“I should think not, not with those habits!” snapped the old man.
“—so I’m his nephew and his heir. But I’m not trying to put the Dictatorship back, even though I should be dictator. I just want to get rid of Colonel Wedder. He has ruined my people, and I am looking for money or weapons or help to make my home-world free.” This was the point, Casher O’Neill knew, at which people either started believing him or did not. If they did not, there was not much he could do about it. If they did, he was sure to get some sympathy. So far, no help. Just sympathy.
But the Instrumentality, while refusing to take action against Colonel Wedder, had given young Casher O’Neill an all-world travel pass—something which a hundred lifetimes of savings could not have purchased for the ordinary man. (His obscene old uncle had gone off to Sunvale, on Ttiollé, the resort planet, to live out his years between the casino and the beach.) Casher O’Neill held the conscience of Mizzer in his hand. Only he, among the star travelers, cared enough to fight for the freedom of the Twelve Niles. Here, now, in this room, there was a turning point.
“I won’t give you anything,” said the Hereditary Dictator, but he said it in a friendly voice. His niece started tugging at his sleeve.
The older man went on. “Stop it, girl. I won’t give you anything, not if you’re part of that rotten lot of Kuraf’s, not unless—”
“Anything, sir, anything, just so that I get help or weapons to go home to the Twelve Niles!”
“All right, then. Unless you open your mind to me. I’m a good telepath myself.”
“Open my mind! Whatever for?” The incongruous indecency of it shocked Casher O’Neill. He’d had men and women and governments ask a lot of strange things from him, but no one before had had the cold impudence to ask him to open his mind. “And why you?” he went on, “What would you get out of it? There’s nothing much in my mind.”
“To make sure,” said the Hereditary Dictator, “that you are not too honest and sharp in your beliefs. If you’re positive that you know what to do, you might be another Colonel Wedder, putting your people through a dozen torments for a Utopia which never quite comes true. If you don’t care at all, you might be like your uncle. He did no real harm. He just stole his planet blind and he had some extraordinary habits which got him talked about between the stars. He never killed a man in his life, did he?”
“No, sir,” said Casher O’Neill, “he never did.” It relieved him to tell the one little good thing about his uncle; there was so very, very little which could be said in Kuraf’s favor.
“I don’t like slobbering old libertines like your uncle,” said Philip Vincent, “but I don’t hate them either. They don’t hurt other people much. As a matter of actual fact, they don’t hurt anyone but themselves. They waste property, though. Like these horses you have on Mizzer. We’d never bring living beings to this world of Pontoppidan, just to play games with. And you know we’re not poor. We’re no Old North Australia, but we have a good income here.”
That, thought Casher O’Neill, is the understatement of the year, but he was a careful young man with a great deal at stake, so he said nothing.
The Dictator looked at him shrewdly. He appreciated the value of Casher’s tactful silence. Genevieve tugged at his sleeve, but he frowned her interruption away.
“If,” said the Hereditary Dictator, “if,” he repeated, “you pass two tests, I will give you a green ruby as big as my head. If my Committee will allow me to do so. But I think I can talk them around. One test is that you let me peep all over your mind, to make sure that I am not dealing with one more honest fool. If you’re too honest, you’re a fool and a danger to mankind. I’ll give you a dinner and ship you off-planet as fast as I can. And the other test is—solve the puzzle of this horse. The one horse on Pontoppidan. Why is the animal here? What should we do with it? If it’s good to eat, how should we cook it? Or can we trade to some other world, like your planet Mizzer, which seems to set a value on horses?”
“Thank you, sir—” said Casher O’Neill.
“But, uncle,” said Genevieve.
“Keep quiet, my darling, and let the young man speak,” said the Dictator.
“—all I was going to ask, is,” said Casher O’Neill, “what’s a green ruby good for? I didn’t even know they came green.”
