“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 he 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 Joy 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.
Tree spat out the words, “You’ve done it then. This time you will violate all the laws and kill me. This fashionable oaf is not just one more trick.”
A voice behind Casher called very softly, “I don’t know.” It was a man’s voice, old, slow, and tired.
Casher had heard no one come in.
Casher’s years of training stood him in good stead. He skipped sidewise in four or five steps, never taking his eyes off John Joy Tree, until the other man had come into his field of vision.
The man who stood there was tall, thin, yellow-skinned, and yellow-haired. His eyes were an old sick blue. He glanced at Casher and said, “I’m Madigan.”
Was this the master? thought Casher. Was this the being whom that lovely child had been imprinted to adore?
He had no more time for thought.
Madigan whispered, as if to no one in particular, “You find me waking. You find him sane. Watch out.”
Madigan lunged for the pilot’s controls, but his tall, thin old body could not move very fast.
John Joy Tree jumped out of his chair and ran for the controls, too.
Casher tripped him.
Tree fell, rolled over, and got halfway up, one knee and one foot on the floor. In his hand there shimmered a knife very much like Casher’s own.
Casher felt the flame of his body as some unknown force flung him against the wall. He stared, wild with fear.
Madigan had climbed into the pilot’s seat and was fiddling with the controls as though he might blow Henriada out of space at any second. John Joy Tree glanced at his old host and then turned his attention to the man in front of him.
There was another man there.
Casher knew him.
He looked familiar.
It was himself, rising and leaping like a snake, left arm weaving the knife for the neck of John Joy Tree.
The image-Casher hit Tree with a thud that resounded through the room.
Tree’s bright blue eyes had turned crazy-mad. His knife caught the image-Casher in the abdomen, thrust hard and deep, and left the young man gasping on the floor, trying to push the bleeding entrails back into his belly. The blood poured from the image-Casher all over the rug.
Blood!
Casher suddenly knew what he had to do and how he could do it—all without anybody telling him.
He created a third Casher on the far side of the room and gave him iron gloves. There was himself, unheeded against the wall; there was the dying Casher on the floor; there was the third, stalking toward John Joy Tree.
“Death is here,” screamed the third Casher, with a voice which Casher recognized as a fierce crazy simulation of his own.
Tree whirled around. “You’re not real,” he said.
Image-Casher stepped around the console and hit Tree with an iron glove. The pilot jumped away, a hand reaching up to his bleeding face.
John Joy Tree screamed at Madigan, who was playing with the dials without even putting on the pinlighter helmet.
“You got her in here,” he screamed, “you got her in here with this young man! Get her out!”
“Who?” said Madigan softly and absentmindedly.
“T’ruth. That witch of yours. I claim guest-right by all the ancient laws. Get her out.”
The real-Casher, standing at the wall, did not know how he controlled the image-Casher with the iron gloves, but control him he did. He made him speak, in a voice as frantic as Tree’s own
voice:
“John Joy Tree, I do not bring you death. I bring you blood. My iron hands will pulp your eyes. Blind sockets will stare in your face. My iron hands will split your teeth and break your jaw a thousand times, so that no doctor, no machine will ever fix you. My iron hands will crush your arms, turn your hands into living rags. My iron hands will break your legs. Look at the blood, John Joy Tree…There will be a lot more blood. You have killed me once. See that young man on the floor.”
They both glanced at the first image-Casher, who had finally shuddered into death in the great rug. A pool of blood lay in front of the body of the youth.
John Joy Tree turned to the image-Casher and said to him, “You’re the Hechizera of Gonfalon. You can’t scare me. You’re a turtle-girl and can’t really hurt me.”
“Look at me,” said real-Casher.
John Joy Tree glanced back and forth between the duplicates.
Fright began to show.
Both the Cashers now shouted, in crazy voices which came from the depths of Casher’s own mind:
“Blood you shall have! Blood and ruin. But we will not kill you. You will live in ruin, blind, emasculated, armless, legless. You will be fed through tubes. You cannot die and you will weep for death but no one will hear you.”
