Collected Short Fiction

by C. M. Kornbluth

  In the face of Smiley’s bored uninterest he lost his caution and spoke loudly enough for Mistress Cannon, at the bar, to catch a word. She stormed to the table in a loyal rage and threw him out. She later regretted it. Word got around and the incident brought on the only Watch raid during Smiley’s stay at Cannon’s.

  The whole district was minutely sifted and Cade, too, had to submit to questioning. But the Watchers were looking for just one man, and Smiley’s origin did not concern them. Later, word got to Cannon’s that they had found the madman in the very act of airing his mania to jeering children on the street. He did not survive his first night in the Watch House. Those rubber truncheons, Cade remembered, wondered whether it had been necessary to cope with the poor fool so drastically.

  There were others who came to the table and talked. One night there was a fat-faced, sententious fellow, a conman who had hit the skids because of liquor. Smiley bought many drinks for him because he had been in the Cairo Mystery—and several others. He explained that the Mysteries were a good place to meet your johns, and was otherwise defensive. Cade dared to question him closely after the con man had poured down enough liquor to blur his brain and probably leave the incident a blank next morning. But he knew little enough. He’d never heard of hypnosis in connection with a Mystery. A featureless, egg-shaped room had nothing to. do with the Cairo rites. Mysteries were strictly for the johns; the revenue from them was strictly for the blades, like him and Smiley. He proposed vaguely that they start a new Mystery with a new twist and take over the other blades’ johns. With his experience and Smiley’s looks and build it’d be easy. Then he fell asleep across the table.

  There were many others, but she never came and he never heard a word about her or anybody like her.

  When the two weeks he allowed himself were past he knew vastly more than he had known before, but none of it led to the girl. It was time for the other plan.

  Mistress Cannon protested hoarsely when he told her he was leaving. “I never saw a man go through a load like that so fast,” she complained. “You didn’t have to buy for everybody that said he was a rog. Listen—I made enough on that liquor to cover another week easy. You don’t tell anybody about it and I’ll let you stay. Two weeks won’t do it in this town, but three weeks will. What about it?”

  “It’s not the money,” he tried to explain. She was right about blues and greens being gone, but she didn’t know about the box of loot he still had in his room. “There’s a job I’ve got to do. Something I promised before I came here.”

  “A promise doesn’t count when you’re hot!” she shouted. “What good will it do to try and keep your promise if you get picked up by the Watchers as soon as you step out of the door?”

  He wasn’t worried about that. The Cannon grapevine was efficient and he knew the search for the “impostor” Cade had bogged down, at least locally. Two pedestrians had been incinerated by a young Armiger ten days ago. Though a strong order had been put out that identification of the two as the Cade-impostor and ex-Teacher Zisz was not confirmed as yet, the Watch had naturally slacked off its effort almost to zero locally. If Arle was making any search, it was undercover.

  All Cade wanted was a place to leave his few possessions, and that Mistress Cannon could provide. She had a pile of metal boxes in her kitchen that were, under layers of foodstuffs, private vaults with self-set radionic locks.

  Cade dressed in his room for the last time in the sober, dignified suit he had specified. Old Carlin had grumbled at the requirements: “Think you’re going to Audience?” and Cade had smiled—but that, as a matter of fact, was exactly it: the alternative. The only one.

  He could have tried to plunge into the Cairo Mystery and been hypnotized again for his troubles. He could have gone to a Chapter House and been burned down. But there was still, and always, the Emperor.

  Even here at Cannon’s that much remained. The rogs and blades and hostesses were unfit people but they were loyal, every one. There had been no trace of the conspiracy he sought. The insane burglar with his imaginary book had been an object of horror to them all.

  The Realm is wide, thought Cade, hut not so wide that the Emperor will turn a deaf ear to any plea.

  It was the morning of the monthly Audience Day; he had timed it so. His only fear was that he would not be believed when he told his complex and terrible story. The Emperor’s benevolence would be sorely tried to comprehend a plot against him in an innocent Mystery, and also the defection from fitness of the Gunner Supreme. What would he, himself, Cade wondered, have thought of such a tale not long ago?