“That, young man, is a Pontoppidan specialty. We have a geology based on ultra-heavy chemistry. This planet was once a fragment from a giant planet which imploded. The use is simple. With a green ruby you can make a laser beam which will boil away your city of Kaheer in a single sweep. We don’t have weapons here and we don’t believe in them, so I won’t give you a weapon. You’ll have to travel further to find a ship and to get the apparatus for mounting your green ruby. If I give it to you. But you will be one more step along in your fight with Colonel Wedder.”
“Thank you, thank you, most honorable sir!” cried Casher O’Neill.
“But uncle,” said Genevieve, “you shouldn’t have picked those two things because I know the answers.”
“You know all about him,” said the Hereditary Dictator, “by some means of your own?”
Genevieve flushed under her lilac-hued foundation cream. “I know enough for us to know.”
“How do you know it, my darling?”
“I just know,” said Genevieve.
Her uncle made no comment, but he smiled widely and indulgently as if he had heard that particular phrase before.
She stamped her foot. “And I know about the horse, too. All about it.”
“Have you seen it?”
“No.”
“Have you talked to it?”
“Horses don’t talk, uncle.”
“Most underpeople do,” he said.
“This isn’t an underperson, uncle. It’s a plain unmodified Old Earth animal. It never did talk.”
“Then what do you know, my honey?” The uncle was affectionate, but there was the crackle of impatience under his voice.
“I taped it. The whole thing. The story of the horse of Pontoppidan. And I’ve edited it, too. I was going to show it to you this morning, but your staff sent that young man in.”
Casher O’Neill looked his apologies at Genevieve.
She did not notice him. Her eyes were on her uncle.
“Since you’ve done this much, we might as well see it.” He turned to the attendants. “Bring chairs. And drinks. You know mine. The young lady will take tea with lemon. Real tea. Will you have coffee, young man?”
“You have coffee!” cried Casher O’Neill. As soon as he said it, he felt like a fool. Pontoppidan was a rich planet. On most worlds’ exchanges, coffee came out to about two man-years per kilo. Here halftracks crunched their way through gems as they went to load up the frequent trading vessels.
The chairs were put in place. The drinks arrived. The Hereditary Dictator had been momentarily lost in a brown study, as though he were wondering about his promise to Casher O’Neill. He had even murmured to the young man, “Our bargain stands? Never mind what my niece says.” Casher had nodded vigorously. The old man had gone back to frowning at the servants and did not relax until a tiger-man bounded into the room, carrying a tray with acrobatic precision. The chairs were already in place.
The uncle held his niece’s chair for her as a command that she sit down. He nodded Casher O’Neill into a chair on the other side of himself.
He commanded, “Dim the lights…”
The room plunged into semi-darkness.
Without being told, the people took their places immediately behind the three main seats and the underpeople perched or sat on benches and tables behind them. Very little was spoken. Casher O’Neill could sense that Pontoppidan was a well-run place. He began to wonder if the Hereditary Dictator had much real work left to do, if he could fuss that much over a single horse. Perhaps all he did was boss his niece and watch the robots load truckloads of gems into sacks while the underpeople weighed them, listed them, and wrote out the bills for the
customers.
II
There was no screen; this was a good machine.
The planet Pontoppidan came into view, its airless brightness giving strong hints of the mineral riches which might be found.
Here and there enormous domes, such as the one in which this palace was located, came into view.
Genevieve’s own voice, girlish, impulsive, and yet didactic, rang out with the story of her planet. It was as though she had prepared the picture not only for her own uncle but for off-world visitors as well. By Joan, that’s it! thought Casher O’Neill. If they don’t raise much food here, outside of the hydroponics, and don’t have any real People Places, they have to trade: that does mean visitors and many, many of them.
The story was interesting, but the girl herself was more interesting. Her face shone in the shifting light which the images—a meter, perhaps a little more, from the floor—reflected across the room. Casher O’Neill thought that he had never before seen a woman who so peculiarly combined intelligence and charm. She was girl, girl, girl, all the way through; but she was also very smart and pleased with being smart. It betokened a happy life. He found himself glancing covertly at her. Once he caught her glancing, equally covertly, at him. The darkness of the scene enabled them both to pass it off as an accident without embarrassment.
