Norstrilia - Illustrated

by Cordwainer Smith

  Of protest out of the mad profound

  Trap of the godmachine!

  “Godmachine,” thought Rod, “now that’s a clue. I’ve got the only all-mechanical computer on this planet. I’ll play it on the stroon crop, win all or lose all.”

  The boy stood up in the forbidden room.

  “Fight it is,” he said to the cubes on the floor, “and a good thanks to you, grandfather-to-the-nineteenth. You met the law and did not lose. And now it is my turn to be Rod McBan.”

  He turned and shouted to himself,

  “To Earth!”

  The call embarrassed him. He felt unseen eyes staring at him. He almost blushed and would have hated himself if he had.

  He stood on the top of a treasure-chest turned on its side. Two more gold coins, worthless as money but priceless as curios, fell noiselessly on the thick old rugs. He thought a goodbye again to his secret room and he jumped upward for the bar. He caught it, chinned himself, raised himself higher, swung a leg on it but not over it, got his other foot on the bar, and then, very carefully but with the power of all his muscles, pushed himself into the black opening above. The lights suddenly went off, the dehumidifier hummed louder, and the daylight dazzled him as the trap door, touched, flung itself open.

  He thrust his head into the culvert. The daylight seemed deep grey after the brilliance of the treasure room.

  All silent. All clear. He rolled into the ditch.

  The door, with silence and power, closed itself behind him. He was never to know it, but it had been cued to the genetic code of the descendants of Rod McBan. Had any other person touched it, it would have withstood them for a long time. Almost forever.

  You see, it was not really his door. He was its boy.

  “This land has made me,” said Rod aloud, as he clambered out of the ditch and looked around. The young ram had apparently wakened; his snoring had stopped and over the quiet hill there came the sound of his panting. Thirsty again! The Station of Doom was not so rich that it could afford unlimited water to its giant sheep. They lived all right. But he would have asked the trustees to sell even the sheep for water, if a real drought set in. But never the land.

  Never the land.

  No land for sale.

  It didn’t even really belong to him: he belonged to it—the rolling dry fields, the covered rivers and canals, the sky catchments which caught every drop which might otherwise have gone to his neighbors. That was the pastoral business—its product immortality and its price water. The Commonwealth could have flooded the planet and could have created small oceans, with the financial resources it had at command, but the planet and the people were regarded as one ecological entity. Old Australia—that fabulous continent of Old Earth now covered by the rains of the abandoned Chinesian cityworld of Aojou Nanbien—had in its prime been broad, dry, open, beautiful; the planet of Old North Australia, by the dead weight of its own tradition, had to remain the same.

  Imagine trees. Imagine leaves—vegetation dropping uneaten to the ground. Imagine water pouring by the thousands of tons, no one greeting it with tears of relief or happy laughter! Imagine Earth. Old Earth. Manhome itself. Rod had tried to think of a whole planet inhabited by Hamlets, drenched with music and poetry, knee-deep in blood and drama. It was unimaginable, really, though he had tried to think it through.

  Like a chill, a drill, a thrill cutting into his very nerves he thought:

  Imagine Earth women!

  What terrifying beautiful things they must be. Dedicated to ancient and corruptive arts, surrounded by the objects which Norstrilia had forbidden long ago, stimulated by experiences which the very law of his own world had expunged from the books! He would meet them; he couldn’t help it; what, what would he do when he met a genuine Earth woman?

  He would have to ask his computer, even though the neighbors laughed at him for having the only pure computer left on the planet.

  They didn’t know what grandfather-to-the-nineteenth had done. He had taught the computer to lie. It stored all the forbidden things which the Law of the Clean Sweep had brushed out of Norstrilian experience. It could lie like a trooper. Rod wondered whether a “trooper” might be some archaic Earth official who did nothing but tell the untruth, day in and day out, for his living. But the computer usually did not lie to him.

  If grandfather19 had behaved as saucily and unconventionally with the computer as he had with everything else, that particular computer would know all about women. Even things which they did not themselves know. Or wish to know.