  But it would get to persons less full of loving-kindness than the Emperor. He had seen the iron-faced Power Master at ceremonies—a grim tower of a man; the gentle Emperor’s mailed fist. Which was as it always had been, which was as it should be. It wasn’t hard to visualize the Power Master believing enough of the story to investigate, and that was all that would be needed.

  Cade had in his pockets as he left only half the remaining smaller gawdies, three blues and a few greens. Gold box and gun of the Order were in the kitchen behind hardened bronze and under a layer of meal. There was something like a tear in Mistress Cannon’s bloodshot eye when she said: “Don’t forget you’re coming back. There’s always a place for you here.”

  He told her he wouldn’t, and it was true. He hoped he would never have to see the place again, but he knew he wouldn’t forget it to his dying day. Such—irregularity. No order in their lives or thoughts, no proportion, no object, no fitness. And yet there was a curious warmth, an unexpected sense of comradeship like that he felt for Brothers in the Order, but somehow stronger. He wondered if all Commoners had it or if it was the property of only the criminals and near-criminals.

  When he closed the door behind him and started down the street he felt strangely alone. It was the same street down which he had walked in the lamplight with the elusive girl following behind. He rounded the corner where another Watchman now stood and trudged to the Palace in a bitter solitude. What would happen would happen, he gloomily thought, and cursed himself for his gloom. He should have been full of honorable pride and exultation over the service he was about to render to the Emperor, but he was not. Instead he was worried about the Commoner girl. The girl, the girl, the girl! He had lied to the Gunner Supreme by not mentioning her—but only after he half-knew the Supreme was an unfit voluptuary, false to the Order. Hopefully he tried to persuade himself that she would come to no harm; realistically he knew that, harm or not, he could not lie and that she might be caught and crushed in the wheels of justice he soon would set into motion.

  XIV.

  As a respectable-looking Commoner of the middle class, Cade was admitted without questioning through the Audience Gate, a towering arch in the great wall that enclosed the nerve-center of the Realm. The Palace proper, a graciously-proportioned rose marble building, lay a hundred meters inside. A Klin Serviceman—the gold braid on his gray meant Palace Detail—led the newcomer to a crowd already waiting patiently in the plaza.

  “Wait here,” he said brusquely, and strode off.

  Cade waited as further Commoners arrived and the crowd began to fill the open square. He noticed., however, that from time to time one of the throng—usually well-dressed—would approach a loitering guard for a few words. Something would seem to change hands and the man or woman would be led off toward the Palace itself.

  The Gunner managed to be nearby the next time it happened; he smiled bitterly as his suspicions were confirmed. Even here in the Palace, under the very eyes of the Emperor, there was corruption almost in the open. His time at Cannon’s should have prepared him for it.

  The next Serviceman to approach the crowd with a newcomer took him inside for the modest price of one green. And he gave Cade what the Gunner took to be complete instructions: “When you enter the Audience Hall, wait for the appearance of the Emperor. After he appears, face him at all times, standing. Keep silent until you’re announced. Then, with your eye
s lowered, not stepping over the white line, state your case in ten words or so.”

  “Ten words!”

  “Have you no brief, Commoner?” the guard was amazed.

  A brief would be a written version of his case. Cade shook his head. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Ten words will be ample.”

  He turned down the Serviceman’s friendly offer to locate a briefsman who would, of course, require something extra for a rush job. Ten words would be ample; the ones he had in mind would create enough furor to give him all the time he’d need to state his case.

  The guard left him finally outside the ornate door of the hall with a last stern order: “Stand right here until they let you in.”

  “And when is that supposed to be?” a fussily-dressed man at Cade’s elbow asked as the Serviceman walked away. “How long a wait this time?”

  Before Cade could say he didn’t know, a white-haired granny scolded: “It doesn’t make any difference. It’s a real treat, every minute of it. I’ve been promising myself this trip—I live in Northumberland, that’s in England—for many a year and it’s a fine thing I finally got the greens for it saved, because I surely won’t be here next year!”