Her viewtape had come to the story of the dipsies, enormous canyons which lay like deep gashes on the surface of the planet. Some of the color views were spectacular beyond belief. Casher O’Neill, as the “appointed one” of Mizzer, had had plenty of time to wander through the non-salacious parts of his uncle’s collections, and he had seen pictures of the most notable worlds.
Never had he seen anything like this. One view showed a sunset against a six-kilometer cliff of a material which looked like solid emerald. The peculiar bright sunshine of Pontoppidan’s small, penetrating, lilac-hued sun ran like living water over the precipice of gems. Even the reduced image, one meter by one meter, was enough to make him catch his breath.
The bottom of the dipsy had vapor emerging in curious cylindrical columns which seemed to erode as they reached two or three times the height of a man. The recorded voice of Genevieve was explaining that the very thin atmosphere of Pontoppidan would not be breathable for another 2,520 years, since the settlers did not wish to squander their resources on a luxury like breathing when the whole planet only had 60,000 inhabitants; they would rather go on with masks and use their wealth in other ways. After all, it was not as though they did not have their domed cities, some of them many kilometers in radius. Besides the usual hydroponics, they had even imported 7.2 hectares of garden soil, 5.5 centimeters deep, together with enough water to make the gardens rich and fruitful. They had bought worms, too, at the price of eight carats of diamond per living worm, in order to keep the soil of the gardens loose and living.
Genevieve’s transcribed voice rang out with pride as she listed these accomplishments of her people, but a note of sadness came in which she returned to the subject of the dipsies. “…and though we would like to live in them and develop their atmospheres, we dare not. There is too much escape of radioactivity. The geysers themselves may or may not be contaminated from one hour to the next. So we just look at them. Not one of them has ever been settled, except for the Hippy Dipsy, where the horse came from. Watch this next picture.”
The camera sheered up, up, up from the surface of the planet. Where it had wandered among mountains of diamonds and valleys of tourmalines, it now took to the blue-black of near, inner space. One of the canyons showed (from high altitude) the grotesque pattern of a human woman’s hips and legs, though what might have been the upper body was lost in a confusion of broken hills which ended in a bright almost-iridescent plain to the North.
“That,” said the real Genevieve, overriding her own voice on the screen, “is the Hippy Dipsy. There, see the blue? That’s the only lake on all of Pontoppidan. And here we drop to the hermit’s house.”
Casher O’Neill almost felt vertigo as the camera plummeted from off-planet into the depths of that immense canyon. The edges of the canyon almost seemed to move like lips with the plunge, opening and folding inward to swallow him up.
Suddenly they were beside a beautiful little lake.
A small hut stood beside the shore.
In the doorway there sat a man, dead.
His body had been there a long time; it was already mummified.
Genevieve’s recorded voice explained the matter: “…in Norstrilian law and custom, they told him that his time had come. They told him to go to the Dying House, since he was no longer fit to live. In Old North Australia, they are so rich that they let everyone live as long as he wants, unless the old person can’t take rejuvenation any more, even with stroon, and unless he or she gets to be a real pest to the living. If that happens, they are invited to go to the Dying House, where they shriek and pant with delirious joy for weeks or days until they finally die of an overload of sheer happiness and excitement…” There was a hesitation, even in the recording. “We never knew why this man refused. He stood off-planet and said that he had seen views of the Hippy Dipsy. He said it was the most beautiful place on all the worlds, and that he wanted to build a cabin there, to live alone, except for his non-human friend. We thought it was some small pet. When we told him that the Hippy Dipsy was very dangerous, he said that this did not matter in the least to him, since he was old and dying anyhow. Then he offered to pay us twelve times our planetary income if we would lease him twelve hectares on the condition of absolute privacy. No pictures, no scanners, no help, no visitors. Just solitude and scenery. His name was Perinö. My great-grandfather asked for nothing more, except the written transfer of credit. When he paid it, Perinö even asked that he be left alone after he was dead. Not even a vault rocket so that he could either orbit Pontoppidan forever or start a very slow journey to nowhere, the way so many people like it. So this is our first picture of him. We took it when the light went off in the People Room and one of the tiger-men told us that he was sure a human consciousness had come to an end in the Hippy Dipsy.