  Good computer! thought Rod as he trotted around the long, long fields to his house. Eleanor would have the tucker on. Doris might be back. Bill and Hopper would be angry if they had to wait for the Mister before they ate. To speed up his trip, he headed straight for the little cliff behind the house, hoping no one would see him jump down it. He was much stronger than most of the men he knew, but he was anxious, for some private inexpressible reason, for them not to know it.

  The route was clear.

  He found the cliff.

  No observers.

  He dropped over it, feet first, his heels kicking up the scree as he tobogganed through loose rock to the foot of the slope.

  And Aunt Doris was there.

  “Where have you been?” said she.

  “Walking, mum,” said he.

  She gave him a quizzical look but knew better than to ask more. Talking always fussed her, anyhow. She hated the sound of her own voice, which she considered much too high. The matter passed.

  Inside the house, they ate. Beyond the door and the oil lamp, a grey world became moonless, starless, black. This was night, his own night.

  THE QUARREL AT THE DINNER TABLE

  At the end of the meal he waited for Doris to say grace to the Queen. She did but under her thick eyebrows her eyes expressed something other than thanks.

  “You’re going out,” she said right after the prayer. It was an accusation, not a question.

  The two hired men looked at him with quiet doubt. A week ago he had been a boy. Now he was the same person, but legally a man.

  The workwoman Eleanor looked at him too. She smiled very unobtrusively to herself. She was on his side whenever any other person came into the picture; when they were alone, she nagged him as much as she dared. She had known his parents before they went offworld for a long-overdue honeymoon and were chewed into molecules by a battle between raiders and police. That gave her a proprietary feeling about him.

  He tried to spiek to Doris with his mind, just to see if it would work.

  It didn’t. The two men bounded from their seats and ran for the yard, Eleanor sat in her chair holding tight to the table but saying nothing, and Aunt Doris screeched so loud that he could not make out the words.

  He knew she meant “Stop it!” so he did, and looked at her friendlily.

  That started a fight.

  Quarrels were common in Norstrilian life, because the Fathers had taught that they were therapeutic. Children could quarrel until adults told them to stop, freemen could quarrel as long as Misters were not involved, misters could quarrel as long as an Owner was not present, and Owners could quarrel if, at the very end, they were willing to fight it out. No one could quarrel in the presence of an offworlder, nor during an alert, nor with a member of the defense or police on active duty.

  Rod McBan was a Mister and Owner, but he was under trusteeship; he was a man, but he had not been given clear papers; he was a handicapped person.

  The rules got all mixed up.

  When Hopper came back to the table he muttered, “Do that again, laddie, and I’ll clout you one that you won’t forget!” Considering how rarely he used his voice, it was a beautiful man’s voice, resonant, baritone, full-bodied, hearty and sincere in the way the individual words came out.

  Bill didn’t say a word, but from the contortions of his face Rod gathered that he was spieking to the others at a great rate and working off his grievance that way.

  “If you’re s
pieking about me, Bill,” said Rod with a touch of arrogance which he did not really feel, “you’ll do me the pleasure of using words or you’ll get off my land!”

  When Bill spoke, his voice was as rusty as an old machine. “I’ll have you know, you clutty little pommy, that I have more money in my name on Sidney ’Change than you and your whole glubby land are worth. Don’t you tell me twice to get off the land, you silly half of a Mister, or I will get. So shut up!”

  Rod felt his stomach knot with anger.

  His anger became fiercer when he felt Eleanor’s restraining hand on his arm. He didn’t want another person, not one more damned useless normal person, to tell him what to do about spieking and hiering. Aunt Doris’s face was still hidden in her apron; she had escaped, as she always did, into weeping.