  “Perhaps not,” said the man distantly. And then curiously: “What’s your complaint for the Emperor?”

  “Complaint? Complaint? Dear me, I have no complaint! I just want to see his kind face close up and say ‘Greetings and love from a loyal old lady of Northumberland, England.’ Don’t you think he’ll be pleased?”

  Cade melted at her innocence. “I’m sure he will,” he said warmly, and she beamed with pleasure.

  “I dare say,” said the fussily-dressed man. “What I have to lay before the Emperor’s justice and wisdom is a sound grievance—” he whipped out and began to unfold a manuscript of many pages—“against my cursed neighbor Flyte, his slatternly wife and their four destructive brats. I’ve asked them politely, I’ve demanded firmly, I’ve—”

  “Pardon.” Cade shouldered past the man and seized the old lady from Northumberland by the arm. He had been watching once again the way to get out of a wait-here group. To an expectant Serviceman he said: “Sir, my old mother here is worn from travel. We’ve been waiting since sun-up. When can we get into the Hall?”

  “Why, it might be arranged very soon,” the Serviceman said noncommittally.

  Cade abandoned the effort; apparently there was nothing to do but pay. Bitterly he pulled another green from his pocket. He had just one more after that, and a few blues.

  “It’s only your old mother you want admitted?” the guard asked kindly. “You yourself wish to wait outside for her?”

  Cade understood, wavered a moment and then handed him the last green he owned. It didn’t matter. Once in the Hall, in the Emperor’s own presence, there could be no more of this.

  And he was in the Hall, with the puzzled, grateful old lady from Northumberland beside him, her arm tucked under his.

  “Over there,” the guard pointed. “And keep your voices low if you must speak.”

  There were two groups waiting, clearly distinguished from each other. One was composed of Commoners, about fifty of them, nervously congregated behind a white marble line in the oval hall’s mosaic flooring. There were perhaps as many persons of rank chatting and strolling relaxedly at a little distance from the Commoners. At the end of the hall was a raised dais where, he supposed, the Emperor would sit. By the dais was a thick pedestal a meter high. Klin guards stood stiffly here and there, with gas guns at their belts. The nearest of them gestured abruptly at Cade, and he hastily moved into the Commoners’ enclosure.

  Granny was clutching his arm and pouring out twittery thanks. But Cade, already regretting the impulse, turned his back on her and worked his way through to the other side of the group. He was joined a minute later by the overdressed fellow who had talked to him outside the Hall.

  “I saw you couldn’t persuade the guard,” the man said, “so I paid without quibbling. I wonder how many more times the Grays will expect us to pay?”

  “That had better be the last,” Cade said grimly.

  “Such a pity!” someone said from his other side.

  “Eh?” Cade turned to see a middle-aged woman, neat as a wasp. She was staring with pursed lips across the Hall at a space near the dais that had been empty only a few minutes ago. It was filling now with star-bornes—Ladies, high dignitaries in the Klin Service and a few Brothers of the Order, their cloaks banded with the Silver of Superiors below colored stripes that designated their Stars. Cade studied the stripes and cursed silently: Congo, Pacificisles, California, and of course Eastcoast. He had served under hone of them; they would not be able to identify him on the spot. But at the same time they would not half-recognize him, assume he was the Cade-impostor and blast him where he stood.

  “Such a trial to the Court!” the woman insisted, pursing her lips and shaking her head with enjoyment.

  “What?” asked Cade. She pointed and he realized he had asked the wrong question. “Who?” he amended it, and then he saw—

  “Who’s that?” he demanded, clutching the sleeve of the man next to him.

  “What’d you say? Would you mind—this cloth crushes.” He picked Cade’s hand from his sleeve indignantly, but the Gunner never noticed. It was she: he was certain of it. Her back was turned to him and her hair was a brilliant, foolish shade of orange-red to match her gown, but somehow he was certain.

  He turned to the wasp: “What about her? Who is she?”