“Why?” screamed Tree. “Why? What have I done to you?”
“You remind me,” howled Casher, “of my home. You remind me of the blood poured by Colonel Wedder when the poor useless victims of my uncle’s lust paid with their blood for his revenge. You remind me of myself, John Joy Tree, and I am going to punish you as I myself might be punished.”
Lost in the mists of lunacy, John Joy Tree was still a brave man.
He flung his knife unexpectedly at real-Casher. Image-Casher, in a tremendous bound, leaped across the room and caught the knife on an iron glove. It clattered against the iron glove and then fell silent onto the rug.
Casher saw what he had to see.
He saw the place of Kaheer, covered with death, with the intimate sticky silliness of sudden death—the dead men holding little packages they had tried to save, the girls, with their throats cut, lying in their own blood but with the lipstick still even and the eyebrow-pencil still pretty on their dead faces. He saw a dead child, ripped open from groin upward to chest, holding a broken doll while the child itself, now dead, looked like a broken doll itself. He saw these things and he made John Joy Tree see them, too.
“You’re a bad man,” said John Joy Tree.
“I am very bad,” said Casher.
“Will you let me go, if I never enter this room again?”
Image-Casher snapped off, both the body on the floor and the fighter with the iron gloves. Casher did not know how T’ruth had taught him the lost art of fighter-replication, but he had certainly done it well.
“The lady told me you could go.”
“But who are you going to use,” said John Joy Tree, calm, sad, and logical, “for your dreams of blood if you don’t use me?”
“I don’t know,” said Casher. “I follow my fate. Go now, if you do not want my iron gloves to crush you.”
John Joy Tree trotted out of the room, beaten.
Only then did Casher, exhausted, grab a curtain to hold himself upright and look around the room freely.
The evil atmosphere had gone.
Madigan, old though he was, had locked all the controls on standby.
He walked over to Casher and spoke. “Thank you. She did not invent you. She found you and put you to my service.”
Casher coughed out, “The girl. Yes.”
“My girl,” corrected Madigan.
“Your girl,” said Casher, remembering the sight of that slight feminine body, those budding breasts, the sensitive lips, the tender eyes.
“She could not have thought you up. She is my dead wife over again. The citizeness Agatha might have done it. But not T’ruth.”
Casher looked at the man as he talked. The host wore the bottoms of some very cheap yellow pajamas and a washable bathrobe which had once been stripes of purple, lavender, and white. Now it was faded, like its wearer. Casher also saw the white clean plastic surgical implants on the man’s arms, where the machines and tubes hooked in to keep him alive.
“I sleep a lot,” said Murray Madigan, “but I am still the master of Beauregard. I am grateful to you.”
The hand was frail, withered, dry, without strength.
The old voice whispered: “Tell her to reward you. You can have anything on my estate. Or you can have anything on Henriada. She manages it all for me.” Then the old blue eyes opened wide and sharp and Murray Madigan was once again the man, just momentarily, that he had been hundreds of years ago—a Norstrilian trader, sharp, shrewd, wise, and not unkind. He added sharply: “Enjoy her company. She is a good child. But do not take her. Do not try to take her.”
“Why not?” said Casher, surprised at his own bluntness.
“Because if you do, she will die. She is mine. Imprinted to me. I had her made and she is mine. Without me she would die in a few days. Do not take her.”
Casher saw the old man leave the room by a secret door. He left himself, the way he had come in. He did not see Madigan again for two days, and by that time the old man had gone far back into his cataleptic sleep.
XI
Two days later T’ruth took Casher to visit the sleeping Madigan.
“You can’t go in there,” said Eunice in a shocked voice. “Nobody goes in there. That’s the master’s room.”
“I’m taking him in,” said T’ruth calmly.
She had pulled a cloth-of-gold curtain aside and she was spinning the combination locks on a massive steel door. It was set in Daimoni material.