“And we never even thought of the pet. After all, we had never made a picture of him. This is the way he arrived from Perinö’s shack.”
A robot was shown in a control room, calling excitedly in the old Common Tongue.
“People, people! Judgment needed! Moving object coming out of the Hippy Dipsy. Object has improper shape. Not a correct object. Should not rise. Does so anyhow. People, tell me, people, tell me! Destroy or not destroy? This is an improper object. It should fall, not rise. Coining out of the Hippy Dipsy.”
A firm click shut off the robot’s chatter. A well-shaped woman took over. From the nature of her work and the lithe, smooth tread with which she walked, Casher O’Neill suspected that she was of cat origin, but there was nothing in her dress or in her manner to show that she was underpeople.
The woman in the picture lighted a screen.
She moved her hands in the air in front of her, like a blind person feeling his way through open day.
The picture on the inner screen came to resolution.
A face showed in it.
What a face! thought Casher O’Neill, and he heard the other people around him in the viewing room.
The horse!
Imagine a face like that of a newborn cat, thought Casher. Mizzer is full of cats. But imagine the face with a huge mouth, with big yellow teeth—a nose long beyond imagination. Imagine eyes which look friendly. In the picture they were rolling back and forth with exertion, but even there—when they did not feel observed—there was nothing hostile about the set of the eyes. They were tame, companionable eyes. Two ridiculous ears stood high, and a little tuft of golden hair showed on the crest of the head between the ears.
The viewed scene was comical, too. The cat-woman was as astonished as the viewers. It was lucky that she had touched the emergency switch, so that she not only saw the horse, but had recorded herself and her own actions wh
ile bringing him into view.
Genevieve whispered across the chest of the Hereditary Dictator: “Later we found he was a palomino pony. That’s a very special kind of horse. And Perinö had made him immortal, or almost immortal.”
“Sh-h!” said her uncle.
The screen-within-the-screen showed the cat-woman waving her hands in the air some more. The view broadened.
The horse had four hands and no legs, or four legs and no hands, whichever way you want to count them.
The horse was fighting his way up a narrow cleft of rubies which led out of the Hippy Dipsy. He panted heavily. The oxygen bottles on his sides swung wildly as he clambered. He must have seen something, perhaps the image of the cat-woman, because he said a word:
Whay-yay-yay-yay-whay-yay!
The cat-woman in the nearer picture spoke very distinctly:
“Give your name, age, species, and authority for being on this planet.” She spoke clearly and with the utmost possible authority.
The horse obviously heard her. His ears tipped forward. But his reply was the same as before:
Whay-yay-yay!
Casher O’Neill realized that he had followed the mood of the picture and had seen the horse the way that the people on Pontoppidan would have seen him. On second thought, the horse was nothing special, by the standards of the Twelve Niles or the Little Horse Market in the city of Kaheer. It was an old pony stallion, no longer fit for breeding and probably not for riding either. The hair had whitened among the gold; the teeth were worn. The animal showed many injuries and burns. Its only use was to be killed, cut up, and fed to the racing dogs. But he said nothing to the people around him. They were still spellbound by the picture.
The cat-woman repeated:
“Your name isn’t Whayayay. Identify yourself properly: name first.”
The horse answered her with the same word in a higher key.
Apparently forgetting that she had recorded herself as well as the emergency screen, the cat-woman said, “I’ll call real people if you don’t answer! They’ll be annoyed at being bothered.”
The Rediscovery of Man - The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith - Illustrated Page 61