  “Don’t you know?” She eyed him significantly. “The Lady Jocelyn,” she whispered. “The peculiar one. You’d never think to look at her that she’s a niece of the Emperor himself—”

  The fussily-dressed man interrupted with a snickering question to show that he was up on the latest Palace gossip: “The one that writes poems?”

  “Yes. And I have a friend who works in the kitchens, not a cook but a dietician, of course, and she says the Lady Jocelyn reads them to everybody—whether they want to listen or not. Once she even began reciting to some Commoners waiting just like us—”

  But Cade was not listening. The Lady Jocelyn had turned to face them and her resemblance to the girl of the Mystery collapsed. The bright red hair, of course, was dyed. But even Cade, as little competent to judge women’s clothes as any man alive, could see that it was a bad match to a wretchedly-cut gown. She was round-shouldered and evidently near-sighted, for she stood with her head thrust forward like a crane. When she walked off a moment later after surveying the Commoners indifferently, her gait was a foolish shamble. If there was any resemblance at all between this awkward misfit of the Court and the vivid, commanding creature who had saved his life, it was only in the nature of a bad caricature.

  All around him there was a sigh and a straightening. The Emperor had come in and was seating himself on the dais. Two Klin guards moved to the Commoners’ area and there was a subdued sort of jockeying for position. Before Cade understood what was going on, one of the guards had relieved him of his last few blues, examined the small sum with disgust and stationed him well to the end of the line. Curse it, how much more was he supposed to know that he didn’t? He realized that the guard’s instructions had not been instructions at all but a last-minute warning which hit only the things he wasn’t supposed to do not talk, not turn his back, not overstep the line, not be long-winded—a mere recapitulation of things he was supposed to know. What else was involved? The Commoners he had known at Cannon’s were loyal, but shied from the idea of an Audience. He saw plainly from the people he was with that it was a middle-class affair. What else was involved? He was glad he wasn’t at the head of the line—and hastily fell into step as the line moved off to stop at the enigmatic pedestal before the dais. Cade saw the fussily-dressed man at the head of the line; he dropped currency—greens!—on it and murmured to one of the guards.

  Thank offering, love offering, something like that, he vaguely remembered now, much too late to do anything about
it. He glowered at the white-haired granny halfway down the line and berated himself for the impulse that had made him pay her way in. She, canny, middle-class, had saved her money for the offering.

  “Commoner Bolwen,” the guard was saying, and the fussily-dressed man said to the Emperor, with his eyes lowered: “I present a complaint against rude and unfit person to my Emperor.” He handed his bulky brief to the guard and backed away from the dais.

  Not a blue on him, Cade thought, and the line was shortening with amazing efficiency. “Offering,” they called it. Did that mean it was voluntary? Nobody was omitting it.

  “I ask my Emperor to consider my brilliant son for the Klin Service.”

  “Loyal greetings to our Emperor from the city of Buena Vista.”

  “I ask my Emperor’s intercession in the bankruptcy case of my husband.” Cade looked up fleetingly at the Emperor’s face for possible inspiration, and lost more time. The face was arrestingly different from what he had expected. It was not rapt and unworldly but thoughtful, keen, penetrating—the face of a scholar.

  There was a guard at Cade’s side, muttering: “Offering in your left hand.”

  Cade opened his mouth to speak, and the guard said: “Silence.”

  “But—” said Cade. Instantly the guard’s gas gun was out, ready to fire. The guard jerked his head at the door. He was no moon-faced, sluggish, run-of-the-mill Watchman, Cade saw, but a picked member of the Service; no fighting man but a most efficient guard who could drop him at the hint of a false move. And there were other guards looking their way. Cade silently stepped out of the line and backed to the great door, with the guard’s eyes never leaving him.

  Outside the Hall the guard delivered a short, withering lecture on Commoners who didn’t know their duties and would consume the Emperor’s invaluable time as though it were the time of a shop-attendant. Cade gathered that the offering was another of the Commoners’ inviolable laws—even stronger than the one that made you use a smoker pellet when it was offered to you. Something as trivial as that, and it had barred him for a month from bringing his case to the Emperor!