The maid went on protesting. “But even you, little ma’am, can’t take him in there!”
“Who says I can’t?” said T’ruth calmly and challengingly.
The awfulness of the situation sank in on Eunice.
In a small voice she muttered, “If you’re taking him in, you’re taking him in. But it’s never been done before.”
“Of course it hasn’t, Eunice, not in your time. But Casher O’Neill has already met the mister and owner. He has fought for the mister and owner. Do you think I would take a stray or random guest in to look at the master, just like that?”
“Oh, not at all, no,” said Eunice.
“Then go away, woman,” said the lady-child. “You don’t want to see this door open, do you?”
“Oh, no,” shrieked Eunice and fled, putting her hands over her ears as though that would shut out the sight of the door.
When the maid had disappeared, T’ruth pulled with her whole weight against the handle of the heavy door, Casher expected the mustiness of the tomb or the medicinality of a hospital; he was astonished when fresh air and warm sunlight poured out from that heavy, mysterious door. The actual opening was so narrow, so low, that Casher had to step sidewise as he followed T’ruth into the room.
The master’s room was enormous. The windows were flooded with perpetual sunlight. The landscape outside must have been the way Henriada looked in its prime, when Mottile was a resort for the carefree millions of vacationers, and Ambiloxi, a port feeding worlds halfway across the galaxy. There was no sign of the ugly snaky storms which worried and pestered Henriada in these later years. Everything was landscape, order, neatness, the triumph of man, as though Poussin had painted it.
The room itself, like the other great living-rooms of the estate of Beauregard, was exuberant neo-baroque in which the architect, himself half-mad, had been given wild license to work out his fantasies in steel, plastic, plaster, wood, and stone. The ceiling was not flat, but vaulted. The four corners of the room were each alcoves, cutting deep into the four sides, so that the room was, in effect, an octagon. The propriety and prettiness of the room had been a little diminished by the shoving of the furniture to one side, sofas, upholstered armchairs, marble tables, and knickknack stands all in an indescribable melange to the
left; while the right-hand part of the room—facing the master window with the illusory landscape—was equipped like a surgery with an operating table, hydraulic lifts, bottles of clear and colored fluid hanging from chrome stands, and two large devices which (Casher later surmised) must have been heart-lung and kidney machines. The alcoves, in their turn, were wilder. One was an archaic funeral parlor with an immense coffin, draped in black velvet, resting on a heavy teak stand. The next was a spaceship control cabin of the old kind, with the levers, switches, and controls all in plain sight—the meters actually read the galactically-stable location of this very place, and to do so they had to whirl mightily—as well as a pilot’s chair with the usual choice of helmets and the straps and shock absorbers. The third alcove was a simple bedroom done in very old-fashioned taste, the walls a Wedgwood blue with deep wine-colored drapes, coverlets and pillowcases marking a sharp but tolerable contrast. The fourth alcove was the copy of a fortress: it might even be a fortress: the door was heavy and the walls looked as though they might be Daimoni material, indestructible by any imaginable means. Cases of emergency food and water were stacked against the walls. Weapons which looked oiled and primed stood in their racks, together with three different calibers of wirepoint, each with its own fresh-looking battery.
The alcoves had no people in them.
The parlor was deserted.
The Mister and Owner Murray Madigan lay naked on the operating table. Two or three wires led to gauges attached to his body. Casher thought that he could see a faint motion of the chest, as the cataleptic man breathed at a rate one-tenth normal or less.
The girl-lady, T’ruth, was not the least embarrassed.
“I check him four or five times a day. I never let people in here. But you’re special, Casher. He’s talked with you and fought beside you and he knows that he owes you his life. You’re the first human person ever to get into this room.”
“I’ll wager,” said Casher, “that the Administrator of Henriada, the Honorable Rankin Meiklejohn, would give up some of his ‘honorable’ just to get in here and have one look around. He wonders what Madigan is doing when Madigan is doing nothing…”
The Rediscovery of Man - The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith - Illustrated Page 69