  Just as he was about to speak again, perhaps to lose Bill from the farm forever, his mind lifted in the mysterious way that it did sometimes; he could hier for miles. The people around him did not notice the difference. He saw the proud rage of Bill, with his money in the Sidney Exchange, bigger than many station owners had, waiting his time to buy back on the land which his father had left; he saw the honest annoyance of Hopper and was a little abashed to see that Hopper was watching him proudly and with amused affection; in Eleanor he saw nothing but wordless worry, a fear that she might lose him as she had lost so many homes for hnnnhnnnhnnn dzzmmmmm, a queer meaningless reference which had a shape in her mind but took no form in his; and in Aunt Doris he caught her inner voice calling, “Rod, Rod, Rod, come back! This may be your boy and I’m a McBan to the death, but I’ll never know what to do with a cripple like him.”

  Bill was still waiting for him to answer when another thought came into his mind,

  “You fool—go to your computer!”

  “Who said that?” he thought, not trying to spiek again, but just thinking it with his mind.

  “Your computer,” said the faraway thinkvoice.

  “You can’t spiek,” said Rod. “You’re a pure machine with not an animal brain in you.”

  “When you call me, Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan to the hundred and fifty-first, I can spiek across space itself. I’m cued to you and you shouted just now with your spiekmind. I can feel you hiering me.”

  “But—” said Rod in words.

  “Take it easy, lad,” said Bill, right in the room with him. “Take it easy. I didn’t mean it.”

  “You’re having one of your spells,” said Aunt Doris, emerging red nosed from behind her apron.

  Rod stood up.

  Said he to all of them, “I’m sorry. I’m going out for a bit. Out into the night.”

  “You’re going to that bloody computer,” said Bill.

  “Don’t go, Mister McBan,” said Hopper. “Don’t let us anger you into going. It’s bad enough being around that computer in daylight, but at night it must be horrible.”

  “How would you know?” retorted Rod. “You’ve never been there at night. And I have. Lots of times…”

  “There are dead people in it,” said Hopper. “It’s an old war computer. Your family should never have bought it in the first place. It doesn’t belong on a farm. A thing like that should be hung out in space and orbited.”

  “All right, Eleanor,” said Rod, “you tell me what to do. Everybody else has,” he added with the last bit of his remaining anger, as his hiering closed down and he saw the usual opaque faces around him.

  “It’s no use, Rod. Go along to your computer. You’ve got a strange life and you’re the one that will live it, Mister McBan, and not these other people around here.”

  Her words made sense.

  He stood up. “I’m sorry,” said he, again, in lieu of goodbye.

  He stood in the doorway, hesitant. He would have liked to say goodbye in a better way, but he did not know how to express it. Anyhow, he couldn’t spiek, not so they could hier it with their minds; speaking with a voice was so crude, so flat for the fine little things that needed expression in life.

  They looked at him, and he at them.

  “Ngahh!” said he, in a raw cry of self-derision and fond disgust.

  Their expressions showed that they had gotten his meaning, though the word carried nothing with it. Bill nodded, Hopper looked friendly and a little worried, Aunt Doris stopped sniveling and began to stretch out one hand, only to stop it in midgesture, and Eleanor sat immobile at the table, upset by wordless troubles of her own.

  He turned.

  The cube of lamplight, the cabin room, was behind him; ahead the darkness of all Norstrilian nights, except for the weird rare times that they were cut up by traceries of lightness. He started off for a house which only a few but he could see, and which none but he could enter. It was a forgotten, invisible temple; it housed the MacArthur family computer, to which the older McBan computer was linked; and it was called the Palace of the Governor of Night.

  THE PALACE OF THE GOVERNOR OF NIGHT

  Rod loped across the rolling land, his land.

  Other Norstrilians, telepathically normal, would have taken fixes by hiering the words in nearby houses. Rod could not walk by telepathy, so he whistled to himself in an odd off key, with lots of flats. The echoes came back to his unconscious mind through the overdeveloped ear-hearing which he had worked out to compensate for not being able to hier with his mind. He sensed a slope ahead of him, and jogged up it; he avoided a clump of brush; he heard his youngest ram, Sweet William, snoring the gigantic snore of a santaclara-infected sheep two hills over.

  Soon he would see it.

  The Palace of the Governor of Night.

