. Everywhere, men and women worked with a wild will to build a more imperfect world.
I myself went into a hospital and came out French. Of course I remembered my early life; I remembered it, but it did not matter. Virginia was French, too, and we had the years of our future lying ahead of us like ripe fruit hanging in an orchard of perpetual summers. We had no idea when we would die. Formerly, I would be able to go to bed and think, “The government has given me four hundred years. Three hundred and seventy-four years from now, they will stop the stroon injections and I will then die.” Now I knew anything could happen. The safety devices had been turned off. The diseases ran free. With luck, and hope, and love, I might live a thousand years. Or I might die tomorrow. I was free.
We revelled in every moment of the day.
Virginia and I bought the first French newspaper to appear since the Most Ancient World fell. We found delight in the news, even in the advertisements. Some parts of the culture were hard to reconstruct. It was difficult to talk about foods of which only the names survived, but the homunculi and the machines, working tirelessly in Downdeep-downdeep, kept the surface of the world filled with enough novelties to fill anyone’s heart with hope. We knew that all of this was make-believe, and yet it was not. We knew that when the diseases had killed the statistically correct number of people, they would be turned off; when the accident rate rose too high, it would stop without our knowing why. We knew that over us all, the Instrumentality watched. We had confidence that the Lord Jestocost and the Lady Alice More would play with us as friends and not use us as victims of a game.
Take, for example, Virginia. She had been called Menerima, which represented the coded sounds of her birth number. She was small, verging on chubby; she was compact; her head was covered with tight brown curls; her eyes were a brown so deep and so rich that it took sunlight, with her squinting against it, to bring forth the treasures of her irises. I had known her well, but never known her. I had seen her often, but never seen her with my heart, until we met just outside the hospital, after becoming French.
I was pleased to see an old friend and started to speak in the Old Common Tongue, but the words jammed, and as I tried to speak it was not Menerima any longer, but someone of ancient beauty, rare and strange—someone who had wandered into these latter days from the treasure worlds of time past. All I could do was to stammer:
“What do you call yourself now?” And I said it in ancient French.
She answered in the same language, “Je m’appelle Virginie.”
Looking at her and falling in love was a single process. There was something strong, something wild in her, wrapped and hidden by the tenderness and youth of her girlish body. It was as though destiny spoke to me out of the certain brown eyes, eyes which questioned me surely and wonderingly, just as we both questioned the fresh new world which lay about us.
“May I?” said I, offering her my arm, as I had learned in the hours of hypnopedia. She took my arm and we walked away from the hospital.
I hummed a tune which had come into my mind, along with the ancient French lan
guage.
She tugged gently on my arm, and smiled up at me.
“What is it,” she asked, “or don’t you know?”
The words came soft and unbidden to my lips and I sang it very quietly, muting my voice in her curly hair, half-singing half-whispering the popular song which had poured into my mind with all the other things which the Rediscovery of Man had given me:
She wasn’t the woman I went to seek.
I met her by the merest chance.
She did not speak the French of France,
But the surded French of Martinique.
She wasn’t rich. She wasn’t chic.
She had a most entrancing glance,
And that was all…
Suddenly I ran out of words. “I seem to have forgotten the rest of it. It’s called ‘Macouba’ and it has something to do with a wonderful island which the ancient French called Martinique.”
“I know where that is,” she cried. She had been given the same memories that I had. “You can see it from Earthport!”
This was a sudden return to the world we had known. Earthport stood on its single pedestal, twelve miles high, at the eastern edge of the small continent. At the top of it, the Lords worked amid machines which had no meaning any more. There the ships whispered their way in from the stars. I had seen pictures of it, but I had never been there. As a matter of fact, I had never known anyone who had actually been up Earthport. Why should we have gone? We might not have been welcome, and we could always see it just as well through the pictures on the eye-machine. For Menerima—familiar, dully pleasant, dear little Menerima—to have gone there was uncanny. It made me think that in the Old Perfect World things had not been as plain or forthright as they seemed.
Virginia, the new Menerima, tried to speak in the Old Common Tongue, but she gave up and used French instead:
“My aunt,” she said, meaning a kindred lady, since no one had had aunts for thousands of years, “was a Believer, She took me to the Abba-dingo. To get holiness and luck.”
The Rediscovery of Man - The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith - Illustrated Page 50