  The most useless building in all Old North Australia.

  Solider than steel and yet invisible to normal eyes except for its ghostly outline traced in the dust which had fallen lightly on it.

  The Palace had really been a palace once, on Khufu II, which rotated with one pole always facing its star. The people there had made fortunes which at one time were compared with the wealth of Old North Australia. They had discovered the Furry Mountains, range after range of alpine configurations on which a tenacious non-Earth lichen had grown. The lichen was silky, shimmering, warm, strong, and beautiful beyond belief. The people gained their wealth by cutting it carefully from the mountains so that it would regrow and selling it to the richer worlds, where a luxury fabric could be sold at fabulous prices. They had even had two governments on Khufu II, one of the day-dwelling people who did most of the trading and brokering, since the hot sunlight made their crop of lichen poor, and the other for the night-dwellers, who ranged deep into the frigid areas in search of lichen—stunted, fine, tenacious and delicately beautiful.

  The Daimoni had come to Khufu II, just as they came to many other planets, including Old Earth, Manhome itself. They had come out of nowhere and they went back to the same place. Some people thought that they were human beings who had acclimated themselves to live in the subspace which planoforming involved; others thought that they had an artificial planet on the inside of which they lived; still others thought that they had solved the jump out of our galaxy; a few insisted that there were no such things as Daimoni. This last position was hard to maintain, because the Daimoni paid in architecture of a very spectacular kind—buildings which resisted corrosion, erosion, age, heat, cold, stress and weapons. On Earth itself Earthport was their biggest wonder—a sort of wine glass, twenty-five kilometers high, with an enormous rocket field built into the top of it. On Norstrilia they had left nothing; perhaps they had not even wanted to meet the Old North Australians, who had a reputation for being rough and gruff with strangers who came to their own home planet. It was evident that the Daimoni had solved the problem of immortality on their own terms and in their own way; they were bigger than most of the races of mankind, uniform in size, height and beauty; they bore no sign of youth or age; they showed no vulnerability to sickness; they spoke with mellifluous gravity; and they purchased treasures for their own immediate collective use, not for r
etrade or profit. They had never tried to get stroon or the raw santaclara virus from which it was refined, even though the Daimoni trading ships had passed the tracks of armed and convoyed Old North Australian freight fleets. There was even one picture which showed the two races meeting each other in the chief port of Olympia, the planet of the blind receivers: Norstrilians tall, outspoken, lively, crude and immensely rich; Daimoni equally rich, reserved, beautiful, polished and pale. There was awe (and with awe, resentment) on the part of the Norstrilians toward the Daimoni; there was elegance and condescension on the part of the Daimoni toward everyone else, including the Norstrilians. The meeting had been no success at all. The Norstrilians were not used to meeting people who did not care about immortality, even at a penny a bushel; the Daimoni were disdainful toward a race which not only did not appreciate architecture, but which tried to keep architects off its planet, except for defense purposes, and which desired to lead a rough, simple, pastoral life to the end of time. Thus it was not until the Daimoni had left, never to return, that the Norstrilians realized that they had passed up some of the greatest bargains of all time—the wonderful buildings which the Daimoni so generously scattered over the planets which they had visited for trade or for visits.

  On Khufu II, the Governor of Night had brought out an ancient book and had said,

  “I want that.”

  The Daimoni, who had a neat eye for proportions and figures, said, “We have that picture on our world too. It is an ancient Earth building. It was once called the great temple of Diana of the Ephesians, but it fell even before the age of space began.”

  “That’s what I want,” said the Governor of Night.

  “Easy enough,” said one of the Daimoni, all of whom looked like princes. “We’ll run it up for you by tomorrow night.”

  “Hold on,” said the Governor of Night. “I don’t want the whole thing. Just the front—to decorate my palace. I have a perfectly good palace all right, and my defenses are built right into it.”

  “If you let us build you a house,” said one of the Daimoni gently, “you would never need defenses, ever. Just a robot to close the windows against megaton bombs.”